Robert Evans (16:51)
Hard to beat. The early 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century. That's like the. From like 1850 to 1950. We are in just prime bastard territory. And I. I don't know entirely if it's. I'm sure a big chunk of it is just that that was the first era in which modern historiography and modern journalism were really firing on all cylinders. And so you had a lot of detail about all of these pieces of shit. And a lot a lot was explored and investigated and guys who in an earlier era might not have been covered because while they were doing terrible things, they weren't one of the big names we have. We know about guys like Eichmann. Right. Whereas if Eichmann is helping to orchestrate a genocide in the 1600s, maybe we don't get nearly as much about him, right? Maybe we get his name a couple of times, but there's not even agreement about like, what he did just because of how the media worked. We had a lot more detail. I know that's a big chunk of it, But I also just think it was also opportunity. Like the technology was moving so fast and there was so much political disruption that there was an incredible amount of opportunity for a bunch of people to seize and grab positions of power and influence that they wouldn't have had access to earlier or later in more settled times. And you know, those are, like the poem said, it's. Those are the times of monsters, right? Like that's, that's when. And we're unfortunately in a similar time now where I'm. I don't, I don't know if. I don't think I would say that there's a higher percentage of bastards than now than at any other time in history. But they've never been so visible. There's so many of them that have. And because they are running the entire media ecosystem, not just like news outlets and television and whatnot, but like social media. Like all of the big social media apps are run by some of the monsters who have tailored their algorithms to support other of the monsters. So it's never been. I don't know if I'd say there's more bastards now than ever, but it's never been so hard to avoid hearing from them. Right? They have the biggest microphone that they've ever been given. And also it's a time of. You've had a bunch of different governments over the last 20 years collapse or reach moments of near collapse. You have economic turmoil, you have social turmoil, and a bunch of new technologies that have given a lot of these assholes an opportunity to get the one thing they want, which is power. And they are all scrambling to position themselves as highly as possible. And ideally, they're trying to become a permanent over class, right? A permanent. They're trying to make themselves into the new aristocracy on a global scale. And that I think it has, it's had a tendency to activate a lot of people, including a lot of people who maybe in a different era wouldn't have been bastards. Like, not that they would have been good people, but they wouldn't have had seen an opportunity to reach out and grab in being a monster to other people. Like, I wonder in a different era if J.K. rowling, you know, has incredible success in the early 1800s, right? She probably Never gets known for anything else. You know, maybe people would have found her letters, you know, decades after her death and been like, oh, she harbored some really bigoted views, you know, but it would have been more like H.P. lovecraft, right, where you've got this guy who people really like their writing, they become very popular. I mean, Lovecraft was after his death, but. And then also. Oh, yeah, and they were, like, super racist in, like, a lot of their private correspondence. You can see some hints of it and some signs of it in there in some of their stories. Like, as opposed to what Rowling is, where she. This is not just a person who wrote some books people liked and also has some bigoted opinions that people became aware of later and, oh, you can kind of see bits of it in her writing. No, this is a person who has turned themselves into an activist and is dedicating their time and their money to hurting a specific group of people as much as she possibly can. A group of people who have no, like, organized, systemic power or wealth to even begin, you know, fighting on at the level she is fighting on in, like, financial terms. That simply doesn't exist. And, you know, what she's doing is deeply cruel and unhinged. And I don't think something someone would have been like her would have been in a position to do in an earlier era. Right. Not that she would have been a better person. She just wouldn't have made her bigotry everyone else's problem to the extent that she can. And I think there's a lot of that, too. I think there's a lot of guys and girls out there who are major figures of shittiness to all of us that we know that in a different era, they probably just would have kept that shit to themselves.
