Hey everybody.  I just wanted to touch base. I’m over here working on the next episode of the labor series (Whose America?), and it’s coming along nicely, but I thought I’d give you something to tide you over. Some of you may have already heard this since I released it on the MartyrMade Substack, but I figured it’s approaching the holiday season, so why not give this one to the whole family.

Like I said, this episode has been on the Substack for a while, along with a lot of other written and recorded content you won’t find anywhere else. Those of you who are already subscribed, for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year, thank you. You are literally the reason I’m able to do this. You know, a couple years ago, after the Jonestown series, I was thinking about calling it quits. I was spending my early mornings, my lunch hours, my evenings and my weekends working on the podcast, and I thought that there was no way I’d be able to keep that up once I had a family, so I really was thinking about wrapping it up. Jocko changed my mind, and those of you who decided to subscribe to the Substack have helped me helped me take a few breaths and every once in a while forget the fact that I don’t have the financial safety net I did when I was working for the DOD. So when I say that you make this possible, I really mean it. Thank you. If anyone out there is not yet subscribed to the Substack, and you can spare $5 p/month or $50 p/year, please consider subscribing so we can keep this thing going. I know it’s not easy out there right now, and everything seems to be getting more expensive by the day, so if you really can’t swing it, I understand, I’ve been there, so just shoot me an email at martyrmade @ gmail and we’ll work something out.

This is the third episode of the series I put together on Jeffrey Epstein. You might have heard the first two on this main feed, but I thought it was time to release this one into the wild. Bring your own torches and pitchforks, I’ll bring the flamethrower.

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).

Here are Parts 1 & 2 of a series exploring potential truth about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Part 3 is available on The Martyr Made Substack, so if you aren’t tapped out on this topic by the end of two episodes, head over to martyrmade.substack.com and become a subscriber for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year to hear that, as well as other subscribers-only MartyrMade podcasts and written content. Thanks again everyone for listening.

*Correction* A few people have informed me that my description of how a hedge fund manager calculates his cut is off in Episode 1. I meant to correct it in the show, but 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.

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Hey everyone. After the recent Thoughts On Ukraine episode, I thought it would be a good idea to bring someone on the show who has a different perspective. Kristaps Andrejsons is a Latvian journalist, writer, and the host of The Eastern Border podcast – one of my go-to podcasts for Russian, Soviet, and Eastern European history for many years. He is a fluent Russian speaker, and provides insight that you’re simply not going to get on CNN or Fox News. That said, he and I have very different interpretations of the recent history between the West & Russia, and this discussion was a great start at getting to the bottom of our disagreements. So, those of you who have been pining to see me get my ass handed to me by someone on this issue, maybe now’s your chance! This is a preview of a Substack subscribers-only episode, so if you can spare $5 a month to help me buy kibble, I’m sure my cats, and certainly I, would really appreciate it.

Follow him on Twitter for regular updates on the current Russian-Ukrainian war, and check out his website and podcast for longer form analysis.

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.

In this and the next episode, I will go over the evidence that notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was a foreign intelligence agent. The next episode will be available only on the Martyr Made Substack.

The follow-up episode will be a little too spicy for public release, so it will be available in about a week, for paid subscribers only. For access, subscribe to the Martyr Made Substack for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year.

This is a preview of my discussion with longtime Los Angeles radio host Bryan Suits about the 1992 LA Riots. Bryan is an Army veteran of both Iraq Wars, the Bosnian peacekeeping mission, and was on the ground as a National Guardsman during the LA Riots in 1992. The full episode is available for subscribers on the MartyrMade Substack.

This is a special announcement from The MartyrMade Podcast. I have been doing this podcast for several years now, and I think we probably have between 80-100 hours of material up. The kind of podcasts I do take a lot of work. I don’t have research assistants, I don’t have editors (obviously), and I don’t have anyone helping with the back-end, website, sound, or business operations (such as they are). This is a one-man show. For years, I was using pretty much every free moment I had – before work, during lunch, waiting for meetings to start, and late into the night – to work on these episodes. Well, recently I made the plunge to start doing this full-time. I left behind a very secure job with good benefits and a solid retirement plan, and I am officially out in the wild. That means I am going to be able to do a lot more things than I’ve been able to do in the past, but it also means that it’s time to professionalize this operation. Podcasting doesn’t come with health insurance or a retirement plan, and so my future and the future of this podcast is now a matter of my relationship to all of you. And so to that end, here is the announcement:

I am going to be moving over to Substack, and will use that website as my one-stop shop for podcasting, writing, and listener interaction. The regular podcast feed will be available on all the normal platforms, free of charge, same as always, but I’m going to be doing a lot of subscribers-only content at Substack. There will be regular, subscribers-only podcast episodes, as well as written content from myself and some (carefully curated) guest writers. The subscriber-only episodes will come in all shapes and sizes – segments based on notes that don’t make it into a regular episode, commentary on current events and social issues, answering listener questions, as well interviews (also carefully curated). Subscribers will also get a discount on all MartyrMade t-shirts and other gear. Oh, and subscribers will be able to comment on posts, and I’m going to be moving a lot of my online activity away from social media and into the Substack comments and other tools.

If you’d like to help support the show, it is just $5 p/month, or $50 p/year, BUT anyone who signs up by October 31 will pay only $4 p/month or $40 p/year forever. That’s not a first-month, or first-year offer, you will pay the lower rate as long as you keep your subscription. I know the world is a crazy place right now, and not everyone can contribute. I also know that there is a mountain of amazing content available for free on the internet. I even know that, probably, someone will pirate the subscriber-only episodes and post them somewhere you can find them with a little work. I understand all of these things, and yet nevertheless, if you can manage it without trouble, and if you’ve enjoyed this podcast up to now, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If you do, and it’s before October 31, don’t forget to use the special offer link in the show notes. I’ll also put it on the website, and on Twitter and Facebook. If you don’t care about the $1 p/month discount, you can just head over to martyrmade.substack.com and sign up there.

Link to subscription discount: https://martyrmade.substack.com/ce198d71

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.

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.

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.

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This is the first episode of a series exploring Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. This episode is only a prologue, a few stories and ideas to serve as a backdrop for everything to come. The next episode will be along in the next few weeks, and every few weeks after that until we figure out why over 900 people committed suicide in a South American jungle in 1978.

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Listen on iTunes!

This is part 2 of a series I’ve been working on with Daniele Bolelli. In part 1, he covered the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre carried out by the US Army. I was working on my next major series when Daniele asked me to do a companion episode on My Lai, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. From his description:

“Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing.” —Private First Class Paul Meadlo explaining his role in the My Lai Massacre.

“How do you shoot babies?” Meadlo was then asked. His reply… “I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.”

“I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.” — Lieutenant William Calley Jr. addressing his own leadership during the action.

“Every Day/ On our fellow man we prey/ Dog eat Dog/ To Get by/ Hope you like my genocide” — The Offspring

“Hello darkness, my old friend…” — Simon and Garfunkel

“I believe now it is but the commencement of war with this tribe, which must result in their extermination.” — Major Jacob Downing

“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” — Quote attributed to Colonel John Chivington

“They were so honorable and so strong, but I felt like they were alone and sometimes when you want to do the right thing, the people that want to do the right thing suffer… even today.” —Lorraine Waters about Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer

“It was hard to see little children on their knees… having their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.” — Silas Soule

I’m not going to lie. This is one of the darkest episodes of History on Fire. But there are reasons for this journey into the heart of darkness. The stories of Sand Creek and My Lai offer an opportunity to explore human agency, the choices separating good and evil, and how some individuals can choose to become sources of light even in the most horrible circumstances. In part B, I hand the microphone to my friend and master podcaster Darryl Cooper (from The Martyrmade Podcast.) Darryl explores the context of the Cold War in order to come to terms with what happened at My Lai, in Vietnam, in 1968. Horror abounds, but if you are looking for heroes in the midst of the horror, you can do a lot worse than hear about the story of Hugh Thompson.

Listen on iTunes!

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In which I take a break from banging out my human sacrifice episode to check in with my patient listeners.

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

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

Support the podcast by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack!

Check it out on iTunes!

Check it out on Stitcher!