We Read Newt Gingrich's World War 2 Alternate History
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It's the podcast that it is on Election Day. But you won't hear this on Election Day. You know how the election has gone. You listening have information. You'll hear this in December. Yeah, probably in December. Which hopefully means the election is over by then. But who knows? God willing. Yeah. God willing. The election is almost certainly over, which means...

You know, find a way to communicate to the past and let us know so that we can gamble on it. That's that's what I'd like you to do. Anyway, speaking of gambling, you know, who knows all of the words to the classic song, The Gambler, our guest today, Molly Conger. Molly, do you know when to hold them?

Oh, I know when to fold them. That's as much of that song as I know. When to run. Well done. Well done. Oh, my God. I think I only know that from Info Wars. I do love watching Alex Jones sing that and the Highwaymen, Poncho and Lefty.

You know he's just grooving. Things are going well for Alex when he's doing that. That's the most jealous I ever am of him because we're not allowed to use, we have no licensing agreement with any company that owns songs. Does he?

Yeah, he must. Otherwise he wouldn't be allowed to air them like that. I think there, cause there are like, there are like, like ways that you as a broadcaster can just like make a deal for access to, you know, they have X number of songs and we can use them for whatever. I think that exists. I think that's gotta be what he does. You were somewhat correct, but I, that doesn't mean that Alex Jones has a deal with them. He could totally be grifting. Cause that's what you do. I think he'd have been sued before then about this. Yeah.

Maybe. You're so chipper today, Robert. Yep. I'm chipper. I'm doing good. How many hours of sleep did you get, bud? I had like six last night. I tried to get to bed early, but I really couldn't get to sleep before like 3.30 in the morning. I don't know. Well, it's behind the bastards, and we're all trying not to obsess over the election. And...

I thought, you know, we all might be hoping that history goes a different way depending on what happens today. So why not read a work of alternate history? You know, we love doing book episodes over here because it's...

Let's me rest a little bit. The trouble is finding a book. You can't just use any book and it's sometimes hard to figure it out. And thank God I got very lucky. Margaret Killjoy was over at my house recently, not bragging, although I am kind of bragging. You know some celebrities. I know some celebrities. I know a famous Killjoy.

who's also a famous Margaret. And she brought me a book that a fan had given her at an event because our fans are unhinged and have just decided sometimes we should hand one member of the team an absolutely terrible piece of literature to give to another member of the team. And the book that I have received is 1945 by Newt Gingrich. Molly? Molly?

Wow. What if things had been different? What if things had been different? Do you know much about old Newt in this book? So I did not realize, and this is on me entirely. I know a little bit about old moon-based Newt.

But I did not realize he had written like 30 works of fiction. He has written a lot of fiction. Where does he find the time? I mean, he doesn't spend a lot of his political career does not take up a lot of time. Because, you know, usually when you see like, oh, you know, this politician has written a book, a memoir, a memoir or whatever. And it's like, OK, well, like a campaign staffer wrote that. That's for PR. No, this is his passion. Yeah. He's writing these. Yeah.

Yeah, this is what he really wanted to do. And my God, I wish we had some sort of program in place where when we find some guy who has like an artistic dream, but also weird right wing politics, like,

We just kind of like swallow our pride and fund, like have a government agency buy up copies of their books so they feel like a success. Anything to keep them from running for office. Let Hitler paint. Yeah, what if, let Hitler paint, let Ben Shapiro make his dog shit TV show about fucking law students.

You're positing sort of like a Truman Show type experience where we encapsulate them safely. We have to Truman Show these people, right? Run a fake, you know, that White House Correspondents Dinner that supposedly got Trump committed him to run for office. Hold a fake one of those where everybody just talks about how nice he is and how much they admire him, you know? Put him in a bubble. Yeah, we really have to put these people in bubbles. It's the kindest thing for all of us. Yeah.

Oh, man. So, yeah, we're going to be reading 1945. As you might guess, it is a World War Two alternate history. Yeah, of course, Sophie. What else could it be? What else could it be? And this is a particular. You did tell me that, but I did not process it. I was like, I was like, that's not what it is. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course. And it's it's it's a wild one. I'm going to tell you that right now. So.

Our author for today, I'm going to go through a little bit of a scripted portion here, is Newton Leroy Gingrich. Leroy. Leroy, yes. Leroy Gingrich. Yeah, you can't not do the Leroy Jenkins thing, which is just going to be incomprehensible for anyone in our audience that's like younger than their mid-30s. You don't know who Leroy Jenkins was. You don't remember the old times. Pieces of shit.

Sorry. Anyway, there's a post in the subreddit now saying that I'm an old man and all my references are old man references. And the thing that makes me angriest is they're like, he never references The Simpsons from any episode later than the year 2000. And I'm sorry, I never reference a Simpsons episode from later than 1998 because that's when they stopped being good. You're not an old man.

Thank you, Sophie. But you've called me an old man on the show. Yeah, that's because I'm allowed to. It's okay when I do it. They're not allowed to do that. You are used to them. To me, you are ancient. I'm not. They haven't even seen Alien 4. These scrubs. These babies. None of them know what Sequest DSV was. Molly, did you watch Sequest? I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Go get a learner's permit. Anyway.

I think we're the same age. We might be. But mentally. What's good? It's Colleen Witt and Eating While Broke is back for season three. Brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeart Radio. We're serving up some real stories and life lessons from people like Van Lathan, DC Youngfly, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and many more.

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Remember that because there's going to be a funny coda to that a little bit later in this story.

We all know Newt's a family man. We all know Newt's a family man. We all know Newt's a big not fighting in wars, but not a big not having wars guy. Newton is elected to Congress in 1979 in an address to college Republicans before his election. He said, I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words.

Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, they've done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, in my lifetime, I was born in 1943. We have not had a competent national Republican leader, not ever.

And it's very clear from that context that a competent leader is a mean one. Right. Like that's what he's missing. Like Richard Nixon's just too nice. Politics really needs is more vitriol. Yeah. It needs more real assholes. I think that's interesting because it makes a case that I think is an important thing to understand if you're trying to like puzzle out why we are where we are now in American politics is.

And the basics of that case is, well, because Republicans lost their minds when Nixon had to step down. And everything they've done since then has been dedicated to stopping, making sure that no other Republican would ever have to leave office no matter what crimes they committed. Right. And there's no precedent. Yeah. No modern precedent for that.

So in 1985, as a congressman, Newton told an interviewer, I think from the Washington Post, who asked about his deferment during Vietnam, quote, given everything I believe, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over. If only, Newt. I do wish you had gone to fight in Vietnam. Yeah.

Now, that same year when President Reagan held a summit with Soviet Premier Gorbachev, Newton called it, quote, the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich. I love the idea that like Gorbachev is a Hitler figure. This guy who wouldn't even shoot back during like the protests that overthrew his government is like a Hitler, you know?

The future Pizza Hut spokesman Gorbachev as a Hitler kind of figure. R.I.P. Hitler, you would have loved Pizza Hut. That does tell you where our boy Newt is on like the political alignment chart, right? He sees Ronald Reagan as a fucking Neville Chamberlain type.

Now that same year, Gingrich made the news for comparing a house race that was in question in Indiana to the Holocaust. Here's a quote about it. In what way? I'm going to read you the quote, Molly. Here's a quote about it as relayed by an article in Mother Jones. And it starts with Newt here. Well,

We've talked a lot in recent weeks about the Holocaust, about the incredible period in which Nazi Germany killed millions of people and in particular came close to wiping out European Jewry. If someone said to me days, two days ago, talking frankly about the McIntyre affair in which Democrats refused to seat the winner of a House race until they'd conducted a recount.

and the efforts by the Democratic leadership to not allow the people of Indiana to have their representative, but instead to impose upon them someone else, something in which he quotes German poet Martin Niemöller. I have never quite until tonight been able to link it together. Niemöller, the great German theologian, said at one point, when the Nazis came for the Jews, I did nothing. And when the Nazis came for me, there was no one left.

Right? Sorry, I think it's Niemöller. But this like, so basically the Democrats are like, well, until we finish a recount, we're not going to sit this guy because there's questions about the election. And, but,

Fucking nude is like this is the same as the Holocaust. So at what point did millions of people die? Did they kill all the voters? Did they murder everybody? It just kind of seems like they were doing a thing that legally is a part of the election, like having a recount, waiting to seat the elected leader until you do the recount. Is that the same as killing millions of people in factories of death?

There needs to be a swear jar for people who abuse the knee molar poem. Yeah. Yeah. You need to put a dollar in the jar because that was not appropriate. I think any time you reference it, you have to lose like it should be like a Yakuza thing where you have to give up one of the joints of a finger. Right. And maybe that'll cause people to be like a lot more careful about when they deploy that bad boy. I heard it in closing arguments at a trial last month, a trial for a man who is a white nationalist. Right.

Amazing. His lawyer's argument was, you know, this is free speech. You're trying him for his free speech. And in his closing arguments, he refers to the Niemöller poem. Except, you know, the poem starts, first they came for the communists. And I said nothing because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews. And I said nothing because I was not a Jew. He says he's going to quote the poem. But he says, first they came for one group.

Yeah. And then they came for another group. And it's like, what are the groups? What were the groups, Terry? Anyone who goes for any group is a Nazi. What were the groups, Terry? Yeah. First, they came for the Nazis. And I did not speak out because I was not a Nazi. Oh, man. Abuse. It's very funny. Okay. Okay.

So let's get back into it. Newt served as the Republican Speaker of the House from 1995 to 99. Gingrich was the architect of the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election, which legitimately set the stage for nearly everything the right has been able to accomplish since.

Without the contract with America and his retaking of the House, it's possible that we see no George W. Bush presidency, no right-wing Supreme Court today, and at least a lot less of a right-wing drift on behalf of the Democrats who stumbled to fight him, right? This is a

major move in U.S. politics. I don't think a lot of folks whose awareness of politics has sort of started since the Trump years know much about this, but you had Slick Willie stop George H.W. Bush from getting a second term. It

drove these people crazy. You have briefly the Democrats in control of government and then in 94 Newt leads I think they pick up 54 House seats. It's this massive sweeping victory that comes with this thing called the contract with America which is basically Newt introducing what becomes kind of the neocon platform, right? And

And this is like a really, I mean, it's one of the most important moments in modern electoral history, right? Newt is one of the first conservatives to see a real promise in creating a right-wing system of education to push conservative values. In 1993, he crafted a college course taught at Reinhardt College called Renewing American Civilization. We're looking at this as like sort of a proto, what's that fucking guy? Who?

Who does the the little kids TV bullshit? Oh, like the Prager University, Prager University. Right. This is a precursor to Prager University. Right. I mean, he was on the Hillsdale track. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's eventually televised in a cable channel called Mind Extension University. I don't like that. Yeah. You got to extend your mind.

Now, obviously, he was a ferocious opponent of gay rights and the degradation of American values in the modern era. He talked a lot about how, you know, people today, especially because of, you know, Democrats gaining such cultural dominance are just, you know, awful compared to, you know, the

the glorious greatest generation who really understood morality. He also cheated on his second wife with a staffer who became his third wife while he was advocating for the impeachment of Bill Clinton over infidelity. Now, this should not have been surprising to anyone who knew that in 1989, in an interview with the Washington Post,

He explained that he fought with his second wife, not because it mattered to him what they were fighting about, but because he had a habit of dominance that had been stoked by his time in politics. He estimated to the post that his marriage had a 53 to 47 percent chance of making it. Oh, man. Family values. Fifty three. Forty seven. I mean, that's.

I wouldn't bet on those odds. Fascinating odds to give your own marriage. Now, Newt has a long and fascinating history, and I do recommend reading that. There's a 2012 Mother Jones article with some of his best quotes that we'll link in the show notes. If you want a better understanding of the man, though, that's a good way of getting it. But for our purposes today, we're going to be focusing on the novel 1945, which he co-authored.

It is set in an alternate world where the U.S. defeated Japan, but Hitler never declared war on the U.S., and so we never got involved in a war with Germany. The Nazis won their war with the Soviets. They took most of their European holdings and forced them to accept a peace. They then boxed the Brits into a corner. A few years later, they carried out a surprise attack.

on the United States in order to kill our nuclear scientists and stop the completion of what in our universe we know as the Manhattan Project. Now, because of where this takes place, I'll spoil it for you, Molly. This book centers around the Waffen-SS invading East Tennessee. That's what this book is about.

How'd they get all the way to Tennessee? They've got their wonder weapons. They've got these – Newt is, again, he's like a history channel, history buff, right? So a huge part of this book is like the Nazis building all of these wonder weapons that were mostly theoretical during the actual war, including this like massive bombing type plane that they had kind of been –

talking about making that probably never would have worked out. Like it's all sorts of like nonsense sci-fi weapons, right? And what did they want with Tennessee specifically? It's where the nuclear program was headed. That's not true. Well, actually, I think it was initially before they moved to Los Alamos. I think they had it was somewhere in like the southeast before they moved to Los Alamos that they had like the early stages of the nuclear program.

And I think he's just kind of positing a much more primitive nuclear program. But I'm going to pull up the book, Molly, because at this point you should see this bad boy. Look at this. Look at this. Look at that cover art. There we go. There we go. Beautiful cover art. Look at the size of his name there. It looks like the book is called Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, 1945. Yeah, like it's a book about a two-year-old Newt Gingrich. Yeah.

And it kind of has like a sci-fi feel to it. If you're a listener, you know, if you're not watching this on YouTube, I don't ever go to YouTube.com. I'm not watching this on YouTube. No, you shouldn't. The cover of the book is on the book's Wikipedia page, and it has kind of a sci-fi vibe to it. Yeah. Now, I want you to look at the back here. First off, it's smaller. Yeah.

than I expected when you see him in a photo like this. This is a picture of him with his co-author, William R. Forstian, and with Jim Bain, who is the owner of Bain Publishing. And we're going to be talking a lot about Bain Publishing. I also...

Related to Bane Capital or Bane the Batman villain? No, not at all. Spelled differently. Has not broken Batman's back. I do really like the Hitler on the back here. You can see him here. He just looks so happy. You hold it up to me. Wrong camera. Wrong camera. Other camera. It's hard to figure out here.

Yeah, that way. Yeah, there we go. Wow. That's a good Hitler. Look at him. Look at him. Good choice. So English is six feet tall. How big are those other men? Oh, wow. Because, yeah, I thought he was actually tall. So these guys. So I think it's William Forstian is just kind of a fucking mountain of a man. Yeah, he's got to be like six, three, six, four. It's a big guy.

Jim Bain, not a big guy, also has the and I say this with all love to pornographers. He has the smile of a pornographer. Right. Like, look at that. That's a man who's looking at you naked. Like there's no there's no there's no other way to describe the look on Jim Bain's face.

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That is way, way too much money to spend on Newt Gingrich's 1945. Holy shit. I feel like a $29.99 for that hardback today would be pushing it. Yeah, yeah. This is like maybe like a $15 book. Man, that's a lot. That's a lot. So...

Introducing Lieutenant Commander James Martel. He's the right man in the right place at a very bad time. The year is 1945. In Europe, the Third Reich reigns triumphant. The Soviet Union is a fragment of its former self, and Britain has accepted a dictated armistice. In the Pacific, after a brief, sharp war with Japan, America is the only significant military presence.

Now the world's two superpowers eye each other warily across an Atlantic Ocean that daily grows smaller. The big show is about to start. Who will win? The Americans with their formidable industrial base and superior logistical techniques or the Germans with their science fiction super weapons that turn out not to be fictional after all. Only one thing is certain. If America is beaten, this alternative Reich will last a thousand years.

Join Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and fellow historian William R. Forshton in a world that, save for Adolf Hitler's inexplicable folly in prematurely declaring war on the United States in 1941, would have been...

Just revisiting the timeline here. So he's not writing this in his spare time, like in his retirement or. No, this is he's speaker of the House. This is a year after he like orchestrates a complete upending of U.S. electoral politics. Shouldn't he be focusing on like the government?

No, no. I think we can all agree this was a better use of his time than doing his job. I just find it very funny that he describes himself and his co-author as fellow historians, because as a spoiler, they are not. Neither of them are historians. Well, Forstian is a little bit of a historian, but he's like a historian who went immediately into writing alternate histories.

He is a professor of history at Montreat College in North Carolina. But Montreat College is like a small, presbyterian. But that's not a real college. Yeah. Look, I'll give a partial to Forschen, right? Because again, he spends most of his career, like his big job is writing a bunch of articles for Boys Life magazine, as well as young adult novels. And does that make you a real historian? Eh.

I'm going to put that I'm going to put that on the cusp. But fucking Newt Gingrich certainly is not a real historian. Forstian's main publisher was Bain, who back in the early to mid 1990s was a major purveyor of pulp sci fi and alternate history books. That changed as a result of 1945, which due to Gingrich's star power was expected to be a major hit.

You can tell just by the look of this cover, right? Newt's name is massive. They're charging $24 fucking dollars for this thing. And yeah, it's a catastrophe, Molly. It's one of the greatest disasters in fucking alt history publishing.

If you read online forums where alt history fans discuss this book, the rumors, credible ones, are that Newt promised Bain he was going to devote a lot of time using his platform. Newt is a famous PR hound, right? He's constantly talking to the Washington Post. He's willing to say like,

shitty stuff about himself to them as we've kind of covered earlier because his attitude is I should always be in the post right so Bane is like well old Newt he knows how to get all the attention we need to move some real copies let's buy like a hundred thousand copies of this fucking book no book sells a hundred thousand copies I know it's so funny and yeah

Newt fails to do the actual PR that he had promised to do, and as a result, 1945 is one of the biggest flops in publishing history. According to the Washington Post, for every 100 copies of this book that were sent out by Bain, 81 were returned unsold, leaving the publisher with almost 100,000 copies sitting around their warehouse. The scuttlebutt is that this was such a flop, it nearly killed Bain entirely.

While I was doing my pre-search for this episode, I found a thread on a forum titled AlternateHistory.com from 2007. Users speculated about why the sequel never came to pass. One user, BCO, wrote, 1945 practically bankrupted Bain Books. They assumed a prominent figure as Gingrich would lead to huge sales, printed up a lot of books, couldn't sell many of them. The idea of a sequel was out of the question.

Another user, Amerigo Vespucci, replied with added context, to make matters worse, there was a falling out between Jim Bain and Forstian over creative differences in the story. In part, Forstian wrote the story as a single volume, but in order to better capitalize on the name on the cover, Bain split it into two volumes. There were other differences as well, and Bain never really discussed the matter in public. It left a bad taste in his mouth.

Even with Bane's passing, I doubt we'll ever see the second volume. There'd be too many legal problems surrounding it. Your best bet might be to wait 20 years or so until Forstian is dead too. He is still alive. Enter a law school to become a crackerjack lawyer and publicist, and then start negotiations to have the second volume released from his estate. I love the thought of a man who's that dedicated to a 1945 sequel. I need to know how it ends. That he orchestrates a 30-year plan to get that book. Does Hitler die? Yeah.

Hitler is still alive. That's what I'm saying. It's like in the sequel. How does it end for Hitler? I think the way this book is supposed to explain things with Hitler is that like he's in a horrible plane crash in 41. And so he gets all fucked up and his people are able to like negotiate a peace with the USSR. And as a result, he kind of loses his mind. Like he's just like this damaged, broken man.

uh figure of a man in the book but he was so mentally normal before yeah he was doing so great before uh because this is an alt history thing and because newt is the kind of dude that he is the main nazi in this is a guy named otto scorsese who is a lot of people he was a real guy he was one of the fathers of like modern special forces tactics like uh scorsese is a major figure in the development of like that kind of shit i did find in a there's a fucking uh

Orlando Sentinel book review that says that he died during an attack on Crete, which is not true. He lived until the 70s. He moved to Spain so that Franco would protect him. And he lived a fairly long life for a dude like him. But yeah, I wanted to start here with one of the most, probably the most famous passage in this book, right? The opening scene, which features a high-powered woman

DC politician who happens to be, if I'm not mistaken, the Speaker of the House. We got a self-insert. Yes. This is Newt's self-insert. And remember...

1995, this is right around when Newt Gingrich is attacking Clinton and saying that he should be impeached. Does he describe his self-insert character as like very handsome? He describes his self-insert character as having an affair while he, as the real Speaker of the House, was in this moment having an affair. Okay, we have some honesty. And specifically, the point of this chapter is his self-insert character hands over the secret to a Nazi spy.

who is the person he's having an affair with, that the U.S. is working on creating an atomic weapon. Like, the inciting incident in this is...

His self-insert being compromised and giving up nuclear secrets in order to get laid. And he is in the real world, the Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House and having an affair with a staffer. That just doesn't sound trustworthy to me. It's amazing stuff. September 1st, 1945, Washington, D.C. Also, I don't know why they do this, but they spell prologue wrong.

That's not one of the ways to spell that. At the end of this, I've only ever seen it spelled with an E at the end of it. I don't understand why they're doing it this way. But darling, Germany and the United States are not at war. What harm is there if we share the occasional bit of gossip? Surely you don't think that I, a loyal Swede, the question trailed off in a lethal pout as his beautiful and so very exotic mistress stretched languidly mock innocent appeal in her eyes.

Still, he mustn't let her see just how much she moved him. A relationship had to have some balance. He stretched in turn, reached out for his cigarettes, and gold-plated Ronson on the Art Deco nightstand with its Tiffany lamp. Since he wasn't sure what to say, he made a production out of lighting up and enjoying that first luxurious after-bout inhalation.

What an unsexy way of talking about the aftermath of sex. Just to say, Prologue, no E, is a declarative programming link which is designed for developing logic-based AI applications.

I think, okay, so this is, oh, maybe this is what OpenAI used to create their AI. Is it all based on Gingrich's 1945? That's exactly what I'm saying here. That's exactly what I'm saying. What a nightmare. What a hideous, hideous nightmare. So he's having after sex smokes with this lady who's very obviously a Nazi spy.

Yeah, she's not even being kind of sly about it. She's like, what if we just if you really love me, you tell me national defense information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, here is Newt not at all talking about his actual marriage and actual infidelity. Playfully, to drive home the potential loss, she bit his shoulder, then kissed it better. Oh, hell, I don't want to. I wish I could just divorce Miss Little Goody Two Shoes.

I like this arrangement. She laughed softly. Mistress to the chief of staff of the president of the United. Oh, sorry. The chief of staff. So it's not exactly him, right? It's just basically him. Nice title, don't you think? Such a book I could write. Shh.

Mayhew shuddered at the thought. Don't even joke about it. But he could trust her to be discreet. He was sure he could trust her. More to cover his moment of doubt than for any other reason, he harked back to her initial gambit. One thing we really don't have to worry about is a war between Germany and the United States. It just isn't in the cards. There's no way it could happen within the next year or so. And after that, we'll take it from me, but nobody is going to dream of messing with the United States. Not even Adolf Hitler.

I don't think there's going to be a war either, but you seem so sure. What is your big secret? You were so excited about it when you came in here, and now you won't tell me. Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress. Tell me, she hissed.

Mayhew looked at his delicious interrogator. For a moment, her intensity almost frightened him. Then he was overcome by it, by her. His had been a strict and starchy upbringing, and his marriage had not been born of love, but of political opportunity, though his wife didn't know that. So he capitulated. Besides, he wanted to tell, what good were secrets if you couldn't share? Okay, I surrender. Lucky for you, she purred, then laughed. Such games we have, she whispered in his ear. You play wonderfully. Now tell.

Having given in, characteristically, he stalled. Sure, you're not looking for a story for your Swedish newspaper. She just looked at him. He could tell she was tiring of the delay. And then he tells her that we're making a nuke. He must have missed the annual training that they give men in the government that like beautiful women do not want to talk politics with you with their tops off. No, no. Beautiful women just aren't doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

No, they never would. I think that's very funny. I think there's so much so many so much off putting language in this book. Like thinking of Newt Gingrich writing the word sex kitten gives me like physical shivers up and down my spine. And it should do the same to you. But you know what doesn't make me shiver?

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And we

You can really tell this is election day. Yeah, we're half-assing our 1945 episode. I can't wait to find out what happens when she doesn't do anything with that secret. Yeah, well, she does, and Hitler invades East Tennessee. Ha ha ha!

Which is funny because there is a guy who does love Hitler who has a compound in East Tennessee. There's a lot. Molly, there's more than one guy who loves Hitler and has a compound in East Tennessee. God.

So there's a Gizmodo article I found called Newt Gingrich should go back to writing science fiction. Yes, he should. Kind of urging him to finish this book. It has some interesting stuff to say about this piece of fiction. And

In any case, whether 1945 is as historically dodgy as many have claimed, it contains several vital elements of total awesomeness. For one thing, the triumphant Nazi Germany spends its time developing what the back cover describes as science fiction superweapons. You think I'm kidding? How about rockets that are remotely guided via television cameras or super jets with drop tanks to provide ground support, plus super rockets and hydrogen-powered submarines, plus...

You can't just stick super in front of a real thing. You gotta stick super in front of it, otherwise people won't know that it's better than the normal kind of thing. Every villain in this book is hideous and crazy. At some point, Skorzeny gets injured and loses an eye, so he can get an eye patch, or maybe some kind of cyborg eye. In this passage, our hero, the square-jawed Jim Martell, tries to shoot down Skorzeny's plane and fails.

Now, ammunition gone, he could only watch as the second and then the third plane lifted off. Unlike the second plane, the third stayed low as the pilot pushed it in just enough left rudder to cause the plane to crab onto the edge of the grass strips that it passed by not 20 feet away from where Jim stood. Otto Skorzeny looked down, grinning demonically, and James Martell finally understood the meaning of hatred.

There's apparently like three or four times where a character learns the meaning of hatred. And that's because Newt Gingrich, as an educator, likes it when people expand their minds. For a little bit more coverage of some of the awkward lines in this book, I'm going to turn to an Orlando Sentinel piece titled, As a Writer, Gingrich Makes a Good Politician. Good title for a book review.

1945 is cluttered with awkward lines like the exhaust vapors that swirled in through the car's open window stank like hell itself. Then there's this. The scene brought to Martel's mind the absurd image of a cobra tenderly protecting a baby. Much of the pre-pub. What's bringing that to mind? Why would that bring that to mind? Have you ever seen that? Is that a thing you can picture because you've witnessed it?

You know what this reminds me of? Yeah. You know what this reminds me of? A thing no one's ever seen. Much of the, yeah, it's very funny. Much of the pre-publication hoopla surrounding 1945 involved its supposedly steamy sex scenes, some of which were exerted, excerpted last year in the New York Times Magazine when the book was still in draft form.

Gingrich vowed to tone down the sex. He succeeded, for example, in bed with his. Yeah, I mean, we just read that passage. But I love that there were leaks of this that were too horny and he had to change the final draft. There's also a lot of leaking these. It's got to be nude, right? Who else would leak these, right?

He's just testing the water. How horny can we get? A good amount of George H.W. Bush slander in this. Gingrich talks about, like, has a character who knew him when he was a pilot because George H.W. Bush fought in World War II, who says, if you needed someone to lead a group straight into enemy flack, he was your man. Which is funny because he was, in fact, shot down during the war. And he had to also edit those portions to be nicer to George H.W. Bush, which

Which is cowardly, Newt. Like you've blown up any sort of legitimacy your book had when you do stuff like that.

Anyway, I want to move to a passage midway through the book that's set in Winston Churchill's office because one of the things that happens while the Germans invade East Tennessee, Rommel conducts a landing in Scotland. Of course. They're moving down through Scotland. The Desert Fox is going to the Moors. No one better to conduct a war on the Scottish Moors than the Desert Fox. Just port the Africa Corps right on over. They'll appreciate the breeze. Yeah.

So I want to talk about this just because there's a little bit here that's kind of relevant to modern politics. Here's Winston Churchill talking. And one of his aides says... Molly and I both made the same face where we're like, oh no. Uh-huh. He

He's talking to one of his aides, a guy named Andrew. For my part, I've ordered a secret alert for the Royal Air Force starting at midnight. Also, the army will move on spring maneuver schedule up so as to increase troop strength throughout England. I'm also going to make a speech before the house next week, accusing Hitler of preparing to launch an attack against us when

Winston, I wish you wouldn't do that. Why? Because the America First crowd will go to town on you, that's why. They'd claim it was part of an ongoing plot to drag us into yet another European conflict. They'll say it was a repeat of what you and Roosevelt tried to do in 40 and 41. They'll say you're deliberately trying to provoke Hitler, that you came back to office intending to do just that, to finally drag us into a showdown with Germany. If you make that speech, I won't be able to back you up. A colonizer.

A cold, static-laden silence was the only response. Even Roosevelt didn't start to move openly until after the forty elections, you know, Andrew continued after a moment's pause. You know that I agreed with him a hundred percent. I could see the threat as far back as the denouement of Versailles and the move into the Rhineland.

I knew then, and I know now, that the maniac son of a bitch would never stop on his own, and that nothing short of a full-scale war with the United States could stop him. We should have been in it back in 41. If it hadn't been for that damned accident, he'd have declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. He all but told me that himself. In 41, we'd have won easily. Now he's ten times more dangerous.

I just love that the America first guys are the bad guy in 1995. And fucking Gingrich is absolutely going to wind up on that side here. Yeah. Now there's a couple other fun moments in another chapter, not long after this. We've, we go to Rommel talking with some of his people. And there's a line here. That's very funny.

Americans would be startled to discover the degree of camaraderie that existed not just between different ranks within the German officer corps, but between officers and rankers. Though the practice had its roots in the mutinous conditions prevalent in the German military at the end of the Great War, perhaps Germans could afford the informality because German society was so thoroughly status-conscious.

whereas Americans, so unready to grant superiority to anybody, needed the outward manifestations of rank because otherwise they would lose track of who issued orders and who took them. It's an interesting description of American culture. Oh, Newt.

And a strange read of Germans. I don't know that there was informality in the ranks. Yeah, informality in the German military. I think he's trying to talk about like Aufstiegstaktik, which was this kind of anti, it was this kind of flattening of military hierarchies in certain specific ways that came about as a result of like,

in World War I where you were saying basically like unit leading officers should have a lot of freedom to like conduct advances and kind of carry out attacks in a way that sort of they see fit rather than having to follow orders to the letter from above, right?

I just don't know if that translated into sort of the social culture of the German people. I don't know that I would say the German military was particularly informal between officers and civilians, especially since like the Prussian Junker officer class was still a major part of the German military in this period.

So what happens when they get to Tennessee? Is it like a ground invasion? I think they I mean, they come in from the air. Right. Of course. And then I mean, I can tell you what happens, which is that Sergeant Alvin York and a bunch of elderly veterans form a militia and stop.

The Nazis. Oh, largely that's who saves the day because Newt's got to have his like pro Second Amendment stuff. So he like puts it in the mouth of like an elderly Sergeant York fighting off the old men of Appalachia. Just like the old men of Appalachia.

Look, I can buy that. I can buy that. I mean, the Waffen-SS proved in the actual World War II that they were not very good at fighting an insurgency. And I think that Appalachia is worse terrain to fight an insurgency than anywhere in Western Russia. So I'm going to say, yeah, probably. Probably that would have gone bad for the Nazis. Exactly.

This could conceivably have been an interesting alternate history. The Waffen SS trying to like fight their way town to town through Appalachia and just getting their shit wrecked. Well, the problem with this book, because that isn't it. That's a book I would read, especially if someone like that, someone less problematic like Harry Turtledove had written the fucker. But that's not like Newt. Actually, Newt and Forstian kind of fall for a standard pitfall.

in writing fiction here, writing particularly like speculative past fiction is you have this point that's the actual thing that you want to get that's actually interesting, which is like an insurgent war in Appalachia between the Nazis and like elderly American World War I veterans. That's a fun premise.

But you don't get to it until the very end of the book, right? By the end of the book, Hitler is geared up for a full-scale invasion and we're actually getting ready to have like – he set up like a naval conflict between like US carrier groups and Nazi –

like the German Navy. Like there's a lot of cool stuff that's happening by the end potentially, but it's not really a part of the story because he feels the need to like go back much further. Like you should always start a book at the thing that's most interesting to you, right? Like you don't actually want to waste a lot of time building up to that, even if you're like, well, people are going to want to know how we got here. No, they're not.

They don't give a shit. Start at whatever's most interesting. You know, it's a rookie mistake. Maybe if Newt hadn't been so busy being the speaker of the house, he'd have been able to get it right. So what you're saying is the sequel is probably a banger and we need to get it. I think the sequel is a banger. It was all apparently intended to be one book that's too long. But yeah, you know, I don't know. We probably don't need to go through this whole thing, especially because it's the election.

I do like that he named his protagonist Jim Martell, right? That's very Charles Martell. It's a fine name. Yeah. It's a fine name. Yeah, yeah. Also played by Christopher, what's his name? From The Lord of the Rings. I don't know. I think I'm good on this book. Yeah.

We hit 45 minutes, right? That's all we owe you on our off week. This is an off week. We're taking a breather.

Uh, we're trying not to focus too much on the news because nothing interesting is going to happen yet. You in the future know. So just scream at past Robert and Molly about what happened. Uh, and if I don't get any message from the future, I will assume that we all die this week. So please do send a message. This is it for the whole world. Uh, thank God. Thank goodness. Anyway, Molly, how do you feel about the alternate past? What's your, what's your favorite?

World War Two counterfactual. Do you spend much time thinking about, like, for example, what if the Germans hadn't invaded Russia but had focused all of their military might on North Africa? You know, as a woman, Robert, I'm going to say no. I have never thought about that in my life. It's a shame. I spent a lot of time doing World War Two counterfactual. Now, I could run get my partner. I think he probably could talk about this for hours. I think this is a thing that men don't.

Like to think about. Oh, yeah. But no, no, I have. I have never considered this. So are you more of a World War One counterfactual guy? Like what if what if Serbia had had taken over the Austro-Hungarian Empire? What if what if by World War Two, the great land power in Europe was the Serbian Empire?

I'm always asking myself like that. Sophie, aren't you always asking about that? I'll tell you one thing. We never would have stopped putting cigarettes in movies, right? If Serbia is like a China-sized market for American television and film, cigarettes don't ever get cut out of Hollywood, you know? So that's good. That's my prediction. Anyway... Molly, do you have anything you want to plug?

Yeah, you should listen to my podcast, Weird Little Guys. Assuming no acts of terrorism happened this week, I won't have any new news to cover in there. But each week we... There have already been five bomb threats against polling locations in Georgia. Oh, they did pick up a guy the other day with an armed bomb about to blow up the power grid in Nashville. So it does keep happening. I'm not going to say there will be no acts of terrorism. Yeah.

Yeah, well, you can tune into Weird Little Guys to hear about these kind of weird little guys who do things like that. Yeah. Speaking of weird little guys, Newt Gingrich, probably a lot littler because he's extremely old now. So he's weird. Check out Newt's wife's Instagram. She photoshops her face to be completely smooth in every picture. It's incredible. Beautiful. And presumably, if this book is true, she's plying him for nuclear secrets. Yeah.

She used to be the ambassador to the Vatican. She's not anymore, I reckon. Wow, what a do-nothing job. I know. Make me ambassador to the Vatican. Because you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get into those catacombs. I'm going to steal some saints' bones, you know? I'm going to have a whole necklace made out of the bones of saints. Dream bigger. I'm getting the chronovisor. Oh, wow. Yeah, the Pope's time machine. Yeah, of course. Wow.

Anyways, hopefully... The Pope has a time machine. Hopefully things aren't...

I love the idea that the Pope has a time machine because my imagination is rather than doing like anything that would help the Catholic Church, he just repeatedly goes back in time to like put a thumbnail on Martin Luther's chair. Like he's just constantly fucking with Martin Luther a little bit. I don't think the chronobiser allows you to manipulate the past only to view it. Oh, well, then I would go look at dinosaurs.

Obviously. Obviously, Robert. That's the only thing I would be interested in. I'm proud to say I wouldn't stop any historical crimes with a time machine. I'm doing nothing but dinosaur related stuff if I get access to a time machine. Yeah. Anyway. That's what I'm doing. Go have sex with Newt Gingrich and get secrets from him.

It's apparently easy. There's only one way to learn. I hope future everybody is okay. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, wear a rubber. You don't know where Newt's been. Newt doesn't know where Newt's been at this point.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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