Alright, I'm Nate.
And I'm Mike.
And due to some technical difficulties, we have both just lit up our cigar.
I'm about an inch, an inch in, but Mike will tell us what we're smoking.
We are smoking a Cohiba Black and the size is a Robusto because I like Robustos.
Yes and I was going to say that usually as long as we're not in the bedroom we do whatever
Mike likes.
But the first couple puffs off of this cigar were very tasty.
Not really bitter at all.
And then now being an inch in, I don't know, I feel like it's a really decent, decently
made cigar here.
See, mine went out and I had to relight and I'm about a quarter inch in.
So from that everybody can tell who was having the difficulties.
Our third co-host decided to chew up my microphone and my headphones so I've had to make a do
with a different setup.
We'll have to start a third co-host destruction go fund me or something.
Oh, we are making her a kennel because she was naughty over the weekend when I was gone.
Yes, and what were you doing when you were gone?
I was paddle fishing.
And I saw pictures.
Now what do you do with those?
Do you eat them?
Do you throw them at friends?
Do you eat them?
I actually today, I filleted up.
I didn't fillet the fish.
I brought it to the fish cleaning station.
But I packaged it, cut it up and cleaned the red off and packaged it.
I got eight sandwich bags full, something like that.
And what is it?
Is it comparable to another kind of fish that our listeners may or may not have tried?
It's white, firm and flaky, but it has fat in it and you have to get that fat out.
Otherwise it's real fishy.
But it's similar to like a halibut, something like that.
Some halibut tastes good without having to doctor it up.
Okay.
Paddle fish, you have to get that fat out so you can boil it or brine it or something
like that.
Grill it.
It'll cook the fat right out of it.
Okay.
They were quite a bit larger than I kind of thought when you said paddle fish.
Of course, I've never been paddle fishing.
So I wasn't sure if you were fishing for a fish called a paddle fish or using a paddle
board to go fishing.
Yes.
It is a fish called a paddle fish and I caught a little one.
Okay, but they're big.
They look big.
Oh yeah, they're huge.
The one I caught was 18 pounds, but you can routinely get them 60 pounds.
That's a pretty normal size paddle fish.
Records vary, but they can get upwards of 140, 150 pounds.
Is the largest they get.
I have a picture.
I caught a 28 pounder a couple years ago and it was right next to an 80 pounder.
Okay.
It looked so small.
But yet that 28 pounder was twice as big as that 18 that I caught as far as size.
So do you need a deep sea pole?
You need a special pole for those?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I have a 10 foot ugly stick with a big salt striker reel.
I think I have 30 or 40 pound monofilament.
Okay.
So my little walleye rod wouldn't do it, huh?
No, no, I don't think so.
I've got a musky rod and reel.
Would that do it or would I need something bigger still probably?
I mean, it would do it if you did catch a 70 pounder.
That's the thing is that you're snagging them.
You cast into the river with a weight in the number 12 treble and you try to snag them.
Okay.
So you don't know what you're going to get.
You know what I mean?
You have no idea.
You could snag into a 100 pounder.
You could snag into a 10 pounder.
So a musky rod would definitely handle a 28 pounder or a 30 pounder, but probably not a
70 pounder.
Yeah.
And they'll jump out of the water like a marlin.
I mean, it's pretty impressive when they fight.
Yeah.
Yeah, they don't like getting jabbed.
Shocker, right?
Yeah.
Surprise, surprise.
But.
Yeah, we'll have to go sometime.
Absolutely.
Anytime.
This is my sixth or seventh year.
Okay.
In a row going.
Other than they canceled it one year for COVID.
Yeah.
But.
Because the fish were worried for their safety.
Yes.
Yes, the fish were very worried.
But.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Well, what's our main topic today then?
I think our main topic is going to be our favorite historical fact and or historical
period.
I have two facts.
Okay, perfect.
I think before we get into that though, we should talk about a little bit of legislation
that's kind of working its way through.
And I don't think it's the one you think that it's going to be.
I want to talk about the FDA and they're banning menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars.
Oh, I have not heard of this.
Well, they're trying to keep cigarettes and cigars out of the hands of children.
And so they're banning menthol cigarettes, which makes sense, I guess, because it's like
I don't smoke cigarettes and I haven't smoked a menthol cigarette that I'm aware of, but
they taste kind of minty.
And then I was really worried because we were talking about doing the CAO flavor off.
The CAO flavor off.
And I was thinking, well, are those going to be banned under these new rules?
And so I did some digging.
There are listeners who might not have done digging or might not have heard about this.
And they're really just banning like grape, cherry, anything that's overly very swish
or Swedish.
Not Swedish like the country.
But they're banning cigars with a primary flavor additive.
I see.
So they're banning blunts.
That's what I'm picking up here.
So just like the United States government made laws that somehow made pizza a vegetable,
they are now making blunts and swisher sweets legally cigars.
I see.
Well, you know, that's interesting.
I remember when they banned flavored cigarettes.
And that really bummed me out because I used to get a brand of cigarettes called Sweet
Dreams and they were German made and they were chocolate flavored and they had a couple
different other flavors too.
But I like the chocolate ones and I really love those things.
They were a nice little treat every now and again.
Yeah.
And you know, I liked them.
Yeah.
Well, I think they're not going to ban the vape juice since that's what I understand.
That's not dangerous at all.
That's not dangerous at all, Mike.
Sure.
Unless you buy those vape cartridges from like the 7-Eleven, then they explode in your
lungs or something if the news headlines are to be believed.
But I would hope that none of our listeners would do such a thing and they would go to
like a reputable online shop or something.
Yes.
And not go to the 7-Eleven for your fix.
But I think for our historical facts, tidbits, periods, whatnot, since you have two and I
just have one, why don't you lead us off, then we'll do mine, and then we'll wrap up
with yours.
Perfect.
Both of mine are relevant to current politics, interestingly enough.
As everybody knows, there's perennial things that Americans all fight about.
And both of these historical documents pretty much make the debate pointless, but there's
a group of people that like to just deny reality and pretend like they don't exist.
Me when a work email comes through.
This email does not exist.
You have not found me.
So the first is the Treaty of Tripoli, which was signed in 1796, while John Adams was president,
one of the founding fathers, FYI, for those who are not Americans.
And not his son, John Quincy.
He was also president.
No, the OG John Adams, my favorite president.
He's my favorite president and definitely my favorite founding father.
Interesting character.
But the Treaty of Tripoli was what the United States signed with a bunch of Barbary pirates
who were seizing Americans and were enslaving them.
And America didn't want Americans, white American citizens to be enslaved in Africa.
So we started a war with these pirates, basically.
And they were Muslim pirates.
So the original treaty was made in Arabic and that was translated into English and the
United States ratified it.
And ultimately, the Islamic treaty or the Arab treaty in Arabic and the treaty in English
were not the same treaty.
So they resigned a new treaty, I believe in 1806.
Excuse me, 1805.
One second here.
So it's very interesting.
And it was signed unanimously passed by the Senate.
And all those senators were, of course, founding fathers, given the time period.
The reason why all this background information is relevant is because in the Treaty of Tripoli,
which have you heard of the Treaty of Tripoli, Nate?
I've heard of the shores of Tripoli.
Yes.
And the Treaty of Tripoli does sound vaguely familiar, though I couldn't tell you with
any certainty what it had to do about.
And I wouldn't have known it was having to do with pirates until you told me just now.
Sure.
So the important part to our current situation was that the English translation or the American
version has Article 11.
And Article 11 has John Adams's view of what the separation of church and state is.
So Article 11 reads, and this was unanimously passed by the founding fathers and endorsed
by a founding father president.
Remember?
Yes.
So, as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on
the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character or enmity against the laws, religion,
or tranquility of Muslims, aka Muslims, and as the said states never entered into any
war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that
no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the
harmony existing between the two countries.
Isn't that interesting?
I think I know now why they don't teach the Treaty of Tripoli in government-run schools.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Or I should say in Christian indoctrination churches.
Right.
It's insane that a document like this exists and people argue about it.
And interestingly enough, modern people argue that it should be discounted because it wasn't
in the Arabic version of the treaty, even though it was in the English version that
everybody read and everybody signed.
The treaty is only two pages long.
So yes, it's an OG treaty, you know, very, very simple.
Yeah, it's not the Apple terms and conditions.
No, it was not.
You can look up what would be called a PDF version of it, and there's only 12 articles
in the treaty, and they're all two or three sentences long.
So yeah, it's not exactly complicated to understand what was going on.
I can't believe they had PDFs back then.
I know, right?
Yeah.
John Adams uploaded it to a PDF.
He put it in the founding fathers cloud.
Yes.
I just thought of a third fun fact, but we can get to that later.
Okay.
But yeah, I can't believe this is always a hot topic even today with religious types.
Even without the Treaty of Tripoli, which I did do some researching on whether or not
our country was, you know, quote unquote Christian or not.
And even without the Treaty of Tripoli, surprise, it's not.
Most of the founding fathers didn't consider themselves Christian, for one.
Thomas Jefferson actually wrote the Thomas Jefferson Bible, where he took all of the
miracles out of it, out of the New Testament.
And it was basically just more like a philosophy book for him of, you know, guiding principles
and none of the, what he considered to be kind of like the magic, magic spells and things
like that.
But I think they were, is it Unitarian?
Is that what?
Adams was Unitarian.
Unitarian.
They were mostly not Christians.
In the strict sense.
No, not, and Ben Franklin certainly wasn't a Christian.
At least not in any practical sense.
Yeah, he flew that kite at the try and lightning strike God.
All right.
Are you ready for my fact?
Absolutely.
And luckily for me, my fact coincides with one of my favorite historical periods, which
is the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Westward expansion.
And I'm very, very pro Lewis and Clark.
I'm all about stealing land from the native populace.
And okay, so somebody's going to take that and make a clip.
So when I run for president later, I won't be able to get any votes, but I'm not really
for that.
And actually I read one of my favorite books about Lewis and Clark.
I went on a huge Lewis and Clark spree last year.
I found all these books, I researched them.
Don't bother with Steven Ambrose.
Sorry Steven, or not sorry.
I guess he's very divisive in the historian community.
Yes, he is.
He'll write about anything basically.
But I read one of my favorite ones was Lewis and Clark among the Indians.
And it was less about them getting from point A to point B, but how their Native American
relations went.
And they basically are a very good case study for how it should be done.
And they were very, very good with all of the tribes that they encountered.
And they were very friendly with all the tribes they encountered.
And they had to be out of necessity for one point.
But Thomas Jefferson gave them the edict to go and be nice to these tribes and learn about
these tribes.
And to learn about the Native populations that were now under US rule, more or less.
Or within US lands, however they kind of phrase it at the time.
In reading these books, and I've got a slew of suggestions if anybody is interested, but
Lewis and Clark among the Indians was a very good one.
And it really kind of opened my eyes to all of the things that they actually did.
Because in most common conversation, Lewis and Clark, oh yeah, they went and found the
west side of the country, which isn't really what they did.
They were trying to find the quickest overland route to the west side.
They knew there was a west side.
But what I read in all of these books, they had a little addendum either at the beginning
or in the back talking about Sacajawea.
So my favorite historical fact is if you read all the journals, and they're not just the
Lewis and Clark journals, it's the Lewis and Clark Expeditions journals because they encouraged
every member to keep a journal.
Now every member didn't necessarily, or they didn't write as often as Lewis and Clark did,
but they all wrote journals.
And these notes about Sacajawea were basically, okay, I know we have to mention Sacajawea,
but if you read the journals, she actually doesn't really do anything.
She was 16 years old with a newborn.
She had her French fur trapper husband slash owner.
We weren't even sure if she was a slave or if they were married or whatever.
But his name was Charbonneau.
And she was, I guess what they figured was she was kind of kidnapped from her home tribe
by another tribe and then somehow got sold or married to this Charbonneau fur trapper,
French fur trapper.
And hadn't been home since she was maybe 12 or 10 or 8, somewhere, really young.
And they get out there, and so everybody says, oh yeah, if not for Sacajawea, the expedition
wouldn't have survived.
But they go out there and they happen to be standing in the backyard of her tribe.
She doesn't recognize any of the landmarks, looks up across the river and sees her brother
or cousin or something and says, we're here.
And that's basically all that there is about her in the journals.
One of the two kind of adopted or quasi adopted or educated her son, her and Charbonneau's
son.
So I wanted to look up why we minted a coin for Sacajawea, the dollar coin, Sacajawea
dollar coin, why everybody loves Sacajawea when there's really no historical evidence
that she did a whole lot of anything.
Now, maybe she did, maybe she did, but not enough to warrant a lot of text in the journals.
Sure.
So here's what I found out.
I found out that the Lewis and Clark expedition, if you're somebody who likes to romanticize
history, if you want to create fiction, if you want to create a dramatic work based on
the Lewis and Clark expedition, it's a shitty thing to try and base anything off of because
you know what?
They went all the way out, all the way back and they lost one person due to appendicitis.
There wasn't, I mean, yeah, sure.
They encountered like a bear.
Some of the tribes, like the situations got a little like sticky, got a little sticky,
but really there was, there's no death.
Got a whole lot of excitement in terms of modern Hollywood or even not modern Hollywood.
I guess I've never read any of the memoirs.
Yeah.
I would, you know what I'd say, I pick up Lewis and Clark among the Indians.
That's probably your best bet to kind of shine a whole new light on what they did.
But they didn't, like there was really no danger.
And so in, so people started romanticizing it and putting out fictional versions, you
know, where Sacagawea was the one part of the love triangle between, you know, Clark
and Lewis and stuff.
And Charbonneau was some kind of slaver and whatever.
But what I found out was in 1893, a historian named Elliot Cows, and it looks like Cooz.
And the Cooz deer is actually named after him, but it shouldn't be pronounced Cooz
deer, it should be pronounced Cows deer.
So Elliot Cows, he's not a historian.
He's an army surgeon and he was an avid traveler to the expedition sites.
But what he did was he redrew Sacagawea's character, increased her participation in
the journey.
And it says that his work strayed widely from what was originally recorded about the expedition.
And those alterations that he made blossomed into expedition fiction.
And here is probably the most important part.
That pro-feminist arguments contributed to the uplifting of Sacagawea's character and
that anti-French sentiment was used to turn the fur trapper, who did a lot more of the
guide work, into a kind of a crass and terrible person because there was a lot of anti-French
sentiment at the time.
And I guess the pro-feminists really liked the idea that there was a 16-year-old female
that saved the expedition, even though that's not true.
Interesting.
That reminds me of Washington Irving making up the myth that Columbus set sail to prove
the earth was round.
Which is a complete falsehood.
But people believe it.
I thought he set sail to rape and pillage.
Well, kind of.
That was kind of the goal.
Just not on the continent he landed on.
Well, yeah.
I have another little tidbit about Columbus, real quick.
That they were in, what is it, they landed where?
South America, right?
Yeah, it was in Espanola.
Yeah, and they were raping and pillaging and the population was like, whoa, wait a second,
we thought you came here as gods, but you're clearly just a bunch of horny assholes.
And because they knew the star charts and everything, they knew a lunar eclipse was
coming.
And so they said, well, if you don't let us continue raping your wives, we're going to
blot out the sun or whatever.
And so two days later, the eclipse happened and they got to go back to raping all the
women.
That's horrible.
Horrible, but amusing.
Well, what do you do?
Right, I wasn't there.
It's in the past, sorry.
Right, I'm not directly responsible for that.
But maybe it's a good lesson in stay in school and don't do drugs.
Because then you'll know when the next eclipse is and you can not be taken advantage of if
you're on the weaker side.
Sure, maybe it's a good lesson about critical thinking and questioning charlatans.
So before your next tidbit, I'm about, I don't know, three quarters of an inch from the wrapper
here, which I'm about to peel off.
But so far it's been very steady, very consistent.
And as well, I'm about halfway through.
Okay.
It's not overly dark, but it has nice characteristics, I think.
Nice, goes down a complex flavor.
Not super sweet, but it's not offensive by any means.
It's pleasant.
I was expecting that.
I've had a particular cigar before.
Okay.
Cohiba is a very popular brand, but I don't.
Well, I see why.
I don't care for them because they usually don't have a lot of character.
You know, they're just kind of a one note pleasant.
It's good, but it's just like.
Yeah, it's pleasant.
I don't think it's the best one we've smoked.
No, it's not.
But it's certainly one that I might keep just for kind of a go-to on a day where I don't
have anything else to smoke, I suppose.
Right.
It's good to give somebody who doesn't smoke a lot of cigars, but they want to try a real
cigar.
Yeah.
I mean, they've got the brand cred.
Everybody's heard of Cohiba, mostly.
That's into cigars anyway.
Oh, absolutely.
They're very famous.
So it's mainstream borderline.
Kind of like Omega watches or something.
Everybody knows about it.
So anyway, I guess speaking of charlatans, my next two are also about American politics
and charlatans and people lying.
So we're going to fast forward in American history about 60 years to right before the
Civil War.
Where could this possibly be going?
So again, for anybody who is listening to us who's not an American, we still have these
debates 150 years after our Civil War about the causes and motivations of the political
leaders who started-
It was states' rights.
Yes, it was states' rights and the average Confederate soldier was fighting for his state
and his culture and his freedom.
So these black people and chains back here, don't pay attention to them.
States' rights.
Right.
It's called the Lost Cause Myth for those who are not aware.
It's like a romanticization of the motivations of the Confederate forces.
Where of course both Yankees and Minnesota lost a significant portion of its soldiers
in the Civil War.
So I do have a slanted view as a warning for everybody else.
And my family's been in the North since the 1650s.
So it definitely skews my perception a little bit.
I went to college in Oklahoma where everybody called me a Yankee and I did some checking
and guess what?
Oklahoma?
Not in the Civil War.
So they weren't there.
Sorry.
Right.
Yeah.
That's how the Southern culture is spread.
So anyway, my second little favorite fact here is a little thing called the Cornerstone
Speech.
And the Cornerstone Speech was made March 21st, 1861, which is shortly before the start
of the Civil War.
And it was made by the vice president, the future vice president of the Confederacy,
Alexander Stevens.
Oh, yes.
So it's called the Cornerstone Speech because basically the guy was trying to lay the cornerstone
in the speech for the foundation of the Confederacy.
And it was very interesting.
So here's a direct quote from the speech.
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our
peculiar institution, aka African slavery as it exists among us, the proper status of
the Negro in our form of civilization.
This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this as the rock upon which the old union
would split.
He was right.
I'm glad he put it to rest.
I mean, thank goodness.
Let's all read it and then we can stop arguing about it.
Right.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, in the speech, he said, our new government's foundations are laid
as cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.
That slavery is is his natural and normal condition.
This our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon the great
physical, philosophical and moral truth.
So I don't I don't I don't like that.
But I mean, if he knows what he's talking about, I just have to blindly accept it, I
guess.
I don't agree with that.
Obviously, I don't know.
Me either.
I was doing a parody of the people on the Internet and they're like, well, I read this.
I don't quite like it, but it must be true.
Oh, yeah.
It's like so it's kind of like the Treaty of Tripoli.
It's so blatant and obvious that anybody who does any amount of research for themselves
and who has an open mind knows that the South was fighting to preserve slavery.
I don't know.
That still kind of sounds like states rights to me.
Yeah.
States rights, which is now still a boogeyman in many ways.
Not all the time, obviously.
I'm a states rights person myself.
But well, I like state states rights.
I believe in state rights, but I don't believe in state rights to subjugate an entire population
based on race.
Sure.
Well, obviously, I shouldn't say sure.
Yes.
Yeah.
Sure.
OK, Nate.
OK.
So I support states rights because I from working around the country with different
people from around the country, I kind of came to the understanding that the United
States is an empire and that each state is kind of like a nation and we're radically
different from one another.
You know, Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota are radically different.
And they're certainly radically different than Louisiana and Arkansas, you know, or
Mississippi.
Like those are those places are not anything alike in culture just because we share a similar
language.
Yeah.
For those.
And I'll say like even within the upper Midwest here, you know, like Minnesota, North Dakota,
Wisconsin, we all kind of like hate each other or give each other grief about, oh, you're
from Minnesota, oh, you're from Wisconsin, oh, you're in the Dakotas.
You know, you can loop in like, you know, Iowa and Illinois sometimes do.
But by and large, like if there's like some southerner up here, we're going to defend
each other to that southerner, you know.
Oh, absolutely.
So we've got kind of a shared culture, even though we have little like fractures or good
natured ribbing between the different states and even even, you know, like within the state,
you know, if you're in the city center like I am versus Mike or James in somewhere else
northern Minnesota.
Yeah, you still get you still get some differences.
But then we're all still we're Minnesotans.
We're living here.
Oh, absolutely.
But you know, for those who don't live up north, my local news puts subtitles on people
from the south when they have them on the news show.
So if they cover something going on in the south and they have an interview with somebody,
they put subtitles because a lot of people cannot understand southern English, the southern
dialect.
Sometimes they just put subtitles on black people and you can understand you can understand
them just fine.
And you're like, why?
Why though with the subtitles?
I guess I've never noticed that.
But I'm sure they do.
I'm sure they do.
I know that some of the southerners, I I never personally have a difficult time understanding
them, but I worked with a lot of southerners in the oil industry.
But I can see why they put subtitles on is my nieces and nephews can't understand, you
know.
I do.
Like I do watch quite a few foreign films and things.
And every once in a while is just like.
Usually I'm pretty good if they're speaking English, but they're you know, they've got
the accent.
But sometimes it's like I have to go back and flip the subtitles on to say what the
hell were they talking about there?
Especially if they get like agitated or they're, you know, like passionate.
Oh, sure.
I mean, it's the same when I get drunk, you know.
Yeah, I wish you came with an accent.
It gets stronger.
Oh, Siri barely understands me on my phone.
It's crazy.
Had an iPhone since forever, you know.
And they still still has our time understanding what I want.
But anyway, so that's yeah, that's the cornerstone speech.
And again, it's like an issue.
I still don't understand.
We're arguing about it today with the crazy Confederate flags and people.
Why don't we talk about the Confederate flags and Confederate statues for a little bit?
Because that should be should be just far enough out of kind of the popular focus or
the mainstream focus in the news right now, especially with certain leaked documents from
the Supreme Court.
But you know, how do you feel about them tearing down Confederate statues and kind of banning
the Confederate flag?
Well, first of all, the Confederate flag is a lie.
It was not a Confederate battle flag and it wasn't a flag of the Confederacy.
It was a flag that was resurrected by the Ku Klux Klan to like wave around and terrorize
black people.
Now, now wait a second here, Mike.
The Ku Klux Klan, they're a states rights advocacy group, right?
Yeah.
Oh my God.
I hope everybody knows I'm being incredibly sarcastic.
Yes.
With that.
So again, no offense to anybody.
I'm guessing that all of our listeners are North American.
We do have listeners overseas though, Mike.
Do we really?
We do.
Interesting.
Well, hello overseas listener.
Or BienVidu.
Oh, OK.
But yeah, the KKK, short for Ku Klux Klan, is a white supremacist organization that's
ebbed and flowed over the years.
They've been embraced by Hollywood in the past.
Birth of a nation.
Birth of a nation, the first American blockbuster shown by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson,
president of Wisconsin.
I did not buy tickets to go see that.
So I am in the clear.
My conscience is clear.
No, I've never seen it.
I kind of want to watch it.
I've seen clips from it in film school.
It is pretty propaganda-y.
Oh, I can imagine that the super racist Woodrow Wilson.
But is it more racist than Disney's Song of the South?
I don't know.
I don't.
I actually have a bootleg copy and I haven't watched it yet.
You mean you have a legal copy you legally acquired through the course of legal daily
citizen activities.
Yes, I legally acquired it and it is supposedly a German copy because they sold it there.
Why wouldn't they?
My grandma was full-blooded German, so I'm like, I love some German things, but sometimes
it's like, Germany, man, it was two world wars you started.
Well, my next fact is about that particular incident that has not been named yet.
Still a good segue.
Let's go.
Yes.
Let's do it.
Perfect.
I found this out when I was in college going for history and I had to write myself a little
paper and I wrote a paper about Holocaust denialism, which was a pretty hot topic like
20 years ago.
I don't know how hot it is now, but I know that there's-
You still see it making the rounds though.
Every once in a while, a politician or a celebrity gets busted because they either denied that
the Holocaust happened or they compared something incredibly mundane and trivial to the Holocaust.
Absolutely.
I know that the alt-right, they love Holocaust denial.
They love it.
I don't know why it's so popular amongst that certain sect of right-wingers, but they enjoy
it for some reason.
My fun fact was that the American government, upper levels, knew that the Holocaust was
going on early on, like late 30s, early 40s, before we even, we being the United States,
entered the war.
And FDR kept this information tight to his clothes to the point where Eisenhower-
So is this- I'm sorry.
Just so that I'm clear and our listeners are clear.
Is this something true or is this something Holocaust deniers are saying?
No, this is something true.
Okay.
That-
I just wanted to clear that up.
That defeats the argument of the Holocaust deniers.
So this was a state secret to the point where Eisenhower, who was the leader of the allied
forces in Europe once the Americans got involved, he was not aware that the Holocaust was going
on.
So when American troops, British and American troops started liberating Holocaust camps,
he started getting this information and he had a hard time leaving it.
He went onto the ground and he saw what was happening.
He could barely believe it, especially since he was a high level member of the government.
Wasn't he president or something?
He became president.
So he, in his infinite wisdom, started documenting their taking over the camps and taking pictures
of the prisoners and taking pictures of the bodies and taking pictures of the bone piles
and taking pictures of the hangings and taking pictures of the tortured victims and taking
pictures of the Nazi propaganda and of the barracks and everything.
They actually sent, and I should know off the top of my head, I didn't know we were
going to talk about this or I would have looked it up, but you can't actually get it in America.
You have to buy this documentary that was shot in one of the Holocaust camps, in one
of the concentration camps.
They sent, I want to say like Stanley Kubrick to go film it because they thought nobody
is going to believe this.
These are horrors beyond anyone's imagination.
Nobody's going to believe this.
So they brought in a big Hollywood director, like famous, to go film this stuff.
It's cost prohibitive to pick up because you can't get it here.
So you have to order it from overseas and they're the only ones with the footage.
You're saying that in the land of the free, home of the brave, our government is censoring
precious information?
No, it's state's rights.
So anyway, that's not funny at all.
We're talking about a very serious topic.
I know.
I'm not trying to poke light at what happened or whatever, but I think that-
I'm hoping it's one of the people who deny the Holocaust is what I'm doing.
And those people who deny those things deny that we're not actually a Christian nation.
Those are the people suppressing this sort of information and they're high enough up
where the average American, it's an awful lot of work to get to some of these things.
Well, it can be.
I'm still not to my fun fact yet.
Yes, I'm sorry.
The only reason why I know about this is because I was a history major in college and had to
write a paper on it.
So I had to go and find original sources.
So anyway, Eisenhower had the notion that people in the future would deny the Holocaust
because it's unbelievable, even to him, and he was there.
So the Eisenhower ordered all these documents to be created, pictures, apparently a film.
But the fun thing or the fact is that anyone can go to the Eisenhower Library, which is
a government run institution.
You can go onto the website and you can see the images from the Holocaust.
You can go to the Eisenhower Library, you can go on the website and you can see the
proof that the Holocaust is real.
And it's pretty gruesome.
Some of them, you're talking piles of ashes mixed with bones, mass graves, all sorts of
stuff.
Pictures of Eisenhower and Patton and Bradley on tour at the concentration camps, pictures
of them there.
So it was a pretty big cover up, I know back when I was paying attention, it was always
like, oh, they're making it up or oh, it's a conspiracy.
And it's like, you have pictures of these generals next to mass graves open with bodies.
That's pretty incredible.
Well, they're kind of the same of the same cloth as the people who deny the moon landing.
And they say, oh, it was faked with computer imagery.
And then you look at CGI from like 2005 and you're like, how did we even watch this with
some CGI?
I can't imagine denying that because it shouldn't be like a political thing.
People died.
People's entire families were wiped off of the planet.
Their lines of families, like family generations just ended.
And it's not about you whether or not you think it did or didn't happen.
You're minimizing somebody else's experience, somebody else's family experience, somebody
else's tragedy.
Sure.
I mean, it doesn't benefit anybody politically that I can understand.
But yet people want to fight about it or they want to use it.
They want to manipulate it to make it a political point.
To a certain extent, I understand why denial of the Holocaust against the Native American
population is still going on because that is politically potent in some cases, which
is a total crap.
That's a long history of things going over 400 years.
And I could do research and we could talk about that someday, I guess.
But even my, I know people that were at the residential schools where they tried to kill
the Indian and save the man was their motto.
It's like...
Like the re-education, they did all that.
And they've been doing that too more recently.
And this is more politically charged than the Native American re-education camps, but
the gay conversion centers, like those therapy centers.
Oh, right.
Right.
Like Michelle Bachman's husband.
Yeah.
For those of you who don't know, Michelle Bachman was a congresswoman from Minnesota
who has a husband who is clearly a closeted homosexual.
Yeah.
And I actually met Michelle Bachman.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
How was she?
Except for asking if I thought her husband was attractive.
I'm just kidding.
That didn't happen.
I did.
I met her, but I was working for the Boy Scouts of America.
And they are not...
And recently they've been trying to change because they've been forced to, but they have
not historically been an atheist or alternative lifestyle friendly organization.
So I was not able to get into the weeds with her as it were on any political things.
So it was just more of a, hi, nice to meet you.
And then under my breath, I hope you burn in hell.
If there is such a place.
Well, Michelle Bachman's district had Stearns County in it, which not coincidentally has
the highest rate of incest in the whole state.
Huzzah.
Keep it in the family.
That's right.
But yeah.
So those are all, I'm sure that my American listeners noticed a slant of my fun facts
because they all go against a certain narrative that is told in the United States by certain
people.
Yes.
I have one founding father fun fact that I think you might enjoy.
You might know it, you might not.
The first dinosaur fossil was discovered after George Washington died.
So he had no idea there were even dinosaurs on the planet.
I did not know that.
I know that when I went to Mount Vernon, it was summertime.
And for those who don't know, Minnesota summertime, especially up North, very humid and very hot,
90 degrees, 100% humidity.
Well that's not hot for Florida or Texas or Arizona.
No, it's not.
It's not hot for those places, but it also used to be negative 30 here for like a month.
But just as a frame of reference, it's 100% humidity and 90 degrees where I live in the
summer.
And I went there during the summer and I thought I was going to die in Virginia there.
It was absolutely horrible.
I definitely came away thinking that George Washington was an asshole with his slaves.
It's like who the fuck could consciously make people work in this shit?
It's awful.
It's just horrible.
Yeah, but I guess everybody was working in that shit.
And from the book we talked about a couple episodes back, the Black, Rednecks, and White
Liberals, he actually talked about George Washington and his kind of treatment of slaves.
And he was actively buying slaves because in his will, he gave all of his slaves freedom.
Yes, yes.
But that doesn't change the weather.
No, it doesn't change the weather.
In DC.
And actually for about a six year, six or seven year period, I was going to Washington,
DC every other year for reasons I can't talk about now because they've got a contract out
on me.
But no, it was with the Boy Scouts.
I would go and we went and took a family trip.
And so I went like every other year for the Boy Scouts.
But I got to see a lot of DC that way, which is pretty cool.
Oh, it's very cool.
I would definitely want to go back to go to the Smithsonian specifically.
I really enjoyed that.
I liked the air and space.
That one's really cool.
Oh, I didn't go there.
I didn't go there.
I went to the two art museums and the American History Museum.
They're all cool.
Oh yeah, you can spend a lot of time there, weeks and weeks probably.
So unfortunately, I'm done with my cigar.
I think it was very good.
Definitely not like a favorite.
I wouldn't say favorite.
I would say it's very firmly in the slightly above average.
See and now I have about an inch and a half left and I'm getting a very ashy sour taste
out of the cigar.
Okay.
Mine kind of went a little sour and I just put it out because I've got about an inch
left, maybe about an inch and a half.
I don't know, maybe about an inch and a half.
So I just put it out because I'm like, eh, okay.
It was like the pole was getting very hot and I was like, it's probably about done.
But I think by and large, I would smoke a Cohiba over our Bin Maduro.
Not if you put tequila on it.
See I would smoke our tequila Bin Maduro over a Cohiba any day.
Me too.
Yes.
So yeah, that's it.
I think Cohiba Black.
If you want a good just middle of the road, you want to try a name brand cigar, you want
to get off of, I don't know, Bin Cigars or whatever.
You've got a special event and you've got people that want to try cigars.
Cohiba couldn't really go wrong, I don't think.
It was consistent.
It's all right.
There's better cigars for the money.
But you can hand somebody a Cohiba and they're going to say yes, most likely.
Yeah.
It's just like liquor.
There's better whiskey for cheaper than some of the big name brands that run multi-million
dollar ads.
But it's got the recognition.
So it's kind of a double edged sword.
But it's not a bad.
It's not a bad drink and not a bad cigar.
Right.
Well, okay.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening and we'll pick you up next week.
Have a good week.