The Martyr Made Podcast

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

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

Hi everyone. Here is a talk I gave about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the first inaugural Novitate Conference in Washington, DC. Novitate was created by Luke Burgis to explore and celebrate the work of French scholar René Girard. Luke is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

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Link to the Martyr Made Substack: https://martyrmade.substack.com/

Hi everybody. This is the audio version of a six-part essay series called Blacks and Jews. I wrote it for my Substack a while back, so if it sounds like I’m reading instead of speaking naturally, it’s because in this case I am. I decided to release this to everyone on the main feed because, in light of the recent uproar and brewing Democratic Party civil war over the Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s suddenly become quite timely. Black and Jewish Americans were uniquely united until the late 1960s, when the civil rights movement was subsumed by a Third Worldist outlook that caused the Black Panthers and other activists to turn on the State of Israel, and then on American Jews. It precipitated a split in the so-called Black-Jewish alliance which had been the backbone of the civil rights movement during its glory years, and led to some of the worst outbursts of public antisemitism in American history. The intra-left wing conflict over the current conflict in Gaza is not a new story, and in fact is an example of scabs being torn off old wounds that had barely begun to heal. I wrote this series as I was preparing the most recent episode of Whose America, Inner City Blues, so those of you who’ve heard that will be familiar with some of the material, but there’s also a lot of material that wasn’t in that episode.

As I said, this was previously released on my Substack, so if you enjoy this kind of content maybe you’ll show a little holiday cheer and help support the podcast by becoming a subscriber for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. This is a 100% listener-funded show, I don’t have sponsors or any other kind of funding except what you guys contribute, so your generosity is greatly appreciated.

I’m re-uploading all the podcasts from a new hosting service, so I thought I’d go ahead and put the full Epstein series up while I was at it.

This series deals with some very dark material. It is not for listening with kids in the car or where other people can hear it at work.

If you appreciate this podcast, please consider helping to support it by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack for $5 p/month or $50 p/year. The Substack includes subscribers-only essays, and a subscribers-only podcast feed w/exclusive episodes and audio versions of all Substack essays. This is a 100% listener-funded show, so your support is greatly appreciated.

It’s available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

*Correction* A few people have informed me that my description of how a hedge fund manager calculates his cut is off in Part 1. I meant to correct it in the show, but I forgot. The general point remains, however: there is no way Jeffrey Epstein made the kind of money he was showing by managing one guy’s account over the years.

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

Please consider subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack page. The show is 100% listener supported, and Substack subscribers is the only way I’m able to keep doing this. Thanks for everything.

The Great Migration of 1915-1960 saw over six million African Americans move from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and one whose consequences defined American domestic politics throughout the 20th century. But it wasn’t the first time the industrial cities of America had experienced massive demographic transformation, and the black migrants would run smack into the immigrants of previous generations. In the 1960s, frustration and anger turned to conflict, as race riots drove what was left of the white ethnics out of the inner cities. Today we tell the story of the battle for control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in New York City – a topic which might sound a bit dull, but was one of the most intense periods of racial conflict in recent American history. The conflict captured the attention of the country for months, and led to a split in the alliance between American blacks and American Jews that had powered the civil rights movement until the late 1960s.

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In August 1921, 10,000-20,000 armed coal miners marched on Mingo County, West Virginia to lift the martial law imposed there, free their jailed brethren, and avenge the assassination of one of their local heroes. At least 20,000 more wives, young boys and other civilians followed the army providing medical, logistical and other services. Before it was over, they would storm a mountainside under fire from entrenched machine guns, and while being bombed from the air. It was the largest and most serious armed insurrection in US history since the Civil War. This episode is going to discuss the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, and The Battle of Blair Mountain.

These episodes are out a week or two early on the Substack feed. If you enjoy this content or want more essays and podcasts not available here, please consider becoming a subscriber over at Substack, it’s how I manage to be able to do this at all.

Here’s the link to Jocko’s company, Origin, that I mention in the intro. Go there and check out the high-end clothing, boots, jiu jitsu gis, hunting gear and more, all hand-made in the United States.

Here’s the link to Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire podcast (also available wherever you get your podcasts).

Hi everyone. Here is the first episode – well, the prologue – for a brand new Martyr Made series called Whose America?, on the American labor wars. This is a series I’ve been working on for a while, and a story very close to my heart.

I appreciate the patience and support you guys have shown me. I have a habit of over-burdening myself until work grinds to a crawl, then I panic and work myself nearly insane to catch up. Well, the good news is that I only decided to do this prologue at the last minute to set the tone and get the ball rolling, when the *actual* first episode of this series, on the largest insurrection in American history before or since the Civil War, was already almost done. I’ve got another two books to read before I’m ready to release it into the wild, but it won’t be too long.

This episode has already been available to Substack subcribers for a week. I will be doing that from now on, so you can add that to the list of benefits available to subscribers for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. If you enjoy this episode, or even if you don’t but just want to keep my cats from starving, please consider supporting the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber to the MartyrMade Substack.

Thanks for listening!

Hey everybody. Many of you have asked for my thoughts on the crisis in Ukraine, so here they are. I re-recorded it because the audio was trash the first time around. Sorry about that.

This is the kind of content I usually put on the Substack subscribers-only feed, so if you like this and can spare $5, please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing at martyrmade.substack.com.

Here are some links I mention in the show:

The Snipers Massacre On Maidan

How the West Sowed the Seeds of War in Ukraine, by Pedro Gonzalez

My Twitter thread on the Rand Corporation’s strategy white paper

Scott Horton’s recent speech on the Ukraine crisis

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

More short episodes like this will be available to subscribers only at the MartyrMade Substack.

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple follow the remnants of the 1970s radical left into the fire.

WARNING: Extreme language and disturbing content.

Thank you to www.campuspress.com for sponsoring this series.

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Huge thanks to the folks behind the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown Project. This podcast wouldn't have been possible without their indispensable hard work recording, organizing, and transcribing the Peoples Temple tapes and other source materials. For further information about Jonestown, you can't do better than their website. I did my best to tell the story here as I understand it, but if you ask me the work they're doing will lead to a fundamental future reassessment of what happened.

This was originally intended to be part of the previous episode, but I decided to break them up.

Warning: EXTREME LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC CONTENT

The student movement is dead. The Black Panther Party is torn apart by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Activism devolves into struggle sessions and terrorism, as the movement for civil rights and social justice is left to "drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen." Treason drives Jim Jones off a cliff.

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This series brought to you by the kind folks at CampusPress.

This episode begins where the '60s end, when the radicalism of that decade crash headlong into the diminishing expectations of 1970s America. The Weather Underground veers off toward its explosive climax. As the idealism of the student movement is shunted into self-help fads and therapy sessions, what remaining energy of the radical left is drained into increasingly bizarre and violent channels.

I broke this episode up into two parts, so it ends a bit abruptly. The second segment will be available a few hours after this is released.

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This series brought to you by the good folks at CampusPress.

This episode discusses the beginning of Peoples' Temple's slide into radicalism after Jim Jones leads his people to California. We also talk about the development of 1960s radical political movements, and Jonestown conspiracy theories.

I had to record this episode in a hotel bathroom while on travel for work. The audio quality has some issues at various points. Hopefully, it's not too bad.

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

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