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

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

Hi everybody. This is the audio version of a six-part essay series called Blacks and Jews. I wrote it for my Substack a while back, so if it sounds like I’m reading instead of speaking naturally, it’s because in this case I am. I decided to release this to everyone on the main feed because, in light of the recent uproar and brewing Democratic Party…

I’m re-uploading all the podcasts from a new hosting service, so I thought I’d go ahead and put the full Epstein series up while I was at it. This series deals with some very dark material. It is not for listening with kids in the car or where other people can hear it at work. If you appreciate this podcast, please consider helping to support it by…

This episode will cover the period from 1948 – the year of Israeli independence and the Palestinian Nakba – to the Lebanon War of 1982. It is not meant to be a thorough history of that period, as Fear & Loathing was of the pre-1948 period – to do that justice would require another ten episodes, not just one. This one has a narrower focus. The story…

The Great Migration of 1915-1960 saw over six million African Americans move from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and one whose consequences defined American domestic politics throughout the 20th century. But it wasn’t the first time the industrial cities of Americ…

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 …

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 gr…

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,By Darryl Cooper

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 subsc…

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 ha…

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 pe…

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 Subs…

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple follow the remnants of the 1970s radical left into the fire. WARNING: Extreme language and disturbing content. Thank you to www.campuspress.com for sponsoring this series. Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack. Huge thanks to the folks behind the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown Project. This…

This was originally intended to be part of the previous episode, but I decided to break them up. Warning: EXTREME LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC CONTENT The student movement is dead. The Black Panther Party is torn apart by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Activism devolves into struggle sessions and terrorism, as the movement for civil rights and social justice is le…

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…

This episode discusses the beginning of Peoples' Temple's slide into radicalism after Jim Jones leads his people to California. We also talk about the development of 1960s radical political movements, and Jonestown conspiracy theories. I had to record this episode in a hotel bathroom while on travel for work. The audio quality has some issues at va…

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. Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.…

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.By Darryl Cooper

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.By Darryl Cooper

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 i…

“Mexica ‘beliefs’ have been discussed confidently enough, but academics being natural theologians, usually at an unnaturally abstract pitch. My interest is not in belief at this formal level, but in sensibility: the emotional, moral, and aesthetic nexus through which thought comes to be expressed in action, and so made public, visible, and accessib…

Who’s hungry? Listen on iTunes! Listen on Stitcher! (seems to be some issue here… will try to fix) Visit MartyrMade Facebook page!By Darryl Cooper

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 b…

Modern Zionism began in the late 19th century with idealistic calls for spiritual renewal; by 1939, it had transformed into a desperate play for bare survival. Young revolutionaries do combat with Zionist elder statesmen for the soul of the movement. Hitler’s German Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union do battle for Europe while everything between them …

Riots. Massacres. The end of the world and everything in it. Palestinian Arabs finally find a voice in the wake of the 1929 massacres. Unable and unwilling to find a place for the Jews, Europe’s autoimmune disorder begins to tear the host apart. Desperate European Jews seek escape from Nazi persecution just as Palestinian resistance stiffens and th…

Hi everyone. Been a long time. My day job has been downright abusive the last 2-3 months, but we’re back with Episode 4 of Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem. As the Middle Eastern regional order is hammered into place by the Entente powers, Zionism goes underground. Prosperity abroad and security in Palestine make the 1920s a relatively quiet pe…

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 ques…

The Arabs and the Zionists in Palestine struggle to get their bearings in a ruined world. The smell of gunsmoke still lays thick over the landscape, and the ink is still wet on the Balfour Declaration and the several new international agreements. The First World War is over, and people around the world are demanding their independence in the new wo…

The conflict between Israel and Palestine can often seem like a permanent feature of the global order. The wars, intifadas, refugees camps, suicide vests, UN resolutions, and peace talks have been painfully burned into our collective consciousness. But how could this have happened? Was it always this way? That’s what we’ll seek to find out in this …