Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence. Therefore, we citizens of the United States and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following provisional constitution and ordinances the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions. These two paragraphs are the preamble to John Brown's provisional constitution and ordinances for the people of the United States. Notice the reference to the Dred Scott ruling citing the infamous line that black people had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. John Brown wasn't an incredibly smart man. He wasn't a political thinker or much of a writer. And all of these shortcomings are apparent in his provisional constitution. Like the United States constitution, he established the same three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. But instead of listing the specific powers of each branch, he simply offered a small paragraph of how they would be composed. It isn't much of a constitution, but John Brown obsessed over it for quite some time between the Pottawatomie massacre and the raid on Harper's Ferry. While drafting it, he lived for three weeks with Frederick Douglass, who set of Brown's work on the constitution, quote, his whole time and thought were given to this subject. It was the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Till I confess, it began to be something of a bore to me. End quote. Brown also revealed his plans to Douglass, a plan that Douglass thought was too foolhardy to take any part in.  For my part, I lean toward the former interpretation. Brown loved reading about George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, and it's pretty clear that he conceived of himself as a great general, which was quite a delusion. But over the next few episodes, when I tell the story of Harper's Ferry, I'll do my best to stick to the facts and let people come to their own conclusion about John Brown's enigmatic train of thought. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. Today we begin what many people, including myself, see as the climax of the antebellum controversy, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. And I'll be spending several episodes on this because it's important, of course, but also because I really think it's just a fascinating story, and it's worth diving into some of the details people don't usually get, if for no other reason than the entertainment value of a good historical episode. In today's episode, I want to talk about Brown's recruitment of men and financial backers leading up to the raid. John Brown's plan to wage war on slavery was backed financially by six abolitionists, many of whom came up in the previous episodes on the Fugitive Slave Act. Five of them were from Boston. This would be Samuel Gridley-Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, George Luther Stearns, Frank Sanborn, and Theodore Parker. The first and most important backer, though, was a New Yorker named Garrett Smith, who also helped finance some of Lysander Spooner's writings. If you go to lysanderspooner.org, which is run by Randy Barnett, you can read transcripts of the letters between Spooner and Smith, in fact. It's a great website. If you're not familiar with Randy Barnett, he used to write for Rothbard's Liberty Forum and his early writings on anarchist legal theory are fantastic, but I digress. These men, the Secret Six, were interesting enough to merit some biographical overview, especially Samuel Gridley-Howe. Howe knew all kinds of people whose names we still know today. As a kid, he was the neighbor and family friend of Paul Revere. As an adult, he became friends with Charles Dickens. In fact, even before Helen Keller and the miracle worker, Samuel Howe, became the first person in America to teach language to a blind death mute named Laura Bridgeman. And Charles Dickens wrote about them in his book, American Notes for General Circulation, which you can get for like 12 bucks on Amazon. He also had some early experiences that would affect his response to Brown's arrest at Harpers Ferry. He studied medicine in Europe, and while he was there, Howe participated in the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris, which was an uprising against the restored bourbon monarchy. While he was there, he befriended Marquis de Lafayette, who helped in the American Revolution. So this guy made friends with so many famous people, and it was on an errand for Lafayette that Howe was arrested and imprisoned. And Howe's imprisonment made a significant imprint on his mind that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. He was held in solitary confinement for five weeks in a Berlin dungeon. He had no contact with the outside world during this time, and he wasn't even sure if his family or friends elsewhere in the world even knew what happened to him. Howe developed an extreme fear of prisons after this that was so pronounced that when he visited a British prison with his friend Charles Dickens to give a testimony, Dickens observed that Howe was strangely anxious to leave the prison, and Dickens had, quote, never seen a man so nervous. Later, when Howe was asked to testify in Washington in regards to the raid on Harpers Ferry, Howe wrote in a letter to Henry Wilson that he was, quote, a little wary, for I once hurried into a prison under pretext that my testimony was wanted by legal authority about matters and things on the frontiers of rebelling in Poland, and I did not find it easy to get out. I have since learned that no European despotism is more regardless of justice than is the one we have at home, end quote. Worried about his own possible arrest as part of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, Howe took refuge in Canada for a time. Theodore Parker was another interesting member of the Secret Six. His grandfather was a Revolutionary War veteran famous for his command of Minutemen on Lexington Green, where he uttered the famous line, don't fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here. The shadow of his grandfather stayed with him and certainly seems to have influenced his participation in John Brown's actions and his other abolitionist activities. He once said of his resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, quote, you know I do not like fighting, but what could I do? I was born in the little town where the fight and the bloodshed of the revolution began. My grandfather drew the first sword in the revolution. When I write in my library at home on the one side of me is the Bible which my father's prayed over for nearly a hundred years. On the other side hangs the firelock my grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried it, the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used in the Battle of Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the first gun taken in the revolution, taken also by my grandfather. Would these things before me, these symbols, would these memories in me? When a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman pursued by the kidnappers came to my house, what could I do less than take her in and defend her to the last end, quote. In one episode demonstrating his radicalism and movement away from pacifism, he married a pair of fugitive slaves named Ellen and William Craft. He performed the ceremony in his own home and during the service Parker gave a sword to the groom and said, quote, with this sword, IV wed, and then told the groom to use it to kill any United States officer or slave owner who tried to take him or his new wife back into slavery. For many years in the 1850s, Howe and Parker met as part of a vigilance committee in Boston that was attended by a third member of the future secret six, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Influenced by William Lloyd Garrison, Higginson advocated northern secession under the cry, no union with slaveholders, but he eventually gave in to the encouragement of Charles Sumner to try his lot as a politician on the Free Soil Party ballot for congressmen of his district. He lost this election, but as minister of a church, he frequently lectured about the evils of slavery, which caused enough consternation that he was pressured to resign in 1849, which means he was doing this before the fugitive slave law made abolitionism somewhat more acceptable in the north. And he became an itinerant preacher and abolitionist activist. In contrast to these three was George Luther Stearns, who is a successful businessman who made a respectable fortune for himself. His mansion served as frequent station for the underground railroad where he would hide fugitive slaves under the floorboards of his bathroom. One of the slaves he helped smuggle to Canada, he eventually brought back into the United States and set him up with a barber shop in Harvard Square, which made newspaper headlines for its brazen defiance of the fugitive slave law. This was not an unusual act for Stearns, who helped many fugitive slaves set up some business in which they were able to work for themselves. And he believed that personal entrepreneurship was the best way to help liberated blacks as well as to help free white people. This is worth mentioning too, because while all members of the secret six were radical abolitionists, meaning they believed not just in the immediate uncompensated emancipation of slaves, but they also believed in equal rights for blacks as part of the 19th century natural rights doctrine. Many abolitionists like Theodore Parker did believe that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. John Brown actually impressed Frederick Douglass for rejecting this notion, and George Stearns seemed to have rejected it as well, meaning that they were ahead of their time on racial views even compared to other abolitionists. George Stearns was also a significant financial backer of the Free State movement in Kansas. He invested roughly 48 grand into the movement, the equivalent to about one and a half million dollars today, and his wife Mary Stearns invested 20 or 30 grand herself through some women's groups formed to support the Free State cause in Kansas. The final Bostonian member of the secret six was Franklin Sandborn. He was kind of a morbid romantic. He married his wife even though he knew she was dying. In fact, he agreed to marry her because she was dying after he learned that she had a rare neurological condition, and she died only days after their wedding. For the rest of his life, he would keep a lock of her hair. This might sound sweet, maybe it was, but this kind of tragic romance was somewhat fattish at the time. This was at the height of the Victorian era fixation on weird sexual stuff and tragic youthful death, so Sandborn was probably at least partly caught up in this. There was a lot of weird romantic sexual stuff that came out of the Victorian era literature. In the movie Braveheart, for instance, the king instates the tradition of prima nocta, which was the traditional right for nobles to take a newly wed woman's virginity on her wedding night. But this was never actually policy in history. The idea was born out of Victorian era literature among other various weird fixations. But again, I digress. In any case, Sandborn's morbid romantic gesture seems at least to be partly an outgrowth of this culture. But his marriage is important to our story if only because it was his deceased wife's brother who encouraged Brown to seek support from Sandborn, and Sandborn introduced Brown to some of the other members of the Secret Six. The only non-Bostonian member of the Secret Six was Garrett Smith, but I already talked about him in the episode on the Pottawatomie Massacre, because he was Brown's first major financial backer, and it was on his land that Brown settled his family prior to going to Kansas. Brown's dealings with the Six guys are, I think, some of the most telling actions about his personality and character. The first thing worth mentioning is that all six of them were completely bought into Brown's persona. Whether it was accurate or not, Brown had no qualms about playing up his moral superiority to guilt his financiers into backing him. In one of Brown's most famous documents left behind, he wrote a letter to George Stern's 12-year-old son, Henry, in which he told the boy about how he came to dedicate himself to abolitionism. In the letter, he writes in the third person, and he lays his moralism on thick. In the passage explaining his very early conversion to abolitionism, Brown writes, quote, he, referring to himself in the third person, was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord since the United States Marshal, who held a slave boy near his age, very active, intelligent, and good-filling, and to whom John was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of John, brought him to the table with his first company, and friends, called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles away from home with a company of cattle alone, while the negro boy, who was fully, if not more than his equal, was badly clothed, poorly fed, and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children, for such children have neither fathers nor mothers to protect and provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question, is God their father? End quote. Historians have pretty much dismissed this passage as largely a fabrication by Brown. This was supposedly when Brown was only about nine years old, which means it would be absurd that he would be out conducting a cattle drive on his own, and there is of course no corroborating evidence that Brown did any such thing. It's also unlikely that Brown ever witnessed such a beating of a slave, not because slave masters were kind, but because they were conscientious of what they saw as their own property, and using iron shovels to beat a slave child would have been pretty unheard of behavior, likely something a child wouldn't survive. So historians don't really consider the letter important for what it tells us about John Brown's actual life, but it's considered important because when he wrote it, it's quite clear that he was aiming it at George Stearns, and it does give us an idea of the persona he was presenting to other people as part of his fundraising propaganda. It worked, and Henry Stearns even offered his meager savings as a young child to support John Brown's cause. Another interesting anecdote that illustrates Brown's character when interacting with his benefactors was when he was staying with an abolitionist named Thomas Russell, a judge, and his wife. She recalled that one day she turned, quote, stiff with fright, unquote, when Brown smiled and pulled out, quote, a long evil looking knife, unquote, as well as several revolvers. Then he said to her, according to her recollections, that he would hate to ruin her nice carpet with blood, but he would never allow himself to be taken alive. In Miss Russell's view, Brown enjoyed torturing his benefactors in such a manner, and she was fully aware of his deliberate demonstrations of his monkish superiority compared to their extravagant standard of living.  But Brown's moralism worked on his financial backers, though they did go through periods of doubt about supporting Brown as the 1857 recession left them financially stretched, and at times, Brown seemed slow to act. But in the end, they supported him all the way up to Harper's Ferry, and it's clear that Brown's persona as their moral superior contributed to their dedication. In one meeting, just before the raid took place, Garrett Smith stood up in front of a group of friends with John Brown present and said, quote, if I were asked to point out, I will say it in his presence, to point out the man in all the world I think most truly a Christian, I would point to John Brown, end quote. But funds were easier to obtain, apparently, than men and much of Brown's efforts focused on trying to recruit volunteers for his war against slavery. His need for recruits also exposed him to certain vulnerabilities that jeopardize the plan before it even took place. In 1857, John Brown met a man named Hugh Forbes. Forbes was a British fencing instructor who gained military experience in the Italian revolution led by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Forbes said he was a colonel and offered to act as the drill master for Brown's army. He was working on a training manual for soldiers, in fact, and Brown found the offer attractive and he gave Forbes an advance of $600 as pay for the next six months of work in training his recruits. But months went by and even though Brown didn't yet have anybody for Forbes to train, he was upset that he hadn't seen any return on his investment and he was still waiting for the training manual. Forbes did eventually complete the manual titled the manual of a patriotic volunteer. But unbeknownst to Brown, while Forbes was supposed to be working on his manual, he was expending a lot of effort trying to get funds from Brown's backers for himself. Forbes met with Garrett Smith four months after Brown hired him and introduced himself as Brown's deputy military strategist. Without mentioning the $600 Brown had already paid him, Forbes asked Smith for another $750. Garrett Smith gave him some money. I'm not sure if he gave him the full $750 as Garrett Smith's journal entry about the event only says that he did fork over some money of an unspecified amount. And when Forbes showed up for work in August, there were hardly any recruits for him to train, though Brown promised that many more were on their way. In the meantime, Forbes was instructed to drill a single soldier, John Brown's son Owen. Forbes did run drills with Owen, but he also spent much of his time arguing over John Brown's plan, each man viewing himself as the better general. This is where John Brown suggested the idea of waging an attack on Harper's Ferry as a possible starting point to start moving their army south with a growing army of liberated slaves. Forbes did not believe that freed blacks would flock into the army the way Brown imagined, and he wanted to stick to rapid-fire guerrilla raids conducted by an all-white militia so they could free slaves and smuggle them to Canada. Add to these disagreements the fact that Brown was out of money for the moment to pay Forbes any further. Hugh Forbes had a family he'd left behind in Europe that he claimed he needed to support.  After this, Forbes went to various other abolitionists blaming John Brown for leaving him and his family in poverty. He started writing accusatory letters to members of the Secret Six. Apparently, he was telling them that Brown had sent him to collect the money he'd been promised. It was a mixture between begging, bullying, and blackmail, with Forbes mentioning to them the wealth of information he had about Brown's plan that could put them all in legal jeopardy. Forbes also visited Frederick Douglass. Douglass was completely unaware of the fallout between Forbes and Brown, and he welcomed Forbes into his home, gave him travel money, and a letter to serve as a character reference to give to a wealthy community of German refugees who might donate to John Brown's cause. It was only after Forbes left that Douglass realized he'd been swindled. Forbes made an attempt to swindle and extort anybody he could think of by either pretending to be still working for John Brown or making veiled threats about revealing everything he knew to the authorities. It worked on some and it failed on others, but Forbes served as a major thorn in Brown's side in 1858. Forbes's threats were more effective against the Secret Six than anybody else, as they were worried he might reveal information that could incriminate them. In early 1858, John Brown revealed to his backers the plan to incite insurrection in Virginia, but after they started to worry about Forbes, they told John Brown to stop giving them any details of what he planned to do. They would still support him, but they didn't want to know any incriminating details themselves. They also encouraged Brown to postpone his plan until the threat of Forbes was no longer hanging over their heads. Brown and Higginson were the only ones who did not want to delay, but with the other five getting cold feet, funding was suspended for some time in the spring of 1858, and this did delay Brown's plans. Sharing Brown's impatience, one of his recruits, John Cook, the guy I mentioned in the last Kansas episode, who was a ladies man in a crack shot, offered to start spying on Harper's fairing. He would ingrain himself in the community and gain helpful information. Brown agreed and Cook took up residence in Harper's fairing, and this did lead to information that would be used in the raid among other developments. Cook did seem to have been a decent spy, though it's questionable how much good this did. He befriended the locals, he was charming and sociable, he found employment with several people in the town, and he joined a debate club. As usual, he found favor with the ladies in the town, both young and old. One woman, whose daughter Cook had complimented, wrote of him, quote, I was really pleased with him.  He seems to have made a favorable impression upon everyone, end quote. One of the ladies he attracted was the 18-year-old daughter of his landlady named Virginia. On April 18th, 1859, the two got married with the bride already five months pregnant. As far as we can tell, his relationship with Virginia was sincere, but it also helped him ingrain himself further and gain information for the raid. When he was getting his marriage license, for example, he asked the clerk how many slaves lived in Harper's Ferry, claiming that it was to settle a bet he had with a friend. Another interesting anecdote from his role as a spy, and one that would come up during the raid itself, was John Cook's meeting with Colonel Lewis Washington, who was a slave owner and a local celebrity because he was the great grand-nephew of George Washington. Lewis Washington had inherited some of his great uncle's heirlooms, including a sword gifted to General Washington by Frederick the Great, an epistle that was a gift from Lafayette. One afternoon, Lewis Washington was taking a stroll by the armory that Brown would eventually get trapped in, and he was stopped by John Cook. I believe you have a great many interesting relics at your house, Cook said. Could I have permission to see them if I should walk out some day? This is according to Washington's testimony at the trial after the raid. It was not uncommon for people to ask to see Washington's treasures, and he enjoyed showing them off to people, so he agreed, thinking Cook was just a friendly armory worker. So Cook showed up at Washington's mansion a week later, and Washington happily let him admire the sword and the pistol. As I already mentioned, Cook was an absolute crackshot, and he wanted to fire the pistol, so he asked if Washington had ever done so. Washington told him that he fired it one time a decade earlier, and then he cleaned it out, put it in the cabinet, and the gun would never be fired again. But Cook wanted to see more of Washington's largest state, so he started talking to him about firearms. Then he revealed that he had been part of a hunting party in Kansas, where he killed Buffalo to sell their hides. After this failed to elicit an interested response from Washington, Cook unbuttoned his coat and showed the Colonel his two silver-mounted revolvers. These were very ornate weapons, and finally, Washington seemed interested. Cook said he needed the guns to hunt Buffalo, which was baloney, but he obviously didn't want to tell the slave owner that he was a free-state gorilla. Washington questioned a story about Cook hunting Buffalo with revolvers, and Cook said that he was able to do so because his horse was so well-trained. This seemed to be enough of a save to satisfy Washington, and Cook asked if he'd like to try out his weapons. Washington eagerly agreed, so they went outside and set up a target under a tree in the front of Washington's house. While they were shooting, Washington noticed the engravings on the gun saying John E. Cook, and he asked if that was the man's name. Cook said it was, and claimed that he engraved the guns himself, saying he borrowed the tools from a silversmith. The silversmith he referenced was actually a free black man, named James Monroe Jones, but Cook didn't mention this, of course. So the men each shot off 24 rounds, and John Cook could have easily outshot Washington by all accounts of his reputation with a revolver, but apparently he hid his skills and let Washington seem like the better shot, flattering the man by saying that Washington was the best shot he had ever met. So Cook successfully charmed the man, and in October, Washington tried to visit Cook again only to learn that Cook was out of town. The next time Washington would meet Cook in person would be during the raid, where Cook would arrest him in his home and announce to his slaves that they were officially liberated. But Brown found recruits hard to come by. All in all, John Brown's army consisted of 22 men, including himself, though three of them would be left behind in the hideout to guard the weapons while the rest raided Harper's Ferry. Brown hoped to recruit free blacks to his cause, visiting with both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, in the hopes of gaining their support, and with their influence the support of many fugitive slaves. When he met with Frederick Douglass, Brown was disappointed that Douglass refused to participate in the raid, but Douglass was accompanied by a fugitive slave named Shields Green, who did join Brown. Another black member of Brown's party was an escaped slave named Dangerfield Newby. He was around 40 years old, much older than the other recruits, but he was also the most desperate person in Brown's group. His family was still in slavery, and their owner had originally agreed to sell them to Dangerfield for $700, which was a very high price. But Newby had saved up the money only to have the slave owner renege on the agreement and refuse to sell. So Newby's wife Harriet wrote him a letter imploring him to come see her and the children with or without money, because the thought of seeing him was the only thing that kept her going. So Dangerfield was desperate and out of option, so he joined John Brown hoping to liberate his wife and children, and he was the most anxious member of the party to make their move. Aaron Stevens might be the most different from Dangerfield Newby, in that he seems to have joined John Brown for the fun of it more than anything else. At age 16, Stevens had volunteered to fight in the Mexican-American War, and afterwards he became a burglar in the West. He stayed in the military to fight Indians until he was court-martialed for drunkenness and mutiny after he pulled a gun on an officer. Stevens was sentenced to death by firing squad, but his sentence was reduced to three years' hard labor at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. After less than six months, he escaped and joined the Free State Gorillas using the alias Colonel Whipple. He was very much an abolitionist, and in one raid he fired the shot that killed a Missouri slave owner while freeing the slaves. But Stevens seemed to largely be driven by the excitement of it all more than the moral crusade. Three of Brown's sons would participate in the raid as well, Oliver Watson and Owen, though Owen, due to his physical handicap, would be one of the three left behind, and he ended up escaping from Harper's Ferry and living until 1889, so his testimonies are one of the major sources historians have about all this. I'm not going to detail the backstory of every raid, or that would be tedious, and most of them aren't as interesting as these few, but they'll come up when I talk about the raid itself as they're either killed or captured. At one point, in his attempt to recruit allies, John Brown revealed his plan to some Quakers in Springdale, Iowa, where he was based during the winter of 1857 and 58. The Quakers were indeed anti-slavery, of course, but they were worried about the foolishness of the plan, thinking that Brown was going to put his young recruits in danger, which was obviously true. So a handful of them decided to get together and write a letter to the US Secretary of War, John Floyd. This would have been shortly after John Brown picked Harper's Ferry as his target, and the Quakers revealed as much in a letter. They also named him as Old John Brown of Kansas Infamy and said that his men would go through Pennsylvania and Maryland to enter Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The letter might have stopped Brown's raid before it had even started, if not for the one mistake they made. They said that Brown had placed a spy at the Armory in Maryland. This was the only thing in the letter that wasn't true, and it's just the small detail that the Armory was not in Maryland. It was in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, placing it just on the other side of the river that separated the two states. John Floyd read the letter and he knew that there was no Armory in Maryland, so he thought it was a hoax and he took no action. In a testimony he gave after the fact, he also blamed his decision to ignore the letter on the fact that in his mind, quote, a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizen of the United States, end quote. So the small geographic error on the part of the Quakers was enough to save Brown from being exposed nearly two years before the attack actually took place. In addition to getting men, Brown also started to stockpile weapons. He had a supply of arms and gunpowder funded by the Secret Six, but he wanted something else for the slaves he would liberate, since he knew they would have never have held a gun before. In March of 1857 he met a blacksmith named Charles Blair, and like he did, to many of his admirers, John Brown showed off the Bowie knife he had acquired in Kansas and he asked about the feasibility of a fixing a similar blade to a long pole to make a pipe. Blair said he could make it, and Brown contracted with Blair to make thousands of them to arm the swarms of fugitive slaves he anticipated. He made an initial payment of $550, and Blair gave Brown an initial supply as samples of the work, but not long after Brown was strapped for cash and he couldn't make any more payments, so Blair stopped working on the pikes. And it wasn't until June of 1859 after Brown had finished another round of fundraising that he met with Blair again and gave him the rest of the money to fulfill the contract, thus securing a huge supply of pikes that would almost entirely go unused after the anticipated swarm of slaves failed to appear. Brown also took on the side mission in late 1858 which may have helped reignite support for his cause from his backers who were starting to wonder if Brown would ever actually do anything. Brown had returned to Kansas now operating under the name Schuble Morgan and sporting the giant white beard that many of you have probably seen in one of the more famous photos of him. While in Kansas, Brown's plan was at a low point. He was cash strapped with his supporters losing faith and Hugh Forbes causing problems while the few men he had recruited were getting bored. But in December, a Missouri slave named Jim Daniels came into Kansas pretending to be there on business selling brooms. But instead, he was there to give Brown a message. He and several other slaves were about to be sold and they needed Brown's help. This was just the sort of thing Brown needed not only for his own sense of purpose but to show his financiers that he was still a man of action. So Brown led 18 men from Kansas into Missouri the night after he spoke to Daniels. One of his men took into the house of Daniels' master and freed slaves at the point of his gun. Then they moved to a neighboring property and freed five more slaves. Some of the men, including Stevens, raided yet another neighboring home and freed one more slave and this is where Stevens shot and killed the owner. In addition to liberating 11 slaves, the guerrillas stole livestock, food, clothing, and two white hostages and then fled back to Kansas. The hostages would be released once the raiders were in safer territories. For the Missourians, this was another of Osawatomi Brown's terrorist attacks and the newspapers reported exactly that. For John Brown, this was the good press he desperately needed to remind the Secret Six why they were giving him so much money. This event would be called the Battle of the Spurs and Brown helped smuggle all 11 of the slaves into Iowa to take refuge with the Quakers. During the trip on a ferry boat, one of the slaves gave birth and the child was named John Brown in honor of their liberator. Brown took full advantage of the event for the purposes of his own propaganda. He wrote a draft of an article comparing the Battle of the Spurs to a massacre with a French name that I'm not going to try to pronounce and in the massacre he referenced 11 free statemen were shot and left for dead by a Georgian named Charles Hamilton. Brown pointed out that the territorial government never bothered to investigate the murders. By contrast wrote Brown, quote, 11 persons are forcibly restored to their natural and inalienable rights with but one man killed and all hell is stirred from beneath, end quote. After this event, all of Brown's focus was on the planet Harper's Ferry and as if a sign from above he got one last minute recruit, Francis Jackson Mariam. Mariam was hardly fit to fight. He was scrawny, he had a glass eye and he clearly had syphilis. For these reasons he would be one of the three left behind to guard the weapons cache but he was valuable for what he brought with him, $600 in gold coins, his inheritance that he was donating to Brown's cause. This money would come in handy as they took the war further south, at least that's what they thought at the time. Finally at the beginning of October 1859, the men made their final preparations for the attack that would commence on the 16th of that month. John Cook defying Brown's orders warned his wife and mother-in-law about the plan so they could find safety elsewhere. Charles Tidd, another of Brown's volunteers, wrote his parents to let them know where they could find his belongings since this was, as he put it, possibly the last letter they would ever receive from him. Another recruit, William Lehman, used his final letter to reveal to his family why they had gone so long without seeing him. He was part of a secret group on a mission to exterminate slavery.  His brother Watson gave a darker goodbye to his wife Belle shortly after she gave birth to his son. In his last letter to Belle, Watson wrote, I sometimes think perhaps we shall not meet again. If we should not, you have an object to live for, to be a mother to our little Fred. He is not quite a reality to me yet. End quote. When he'd left North Elba a few months prior, just after Fred was born, Belle couldn't understand why he was crying. She didn't know about the conspiracy. Stevens also wrote a letter to a sweetheart, which he signed with his pseudonym, Colonel Whipple, which almost gives a comical ending to what was a pretty heartfelt letter. Finally, with all the preparations in place, John Brown gave the final orders. The three men who were least fit for combat were to be left behind to guard the weapons. This would be Francis Merriam, Owen Brown, who had a useless arm, and Barclay Coppock, an Iowa Quaker, who probably had asthma, but they only saw him as having bad lungs and low stamina. His brother Edwin would join Brown and the others in the raid. So on Sunday evening, October 16th, Brown gave a final piece of instruction to his 18 volunteer soldiers, quote, you all know how dear life is to you and how dear your life is to your friends. Do not, therefore, take the life of anyone if you can possibly avoid it. But if it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it, end quote. With that, at eight o'clock, Brown took a seat in the horse-drawn wagon carrying weapons and gunpowder and said, come on, boys. And he led the way to Harper's Ferry. The attack that would follow will be the topic of the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.


What's up everybody? Jayz here for jazzyoverjazzbeadscasebrakes.com. We just filled up a Win four spots in the mixer 2019-20 panini mosaic cello packed break random teams number 84 Now I'm gonna show you guys out of description page guys just to show you guys I know Nick has uploaded number 85 Then we have to do this break plus the blaster box and I think we're sold out with the mixer But this is break number 84 just to show you guys that in the description, of course We're 30 spots no veteran base card ship the way it works to randomize customer names Teams distribute the hits out of this pack and at the end of the break will randomize the customer names top four We'll win a spot each in the Wisconsin mixer, which is actually a multi sport mixer I actually haven't done one of these in a while. So should be fun to see one-on-one Yannis Rogers do autograph giveaway and again Nice little mixer. It's multi sport as well. I believe so There you go. So let's do the break itself first roll the dice Two and a three five times. Good luck one two three four Five Grizzlies down to the war wizard. Sorry We're with the Grizzlies received the Lakers all with the Celtic down with the spur of Scott You have the pelicans Scott Peter Scott Claremont you have the nuggets jack with the jazz Mike with the Pacers ride with the blazers Derek with the bucks and rest of the Hornets throw the Rockets We're on with the magic Kevin with the Raptors Josh with the nets Jacob You have last ball Mojo Hawks Derek with the T wolves Jake with the Bull 76ers Davis with the calves Jazz with the Warriors around with the heat received with the Suns Ryan Herald with the Pistons Tim with the Kings Christian with the Thunder Sarah with the flippers build the Mavericks Ryan with the Knicks and Zach With the Washington Wizards. I think I know nobody really trades in this. I'm gonna close the trade window and Don't a rib open this cello pack And then we'll see who gets spots in the mixer. Remember number 85 is already in the store So can always get another way to win some spots in the mixer for a fracture of the price Got triple J Look at Donch's got game Julius Irving Darian Fox Nicolette Jogic and nice Kobe white NBA debut For the bulls It's going to Jacob. So color penny sleeve my sensor and then these are Base cars base cars rookie There now, let's see who wins spots in the mixer guys remember top four Top four wins spots in the mixer. Let's roll it. We got a tune of two four times top four get in there you go One two three four Boom Tim you're in Kevin you're in Ryan H. You're in and Ryan H. Look at that Ryan Harold Very nice after four times Top four in congratulations guys you guys are now in the mixer another way to win a number 85 and that blaster on the website Appreciate you guys Jatsby's case breaks.com


Hi my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I have another book review for you and that is by Oak and Ash and Thorn by DJ Conway. This book is about Celtic shamanism. I've seen it on a few recommended reading lists out there and it is indirectly related to druidry because many druid paths including my own have elements of shamanism in it. So I thought that this would be a really interesting book and it turns out I hated it. I'm sure it works really well for some people's path. For me it just really didn't gel. But let's talk a little bit about how the book is set up and what it talks about. Each chapter has a subject and it talks about kind of generic information, a little bit of the author's personal perspective, and ends in a meditation or shamanic journey. Topics include the different worlds and realms of Ashaman's work, shamanic tools, how to use shamanic work as healing, talks about a bit about Celtic history, some on shadow work, how to empower yourself, all topics that many pagan books talk about, but definitely a shamanic emphasis. I got off to a poor start with this book just because there were some bits of its historical interpretation that I didn't agree with based on my own historical research. Not all of it is awful. The author acknowledges that there are some disagreements in the world about who is a viable resource, who is not. So that part at least was decent. The author also starts the book saying that this is an individual path, that you should trust your intuition, that judgment doesn't really have a place in this work. At the same time, there are other chapters as we get going on that the author is very adamant about what is real work and what isn't real work, and it just put a bad taste in my mouth. And I felt that much of what the author was saying and yet doing in later parts of the book was a bit hypocritical. The journey and meditation work at the end of the chapter was interesting. There were a couple that I did find useful, but on the whole I found them very forced and not presented in a way that gave you much autonomy or authority over much autonomy over the work and the journey itself. I struggled with the writing in that I don't think I was done very well. The tone and just generic, just the sophistication of the writing and the way it was presented, some of the grammar even, was not good. I feel a little guilty. I want to give good book recommendations and really encourage people to step outside their comfort zones and read things they might not have. But I'm really sad to say that I can't recommend this book, like even a little. Sorry. I hope that there's someone out there who worked really well for it, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments on like why you liked the book and what gelled well for you. But if you have liked some of my other book recommendations, I think you should avoid this one. I at least only paid $4 for it at the half price bookstore, so I don't feel terrible about it. And if I ever do a giveaway again, it might get thrown in so that perhaps someone else will enjoy it. But we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll reread it and find something I do enjoy in it. Probably not. Maybe. Thanks for watching and as always, may you find peace in the sacred grove.


Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major news developments from around the world. Our headlines, Palestinian prisoner released from Israeli detention after 65 days of hunger strike. Thousands of villagers arrested during protests against home demolitions in India. Argentine indigenous leader Milagrosala completes 2000 days in detention. And in our video section, we take a look at the state of siege in Haiti and the risk of foreign intervention. In our first story, a 28-year-old Palestinian prisoner was released from detention after 65 days of hunger strike. Gadhanfar Abu Atwan was first arrested by Israeli authorities 10 months ago. He was detained without charges or a trial under Israel's administrative detention system. As part of this, authorities are not required to present any evidence to justify arrest. Starting May 5th, Atwan launched a hunger strike to demand that he be released. On July 3rd, he also started refusing to drink water. His lawyer told AP that Atwan was arrested in October, released and then arrested again without ever being charged. The Palestinian Prisoner's Club also stated that he was assaulted and abused in prison and sprayed with a substance that made it hard to breathe. As his health continued to worsen, he was shifted to Israeli Kaplan Hospital. Meanwhile, the Israeli Supreme Court recently cancelled his administrative detention. However, his lawyer stated that Atwan remained captive in hospital due to his health. Medical records dated July 7th stated that he was noticeably weak, almost unable to speak and unable to move his lower limbs. He was confirmed on July 8th that he would be shifted to a Palestinian hospital in the occupied West Bank. As reported by Middle East Eye, Atwan has spent seven non-consecutive years in Israeli prisons since he was 19 years old. Rights group Ademir has estimated that five twenty Palestinians are currently detained in Israeli military jails without charges or trial. Since 1967, almost 20% of the Palestinians or over 800,000 people have been arrested by Israeli forces. Within the occupied West Bank, at least 40% of the other male population has been imprisoned at least once. We now go to India where 10,000 families in the state of Haryana are at risk of losing their homes. The Supreme Court has ordered the demolition of encroachments on forest land in Faridabad. This was supposedly done to preserve the green cover of the Aravali Mountains. The municipal corporation has been given six weeks to implement the order, which will impact over 140,000 people. These encroachments refer to the Khuri village, which is mostly composed of poor and migrant workers. They have lived in the area for decades after coming there to work in the quarries. While all mining operations were banned in 2009, the people continue to live in the village. The residents have stated that they were sold the land by local builders, offering collaboration with the forest department. They have also pointed to the high-rise buildings in the area, which have received no such orders. Following the Supreme Court's ruling on July 7, all water and electricity supplies to the Khuri have been cut off. With the demolition deadline drawing close, residents have reported several suicides. Moreover, with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, 10 people have reportedly died due to lack of water. Meanwhile, the residents of Khuri village have held regular protests on its rising repression. Oh, 150 people are facing charges under the Disaster Management Act, incitement of violence, etc. Oh, 5,000 people were detained by Delhi police during a protest held on July 8. A representative body of the villagers has now put forth four demands. They've asked the demolition orders be revoked, affected families be compensated, and the officials responsible for suicides in the area be punished. The next hearing on the matter has been scheduled for July 27. Our next story is from Argentina where indigenous activist Milagros Sala has completed over 2,000 days in detention. The social leader was first imprisoned in January 2016 under right-wing former president Mauricio Macri. She was accused of instigation to commit crimes and disturbances. This was related to protests held outside the provincial government office against changes to the cooperative system. While her release was ordered, further criminal proceedings were initiated to keep her in detention. These were part of the PBS Villaros case. Her organization, Tupac Amaru was accused of fraud in relation to a housing construction program. Following her arrest, she was imprisoned at a prison in the Jujube province. Her arrest was declared as arbitrary by the UN working group on arbitrary detention. The body argued that there had been consecutive allegations issued against Sala to ensure that she would be indefinitely detained. She was imprisoned in Jujube till August 2017, after which she was placed at the house arrest. She is currently facing charges in a total of 16 cases. The Argentine Supreme Court has yet to rule on an appeal she has filed in the PBS Villaros case. If convicted, Sala will face 13 years in prison. Meanwhile, a protest camp was set up in the capital of Buenos Aires this week to demand that she be released. Various trade unions, social movements, and civil society groups gathered in the Plaza de Mayo. Several cultural programs, forums, and other events were held to denounce the persecution of political prisoners. And in our final story, we go to Haiti. Authorities announced on July 8 that 17 suspects in the assassination of the de facto President Joan Almoise had been detained. Police Chief Leon Charles stated that 15 of them were from Colombia. Meanwhile, the Colombian government has said that at least six are retired members of its army. Two other detainees are believed to hold dual US-H&N citizenship. Charles further stated that eight suspects were being pursued and three others had been killed. Meanwhile, Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph has announced a state of siege across Haiti. The army and police forces have been mobilized, and movement has been heavily curtailed. Here is a video feature of the situation in the country. The sociopolitical crisis in Haiti has been further deepened with the assassination of its president. In the early hours of July 7, unidentified armed men attacked the house of Haiti's de facto President Joan Almoise and shot him dead. Haiti's Interim Prime Minister and now-acting President Claude Joseph confirmed the news in the early morning and declared a 15-day state of siege. On the evening of July 7, the Secretary of State Communication, Franz Xantos, reported that the two suspects in the president's assassination had been arrested by the National Police in Palerine. Hours later in a press conference, the director of the Haitian National Police, PNH, Leon Charles confirmed that the police captured two of the presumed assassins and killed four others. Claude Joseph also reported that he held a meeting with the core group, composed of the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, United States of America, as well as representatives from the United Nations and the Organization of American States. He also informed that he spoke with the U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, about the assassination and the political crisis. Haitian civil society organizations and other progressive sectors have expressed concern about these meetings. They warned that Moise's assassination could be used as a pretext to increase foreign interference and will far from alleviate the socio-political crisis in the country. They apprised that the core group has its own economic and geostrategic interests in the country. They also recalled that the core group supported Moise's illegitimate government, whose presidential term constitutionally ended on February 7, 2021. The group also supported his unconstitutional plans to hold legislative and presidential elections in a constitutional referendum on September 26, 2021, despite the widespread popular rejection. Julio Sur Americas, a network of social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, condemned Moise's assassination and pointed out that there are factors which indicate about the complicity or participation of the security forces in the assassination. Social movements of ALBA also stressed that Moise's murder must not be the excuse for a new intervention in Haiti. That's all we have time for today, we will be back on Monday with more news from around the world. Until then, keep watching People's Dispatch.


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You're listening to highlights from The David Feldman Show, heard nationwide on Pacifica Radio, or as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and now YouTube. Please subscribe to this channel. For more information, go to davidfeldmanshow.com. Thank you for listening. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you.  Oh, okay. Little Things in Life. It's the little things in life that make you happy. And I came into the studio and Alex drilled a hole in the table. Uh-huh. You like that hole? I mean, do you think that he personally drilled that hole? I think that maybe he got a new hole? I don't know. Or this has already been in there. Listen, I'm an expert on holes in wooden objects that are...  Bet you have. Mom, just...anyway... Can a wooden doll divorce you, too? Or is that just real women?  This is my mother. Hi, mom. Hi, um...very disappointed. With me? With what you've done with your life. I know. But you...  They sucked. They were never good enough for my bubola. I should be holding kegel. I always get it mixed up. My mom, you always did. So you were supposed to make kegel.  You're tight young fingers. This is not going well. I've got to go. You say to my kids, you want to taste my kegel. You want to taste some of Grammy's kegel. Yeah. Yeah. And we... And they did. And what did they think? They said... A little more savory than they were expecting, I think. You say it's tight. Now, mom, you're eating bacon. I brought bacon to your Jew podcast. What are you eating? Is that turkey bacon? No, it's regular bacon. It's two sides of bacon. Because the store next to my house likes to only give me two pieces of bacon.  Because I can't eat eggs and I can't eat a lot of things because it makes me diarrhea. It gives you diarrhea. But you know that, son. Yes. So, should we talk about diarrhea? Yeah. I have a theory about diarrhea. It's your... I think it's a New York phenomenon. Okay. I think that you have 12 million people living on top of one another and there isn't enough Purell. There's like trickle down diarrhea. Do you think diarrhea has ever leaked through a ceiling?  You know what I'm talking about when like a toilet's not in? They haven't like bolted the toilet in enough? I feel like you're laughing too hard at this. I was asking just a regular question. I know. It's just like when my... Well, it's... I could talk about... All I want to do is talk about diarrhea. I'll talk about half my sets about diarrhea and now I don't have diarrhea anymore and I like don't know who I am.  I don't want the people to get confused. Does she have diarrhea or not? But I was doing daily diarrhea diaries for a while. Really? Your daily di... Really? I did it for two days. I have ADD. Things don't really last. I don't have much while. I did too. They weren't even on consecutive days. I just spit bacon on to you. Annie Letterman. It's Letterman. Well, we can talk about that for a sec. The pronunciation. Because I know you're a Jew and Jews, I don't know, have problems with everything but I wanted to explain the pronunciation of my last name. Okay. My dad's father pronounced it Letterman but we don't like him so my dad changes to Letterman and we just say Letterman now.  So then that's how you legally don't have to change your last name if you wanted to zone a family member. You just change the pronunciation. Well, we'll talk about Father's Day. Your dad, you get along with your dad. He's my number one, my favorite person. That's amazing. I feel bad for my mom. She knows I bought a necklace that says mom on it just to try to make her feel better about it but she knows I want a dad necklace and I want it to be a little bit bigger. And when you're hanging upside down from the Vietnamese spin-share it says wow. So it's not really mom. That's true. With my family. On family vacation when they spin me upside down. Letterman. Okay. Like as in Dave Letterman. It's like Dave Letterman. But I would say no T is 1D. That's what I used to say when you were allowed to say tranny because then they could remember tranny, Annie, no T is 1D. But then I did have a guy. I said that to a male flight attendant once. We call them, come on. I don't call you a comedian. You just call him.  Why do you have to say male flight attendant?  He was, listen, I'll tell you. It turns out he was straight because I got an email. Uh-huh. Because my email is just my name.  Nobody email me, please.  But so he emails me after I met him and I said that thing and he's like, hey, I just, I looked up your email and I wanted to email you. And I was just curious, is that true? So this was this older flight attendant man who I guess thought that I really was like a trans girl and he was like, I'm gonna be your papa. Wow. And I had to write him back and be like, I was totally just kidding. But thank you for reminding me how small my tits are that that was very beautiful. And how broad my shoulders are. I was obviously a swimmer. But I did not swim into Pussy's as a man, ever. Just as a woman. Just a nice college grad. So a woman who's very attractive. Uh-huh. Invited me over to watch television. This is unbelievable. I know. Me. In the apartment. Okay. She wants to watch the Tonys with me.  I said, are we gonna eat donuts and talk about it? Does that eat her out?  Is that your hole? It's so annoying when comics go blue. I hate it. Anyway, go ahead.   How old is she though? I don't want to get into specifics. No, but just, is she younger or older than? Yeah. Yeah. Relatively? Well, everybody's relatively. A lot younger than you. Everybody's a lot younger than me. Because you might have gotten into the dad zone, which is something men of your age. I have never said that before.   And then so we don't know that you're trying to bang us. We don't know that because you're a comedian and comedians can get laid different than other guys, right? Why? Because you're funny. You have a currency that's not the same as other men. Tell me about the dad zone. The dad zone. I don't want to be in the dad. That's creepy.  That's right. But are there women who have daddy issues that they resolve with? Yeah, for sure. I think they do. Obviously. I mean. Don't you think, let me ask you this. Do you think most women have unresolved daddy issues? The same way, because Freud refused to touch on this. He just threw up his hands, said, I don't know what women want. Give me some cocaine. Yeah. He's like, I love coke. Because even Freud couldn't figure out women. And I'm not, I know you don't speak for a woman, but do you think, given that all men have mommy issues, don't you think all women have unresolved daddy issues? Yeah, we have daddy issues. We have mommy issues. We all, there's like, I don't know, I obviously can only speak for myself, but for sure, big issues with my dad.  I think parents are just hard, but I'm really lucky I have the best. Right, but fathers, we should move on. No, we can keep going. Okay, I think a mother can smother a son. The old mother smother. The mother smother. My favorite wrestling move. It's when you take your kids and you offer them Google, but you kegel on them. The mother smother. The mother smother. And nobody says that's creepy. Nobody will ever say it's creepy that a mother smothers and controls her son. There's nothing creepy about, you know, it's not healthy.  But this is just my prejudice. This is what I think. I think a father who tries to smother his daughter is...  There's something a little creepy about that. Or it's more possession and like treating your daughter as like an object that you want to protect and keep a certain way, but she's like her own person. Okay, this is important to me, and I'm not trying to, but this is... You're welcome. Okay, you agree that you meet me, right? Dad's on immediately.  I talk to her three times a day. I have to take her shopping. I'm taking her to play poker tonight. I take my mother to the movies. This is how I see it. It's creepy. It's disgusting. But you get it. Yeah, we saw Psycho. We saw the movie. We know you're dragging around a corpse, dude.  Hang on. Take a breath. I'm being serious. Be serious. Okay, they're... Yeah, I don't know. You don't think the mother's trying to bang the son, though, right? I don't think the father is always trying to bang the daughter unless we're talking about the president. But it's like...  Do you see her recoil? Hang on. I just laughed, and here's what Siri said. Which email address from that guy? My laugh. Siri takes my laugh at... Hey, Siri. Got... Hang on. Hey, Siri. Can you give me... Email address. That's what my laugh sounds like. But I liked his email address was good. What was it? Something picnic? We have to... No, I put my email in and he puts his. Everybody email him instead of me. All my inquiries go through that guy's email. Hey, has anybody done a bit about Siri talking back to you while you're having sex? Somebody must have done that. Probably. Because Siri... I don't know how to turn Siri off, and I laughed, and she thought I was asking for this Matt Giler guy.  I recall nine months. A flat line? Is someone dead in there? I sense no movement. There's some light weeping. And it's male, unfortunately. I'll order new sheets immediately. Yes. So, I'll move on. No, we can talk about it. I feel like you have something you want to say. No, no.  I lived with my mother until I was 80. Now I'm ready to date. You're 80? Yeah. I'm a little older than that. I was like 82. I had work done. I love hurting men, but it just feels so good. You know I was born, so I have a twin brother, and I was born breech after him. What does breech mean? I came feet first, but he was born first, regular head first. So I came feet first, which means that I kicked him out of the womb. Which I thought was a joke, and my mom was like, no, the doctor said you kicked him out. So I was just born to a masculine woman, to a masculine man. But in a masculine, it's my brother if I call him a woman. So there you go. Tell me about Father's Day. Your dad has a ponytail. Well, he grew out his mullet for family vacation. He just knows how to be fun. He knows what's going to be good. So he grew out a mullet for family vacation. My mom cuts his hair, and so I just put in a ponytail, and he just left it in for the whole day, and it was really exciting. First marriage? Mm-hmm. So you guys have been married for 44 years, I think? That's amazing. Yeah, my dad was working at Penn, or he was going to Wharton or something, and he was in his early 30s. He might have been 30 or 31, and my mom was going to Tufts in Boston, and they both were friends with opposite sexes of a couple, and the couple hated them as third wheels, so they set them up. No. So they met up, and then they dated only for like six months long distance, and then got married. My mom was only 22, so they're nine years apart. And you're Quaker, so they're from Pennsylvania? Well, my dad's from upstate New York, and my mom's from near the Connecticut border of New York, but she just decided to raise us Quakers. She worked at a Quaker school and liked it, so we're two. And Quakers, it comes from Quaking. It's almost like a clitoral orgasm, right? Well, I'm always masturbating in Quaker meetings, so. But don't you Quake? Isn't there like a Quake? Yeah. What does Quaking mean? So originally it was about that everyone sits in silence facing each other, and it's supposed to be that God is speaking through you and you're moved to speak, so you stand and speak, but it was a little crazier back in the day. In your day or back in the day? No, back in like the, I don't know when. When Ben Franklin was doing it? Yeah, I mean, probably definitely before him. I don't really know the timeline of Quakerism. I'm pretty, I'm pretty chill on learning facts, so I'm pretty like relaxed and laid back about any sort of learning or knowledge, but. Barbara Bush. I'm doing a joke, by the way. Just attention everybody, I'm about to make a joke. We know because you get your, ah, Barbara Bush. Uh-huh. Barbara Bush is Quaker. Really? Well, she's on the Quaker Oats box.  I was like, what?  She is. I'm done making my joke. But then it was throwing me into telling me about there's programmed and unprogrammed Quakers, so Quakerism believes that God's in the form of an interlite and I'm unprogrammed Quaker, so it's God's in the form of an interlite that's in everyone, everything. Right. So that's why we're pacifists and everything's chill and we're try to be kind and whatever. Richard Nixon was a Quaker. Yeah, well, I mean, then there's unprogrammed Quakers, so I don't know which one he was. I'm assuming he was unprogrammed. But... Do you wear buttons? No, it's not Amish. I think a lot of people think Amish. I thought Quakers... We don't churn butter. And I thought Quakers aren't allowed to wear anything militaristic.  You can be a non-believer. You can be anything. So I could become a Quaker. Yeah. You can go to Quaker meeting whenever you want. Have a good time. Is Jesus part of this? Because that's the deal killer for me. I mean, it doesn't have to be. I mean, I remember going to Quaker meeting every Sunday and there was one woman who ran the first day of school who would make us color in Jesus stuff, but I don't know anything. Nobody ever taught me anything about the Bible or brought it up to me rather than her. You understand that the Jesus thing is... Because you killed him. We didn't kill him. We hired the Romans. You gave him a good run for his money, though, didn't you? We didn't kill him. Technically, the Nails killed him, but we didn't kill him. Right. My uncle Murray was there and he said, fold his legs. Do you have a Murray? Yeah. Just tell him to cross his legs so we could use one nail. Don't waste. That's a good ju-ju. Do you have an Uncle Murray? Do you have an Uncle Murray? Such a good ju-name. I know, which is... Murray. Murray. But Sam from Philly said Murray. By the way, the Jesus thing is just whatever it is, I'm against it. So in other words, if you're for Allah, I'm against it. If you're for Jesus, I'm against it. All right, Bill Maher, let's hear that hard R. Ooh. Go ahead. No, I was just making fun of your... No, no, you just threw me. I threw you? Yeah, that got me. Sorry. I don't want to got you. So... But yeah, it's creepy for moms. I mean, it's creepy for both I guess. I want to talk about Quakers. Oh, and then so you were supposed to have shook... You were shaking because God was peeking through you, but nobody's shaking. People are just talking... But my brother told me that I like... I was just hanging out with my twin brother because his daughter was turning five. She's so cute. Shout out to Risi. I hope you enjoyed all this other stuff I talked about. I'll talk about squirting later. Pegging. I can't wait to teach you about pegging, girl. You talked about squirting. I'm squirting out of my butt.   I'm so glad you're here. I'm glad I'm here too. I'm excited to do your podcast. Great. I just... But so... Your dad. My brother said...  And I always thought I would talk about like Somalia. Like I would hear like something on the news. And then I would just... I don't know. I liked to have do that. But he said that I would stand up. He said once I stood up and I went... Do you ever think... And this is... How old were you? Probably like third grade. Okay.  And that there's all these other universes. I don't know if I said universes. There's all these other people living all these other lives and they're them. And thinking about how it's their life. And like my teachers could not be my teachers. But they are. Do you ever think about that? And that's something I still think about all the time.  It was so fun. It was like a fire pit. My brother... Like it was just like so fun. I probably shouldn't say that. My family members... You're younger than your brother. I'm six minutes younger than him. But we're born at midnight. So we have two different birthdays. Wow. Yeah. I came kick... I kicked him out on one day and then I was born the next. And being younger and being serious are you more of the rebel than he is? Usually the older sibling is more of the control freak and speaks for the parents. Well I have an older brother too. So my older brother is three years older than there's Max and then me. But I... Yeah I was the for sure the juvenile delinquent and stuff like that. But I was also the only girl. I also I think being the only girl faced some things in life that men and boys don't have to deal with. Like what? Just being... I don't know. Like molested. Having a pee sitting down? No, molested, assaulted, treated inappropriately by adults all the time. I think it was just a different life. That just happened in the last five minutes. And that was just from this grandpa.   Yeah. Did you talk about that in your act? I don't... I mean sometimes I actually like want to start talking about it because I realized if you say diddle people are like chill with it. What? If you say you were diddled or someone was diddled. Yeah. Then they're okay with it. Diddle is the word.  You know what I mean? Like I don't think my experience of course is just my own and it's not as extreme as a lot of other experiences and I'm not like... And I'm also like a full person and I feel really good about who I am now. Definitely after the election was a little rough but... So let's talk about... By the way I don't do the kind of show where I try to make people open up.  You can get in the way of those. I realize that we're all vehicles for your one-liners. Yes. Katy Perry is going through a transformation. Mm-hmm. Did you read about this that she was at the Javits Center the day Hillary was supposed to be president. Okay. And she lost and she's had this spiritual realignment where she is... Is...  Oh god. Well she is pretty talented. She's pretty. And she's... Well but and she's... Her songs are good. Her songs are good. They're catchy. Yeah I like her songs. And she comes from a deeply religious Christian background that she's playing with. In other words she's rebelling... I think they're Pentecostal or something. It's always so crazy when you hear those stories. Right. And I knew that she came from a deeply religious background. I don't know the difference between Pentecostal and Evangelical.  And all that stuff. I don't even know about my own religion. But she was campaigning for Hillary. And I remember thinking knowing her background this is solely about a woman being president. That given her background she has to have conservative leanings. This is solely about getting a woman elected president. Is that important? In other words can you disagree with Hillary on everything?  I mean no I guess not because she's not elected. And women voted again.  It's unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable. Right I don't want to talk about Trump. But yeah no of course I don't either but I don't think I mean I don't know I'm not any of those things and I was for Hillary and I don't know.  Right we don't ask men why they're voting for someone.  What are we talking about? Fathers they were Can we just talk about queefing on kids? What are we talking about? His father's day is coming up it's hard for me to shop for my dad because he's dead and his neck I like to buy him like neck ties but his neck size is always changing because he's dead so I Was he not cremated? No I keep him just like your yeah psycho Yeah I keep dad in the room with me Now your father really wasn't cremated your father's dead for real? Yes Okay and he wasn't cremated? No He was buried in a Jewish cemetery? We keep him in my basement I want to know the truth The truth?  I don't know how these Jewish cemeteries work I don't tell the truth on this show Okay I don't so I can't Okay You may even be alive for all I know Oh shit Everything is him So your dad What's your earliest It's weird that you brought up the topic that you really needed to talk to Well I made a joke about Having a father and now we're like How hard it is to shop for my father because he's dead That was a joke But I know I was just curious About my father I just had some questions I'm sorry I care Are you not used to women asking you questions about yourself They're not interested You gotta get out of that dad zone dude It's a control thing too For you Yeah I control the situation By what?  Ann Margaret what nonsense are you talking about? do you know who Ann Margaret is? she got her head chopped off that would be Ann Boland I told you I'm not much of a I'm like I'm pretty chill on learning okay pillows and set of chairs and they didn't make us read books we had movie class this is real really? yeah movie class what high school did you go to? it was called the Krefeld school and it was a juvenile delinquent school but also autistic kids what? is it named after Jacob Krefeld? I don't know Ann Margaret 75 years old absolutely gorgeous she was in Bye Bye Birdie oh okay yeah she's still gorgeous and her husband Roger Smith just passed away and Ann Margaret he had some debilitating muscular degeneration and she nursed him that's my type were you asking earlier? that's my type did you ask? that's the answer you know what you're making me are you schvitzing? you're making me laugh I get dizzy it's a certain okay so and I'm thinking there's the most Ann Margaret is if you're you know certain age baby boomer fantasy Ann Margaret is your fantasy right then I think okay but I'm also looking for somebody to nurture me and mother me and here Roger Smith has this muscular degeneration and she nursed him do you think men I don't know the answer would I want Ann Margaret whose apps you know she's the you don't want her to be wiping your ass or do I well they've been together their whole lives yeah yeah I mean I think that there's probably guilt involved I know that my dad is is nine years older than my mom ten years older than my mom and I know that it's getting like different you know he's in his mid-seventies and I know that he feels I think it's like upsetting for him that the future is possibly my mom having to take care of him that way but I think that they love each other and that's like a part of what their right thing was I just think it's life is fucked up that you been thinking about it a lot that you your family like all the people that you love everything staggered right so it's like all these people that you love these parents well for me at least you know I love my family so much it's like my parents are so amazing and then they're like born and then you know you love your pets and they just last for like the most like 15 years and then you like you invest in these relationships and they either don't work out which is also a death where you're like alright I put like so much especially the ones that you think that are multiple years and stuff where you're like wow I really like put a lot into this and then these are one of the only relationships where you can just completely cut them out that always feels weird and then and then on top of that you can meet someone fall in love like do the thing that everyone wants have the kids do the thing that is the quintessential apparently the thing people want which is not what I want but like that perfect thing and then that person dies and then you're single and alone or you have to watch them die or in the notebook you both die at the exact same time Nicholas Sparks yeah Nicholas Sparks he's very he's more I would say like he's almost a reporter because his books are so realistic but in the notebook a couple dies together at the exact same time from what? old age that has happened at the exact same time holding hands oh yeah well a lot of people is this Defender Nicholas Sparks movie no I'm just thinking 9-11 a lot of people died at the same exact time wow wow just pointing that out we're cutting that out we're not cutting that out we're not cutting it out now we can't cut anything I was trying to shoehorn a joke listen 9-11 you know here's the joke ask me the joke that I sometimes do is you know we all die alone unless you're Muhammad Ata that's true that's good so I was trying to I know I was thinking yeah it's like we probably won't die alone at this point with what's happening but what was I going to say well okay speaking of 9-11 so I worked at a restaurant right down the street at Life Cafe and it I worked there for years I first moved to New York started working there I worked there for like maybe three years and then I went out of town and the business went out went out of business they shut the restaurant down I've been around for years and so I went on the internet onto the website to see why they shut down and she said we chose this auspicious day September 11th, 2011 to shut down the restaurant because it seemed fitting isn't that incredible like the like the fucking Twin Towers had gone out of business it was pretty cute to attach something as trivial as never forget the chicken club sandwich so funny so unbelievable okay so you go to movies I don't usually but you talk during movies you text yeah I'll talk like if I have I have ADD so it's like if things need to get done they got to get done when I think of them or they're not going to get done I had to text my I had to email my agent something that was super important I lost $1500 it's like I'm sorry okay so sorry everybody that isn't noticing this except this fucking weird guy that's already starting to do weird little controlling things within two hours of me knowing you do you think in relationships we all try to control one another? well I am I've done like a lot of hallucinogens recently and everything all the stuff the medicines tell me is that I'm very controlling and I need to try to give up some of my control what kind of hallucinogens they're now discovering that the brain has multi-universes inside of it yeah no shit I didn't know that we're all vibrations and fizz everything's all good I can't believe I got mad at you about the editing thing and look at us now because we're fizz so you have all these universes inside your brain maybe you're only supposed to use 5% of your brain when you're on a hallucinogen how much of your brain are you using all of it I don't know I just like to take them and then try to like figure out what I need in my life what I need to work on so like mushrooms I don't know what I don't know what that scares me I mean I've done DMT I died I had an experience of dying on DMT and you have to smoke it out of a crack pipe so what's DMT DMT is it's like a white powder and you have to put it into a crack pipe what if I just smoked crack what if it was just crack but and you have to smoke it out of this like crack pipe ball thing and it it either makes your brain excrete or just is the same chemical that comes out of your brain when you're born and when you die that gives you like the tunnel vision that people always report back when they DMT so you see like a light at the end of the tunnel no I mean some people do I had there was like a light experience for me but people close their eyes they get visited by aliens people tell them shit they live in whole different universes it feels like they're there for days sometimes and it's only like 5 minutes for me mine felt like 30 seconds my friend and her husband and I just told this on a podcast in the same room but and I just had this experience where there was like this bright light behind my friends and all their artwork is like they've done a bunch of ayahuasca and a bunch of DMT and stuff so their artwork is all like psychedelic and I didn't get it until this moment but so there was this painting behind him and it was like glowing behind my friend's husband and they had all the minute I took it everything got sharp and like pixelated looking kind of and everything's this like snake pattern that you see that the Peruvians will actually like sew into fabric and stuff and give to people and it's like a whole there's like a snake theme but it's just sort of like shows you that everything is connected in the whole universe so everything is like in its place exactly where it's supposed to be and then so I see this light and the other room is getting darker and then it's just this light behind them it's getting smaller and then everything in the room and my friend I watched my best friend get sucked up like one eyeball at a time like it looked like the waiting room in beetle juice like one eye like completely stretched out and then her other eye and the rest of her body went and then her husband and then I laid back and I looked at the light I could feel like my grandmother like I just like knew it was like death or whatever and then I felt my body kind of go I didn't feel my body anymore and then I was trying to breathe and then I didn't have to breathe anymore I just breathing just stopped needing to happen and it felt fucking amazing and it felt like I was everything and nothing and it kind of reaffirmed some things I had felt not on drugs kind of had some epiphanies and stuff on my own and yeah I just woke up feeling like really excited for my dad because I've always been really worried about him and his age and his health and I just got excited for him because I know it's going to be good so father did while you were experiencing that were you aware of it or were you totally immersed in it I was aware that I was going through it like you still are yourself you don't like lose your mind in any way like I was me in this journey just like watching like I mean I probably could have talked but I didn't want to talk but I did start like making jokes and I keep going okay so because I've never done this because somebody very close to me had a bad experience with DMT? no just with hallucinatives oh okay yeah there's a bunch of different kinds too right I just you know I'm not going to open up those doors I like to remain tethered to the earth but my you'd like them huh? you'd like them I don't know maybe your brain would be too it's like I think for people with control it's actually good but it is hard you know it's a hard thing to choose because you don't yeah you don't know where you're going to go and I would be afraid to lose my ego to lose who I am I think you're much that's real no that's real but you're strong enough to hold on to who you are I would be afraid to just completely surrender to the universe well I got really worried I mean I was nervous about about that with I wanted to go right when I was ending I was in a three year relationship when I was living in Los Angeles that ended in August I broke up with him and you know how when you want to break up with someone and you don't I mean I loved him he was so sweet but I just knew it wasn't the right thing so I was dreading this breakup and not really being completely honest with myself and so I kept looking for these things like I was like maybe I'll go do Iowa I wasn't doing hallucinations at this time I was like maybe I'll go do Iowa Oscar or something and I just wanted to do something that would give me the excuse to break up with him you know like I wanted to do come back from this thing and be like you know what the spirits told me like peace it was just me not having the balls to like hurt someone I loved you know and then so I was looking into these vipassana silent retreats that are ten days long where you don't talk you don't talk for ten days you don't write why don't you just get married you don't look at people or fuck you and call back but so so like you go ten days and it's like this weird I don't know I've talked to people about it a little bit but I was I didn't do that because I was like I mean I think it would completely reshape who I was as a person could you go ten days without your cell phone no I can't go ten days without anything I mean funyons I've done that's the only thing I've ever done and it's very recent well I don't want to get into the digital digital details oh it's bad I would like to do something like that because what's the longest you go without your phone I can't do it I bring it into the bathroom with me I put in a bag I put it in a bag while I'm in the shower which is why you should never hold anybody's cell phone bringing back to diarrhea yeah it's true there's a lot of diarrhea speckles on my phone for sure you know Diane look how greasy it is I know if we put luminol on our phones what would we find on it we'd find a lot of dick prints dudes are just fucking mushrooms stamping my phone all the time it's so annoying on the subway I'm like enough fine I'll give you a dollar but only because you got it on my niece's face I'm not sure so relationships breaking up with a guy so I was yeah and I was trying to use hallucinogens to be like the excuse and then I just I went to Ireland and kind of had this out-of-body experience just being there and like seeing all these old I went to this church it's 1100 and I am not religious I mean Quakerism is like the least religious you can be I don't believe in God like that or anything but going there and seeing this church just the fact that it physically had been the fact that like everyone has done this before us that we're just so caught up in our own shit but that there have been all these people and that even though like that thing that I said in Quaker meeting where it's like I was chosen to be me and on me it's like you just have to believe that everyone else feels that way too and that and what about stand-up when you're on stage are you satisfying your ego or are you connecting with the audience full connection I get that I think you're right full connection and how long did it take you to learn that or did you know that before you started doing stand-up I think it's just been I've really realized it recently I think honestly all these hallucinogens I did just made me have like a much more a much more self-aware when was the first time you did hallucinogens well high school but I was 14 we did them in the I did acid the first time I took acid yeah I was 14 I went to this alternative school and they had someone had hammered in a human-sized hole in the wall in the glass-blowing studio in the basement so we got kicked out we got kicked out of the basketball game came down into the glass-blowing studio in the basement crawled through the wall ate acid and watched the game through the grates in the floor that was the first time I took acid and no freaking no and I'll tell you something you could always tell who was on acid in my school because they would be looking like they were just the stars remember the stars and yeah I didn't freak out and then I did acid again when I was 14 at my friend's house and her parents knew we were doing it and it was fine did you ever freak out on acid?  Yeah for a little bit I just got to go pick my friend up Okay let me do your intro Okay because we never finished it Any Letterman as they stand up comic who has appeared on MTV's Girl Code Chelsea Lately Comedy Central's at Midnight and this is not happening Welcome to the David Feldman show Oh thank you so much it feels like I've been here for an hour already it feels like you didn't do the intro at the time and this is being recorded later We'll be back with Scott Rogowski he'll join us You're listening to highlights from the David Feldman show heard nationwide on Pacifica Radio or as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher and now YouTube please subscribe to this channel for more information go to davidfeldmanshow.com Thank you for listening The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you Use Sad Pathetic Humps