Podcast / Behind the Bastards

What's life-ruining, my tropers?

There's a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating.

Behind the Bastards is an American comedy/historic podcast hosted by Robert Evans, a former war journalist and writer for Cracked (Not to be confused with the now-deceased producer of Rosemary's Baby and The Godfather).

In each episode, Evans, joined by a guest, narrates the backstory, rise to power, quirks and legacies of one of history's biggest bastards: People who, it can usually be said, left the world worse off than they found it. The guest will occasionally add their own tidbits of knowledge but mostly adds comedy bits from their (usually horrified) reactions to what the bastard of the week managed to get away with, or by cracking jokes with Evans in the hope of keeping things light.

Alongside the well-known historical facts, Evans will often dive into the less-known and too-insane-to-be-made-up personal details of the bastards, such as Saddam Hussein's attempts at writing romance novels or how an optometrist became the dictator of modern-day Syria. Evans' producer Sophie will, on occasion, cut in to drag the subjects back on track whenever digressions get too meandering.

Episodes are usually released weekly, with longer episodes split into two-parters released a day apart. See also Evans' other work It Could Happen Here, his novel After the Revolution, and Worst Year Ever, a political podcast made by Evans in collaboration with Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll from Some More News.

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You know what won't ruin your life? The following tropes and services:

• Academy of Evil: "The Deadliest School in History" details the bloody legacy of the School of the Americas, where the US State Department trained foreign military officers to suppress indigenous and left-wing movements in their countries and instilled American values and a love of American luxury goods in their students, who would return to their home countries, frequently climb the ranks, and stage military coups. At least eleven of its graduates became dictators of Latin American countries and School of the Americas graduates also installed Augusto Pinochet (who unlike most or all of his co-conspirators wasn't actually a School of the Americas graduate), plunged Guatemala into 36 years of civil war, and killed and tortured hundreds of thousands throughout Latin America in the name of enriching themselves.
• Admiring the Abomination: A downplayed example. Despite considering L. Ron Hubbard a monster, Evans admits upfront to being impressed by how good he was at being a con man, how far he managed to take his grift, and the sheer audacity of some of his weirder and more outrageous projects.
• Adolf Hitlarious: Naturally, Adolf Hitler is the subject of more than one episode, and each of those episodes of highlighting his more pathetic or ridiculous qualities such as how he was sincerely convinced that Karl May, a fraudster YA author, was the world's greatest military genius or how he mapped out an elaborate, melodramatic murder-suicide fantasy after being "spurned" by a childhood crush he literally never even talked to.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Napoleon III's second attempt at a coup got derailed by the fact that his entire war party got piss drunk on the boat ride over and in a moment of panic he shot a random unarmed soldier in the mouth.
  • Robert is also very quick to point out whenever Richard Nixon has a presence in an episode that Nixon was constantly drunk during his time as President at a level unseen by normal people to the point that it was a standing order to not listen to him if he ordered a nuclear strike because he was probably drunk (which did happen at least once).
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Robert points out several times that a lot of the people who fought Nazis were themselves horrible people, and some even just as bad as the Nazis. However, since they fought Nazis, they are still on the right side of history.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: Useless and often dangerous fake medicines are commonly discussed. Examples include homeopathy, chiropractic, fake cancer cures that just burn your flesh off, cure-alls like "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (which is bleach), and nonsense surgeries like medically implanting goat reproductive organs.
• Ambition Is Evil: Many of the bastards are driven by a desire to be rich, powerful, and/or famous. Perhaps in the most extreme case, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief architect of the Holocaust and the brains behind the death camp system, is described as being driven more than anything by his desire for status.
  • Robert believes Henry Kissinger's many war crimes were just to maintain power for the sake of it and that Kissinger had no ideological beliefs beyond the idea that Henry Kissinger should have as much power as possible.
• An Aesop: Robert ends the episode on the Business Plot with a rare hopeful message. The plot very nearly succeeded in turning America into a fascist corporocracy, were it not for Smedley Butler, who blew the whole thing apart for no other reason than his dedication to democracy. Sometimes it just takes a single person making a stand.
• Animal Assassin: Synanon was ultimately brought down because they came up with the harebrained scheme of trying to assassinate an Intrepid Reporter by sticking a rattlesnake in the latter's mailbox. They actually put a good amount of thought in the attack, amputating the snake's rattle to prevent it from warning their target. (The victim survived, but with permanent injury to the bitten arm.) Robert and Paul F. Tompkins are left in utter hysterics at the sheer ridiculousness of this.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • "We cover monsters like Adolf Hitler... Saddam Hussein... Erik Prince... Wil Wheaton..."
  • The official description does this as well:
    Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater's insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
  • The episode on Hank Ketcham discusses at length what a neglectful father and generally terrible person he was but what really gets to Robert and Randy Mulholland is that he called his autobiography "The Merchant Of Dennis The Menace" as an inexplicable play on The Merchant of Venice.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: Robert claims that Zeit is the German word for "newspaper". Zeit means "time"; "newspaper" is Zeitung.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: Robert likes to lead into ads by damning the incoming products and services with extremely faint praise like "will make your babies live longer than Hyland's all-natural baby-killing pills.
• Asshole Victim: Discussed in "A Terrible Story About the Internet", which looks at the decades-long harassment of Sonichu creator Christine Weston Chandler and how this community of trolls harassing her gave rise to a lot of modern online harassment culture. One thing that's noted repeatedly is that the fact that Christine herself is not a very pleasant person and holds many unpleasant views that helped the trolls harassing her justify their own actions, even though they were clearly themselves being incredibly cruel jerkasses to an autistic person who had never learned to deal with such situations in a healthy way purely because they found her reactions funny, and didn't really care about her negative views so much as a chance to hurt somebody without feeling like they were the bad guys.
• As You Know: While going over the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Robert can't help but laugh at the fact that every use of the word "goyim" is accompanied with "(non-Jews)", as if a supposed world controlling Jewish cabal would not only have to remind each other what such a common term means but do so repeatedly.
• At Least I Admit It: Robert and Matt discuss this idea during the Oskar Dirlwanger episodes. Robert points out that Dirlwanger was more "honest" about what his acts were doing, whereas his fellow Nazis that were horrified with his actions were just fooling themselves. Both groups ultimately did things that led to horrific human misery, but at least Dirlwanger wasn't trying to fool others about his goals or trying to dress it up.
• Awesome McCoolname: During the second Amway episode Evans spends about a minute gushing over the name of a senator/Amway distributor: Dick Chrysler. He then jokes about his (fake) Democratic rival: Cock Ford. And his (real) successor in the Senate is Debbie Stabenow (pronounced stab-now). He has a similar reaction to a Texas Judge named William Wayne Justice.
  • The diplomat who protested against American complicity in genocide during the Bangladesh Liberation War was named Archer Blood. While everyone notes he has an incredibly evil sounding name, Robert clarifies that he’s the good guy in the story. Guest Gareth Reynolds jokes that Henry Kissinger was probably jealous of the name: “He’s kissy, I’m bloody!”
• Ax-Crazy: The Ustaše in the episode "The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads". To put this into perspective, the Nazis came up with using the gas chambers during the later stage of the Holocaust because they couldn't psychologically handle executing their victims by firing squad. The Ustaše, meanwhile, killed their victims in all kinds of savage and brutal ways with their own hands, such as cutting their eyes, slitting their throat, throwing their prisoners into brick furnaces, and poisoning children.
• Back-Alley Doctor: Many of the bastards examined tend to be people claiming to be medical doctors, despite having only rudimentary medicial training at best, and no actual training whatsoever at worst.
  • One of the shining examples is John Ronald Brown, one of the few bastards who actually managed to get a legitimate medical degree in plastic surgery (if only by barely passing his exams after failing multiple times) and came to "specialize" in gender affirming surgery. Despite having actual credentials and some fundamentally good ideas on a conceptual level about how to perform gender affirming surgery, Evans describe how both laymen and medical professionals were horrified by Brown's practices, noting that despite his lofty ideas he had only very little in the way of technical surgery skills, which often meant his operations turned into downright Meatgrinder Surgery, with horrible physical consequences to follow for many of the trans women he operated on. This was only exacerbated by the fact that Brown, as a person was often slovenly and absent-minded and showed a downright compulsion to completely eschew any ideas of hygienic standards and operating in a sterile environment, meaning he operated his patients pretty much everywhere but in a operating theater, including on the desk of his office, kitchen tabletops, and hotel rooms, earning him the nicknames of "Tabletop Brown" and "Butcher Brown". But the facts that Brown also were willing to perform his operations fairly cheaply and without asking many, if any questions, nor required any reference from a mental health professional (back in the day, the gatekeeping around gender affirming surgery was even more onerous than it is today, and that's saying something); unfortunately also meant that he was the go-to guy for many desperate trans people.
  • Dr. James Burt began practising medicine at a time when the concept of informed consent was utterly non-existent, and unfortunately he wasn't the only surgeon who casually performed operations on unconscious patients who hadn't agreed to or been informed of the procedures in advance (and not even necessarily afterward). What sets Burt apart from even those bastards is that he decided to invent his own procedure, which he dubbed "love surgery", ostensibly to make it easier for women to orgasm. This involved removing the clitoral hood and "building up" tissue to make the opening of the vagina closer to the clitoris. He tended to write off patients who would later complain of pain, oversensitivity, recurrent infections, and other complaints as hysterical.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Evans will usually use this whenever he tries to underline the 'positive aspects' of whatever horribleness the bastard of the week has just committed.
  • Robert’s attempts at various accents are intentionally terrible and often not even close to being right (ex: using a stereotypical Australian accent when imitating someone from Boston.)
• The Bad Guys Are Cops: In light of the increased scrutiny of police in the US in 2020, Evans released a six-part series about the history of American police. It isn't a pretty picture.
  • Robert is also an outspoken left-leaning anarchist, and discussion of cops on the show is usually cast in a negative light.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • About halfway through "Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented", Evans reveals that the episode (and by extension, part two) is not actually about the Dalkon Shield, a horrifyingly dangerous IUD that caused countless serious infections and internal injuries, but rather that the suffering caused by the Dalkon Shield was just a lead-in to and one small part of the history of the real topic: eugenics and population control (the connection being that the Dalkon Shield was distributed abroad by population control organizations long after it had stopped being sold in the United States and was sold in bulk to these organizations unsterilized).
  • Similarly in the episode "Part One: Fake Doctors Who Gave Everyone Alzheimer's", it gives a trend that Robert and his guest were covering wacky fake doctors who misdiagnosed their patients. By the second episode, it is clear that Robert is talking about a much larger scope about health insurance companies with the second part titled "Part Two: The Real Bastard Was Health Insurance Companies All Along."
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As Roger Stone once said, "[Roy Cohn's] absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that." Of course, Cohn died of AIDS at age 59, disbarred, powerless, with most of his assets seized and completely alone, which were definitely not the circumstances Cohn had in mind.
• Be Yourself: Played for Laughs in the episode "The Bastard who Executed the Top Nazis". When challenged on what seem to be the most common thread between history's bastards, Evans eventually says that it's probably that they all seemed to have boundless confidence in their own abilities and an inability to self-reflect or see their own flaws. He then suggested that if there is An Aesop in all this it's that you shouldn't always aim to be yourself, because you just might be a bastard without thinking about it.
• Believing Their Own Lies: During the episodes on L. Ron Hubbard, Evans points out it's difficult to parse how much Hubbard believed his own lies and how much he knew it was a scam, since he genuinely seemed to think some of his (utterly loony) conspiracy theories and false claims about his life were true.
• Bigger Than Jesus: In the episodes on the Moonies, cult founder Sun Myung Moon is noted to have despite being nominally Christian, claimed to be more important than Jesus Himself and that he was sent to correct Jesus's mistakes/failures and assume divinely-ordained rule over the whole world. Additionally, he would claim his newspaper, the Washington Times, to be more important than the Bible and that his newspaper's circulation was a matter of pressing global theological importance.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • Since Robert doesn't actually have any knowledge or say over what particular ads play during the ad break, and sometimes the iHeartRadio network puts in ads from very questionable corporations (including Koch Industries, despite the podcast having done an entire two-part episode on Charles Koch), he has taken to mocking the oncoming ads by pivoting to ads at extremely inopportune moments, damning them with faint praise like "have probably not been complicit in genocide," or just assuming they'll be for arsenic-laced, homeopathic dick pills.
  • A gold dealer using ads targeting right-wing doomsday preppers made the curious decision to heavily promote itself on the show for a while. After Robert eventually found out, he started specifically mocking the gold selling industry before ad breaks.
• Blade Enthusiast: Evans is very fond of knives and machetes and is implied to have a rather sizeable collection of them. The show has its own "Recording Machete" that he would bring into the recording studio, and live shows would end on Evans challenging the guest to a round of machete bagel tennis. Guest Billy Wayne Davis once brought a machete offering to Evans which he had apparently bought anonymously on Craigslist and actually received during an anonymous hand-off in an empty parking lot, which Evans joked was the best way to buy blades of all kinds. Evans also occasionally touts the benefits of the joke psuedo-medical theory of "macheticine", which was concocted during the episode on homeopathy and has tenets spoofing those of homeopathy - 1.) Knife cures knife and 2.) More is more^note the tenets of homeopathy are 1.) Like cures like and 2.) Less is more.
• Boarding School of Horrors:
  • The episode named "The School That Raped Everybody" is dedicated to the Odenwald School, which in 2010 was revealed to have had a long history of sexual abuse of its students reaching as far back as the 1920s.
  • "Canada's Darkest Secret: Residential Schools" goes into the schooling system purposefully designed to destroy First Nations language, culture and traditions under the auspices of "assimilation" into federal Canada, which also perpetrated untold abuse and pain onto Native children through a deliberate lack of oversight and general apathy/antipathy for their suffering.
  • "How The Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies" partially covered child-care facilities run by the Irish Catholic Church for orphans or children of unwed mothers, as well as facilities for pregnant or "soiled" teens.
  • The two-part episode "Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility" covered the Élan School, which shut down in 2011 following well over a decade of allegations from former students chipping away at its legitimacy. Even though Evans admitted that the damages caused by Élan is a drop in the bucket compared to the Residential Schools, the cult-like atmosphere, the numerous vague and contradictory rules, and emotionally and physically abusive systems of punishment used to keep its victims in line (as opposed to the "mere" neglect and dehumanization used by the Residential Schools) made it a special kind of messed-up. Guest Miles Gray concludes to his mounting horror that the place was basically run like a combination of Fight Club and Thunderdome for children.
• Boomerang Bigot: Evans discusses this in regards to Roy Cohn, one of the main architects of the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, which saw what was basically officially sanctioned harassment and persecution of homosexuals and anyone even remotely suspected of being homosexual working for the US government. Cohn headed this policy/witch-hunt, despite he himself being a gay man working for the government (Cohn would publicly deny being gay his entire life, but his sexuality was effectively an Open Secret). Evans explains that Cohn, referring to his own comments on the subject, had convinced himself through Insane Troll Logic that homosexuals were all essentially powerless and could only be victimized, and since Cohn was essentially a rich and powerful bully he therefore reasoned that he could not possibly be homosexual himself. It all finally caught up with Cohn once he contracted AIDS in the 1980s and his repeated attempts at explaining his obviously detonating health away as liver cancer were treated as the Blatant Lies they were; Cohn quickly fell victim to the very same right-wing stigma against homosexuality that he had done so much to promote, and was in short order abandoned by all his powerful allies, including his apprentice, Donald Trump, and was left effectively powerless, alone, and financially broke in his final days.
  • One of the early founders of American fascism turned out to be a light-skinned black man who could pass off as white that nonetheless preached white supremacy. Robert believes the man thought it was inevitable that the US would descend into white fascism and just wanted to stay one step ahead.
• Breather Episode: Apart from the holiday episodes about actually good people, every so often an episode will focus on a minor bastard—someone like the "Liver King", who profits from bogus health claims and seems like an unpleasant person, but who isn't anywhere near the level of a Kissinger or a Heydrich or Scott Adams who Robert will freely admit isn't a villain but is just an extremely narcissistic man he dislikes on a personal level. In the Mengele episode, Evans says that he makes sure to schedule episodes with lower-stakes subjects to give both the crew and the audience a break from the truly heinous stuff.
• Brief Accent Imitation:
  • Throughout "Oskar Dirlewanger: The Worst Nazi", Robert and guest Matt Lieb frequently shift into a German accent to mock Dirlewanger and/or the Nazis as a whole and to lighten the mood a bit given the extremely dark subject matter.
  • Robert and Matt break out the German accent again to mock Louis Napoleon, who was noted to speak French with a German accent his entire life.
  • The mocking German accent once again returns for the series of Josef Mengele.
• Bring My Brown Pants: After learning that Josef Mengele died by drowning, guest Matt Lieb jokingly hopes that he shat himself while drowning. And drank in some of the dirty poop-contaminated-water. And then vomited. And then drank in the poop-and-vomit-contaminated water.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In "The Astrologer Who Managed the Reagan Presidency", Evans says that after the shock of something like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, "People would turn to something comforting. Either drugs, or god, or drugs made out of god after that kind of shock. Nancy turned to astrology."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Robert does not portray himself as a particularly functional human being, making frequent allusions to extensive drug use and thrill-seeking misadventures. That said, the guy is relentless in meeting his release schedule, preparing episodes in advance to cover a trip to report on Rojava and never missing a week while ceaselessly reporting on the civil unrest in Portland, Oregon that continued through 2020. In one case, a Proud Boy broke his hand at a protest and Robert still showed up, letting his friend Garrison write and host the episode because Robert was too spaced out on painkillers to write a script.
• The Caligula: An unsurprising subject of the show. Special mention goes to Saparmurat Niyazov, aka "Turkmenbashi"^note meaning essentially "father of the turkmens", the former dictator of Turkmenistan, who went as far as renaming ketchup for one of the less insane parts of his cultural policies.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The episode on The British East India Company leans fairly heavily into this trope, as does a number of other episodes featuring other less-than-squeaky-clean captains of industry. Evans is openly leftist and can often be as critical of liberal capitalism as he can be of fascist or communist dictatorships.
• Character Catchphrase: Robert almost always segues into ad breaks with "you know who doesn't [insert horrible act he was just discussing]? The products and services that sponsor this podcast".
• Censored for Comedy: Evans doesn't tend to censor himself at all, so the rare occasions when bleeps are used are usually of this variety, such as insinuating that a nameless sponsor does some horrible deed.
• Chekhov's Gag: In the War of The Eggs episode, after noting that The Dollop had covered the same topic, thinks out loud that he needs to get them for a four part Henry Kissinger episode. Two and a half years later, The Dollop guys were the guests on a six part Kissinger episode.
• Christmas Episode: Once a year around Christmas, Robert will highlight the life of "Non-Bastard" who he views as a genuine hero, such as Raoul Wallenberg. The exception is the 2022 Christmas episode, which was about a terrorist group whose plan to avenge the death of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust by killing 6 million Germans was subject of much discussion between Robert and guest Margaret Killjoy.
• Church of Happyology: L. Ron Hubbard has had a whopping six total episodes dedicated to his life, scams, and the founding of the Church of Scientology.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Some of the bastards are downright bizarre in their beliefs and thought processes, such as Scott Adams and G. Gordon Liddy.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Sophie often comes off as this by either interrupting Robert when he's about to say something that could land them in legal trouble or reminding him it's time for an ad break.
  Robert: Sophie won't let me Hubbard.^note meaning buy a boat and make his followers search for gold
  Sophie: Nope.
• Conspiracy Theorist: A few episodes are devoted to individuals who engage in this behavior, most notably Alex Jones, or entire movements built around them such as the Satanic Panic, the Anti-Vaxxer movement and the John Birch Society.
• Contagious Laughter: Any jokes that hit Robert (or Sophie) funny enough can get quite a laugh out of them, which most of the time spreads among the hosts and guests given the nature of a podcast.
• Corporal Punishment: "Oskar Dirlewanger: The Worst Nazi" explores on the parents using this on their children in 19th-century Germany.
• Country Matters: Everyone loses it in the first episode on Alfredo Stroessner when Robert announces that the General in charge in Bolivia is named von Kundt.
• The Coup:
  • Several of the bastards became dictator of a country by staging a coup, or at least attempted to do so, including Qaddafi, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo against his uncle Francisco Macías Nguema (both bastards in their own right) and several mercenaries against both (all failed and also bastards), and several School of the Americas graduates.
  • The episode on James Dobson and Focus on the Family is hosted by Evans's friend Garrison Davis, while Evans acts as the guest in what is jokingly described as a coup and throughout the episode, Evans acts as The Starscream, openly talking about how he's plotting to counter-coup the podcast.
  • In the wake of the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C., Evans had Prop back on the podcast to record "Behind the Insurrection", a miniseries of Behind the Bastards that covered the various fascist coups that happened in Europe leading up to WWII.
• Cargo Cult: One episode is dedicated to the AI generator subculture, and Robert points out that a lot of it has the traits of a cult and burgeoning religion. Some of AI's most fanatic adherents believe that it will evolve into a powerful god that will lead humanity into a bright new future and that anyone who opposes it (like the artists who prefer not to have their work stolen and their jobs replaced with plagiarism machines) are sinners who may not be deserving of death (yet), but are holding us back from our glorious future. There is even a kind of religious schism within this movement between those who see the coming AI god as a savior, and those who see it as a great threat to humanity. Robert is quick to point out however that this is not Deus est Machina; So-called "AI" are just advanced algorithms that use complicated math to mash together images and texts in a way it predicts will answer a prompt, and isn't actually "intelligent" in anything resembling the human sense of the word. Fully sapient AI might be a thing in the future, but is not now.
• Cult: Cult leaders provide a good chunk of the currently represented bastards. Among the cult leaders featured are Keith Raniere of NXIVM, L. Ron Hubbard, R. Kelly, spirit healer John of God, and Paul Schäfer.
• Cute Kitten: Robert will occasionally mention the antics of his cats, which he has named Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's Best Friend (the latter is a girl.)
• Dare to Be Badass: The episode on Hiram Maxim discusses how British colonial propaganda invoked this trope, with disastrous consequences down the line. Victorian society defined manhood in terms of military service, and drawings and illustrations of colonial wars often invoked themes of power and masculinity, depicting British soldiers fighting in fierce hand-to-hand combat against hordes of natives. In reality, these battles usually consisted of native armies being mowed down by Maxim guns and similar weapons, with rifles and melee combat playing a relatively small part. This was no mere accident; propaganda made a deliberate effort to avoid depicting machine guns. As a result, most of the men going into battle during the opening days of the first World War had no idea what contemporary weapons and tactics actually looked like and were completely unprepared to face the horrors of industrial warfare.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Invoked and combined with Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated by Gabriele D'Annunzio: After one of his early works got published, Gabriele sent out an anonymous letter to a poetry magazine lamenting that Gabriele had died after falling off a horse. Gabriele's fame skyrockets and he later "sets the record straight" claiming that someone must have confused him with someone else.
• Dead Baby Comedy: The bread and butter of this series, sometimes even with literal dead babies!
• Deadpan Snarker: Robert's Signature Style is to deliver nearly all of his zingers and bon mots in a deadpan tone.
  • Sophie often shuts down Robert’s shenanigans in an incredibly dry delivery.
• Department of Child Disservices: "The Woman Who Invented Adoption (By Stealing Thousands of Babies)" details the actions of Georgia Tann, who de-stigmatized adoption by way of appealing to wealthy people by putting photos of photogenic children front and center and claiming that children under a certain age were blank slates rather than likely genetically inferior as the then-popular eugenics-based view saw them. She acquired these children by stealing them from poor families and single mothers, either by using her connections to acquire court orders forcibly separating the children from their parents or by tricking the parents into signing papers signing away their parental rights, often only taking the youngest (and most marketable) children unless a client had specifically requested an older child or teenager. Poor conditions in her facilities also led to the deaths of at least 500 children as they were often denied medical care so as to not eat into her exorbitant adoption fees. Her actions also resulted in it being the norm for single mothers to put their children up for adoption for decades after her own child trafficking empire collapsed with her death in 1950.
  • The orphan system in Communist Romania fed the kids in their care so little food that they had to give kids blood transfusions to replenish nutrients in their systems. The blood had next to no testing to confirm whether it was heathy or not which, in the 80s, led to a shocking amount of Romanian orphans with AIDS infections.
• Destination Defenestration: During the Carlos the Jackal episode an incident from his youth where he threw a naked girl out his window into a pile of snow to evade the vice squad is discussed. The girl was unhurt but hurled verbal abuse at him. This was after the same vice squad found a different naked girl hiding in his cupboard.
• Dirty Communists: While not as talked about compared to Those Wacky Nazis (and their similar kin), there have been a number of episodes dedicated to communist bastards, most notably episodes on aspects of Joseph Stalin, North Korea's Kim dynasty, Trofim Lysenko, and to an extent King Norodom Sihanouk^note Who enabled Pol Pot's rise to power and subsequent genocide on Cambodia.
• Distracted by the Sexy: During the episode on Spanish fascism in the "Behind the Insurrections" sub-series, Robert shares a photo of the Spanish Legion with guest Propaganda and producer Sophie, the latter of whom derails the episode for several minutes over how hot the Legion and their tight pants and low-cut shirts that show off their pecs are.
• Do Wrong, Right: The fact that the likes of Koch Industries and Raytheon are included in the show's automated ad rotation doesn't seem to outrage Robert as much as baffle him: as he points out, who on Earth would want to want to do business with oil or defense companies based on podcast ads?
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Discussed in the Vince McMahon series. As Robert points out, wrestling is a violent, dangerously unregulated sport that puts its performers into horrific health risks and result in the majority dying incredibly young. And yet, when the discussion of stricter regulation emerges in the 80s, the only thing journalists and politicians can focus on is proving that wrestling is fake.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The ultimate fate of John C. Woods, the bastard who hanged the Nazi top command. Rather than falling prey to the Nazis he claimed were stalking him, or even accidentally hanging himself, he died from electrocution while trying to change a fuse in a flooded room.
• Drugs Are Good: Robert is a big fan of what he calls "honest poison"—aka recreational drugs whose sellers don't pretend aren't bad for your health.
• Dude, Not Funny!: The first episode on the RSS and BJP had Evans come in in post to point out that his intro that week (a Coronavirus joke about CPAC, written before anyone had died of COVID-19 in the US and the ensuing full lockdown) wasn't very funny any more, and he's adding a new one in post. He then tells a pirate joke instead.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The show settled into a pretty reliable Tuesday-Thursday release schedule late in 2019, with most weeks being a two part episode on a single subject. This release schedule was reasonably common before becoming the default. As a result, a lot of early episodes that are either one-shots or released in three parts will have an unexpected cadence.
• Escalating War: The "War of the Eggs" recounted in the episode of the same name gradually turned into this with the conflict between the company getting eggs off San Francisco and the lighthouse keepers on the island eventually turning to gun fights and naval battles using cannons.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Evans points out that despite his many crimes, Czar Nicholas II seemed to genuinely love his wife and children.
  • One major talking point on the show and other shows Evans does, is that many terrible people throughout history had very wholesome and fulfilling family lives. Evans points out how many people in WWII concentration camps, after spending the day committing horrific war crimes, would then go home and be a loving parent and spouse to their family.
• Even Evil Has Standards: A recurring theme.
  • During the episodes on Walter Freeman it's mentioned that even the CIA thought Freeman's lobotomy was going too far during the time when they were fully into secretly dosing people with LSD and other horrific and highly unethical experiments with MKULTRA.
  • Similarly, George Lincoln Rockwell was considered too racist for the 1960's-era FBI and Selma, Alabama's town elders (two groups not exactly known for being especially friendly to the civil rights movement).
  • Evans guest starred on Hood Politics when discussing the George Floyd murder, and pointed out that even President Trump, who famously is a pro-police hardliner, thought that Derek Chauvin and the other officers at the scene went too far.
  • Joshua "Null" Moon of Kiwi Farms holds some extremely racist, sexist and antisemitic beliefs, not to mention is the owner of a website that usually leads the charge in ruthless trolling campaigns. However, he thought the sustained online harassment of Chris-Chan had gone way too far and worked to stop the more extreme ones.
  • Even the other Nazis in the SS frequently thought Oskar Dirlewanger and his men were going too far and repeatedly reported them to their higher-ups for excessive cruelty and tried to distance themselves from them.
  • The founder of The Silk Road allowed people to use his platform to hire hitmen and buy drugs but he drew the line at people using it to purchase child sex abuse material.
  • Lester Kinsolving was a conservative journalist and not very accepting of homosexuality but he was still one of the few to ask the Reagan administration about the AIDS crisis and express any concern and call them out for their disinterest and belief that since it only affected gay men, it wasn't their problem.
  • Despite the easy temptation, Robert refrains from mocking parents of autistic or disabled kids who get swept up in the anti-vaxxer movement, saying he worked with special needs children in the past and he is sympathetic to parents who were manipulated by Andrew Wakefield's lies.
  • The episode on Wally George is all about how he was a deeply unpleasant man whose behavior was motivated purely by getting ratings but notes he brought on white supremacist and neo-Nazi Tom Metzger and was open in his disdain for Metzger. While it may have been also part of his act for ratings, Robert and Tom Reimann acknowledge it as a contrast to modern right-wing pundits who are all too happy to cozy up to said leaders.
• Evil Colonialist: Another frequent target, especially Sir Henry Morton Stanley who helped Leopold II establish the Congo Free State.
• Evil Is Petty: Many of Evans' digressions of personal lives often highlight how much history's bastards aren't larger-than-life villains, but often horribly petty and flawed people given way too much power by luck or systemic fiat.
• Eviler than Thou: In "The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads", the Nazis were by no means saints in the slightest when they committed the Holocaust but the Croatian Ustaše were absolutely far more brutal and savage when they committed their genocide in the Balkans.
• Executive Meddling: Invoked and Played for Laughs in "How Nestle Starved a Bunch of Babies". Robert asks Sophie what the legal definition of "incitement" is (obviously building up to saying something humorously violent) and she has a "No. Just… No" Reaction and shuts him down.
  Robert: Anyway, Sophie says I'm not allowed to say anything inciting anymore, so we're just gonna end the episode.
  Sophie: Yaaaay!
• Far East Asian Terrorists: The JRA were one of the main subjects of the episode "The Golden Age of Terrorism".
• False Reassurance: Played for Black Comedy in "The Bleach Church is Spreading". Robert and his guest Billy Wayne Davis note that yes, drinking enough bleach will mean you don't have to worry about getting sick, in the same way being hit by an H-bomb will.
• Final Solution: The episodes "Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage" and "The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads" discuss on the topic of genocide and people who carried it out. They also consider the Irish Potato Famine in the episode "That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland" as this.
• Flat "What":
  • Robert's reaction is a flat "what the fuck" when guest host Mia Wong says that Wikileaks revealed that one reason New Zealand sent troops to Iraq was to protect a lucrative contract a company called Fonterra had supplying dairy to the UN. So in other words they went to war over milk.
  • Robert has a similar reaction in the "How Sam Bankman-Fried Conned the Crypto World" episode when Jaime Loftus brought up the fact that Selena Gomez was currently going through a feud with a friend who donated her a kidney.
• Friend to All Living Things: Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is portrayed this way in the second part of the episode on the Reagan Administration's handling of the AIDS crisis. Though a staunchly pro-life Evangelical Christian, Koop became the champion of (predominantly LGBTQ) AIDS patients out of an obligation as both a doctor and a Christian to heal the sick and save lives, regardless of his feelings on their personal lives.
• Freudian Excuse: Conversed in the series on Josef Mengele, where Robert notes that the young Mengele grew up in a middle-class household with two doting parents, and by all outwards appearances never truly needed for anything in terms of economics and parental love and care. He then makes a digression to compare and contrast Mengele with previous bastards, observing that this trope is generally zigzagged. Some of the bastards covered on the podcast had childhoods can be described as pretty awful living, under parents who were domineering and cruel or grew up without any real parental figures in very unhealthy and dysfunctional environments, where they had to fight from an early age to survive, all of which could be pointed towards as a definite influence on their later behavior. On the other hand, many more subjects had, at least according to every available source, loving and caring parents, and perfectly happy, stable, and healthy childhoods with no real hint of future misdeeds, and still decided to engage in a long career of cruel, callous, and inhuman acts regardless of this.
  • Henry Kissinger reportedly was very adamant that his experience of living as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany had zero effect psychologically on his preference of order above everything else (to include justice), something Robert and his guests (Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds) find very hard to take seriously. Multiple times throughout the six-parter Robert will point out something especially pathological from Kissinger to Dave’s disgust only for Garett to sarcastically chime in with "Imagine how worse it would have been if his childhood had effected him."
  • The episode on Roy Cohn also puts an emphasis on his very well-off but dysfunctional background, being the son of a loveless marriage of convenience, dealing with an overbearing mother and seeing his beloved uncle Bernie scapegoated for the Great Depression and all but disavowed by the family. This all played a major role in him becoming callous and keeping his homosexuality a secret, refusing to be seen as "just another queer", and willing to work with people he knew were intensely homophobic and anti-Semitic because he craved their acceptance and desired to be above other gays and Jews.
  • The episode on Scott Adams acknowledge this. Robert and his co-host acknowledge he was a bit of a jerk from the start and always had an ego, but it wasn't until he suffered a disease that took away his ability to speak and pushed away his loved ones as he lashed out because of it that he went off the deep end. Both of them express sympathy for Scott, and acknowledge it was legitimately tragic.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Robert and his co-hosts will acknowledge when a bastard has suffered legitimately horrible and traumatic events, and frequently note that it likely impacted their behavior, but never treat it as a justification for their actions.
• Full-Circle Revolution: In the episode on coup attempts in Equatorial Guinea, the country's first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, was a dangerous and paranoid madman who established a Cult of Personality, terrorized his country, ruined the local economy, and killed thousands for eleven years — both directly through state-sactioned violence against perceived political enemies and indirectly through starvation. His rule was eventually ended when he attempted to purge his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo from the government, but failed and prompted a coup that placed Obiang in charge of the country. Obiang swiftly prove to also be a dangerous dictator who established a cult of personality and kept right on ruling the country with much the same iron fist as his uncle.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Discussed in the Liberian Civil War episodes, with Joshua Milton Blahyi, aka "General Butt Naked", who true to his Nom de Guerre fought in the nude during the war.
  Shereen: [He is] naked and not shot by bullets. It feeds the legend.
  Robert: Exactly. And it's worth noting, in fighting — like what is happening in Liberia — fighting naked, does not expose you to much more danger than fighting with clothing on. This is before people outside of very advanced militaries have ready access to quality body armor. It does just not exist for most people in this fighting. And a t-shirt offers no more protection from a bullet than being naked.
  Shereen: That's fair, yeah.
  Robert: And in fact, there have been forces who have fought naked earlier in history, and one of things that was noted is: when they get stabbed or shot, they were less likely to die, cause they're not having a filthy matted fur or something pushed into a open wound, which causes infection. And there is also not a lot of access to great medical care. So, it sounds wacky and crazy, but it is not as irrational as it may seem.
  Shereen: It has its weird benefits.
  Robert: And also: seeing a naked dude charging you is terrifying.
• Functional Addict: Robert frequently jokes about his copious drug use, though how much of this is comedic hyperbole is up for debate.
  • If his tweets can be believed, Robert has stopped doing certain substances due to mental health. For one, he has stopped using cannabis due to PTSD.
  • He has admitted that one episode was done while he was high on acid, but refuses to say which one.
• The Fundamentalist: A couple of topics are centered on such people, such as "Jerry Falwell: Founder of the Religious Right", "The Cult Behind Josh Duggar" and "The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine".
• Gag Penis: The episode on Zhang Zongchang is entitled "The Well Hung Warlord Who Tried to Conquer China" and over the course of the episode, Mia Wong (acting as guest host) and Robert Evans discuss the warlord's numerous nicknames, which include "Old Eighty-Six" and "The General with three long legs", the former being a reference to the alleged length of Zhang's penis in stacked Mexican Silver Pesos^note A silver peso was about 1/10 inch thick, so that's 8.6 inches and the latter being rather self-explanatory.
  • To partially explain Gabriele D'Annunzio’s success sexually with ladies despite being a balding troll with bad teeth, Robert produces a photo of him clad in a thong and notes the bulge is pretty big.
• Gilligan Cut: To display Vince McMahon's weird attitudes towards women, Robert plays a vignette of Bobby Heenan harassing an increasingly-uncomfortable female employee at the Trump hotel the wrestling event was taking place in who might not have fully understood what was happening. An appalled Seanbaby, the guest for that episode, says that Gorilla Monsoon ought to have shown up to save that poor woman from Heenan, and Robert admits that that's basically what happens in the next vignette.
• Giver of Lame Names; In the "Liver King" live episode Robert declares that he's taking away the "worst at naming a baby" award from Elon Musk and giving it to Brian Johnson for the names of his two sons: Stryker and Rad.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Several times throughout "Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented", Evans and guest Samantha McVay comment that something they said or that a document they're reading said would make a good name for a metal or punk band, such as "vaginal death crab", "fallopian depth charge" or "bacterial expressway".
  • The episode on Narendra Modi had "Mutual Genocide", which was floated as a cool name for a death metal band.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Invoked while discussing the roots of the anti-vaccine movement in the 1880's with Robert acknowledging that both governments enforcing regulations and those protesting them had positive and negative aspects and valid points and concerns, the governments trying to stop the spread of some truly horrifying and deadly diseases but using brutal and merciless methods including forced vaccinations by law enforcement, forcing those infected into horrible isolation units and destroying the property and homes of those at risk and protesters being wrong about vaccines but having genuine concerns about government power, especially since this was shortly after slavery had been abolished, and many being very progressive minded and on the right side of history on other issues such as supporting women's rights, opposing imperialism, advocating for animal rights and supporting civil rights with many older protestors having also been abolitionists years prior. Robert even acknowledges that researching the subject surprised him as he didn't expect to gain a more nuanced and sympathetic view of the movement.
• Guest Host: Occasionally, someone else will host the podcast, though in a twist on the trope, Evans is generally still present when there's a guest host and instead acts as the episode's "guest"
  • Garrison Davis is the most common guest host when Evans is ill, injured, traveling, or otherwise indisposed and covers similar topics to Robert, such as Focus on the Family and the Third Wave.
  • Mia Wong occasionally acts as guest host to shine a spotlight on East Asian bastards like Zhang Zongchang, Nobusuke Kishi, or Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church (aka Moonies).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Invoked. In "The Bleach Church is Spreading", Robert notes that he once found Genesis II Church appalling but somewhat amusing, as it was incredibly small—but the COVID-19 pandemic, and a perceived endorsement of the church's bleach cure by Trump ^note he explains that Trump's comment about internal use of disinfectants was almost certainly not about the church specifically, as plenty of people have had that particular dumb idea, but sounded close enough that they took it and ran with it, made it too influential, and therefore dangerous, to be funny anymore.
• He-Man Woman Hater: "The Birth of the Manosphere" episodes are all about the Manosphere, an online subculture defined by virulent misogyny.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": In the Zhang Zongchang episode, guest-host Mia Wong mentions a "seamen's strike". Wong, clearly foreseeing what is about to happen, makes an attempt to defuse the situation by instantly moving on and continue her narration as straight-faced as possible, but still has to pause when Evans simply cannot help himself and starts snickering at the word choice.
• The Heretic: In the episode on AI cults, Robert explains that, since the AI subculture has all the makings of a burgeoning religion, they of course also has a definition of heresy. He doesn't go as far as to say that they want to burn any unbeliever who opposes the development of generator programs (like the artists who don't want their livelihood stolen), but he doesn't say it won't end like that.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Subverted by Scott Adams, whose self-deprecation hides a truly massive ego. Robert speculates it's a calculated ruse so Adams can come off as likeable.
• Hiding Behind Religion: "How The Rich Ate Christianity" is about how capitalists, wealthy people, and businessmen co-opted Christianity to justify their greed.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Robert makes repeated jokes about a certain meal kit delivery company having a private island just for child hunting. He eventually retired this joke after some listeners took it seriously.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: While not exactly a sidekick, Robert’s producer Sophie is noticeably much more professional and organized than Robert could ever hope to be.
• I Was Beaten by a Girl: Napoleon III's first attempt at a coup failed hilariously when he not only failed to get the troops on his side but got beaten up by the commander's mother and wife with their bare hands. The fact he got his ass kicked by two ladies is brought up repeatedly afterwards.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Episodes are typically titled in the format of "[Bastard's name]: the [noun] who [action that makes them a bastard]." This isn't an ironclad rule, however, as titles like "Jacob Wohl is Still the Dumbest Person In Politics" or "Hitler's Sex Life: The Whole Sad Story."
  • A few episodes bluntly state their subject, including "The Twilight Zone Movie" (which doubles as a BtB of John Landis) and "Kissinger".
• Intoxication Ensues: In the crossover Halloween episode with It Could Happen Here, "That Time the CIA dosed a French Town" the effects on the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit after allegedly being secretly given LSD is described in detail, including a bunch of ducks standing up on their legs like penguins and walking in a line.
• In Vino Veritas: The Josef Stalin two-parter episode discusses how the infamous Soviet dictator became a firm believer in this trope during his older days, and as a result forced the subordinate heads of the Soviet government to come to for a dinner party with him almost every day, where imbibing ludicrous amounts of alcohol and participating in constant drinking games were basically mandatory, as Stalin was convinced that if anyone was plotting against him, they would blabber about it while they were dead drunk (Stalin himself meanwhile drank his spirits thinned with water, because of a doctor's suggestion). Said subordinates were acutely aware that these dinner parties had a really terrible effect on their health, not just because of the sheer quantity of alcohol they consumed at them, but also because of the frequency with which they had to do it, but were also afraid about what the highly paranoid Stalin might do to them if they ever declined his invitations, and as such they felt that refusing, no matter how politely, was simply not an option. Evans remarks that he considers it somewhat of a miracle that despite the numerous cases of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy Stalin's parties caused, that there is no immediate evidence that any of them were major diplomatic or political incidents or direct losses of life amongst the members of Soviet government.
• It's Personal: As a war journalist covering extremism, Evans sometimes ends up covering bastards who have made his job necessary.
  • Robert claims that of all the bastards he discussed, Paul Manafort is the one he personally hates the most due to Robert having personally covered the Ukrainian Civil War which Manafort helped extend and saw the resulting horrors first hand. In a later episode covering Manafort's business partner Roger Stone, while Robert admits Stone did far more damage to America and the world than Manafort, he still hates the latter far more.
  • Evans covered the warzones in north-eastern Syria during the Syrian Civil War and made several stories from the Rojava Autonomous Region. As a result, his coverage of Bashar Al-Assad's (and the US's later) treatment of the Kurds tend go into this trope by his own admission.
  • The Bjorn Lomborg episode also counts since Robert spends a substantial portion of it relating how his conservative upbringing coupled with Lomborg's brand of climate denial had caused him to also embrace climate denial in his youth.
  • On a more comedic note, Robert considers Dudley Allen Sargent to have been the worst bastard discussed on the show due to being considered the creator of Physical Education.
  • While Robert's main hatred for Mark Zuckerberg stems from the fact that Facebook is probably the world's biggest contributor to radicalization and disinformation and Zuckerberg knowingly blocks any attempts to stop it, he has a more personal beef with him due to Facebook's incorrect metrics causing the pivot to video trend that led to Robert and all his friends being fired from Cracked.
  • Robert also openly admits that Scott Adams is not a villain or evil but dislikes him on a personal level due to his absurdly inflated ego.
• Jerkass: Robert freely acknowledges Scott Adams isn't evil, but still centers several episodes around him showing how much of a racist, arrogant jerk he is.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • invoked Discussed. Evans points out that the during first part of the Elon Musk episodes Musk can be seen as this, since he was an abuse victim by his father and classmates, and was often bullied by being different and awkward as a young child. Evans himself was a target of bullies in his younger years for similar reasons as Musk was, making the former sympathetic to the latter's plight.
  • The episodes going over Chris-Chan, while pointing out that she holds despicable beliefs as well as doing some deplorable actions, is overwhelmingly sympathetic to her. Chris-Chan was a target of bullying and neglect as a child as well as constant and horrific online abuse as an adult and was born into a very dysfunctional environment with two older parents who were neglectful alcoholics and compulsive hoarders where she never learned the skills necessary to control her anger, make friends, socialize in a healthy way or gain romantic partners in a traditional way and her low-functioning autism and other mental issues left her disadvantaged from the start.^note Of course, this was before Chris-Chan was arrested for raping her dementia sufferer mother.
  • Clarence Thomas' early life is seen as this, as he was born into destitute poverty, had an absent father, was a target of racism as a youth, and was taken in by an emotionally abusive grandfather.
• Karma Houdini: Incredibly and unfortunately common. The bastards of the week will frequently have either lived a long life without facing consequences for their crimes, or will have yet to have faced real consequences at the time the episode airs.
  • Robert notes that Richard Nixon being hung for sabotaging the Vietnam Peace Talks behind LBJ’s back during the 1968 Presidential election is one of the few times where a President could have just had his political opponent killed and it be wholly justified, lamenting how much better the US would be off had Nixon been hanged for treason.
  • The Business Plot conspirators faced effectively zero consequences for effectively plotting a fascist coup against the US government to the point that most of the conspirators can’t even be identified to this day with 100% certainty.
• Karmic Death: During "Part Two: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich", Robert describes the demise of Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich at the hands of Czechoslovak partisans — an agonizing week-long death of sepsis from wounds caused by a grenade after Heydrich attempted to stand his ground and gun down the partisans in an attempt to show himself as a "hero" rather than simply drive away after their guns jammed. Robert, Sophie, and guest Matt Lieb all agree Heydrich got exactly what he deserved and that it was fitting that his own ambition drove him into that death, just as that ambition had led him to orchestrate the deaths of millions of others. Additionally, Robert contrasts it with the relatively swift deaths given to so many other top Nazis, including Hitler who privately mocked Heydrich for dying a stupid and senseless death before going on to blow his own brains out to avoid capture by the Red Army.
  • Heydrich's fellow Nazi Oskar Dirlwanger met a similar fate. After spending years brutalizing the Reich's enemies to a degree that even disturbed other Nazis, Dirlwanger spent his final days in a jail run by the French Occupation forces and staffed by former members of the Polish Resistance; survivors of his own acts of genocide; who ensure that his case never goes to trial. Robert even calls the end of Dirlwanger's story an ending as happy as stories about slaughter and genocide get.
  • Robert notes Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Communist dictator of Romania, is one of the rare examples of a dictator who actually managed to be overthrown, tried for his many crimes, and quickly executed.
  • George Lincoln Rockwell, a Neo-Nazi politician who incited terrorism and spread white supremacy throughout the US, is murdered by one of his abused underlings.
• Kavorka Man: Both Henry Kissinger and Gabriele D'Annunzio are noted to be inexplicably very popular with the ladies despite neither being especially attractive. Robert theorizes that Kissinger being inordinately respectful to women’s intelligence for a man in the 1970s is actually why (plus it appears his interests in women were more for conversation than sexual activity). D’Annunzio’s appeal was likely in his genuinely savant-level capability as a romantic poet and possibly a Gag Penis.
• Kid Sidekick: Garrison Davis has been jokingly considered as Robert's ward and is frequently used as a fill-in host.
• The Klan: Gets their own episode, focusing on both the First and Second Klans. The Second Klan, and specifically their close relationship with police departments, is also the subject of the third episode of the six-part series on the history of American policing.
• Laughably Evil:
  • Some bastards like L. Ron Hubbard, Zhang Zongchang, Muammar Qaddafi, Turkmenbashi and Charles Dederich are so hilariously over-the-top that Roberts will outright laugh about their actions and be consistently excited to continue discussing and tell what absolute insanity they get up to next, while also being appropriately horrified by their atrocities.
  • G. Gordon Liddy is by far the stand-out. He's a fascist, racist Nazi sympathizer, but he's so stupid, insane, and incompetent at everything he does and completely convinced of his status as a tough, capable badass that his antics are hilarious to learn about. Robert deliberately plays audio of Liddy's utterly vile racist comments just to remind the audience that he was still a bad man beneath all of that.
• Les Collaborateurs: There is a very good chance that any given bastard covered, even will have, at some point, supported and/or actively collaborated with the Nazis or equally heinous regimes.
• Lysistrata Gambit: Evans name drops this trope when discussing the women's protest movement during the second civil war in Liberia in the second part of the series on General Butt Naked.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: "What's [verb]ing, my [related noun]s!". Usually using extremely outlandish and/or unnerving verbs who are only tangentially related.
  • Robert is also extremely fond of going into ad breaks with "you know who doesn't (horrible act he was just discussing)? The products and services that sponsor this podcast".
• Mad Doctor: A staple of the podcast. In particular, their four-part series on Josef Mengele goes out of its way to emphasize that Mengele was not some maniacal top-level Mad Scientist sewing people together, but rather a sort of middle-manager who, while still sadistic at times, was mainly supplying subjects for cruel experiments done by Mad Doctor types. Evans finds the latter more horrifying, because it implies that anybody could become Mengele under certain circumstances.
• Mad Scientist: The podcast has featured several Real Life examples. Subverted in that the most egregious examples, like Trofim Lysenko, killed the most people because they'd been put in high government positions by even bigger bastards, where they would use their theories to affect government policy that indirectly killed a lot of people^note Lysenko's fatally flawed theories on genetics didn't stop him from more or less running Soviet agricultural science for several decades, leading to several mass famines that may have killed more than 30 million people in the Soviet Union and Communist China.
• M.D. Envy: Robert theorises that some of the fake doctors that he covers aren't just in it for the grift, but that they really want to be a doctor, or at least be seen by others as a doctor without actually putting in the effort required to learn how to be an actual doctor.
• Misplaced Accent: When Robert and his guest Billy Wayne Davis joke about foolish people being taken in by obvious con artists or otherwise doing stuff when they really should have known better, they adopt (Robert) or exaggerate (Billy) Deep South accents, even when the story happened in, say, Canada. Both Robert and Billy Wayne admit that it makes no sense and is actually pretty offensive, but both of them are originally from the South and had internalized a thick twang as being how "uneducated" rural people talk.
• Missing Child: The episode on Georgia Tann combines this with Black Comedy, discussing children being randomly abducted, sold, molested and accidentally killed, and their parents being unable to get them back as a result of manipulative laws.
• Not Quite the Right Thing:
  • During the "Non-Nazi Bastards who helped Hitler Rise to Power" Robert and his co-host of the week, Naomi, are at a loss of how to land when discussing an incident in which a woman prevented the suicide of her husband's friend, Adolf Hitler, eventually deciding that, sometimes, history doesn't provide a lesson—it just sucks.
  • "The Bastard who Invented Homeopathy" comes off partially as this. Robert notes that, while homeopathy is essentially placebo therapy and ends up making people not seek out actual medicine for life-threatening conditions, at the time of its invention it was still less deadly than most other medicine at the time, since at least it's not actually harmful (most of the time). Moreover, despite the title, Robert doesn't think Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann really was a bastard - the man was actually trying to advance medicine with an early evidence-based approach, and, like many early scientists, simply happened to be incorrect and didn't live to see his hypothesis disproven.
  • In "The Bastard Who Invented The Lobotomy", Evans notes that Walter Freeman wasn't wrong in his hypothesis that mental illness often had a physical or chemical cause, contrary to the prevailing Freudian medical opinion of the time that mental illness was mostly or all psychological and the result of repressed memories and the like. However, where he was extremely wrong was in his belief that lobotomy was the cure for most or all mental illness, rather than a very limited use niche treatment for a very, very small segment of brain problems.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Robert believes he has the solution to any modern bastard, but can't say it out loud for legal reasons. It rhymes with "shmargeted shmassassination."
• Named Like My Name: In the Steve Jobs episode, Robert brings up how there are many people within Steve Jobs' circle that share names with other people that are more well known for other reasons in popular culture.
  • Jobs' biological sister is Mona Simpson, which Robert noted is the same name as a character in The Simpsons.^note This can be zigzagged as the Mona Simpson character is in fact named after the real Mona due to her marriage with Simpsons writer Richard Appel.
  • One of Apple's first employees is Elizabeth Holmes, a completely different person than the Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, that Robert covered in a previous episode.
  • Apple's first CEO is Michael Scott, a name better known today for another terrible manager.
• No True Scotsman: This comes up in the episode about the Netanyahu family. A big part of the Zionist ideology is that taking their ancestral homelands is what's best for all of Judaism, and therefore any Jew who doesn't believe in Zionism is a self-hating Boomerang Bigot who is not a true Jew. This is of course in spite of how Zionist only makes up a small part of Jews worldwide, and in fact the ideology has large support in non-Jew communities.
• Not Helping Your Case: In part two of the episode on the Finders cult Robert points out that the lie told by the men who were found in a van with several children told the police, mainly that they were taking said children to Mexico to start (in Robert's words) "baby Harvard" did nothing to convince the police that the children were not actually being sex trafficked.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: In the Nobusuke Kishi episode, guest Mia Wong divides Imperial Japan into three periods which she calls "Imperialism 1", "Imperialism 2: Imperialism Harder" and "Imperialism 3: Tokyo Drift". Robert immediately expresses his disappointment in Wong not calling the second phase "Imperialism 2: Electric Boogaloo".
• Offing the Offspring: Regaled in the appropriately titled episode "Gary Young: The Fake Doctor Who Drowned His Own Baby."
• One-Steve Limit: Heavily averted in the Napoleon III series, much to the ongoing annoyance/seething anger of all involved. Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother who was the King of Holland, sired Napoleon Charles, Napoleon Louis, and Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III,) all also Bonapartes. There's also one of Napoleon III's generals, his cousin Jerome Bonaparte, who got the job because his cousin, also called Jerome Bonaparte, fought with Napoleon I, at which point everyone completely loses it, with Robert yelling "Pick new names you assholes!" and them collectively suggesting "Mitch Napoleon Bonaparte" and "Derek Napoleon Bonaparte" to mix things up. Also features a guest appearance from Russian Tsar Alexander I, who's the older brother of Nicholas I, who's the father of Alexander II, who's the father of Behind the Bastards aulmni Nicholas II. It's so bad that on two separate occasions the episode is interrupted by Future Robert to correct mistakes he made regarding who's who; even then he apparently didn't notice that he kills off Napoleon Louis twice, mixing him up with his brother Napoleon Charles who died from illness aged 5, before correctly placing him as the brother who dies of illness as an adult while with the future emperor in Italy.
  Matt Lieb: "I'm having a stroke, dude."
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Robert is not averse to giving honest praise to various figures he ideologically disagrees with or strongly dislikes on a personal level for genuine moments of kindness, restraint or talent they display or just being entertaining in their evil:
  • He makes a point of emphasizing that Roy Cohn was an extremely loyal friend and attorney who would do anything for those he was close to or he was an attorney for and he was noted to be very charming despite his amoral nature.
  • He notes that Scott Adams was a legitimately talented artist with an admirable work ethic, even if he always had an ego and took the wrong lessons from his early achievements.
  • He praises conservative journalist Lester Kinsolving for trying very hard to get the Reagan Administration to address deaths from AIDS for years and being outraged at their callous response.
  • The episode on Chris Chan outlines how Null and other mods at Kiwi Farms, for all their abuse of Christine Chandler and deplorable beliefs and actions in general, were genuinely disgusted by the actions of the Idea Guys and worked to stop them. It's not mentioned in the episode but Null even became a friend and guardian to Christine and sincerely tried to help her as a form of atonement, helping her set up a way to make art work for money to support herself and even working to get her into assisted living for when her mother died, albeit being forced to disavow Christine after the incest charges came out.
  • The discussion of the anti-vaxxer movement and it's historical roots involves Robert noting that it included intellectual figures such as George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy and while they were wrong about vaccines, they were very progressive on other issues such as civil rights, suffrage, animal rights and criticism of colonialism and the British Empire and many had been vocal critics of slavery prior and gives them their due that their concerns about government control and authority weren't totally unfounded given that slavery had ended not too long before.
  • The series on G Gordon Liddy doesn't hold back in discussing what an ignorant, macho and incompetent buffoon Liddy was and gets lots of laughs from his attempts to portray himself as a tough guy but Robert does note that he was capable of at least some introspection and vulnerability when discussing his father who he sincerely loved and idolized and Robert praises the fact that as dumb and aggressive as he was, Liddy was at least fairly genuine in his personality and showed some courage in his willingness, bordering on obsession, with putting his life on the line in combat, in sharp contrast to modern pundits whose attempts to make themselves seem traditionally macho and brag about how they are willing to violently face down opponents are painfully transparent.
  • The series on the rise of right-wing pundits is open in discussing how Joe Pyne, the father of call-in radio, was an extremely abrasive and difficult man and held a lot of questionable views but also takes time to acknowledge he wasn't completely beyond reason, being open to honestly listen and even change his mind when guests on the left made good arguments and being sincerely polite and respectful to Christine Jorgensen, one of the first open Transgender women to gain media attention. Robert also brings up his genuinely impressive military record, serving in the Marine Corps during World War II and surviving some of the worst battles of the Pacific for which he earned three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, noting it as a striking contrast to modern pundits who love to talk big game but would never go anywhere near a real battle.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: One of Sophie's jobs is to interrupt Evans whenever he says something that might get the show in legal trouble.
• Overused Running Gag: Discussed Trope — Robert has made multiple comments about using running gags at least two weeks past when they've gotten stale, such as Doritos or the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. The latter got a response from Sophie that the gag was already well past that point.
  • The Child Hunting Island, as noted below, is the first running gag that has been explicitly discontinued on air.
• Pædo Hunt: Appropriately, "The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader Who Murdered Santa" episodes focus on Paul Schäfer, who was known to have molested numerous children in his cult.
• Papa Wolf: Guest Billy Wayne Davis is audibly angry, including saying he wants to kick the doctor doing it, when Robert plays him a video of a 12 week old baby getting a chiropractic adjustment, which he attributes to being a dad of a 6 month old.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: When discussing how Oskar Dirlewanger died — i.e. brutally beaten to death over a couple of days by the Polish Resistance members who were both one of the primary victims of his crimes and guards of his prison following his capture by the French occupational authorities — Robert points out that what said guards did to him does by all definitions qualify as a war crime, but he also admits that it is extremely hard to argue that wasn't a fate that Dirlewanger richly and fully deserved and that it was by all means rather fitting that he came to meet a slow and violent end at the hands of some of the very people he had inflicted so much inhumanity and horror upon.
• Ponzi: Many of the bastards covered ran Ponzi schemes or MLM schemes, including the Second Klan.
• Precious Puppy: Sophie's dog Anderson (who despite the name is a girl) and is even featured on some of the show's merchandise.
• Private Military Contractors: Eric Prince, founder of the infamous Blackwater unit, got his own episode and has been described as a "frequent guest bastard" for his appearances in many other bastards' stories, and King Leopold is noted to have used mercenaries for many of his greatest abuses of the Congo Free State.
• Prophetic Name: Roberts has (jokingly) expressed a believe in "nominative determinism" or that a person's name determines who they're going to be, such as that a man named "Paige Patterson" just sounds like he couldn't possibly not become a weird religious leader.
• Refuge in Audacity: Robert often jokes about plans to start his own grifts and cults even more outlandish than the ones he covers, at one point stating he dreams of starting his own drug-addled orgy cult and recreating the ATF's Waco, Texas screwup — except he wants to provoke the FDA instead. He also has an odd respect for L. Ron Hubbard he doesn't share with most of the other bastards covered simply because Hubbard's bastardry was so damn ambitious and out there. (The time he attempted to summon the antichrist at a sex mansion in California with real-life Mad Scientist Jack Parsons is glossed over as an aside because there's just too much ground to cover already, though it would later get its own episode.)
• Realpolitik: A distressing number of bastards (especially state leaders) were often allowed to stay in positions of power thanks to this trope, with political (and economical) concerns making greater powers stand in and support and/or condone their bastardry.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • The COVID-19 pandemic forced production of the show to move from its regular studio in Los Angeles to remote casting. Many of the running gags from the studio (such as throwing bagels and the poison room) fell by the wayside as a result. The shift in recording venue also led to a corresponding increase in Sophie's speaking presence on the show, as in the recording studio, she didn't usually have a microphone, while she does have one when doing remote sessions.
  • Additionally, one episode featured Robert as the guest with the show written and hosted by his friend Garrison after a Proud Boy broke Robert's hand at a protest he was reporting on, leaving him unable to type up a script.
  • Robert's time covering the events of Rojava and the extended civil unrest in Portland, Oregon led to the Behind the Police miniseries and also to the spin off shows It Could Happen Here and The Women's War.
  • Several episodes over roughly one year saw the show abandon its usual format and instead dissect Ben Shapiro's novel True Allegiance with the hosts of companion podcast Worst Year Ever. It's since been made clear that these episodes were recorded because they require almost no preparation and could be slotted into the schedule when Robert was unavailable to record.
  • The events of January 6th, 2021 prompted the Behind the Insurrections miniseries about various fascist coups, both failed and successful and what we can learn from them and how to stop future coups from succeeding.
  • In early 2021, pressing family matters cut the Behind the Insurrections miniseries an episode shorter than originally intended and prompted a temporary shift towards more book episodes and away from the standard bastard-of-the-week format, as well as occasionally left the companion current events podcast "Worst Year Ever" presented only by co-hosts Cody Johnson and Katy Stoll.
• Reassignment Backfire: In "Harlon Carter: The Man Who Militarized the Cops and NRA", Harlon is mentioned to have been "promoted" to head of the NRA's new lobbying branch, the ILA, but given no budget. The hope is that he would have to spend all of his time fundraising and would be siloed off from the old guard of the NRA. However, Harlon proves able to instead be leverage his new position to gain even more influence with the help of one of the first computerized mailing lists and further spread his white supremacist agenda.
• Refuge in Audacity: Cecil Rhodes was apparently a fan of this trope in real life, as after becoming a rich diamond magnate he attended Oxford University and would often fail to do his coursework or pay attention in class, instead loafing around campus and showing off pocket diamonds produced by his mines to his classmates. Even Robert and episode guest Prop are impressed by how seemingly little Rhodes cared about his education, since he knew that being rich and famous meant Oxford wasn't going to fail him because they wanted him amongst their alumni.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Name dropped when Evans is explaining how Walter Freeman, the inventor of the lobotomy, was actually correct about mental illness being tied to physical problems in the brain, but his treatment was completely wrong.
  • Also comes up when explaining why the Catholic Church opposed phrenology not because of any objections to the racism in it but because they believed it was the devil's work.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Another frequent target. Evans has followed real-life right-wing extremism for much of his journalistic career (as can be seen in his other works) and has devoted several episodes to the subject, especially on their influences on the U.S. Border Patrol.
• Running Gag: Multiple. Evans tends to rotate his running gags, letting some of them expire to keep the comedy somewhat fresh and avoiding the show to become too mired in in-jokes, though some of them (like Raytheon and the terrible intros) have stuck around.
  • The aforementioned Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking gag of listing Wil Wheaton amongst history's greatest monsters (an appellation he has, as of yet, failed to earn in Real Life).
  • Evans throwing objects (most commonly bagels or Pringles) around the room in response to particularly frustrating aspects of the bastard of the week.
  • Evans is absolutely incapable of pronouncing British town names properly, even after well over a dozen episodes of various British bastards, and has lampshaded this tendency by refusing to find out how.
  • Evans intentionally cuts to commercial just as he's revealed a particularly horrific act by the week's bastard, usually by explaining that the products and services that support this week's episode do NOT cause said horrific act. The ensuing Mood Whiplash is then followed by an Incoming Ham about PRODUUUCTS!
  • Evans giving a "Behind the Bastards Guarantee" that they've explicitly spoken to their list of sponsors to ensure none of them ever engage in [insert horrific action of the week here].
  • Evans ironically gushing about David Koresh and especially his presentation in Waco whenever given half the chance (usually followed by Sophie getting annoyed that he got brought up again).
  • Evans wanting to start his own cult and wanting to antagonize the FDA into laying siege to it.
  • Evans ironically fanboying over the Raytheon corporation and their specialty knife missiles, missiles that shoots knives guaranteed to 100% devastate all civilian wedding parties you aim it at.
  • Evans will jokingly claim that Bernie Sanders was the actual assassin of JFK and Robert Kennedy instead of Lee Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan respectively.
  • Evans trying to get Doritos to sponsor the podcast, especially during the first fifty or so episodes.
  • Evans using increasingly bizarre or non-sensical openings to episodes, including atonal yelling, shouting "HIIIITTTLEEEEEER", and blatantly misrepresenting what the podcast is about, which is more or less inevitably followed by him actually announcing the title of the podcast, that it's about the worst people in history, and that the show is never properly introduced, all in varying levels of verbosity.
  • During episodes with Katy Stoll and Cody Johnson as guests, any of the three bringing up the slogan "One Pump, One Cream" from a bottle of Nestle coffee creamer that was in the recording studio.
  • Evans tends to have running themes for episodes where recurring guests star. For example, eps featuring Billy Wayne Davis tend to be about fake doctors while ones with Sofia Alexandra tend to involve dead children.
  • In early 2022, Evans began insisting that one of the major food box sponsors owned a private island where one can hunt children for sport. The name is always bleeped out, except for one instance. Its Blue Apron. He eventually announced that they were retiring this joke because some people were emailing the team apparently believing it was true.
  • Referring to defined abs as "cum gutters".
  • Starting in Spring 2023, Robert would occasionally put on his "Boston accent", which sounds in no way Bostonian and is more of a shrill, exaggerated Australian accent.
  • During the episodes on the Finder's Cult, Robert implying that guest Jamie Loftus was involving in a series of murders in Grand Rapids Michigan (which Loftus points out occurred when she was in high school in Massachusetts). It got to the point Wikipedia had to lock Jamie's page because people kept editing it.
• Sad Clown: While one of the main thrusts of the show is allowing Robert to showcase his dark sense of humor, he is also very open on the show about his history with PTSD.
• Saving Christmas: Evans jokingly claimed that his Tactful Translation of "Bat'ko" as "boss" during the Christmas Special on Nestor Makhno with Jamie Loftus was done in the name of this. The truth is closer to "daddy".
  Robert: I Did What I Had to Do, to save Christmas. I understand that it's going to ruin the rest of my life.
• Self-Made Lie: Virtually any episode about a so-called self-made billionaire will reveal that they were born into wealth and privilege, or sometimes just luck.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase:
  • Robert has a couple. In older episodes he used "I statistically love about 40% of you," and variations there upon. Newer episodes has him using "Go to hell! I love you!"
  • Sophie usually does a drawn-out "Byeeeee!"
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Surprising everybody, Robert expresses this belief in the episode on AI cults. Better futures are only possible if people imagine and believe in them strongly enough, which he thinks is why AI fanatics are so against artists; The AI subculture believe that we're heading towards a capitalist dystopian world where they will reap all the benefits, while artists actually imagine a truly better world, thus threatening their worldview. At the end of the episode, he encourages the listener to keep hoping for and imagining a better world.
• Sincerity Mode: One of the few times Robert has done this was clarifying that the child hunting island he kept referring to was a joke after some people started taking it seriously.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Robert describes pedophilia as the kind of crime that makes God curse your children.
• Snake Oil Salesman: The show does not look fondly on medical scammers and they are frequently featured as bastards of the week.
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: Discussed in the episode on the Reagans where it was noted that they were friends with many people in Hollywood who were gay, particularly Rock Hudson whose sexuality was an open secret, and there's no evidence that they were personally homophobic beyond the general attitudes of the time. Robert says this actually makes their response to the AIDS crisis and alignment with homophobic movements even worse as it wasn't even a case of ideology but sheer political opportunism.
• Spiritual Antithesis: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a podcast on the same network run by Margaret Killjoy about people and historical movements who, as the title might hint at, will never feature on Behind the Bastards. Evans was the guest on the Cool People premiere.
• Straight Man: Sophie's role is to react with exasperation at Robert's Dead Baby Comedy, make legal disclaimers, and cut short any Overly Long Gags.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: Robert professes in an episode that he finds Pedro Pascal quite attractive, commenting that "No one is that straight."
• Surprisingly Normal Backstory: Discussed. One more than one occasion Robert notices that while quite a few of the bastards the podcast examine have had hard, grueling, poor upbringings in abusive households or lost one or both parents at an early age, it is not all together that unusual for them to come from childhoods that by all accounts have been seemingly economically stable with their parents always having been around, with no outwards signs that said parents having been anything but perfectly normal and loving, and even having tried to support their children's dreams and ambitions to the best of their ability.
• Tactful Translation: During the non-bastard episode on Nestor Makhno, Evans tells guest Jamie Loftus that "Bat'ko" translates as "boss" and then explains in an aside — which was edited in later — that it actually means "father" or "daddy" and that he told her that it meant "boss" for the purposes of the story because telling her that it meant "daddy" would have hopelessly derailed the episode. When Loftus jokingly calls him out on it in a later episode, Evans replied that he was not proud of what he did, but he felt it necessary in the name of Saving Christmas.
• Take That!: Raytheon (aka the RTX Corporation) is a frequent target of digs by the podcast, usually right before ad breaks, for their development of various guided munitions that have been used against civilians, most notably a schoolbus full of children.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Robert is about 6'3 and has a very dry sense of humor.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Many bastards sometimes end up with Evans unironically (or at least semi-ironically) enjoying at least one facet of their life: For instance, he praised the poetry of Zhang Zongchang and his attempts to solve a drought by threatening God with a cannon if he didn't make it rain.
• Those Wacky Nazis:
  • Unsurprisingly, members and enablers of Nazi Germany frequently feature as bastards of the week.
  • G. Gordon Liddy never identified as a Nazi, but he was downright obsessed with the Third Reich, continuously compared random things to the SS as a compliment, and even showed some Nixon aides Triumph of the Will to motivate them. Robert speculates that it was only his idolization of his father, who was staunchly opposed to Nazis, that stopped him from fully embracing the ideology.
• Too Clever by Half: A recurring theme of the series is that many of the people covered are legitimately intelligent and talented at specific things or are generally smart and capable but tend to believe their own hype and badly overestimate their skill at other things or arrive at the wrong conclusions about themselves, with L Ron Hubbard and Scott Adams being notable offenders.
• Unfortunate Names: In "The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader Who Murdered Santa", Robert tells the story of one of the torture victims of Colonia Dignidad, left-wing militia leader...Luis Peebles. Despite the horrible things that happened to Peebles, neither Robert nor Paul F. Tompkins can avoid laughing at how silly the name is though Robert does note that the guy must have been an utter badass to somehow become a militia leader with a name like that.
  • Also brought up when discussing one of the college professors of Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, the "hilariously named" Felix Frankfurter, who went on to become a Supreme Court Justice. Guests Dan and Jordan joke that being born with this name made him become someone everyone would be afraid of.
• Unknown Rival: How Fritz Haber's "rivalry" with Walther Nernst is described in "The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare" since Haber took on the "nitrogen problem" mostly to spite Nernst who didn't seem to have any real opinion of him in return.
• Unpleasant Parent Reveal: The "All Fertility Doctors are Bastards" episode involves a lot of this, as the entire episode is devoted to fertility doctors who used their own sperm to impregnate patients leading to numerous children unaware of their true parentage.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In "The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads", the Soviet Union's support for the Chinese Kuomintang during the 1930s would ultimately lead to the rise of fascist paramilitary death squads in the post-WW2 era that would become known for massacreing suspected communists or anyone who didn't wholeheartedly agree with their regimes.
• Usurping Santa: According to "The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader Who Murdered Santa", Nazi pedophile cult leader Paul Schäfer once had a member of his cult dress up as Santa so Schäfer could shoot him in front of all the children trapped in his cult. He then told the children Santa was dead and they should believe in him unconditionally instead. Episode guest Paul F. Tompkins described it as "the one to beat" when it comes to sheer bastardry, with Evans adding that even Hitler would probably consider that to be going too far.
• Verbal Tic: If Propaganda is on an episode, be prepared to hear the word "fam" used in about every third sentence.
• Villainy-Free Villain: Scott Adams. Robert acknowledges he's not as bad as the other bastards, but still covers him anyway "because he irritates me". He's still quite a Jerkass, but nowhere near as evil as some of the other bastards.
• What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Discussed when talking about Carlos the Jackal and how he attended Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow only to later be kicked out for allegedly trying to start a revolt, since said university is named after someone who did exactly that.
  • Also brought up with the sea colony Minerva, named after a ship that sunk on the reef. Guest David Bell wonders what they were expecting naming it after a previous failure.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: The episode on Gerald Bull ends this way, with Bull being shot in the back of the head three times by an unknown assailant (the briefcase full of money Bull had on him was conspicuously not stolen). Since he would design artillery for the highest bidder, with his current patron being none other than Saddam Hussein, just about every major power had a motive, even if they'd previously worked with him.
• Who Shot JFK?: A Running Gag on the show (and other podcasts Evans is involved in) is that Bernie Sanders was the true assassin of JFK, and that he somehow had Lee Harvey Oswald framed for the crime. This culminated in a Worst Year Ever episode titled The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by the Coward Bernie Sanders.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": In the second Robert E. Lee episode, the guest Prop mentions the recent International Court case accusing Israel of genocide, pointing out how they use pedantics to avoid the clearly true accusation. Robert chimes in that it's actually only genocide if it happens in the Genocide region of France, otherwise it's just targeted mass slaughter.
• Would Hurt a Child: Quite a number of episodes deal with children getting abused or even killed, most notably "The School that Raped Everybody", "Canada's Darkest Secret: Residential Schools", "How The Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies", "Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility", "The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader who Murdered Santa", "The Child Prisons of Texas", and "Oskar Dirlewanger: The Worst Nazi".
• Yakuza: The Yakuza play a major role in the episode on Nobusuke Kishi, who worked closely with them in his time working for the Imperial Japanese government, as economic minister for Manchukuo, and continuing their partnership into his time as founder of the Liberal Democratic Party and as prime minister of Japan. Among other things, it's mentioned that Manchukuo had relatively few of Imperial Japan's infamous army-run sex-slave brothels... because the Yakuza had already set them up there years prior.
• Younger Than They Look: During the Joe Pyne episode, guest Tom Reimann is utterly stunned when Robert reveals Pyne died at the age of 45 since Pyne looked like this when he was alive. As Robert points out, Pyne was both a WWII veteran and a chain-smoker (even while he was on air), which might have aged him prematurely.

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