Behind the Bastards - Part Five: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy and Garrison Davis for part five of our series, in which the story of the Illuminati takes a dark turn.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Elon my Musks? This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is listening to, because within minutes, well, like an hour, of us starting to record the last two parts of our series on the Illuminati, he posted a very boomer Illuminati meme. Extremely funny. The timing was incredible. There's no other explanation but that we have influenced his mind on a deep and possibly occult level.

You know, I think what's probably to blame for this is last night I ate a huge quantity of room temperature shrimp covered in Thousand Island dressing, and then I vomited on the hood of an old Tesla. This was my emidomancy that I was practicing, and I believe it has allowed me to infect Elon's mind with a- Why are you like this? Why did you have- Why did you have to, like, describe the shrimp? Why? Why? Because otherwise, if people don't smell the shrimp,

they're not going to believe the rest of the story, Sophie. If you're going to lie to people, you need details. Gross. Anyways, Margaret Kilgore and Garrison Davis are here. I'll add that anecdote to my growing grimoire of a vomit-related Patrick. I thought you were just going to say you're adding it to the list of things that you tell your therapist about work, but- You know, one time- Actually, a lot of crossover between my grimoire and things I tell my therapist. You know, using vomit magic one time,

I was able to turn a Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner into a bunch of vomit on a Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner. What an amazing feat of alchemy. That- that- that transmutation is just simply mind-blowing. I use it as a spell to be slightly less drunk. See? Limitless power is available when you embrace the- the sacred truths of a mito manzi. Um, good times. Actually would be a pretty fun class to make in like a- in like a Pathfinder type setting. Um, you could do a lot of fun with this.

It'd just be the human fly and it's like how you attack and devour. Oh, that- that's kind of based, actually. Like, yeah, digesting your opponents as you hit them with a sword or something. Yeah. Very cool. That's what everyone is listening to this podcast to hear about. You know what else is cool? The Illuminati.

The Illuminati was mid, but the guy that we're gonna start our episode today talking about, Robert Anton Wilson, was pretty dope. Now, we're talking mostly about Cary Thornley in the- the series, for good reason. Number one, I think he and Greg Hill were the- I mean, they certainly were the initial primary drivers behind Discordianism. Um, Cary is also, as we'll get to, the guy who kind of makes the most sense to cover in detail and behind the bastards. But my- my entry into, like, being interested in- in the- the not just, like, conspiracy culture in America, particularly as it existed in the 80s and 90s, but into the Discordians and to all of this stuff, was through the work of a guy named Robert Anton Wilson.

Um, and Margaret, are you- are you that familiar with Bob Wilson stuff? Okay, so here's where I lose all of my cred. I am very aware of the Illuminati trilogy and I have not read it. Yeah, we'll be talking about the Illuminati trilogy a little later. I've read some of his essays, I think. It's quite relevant. Yeah, he's written a lot of essays. He's- if you really want a sense for the guy, he made a documentary right before he died called Maybe Logic, that is available for free on- on YouTube and whatever.

It's the first thing I watched, the first time I ever took hallucinogens. Um, so he had a big impact on me, and he's a legitimately a really interesting guy. Um, kind of- he- he comes out of Flatbush, Brooklyn, and he- he grew up as a little kid in what he called, like, a New York's Irish Catholic ghetto. Um, he did not have, uh, a lot of- of, uh, or say he spent- he's- yeah, Garrettson Beach is the actual neighborhood that he grew up in, which is kind of, like, out in the middle of nowhere. So there's not a lot of money.

He is- he is abused pretty profoundly by the nuns who run his school as a kid. He is, like, beaten and mentally, like, tormented by these- these nuns. And he also has two bouts of polio as a little kid that he survives. He has- this guy, of all the people we're talking about, Bob Wilson, is the most mentally healthy and also has, like, the roughest life. He has a very hard life. Um, and he, uh, yeah, it- it's interesting. One of the things that is kind of a key moment in this guy's life

is that the- the thing that saves his life from polio is a- a treatment called the Sister Kenny Method, um, which is, like, alternative medicine today and was kind of at the time in the 30s considered, like, quackery. Um, and I'm not competent to, like, weigh in on this, but he credits the Sister Kenny Method with saving him from his polio. And the fact that, like, this thing that people called quack medicine is what saved him as a child is gonna have a really big influence

on just sort of the- the degree of weight that he gives authority as an adult. I- I did not know that, but that makes so much sense for- the rest of his life is so much about, like, how much value we put into what we believe and how much what we believe kind of creates the reality around us. And that is such an interesting thing. I- I'm sure- I'm sure Bob Wilson later on is, like, talked about, like,

the placebo effect and all that kind of stuff as- as that comes up in, like, in, like, Chaos Magic a lot, um, and- and he was a member of the biggest Chaos Magic order. Um, but that- that's just- that's such an interesting story. And I was unaware that he dealt with polio. Yeah. Nor that it was- it was kind of, quote-unquote, purity using this, like, crank method.

Yeah. What's the method? I miss- I'm imagining you go into this, like, convent with your sister, Kearney, Kearney, whatever. Kearney, yeah. Kearney just hits you with a cane. Yeah. I mean, it's- it's- it's basically, like, a bunch of hot compresses

and, like, kind of passive movement, some of which seems like it's- it's sort of similar to, like, massages, um, to reduce, like, some of the spasms that are caused by polio. Um, and, yeah, it's, uh, it's- it's interesting. It's not, like, a, uh, uh, like an expert on any of this, but it does seem she's pretty well regarded within, like, physical therapy and considered to be something of a pioneer

in the field. So I think it's one of those situations where he receives this treatment that people call bullshit as a kid, and it helps him, and later on she's kind of, to at least some extent, vindicated. Um, and, yeah, so this is a big impact on Bob. The other thing that has a big impact on Bob is that just, like, three years after he- or a couple of years after, um,

his- like, while he's sort of in the middle of this polio shit, the War of the Worlds comes on the radio. Um, and so Orson Welles is a huge influence on this guy. Um, as a young adult, he starts working at Playboy, um, and he- he hooks up and gets married to a woman named Arlen. Um, and they are both in addition to being- because we're talking about these guys kind of in their, like, intellectual weirdo prankster thing.

He and Arlen are both also very committed physical activists Uh, they are both involved with the Black Panthers. Um, so these are not- again, these are not just people who, like, talk about shit. Like, they're- they're taking on real risk. And in fact, at one point while he's at, uh, Playboy, one of the editors there, uh, an executive comes up to him and says that, like, tells him his name has been added

to the Chicago PD's, um, Red Squad. Or sorry, they're in Chicago, not LA. And, um, which is like a list of radicals that the authorities had under surveillance. And the Red Squad existed. Um, we don't actually know if Bob was on it or not. Um, and basically this guy tells Bob, like, it's because they think you're a gun runner for the Black Panthers.

And Bob is like, well, no, we're just part of the free breakfast program. Actually, right now, there's a non-zero chance Bob Wilson ran guns. That's not an impossibility. I'm not gonna say that's 100% no. Yeah, full support either way. Um, yeah. And he's, he also, again, for kind of to talk about like how rough this guy's life is, he has several kids with Arlen. His youngest daughter, when she is 15, is beaten to death in a robbery.

Gone bad. Oh, God. Um, and she becomes the first person, one of the very first people in the world and the first person from at least in the Bay Area, to have her brain, um, put in a, uh, in, in cryogenic, whatever, stasis. Um, that's a thing Bob Wilson is into very early on. That is normally, I have very little sympathy as a general rule for the life extension people. Uh, but I obviously can't blame a, a grieving father for doing something like that.

Like that's a perfectly understandable series of actions, especially in the 70s. Yeah, that's different than that. I want to be an immortal mage who rules the world. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Hey, hey, hey, come on. Come on. Um, so while Thorneley and Hill kind of provided the initial impetus behind discordianism, Bob Wilson becomes one of the chief drivers. And he probably is the most influential of them because he is, he is still to this day

probably like one of the number one voices out of the, the psychedelic movement and the counterculture movement in the late 60s and 70s. Bob Wilson wrote a bit about this in the late 70s in a book he put out called Cosmic Trigger. It's actually a series of books. And this is him kind of describing the changes that occur in the American psyche during the time that the discordians are starting out their activism. When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche as Jules Pfeffer, among others, has noticed.

Kennedy was not a universally beloved president, of course. Nobody ever has been, not even Washington. But he was young or youngish, handsome, cultured, brave. Everybody knows the PT 109 story and virile. There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the national psyche by the Dealey Plaza bullets. Camelot died. The divine king had been sacrificed. We were caught suddenly in the middle of a Frazier Freud reenactment of archetypal anthropological ritual.

The national psyche veered dizzily towards chapel perilous. Now chapel perilous. Is this a term y'all are familiar with? No, I have no idea. It's a, it's a psychological term. I know you know the scares because we've talked about this so much. This is like a core part of my personal psychology. Yes.

In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions called chapel perilous in the trade. You come out the other side, either a stone paranoid or an agnostic. There was no third way. I came out an agnostic. And that's, I still think is one of the more useful, especially in the era of the Internet. Because a big thing for, and all of the early Discordians break in different ways, they all react differently to chapel perilous. And actually one thing I'll quibble with Wilson here is I think there is a third way to react to this and we'll talk about that later. But I think Wilson's attitude is going to be, because he is, he is a pan agnostic.

Pan agnosticism is kind of like the ideology that guides him the rest of his life in increasing ways. And that's kind of, if you listen to like best practices from any of these like people who work for traditional journalist outfits in disinfo, like they don't phrase it in as artful or attractive away as Bob Wilson says. But that's what everybody's trying to urge people towards. What is pan agnosticism? Not taking anything as gospel or perfect truth. Not getting, it's not allowing, one of the things Wilson would talk about is the concept of a reality tunnel, right? And so when you start to believe things about the world, that kind of, that changes how you perceive the world.

It changes effectively the world that you live in. And if you're going to like continue to make more choices that help you bore deeper into that reality tunnel, which beers you away from everybody else, right? What we've got with QAnon is a huge chunk of people who have bored a reality tunnel so deep outside of kind of the consensus reality that a lot, most of their other people live in, that they can't be reached in a lot of cases. This is what happens in those, where like somebody will like murder their family or whatever or set off a bomb because they've fallen so deep down this tunnel. And one of the things Wilson is, he doesn't want people to close their minds, but he doesn't want anyone to get, like, to bury themselves too deep in a tunnel that leads them, you know, that they can't get out from, right? Like, that's the benefit of pan-agnosticism.

I mean, I think another really succinct way of thinking about it is it's the same name as his documentary, maybe Logic, as in like, maybe this thing is the thing. Like, a big, he has these speeches where he tries to explain why we should remove the word is from the English vocabulary. Because we say, this thing is this thing. You're now collapsing reality down into this succinct statement that is probably going to cause problems when you create that, like, when you create that sense of equalness. So, think of everything as like, maybe this is the thing or maybe this is the thing. Like, try to, if you want that way. You are using the word is a few times there. Yeah, I mean, you end up using the word because of like linguistics.

But thinking of the world in that maybe framework is just a safer way to approach a lot of these things that try to like mess with your psyche. Okay, it makes for worse writing. Metaphors are generally seen as stronger than similes. So true. That's true. And Bob Wilson will be at war most of his life with the fact that he recognizes playing with this stuff can be dangerous and also it's very fun to do. But as a young man writing for Playboy, he is not as he's not quite as mature as he will later be. And so starting from the position of these beliefs and kind of the value of pan agnosticism, he decides that his goal should be to bring as many people as possible to chapel perilous.

Right. That is in Wilson's eyes, the goal of operation mind fuck is to put stuff out here that causes as many people as possible to hit this decision point where they either become a stone. Paranoid or they kind of back away and gain this ability to look at things from a more objective standpoint. And a big part of like the basic goal here is in order to stop people from kind of going too far in these particularly the John Birch directions. He wants to create art that causes people to confront the fact that reality is not fixed and emerge from that experience questioning their old assumptions. You know, that's that's what Wilson sees as the actual like moral good behind operation mind fuck. So Wilson and his editor fellow editor Shay, they start sitting down with Thornley and the other discordians. And it's from these conversations that they actually come up with a name for operation mind fuck because this is just something they're doing for a couple years.

Right. They're sending off these letters. They're they're putting out these different conspiracy theories in different magazines, but they haven't really named it yet. And I'm going to I'm going to read a quote from the New Yorker about how that goes down. Through every means available, Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan, the mind fuckers intended to attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the Illuminati and other hidden hands. So they planted stories about the Illuminati in the underground press. They slipped mysterious classified ads into the Libertarian Journal innovator and the new left newspaper Roger Spark. They cooked up a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in the Playboy Advisor.

When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting district attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing. Garrison's booster, Art Kunken, of the Los Angeles Free Press got a note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates. The telltale sign, none of them had a left nipple. What if there really isn't Illuminati? Wilson asked Thornley one pot fogged night in 1968. Maybe they'll find out about us and be pissed. I doubt if there is Thornley answered and if there by some chances they'd probably be very happy to have wild ass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories. I really love this idea that probably at some point they like checked someone for it.

And then they're like, no, no, it's not a left nipple and a right nipple. It's two right nipples. Just one of them's on the other side. Yeah, they doubled the right nipples. So obviously, none of what they're doing helps this cloud of suspicion that's fallen down on Kerry that he's deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination. And by this point, JFK conspiracy theorists have become aware of the Discordians and Thornley's involvement and have decided the Discordians are a CIA front, which in fairness is something the Discordians claimed to. So this doesn't come out of nowhere. Oh, boy. That's like the one line I wouldn't cross in any of this.

I'm not going to fedjack it myself. They do that immediately. So Thornley becomes the constant victim of stalking by groups of men in suits. And it's like he is legitimately under investigation by the government. Some of these guys are probably feds. Some of them are probably conspiracy theorists. Kerry is a paranoid schizophrenic who's taking LSD and marijuana nearly every single day. So a lot's going on in his head here, right?

But part of what's going to make this so much more damaging to him is that some of the stalking is real, which makes the stuff that's not real a lot harder for him to doubt. He also, because this is garrison, you may not know this, people's phone numbers used to just be listed in a book that you could pick up. So folks who are into the conspiracy get phone books for wherever he's living, and they start calling him. And some of them will leave cryptic messages. And some of these are probably discordance fucking with Kerry, right? Where they're continuing the conspiracy by pretending to be a part of it to mess with his head.

Some of them are just dead air. They may just be people stalking him. And yeah, it's impossible to say entirely what's happening. But as we turn over to the 70s, Kerry increasingly finds himself acting as a stone paranoid. Now, mental illness does run in his family. His younger brother Dick suffered from schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in this period, Kerry increasingly suffers from them as well. He is eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

This is not like podcast diagnosis hour with Robert Evans here. Kerry Thornley was diagnosed. And he also starts escalating his drug use, which this is a... How old is he during that? Do you know? God, in the 70s, when is he born? It's like what decade is he? I think like 40s. He's probably starting his 30s right now if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, he's like 30s, 40s. I'm under the impression that's like one of the early 30s is like one of the times that... Late 20s, early 30s is when people often have schizophrenic breaks. And it can be... I've had this happen to a couple of friends of mine. I used to live with a young woman who was in her mid-20s, had just finished college, was like going through whatever program you go to to become like a park ranger. And then just kind of one day loses it, you know? Yeah.

And I'm not gonna give like the tales, but like it was... It can come on very suddenly. And we know, one thing we do know is that both LSD and marijuana can trigger schizophrenic episodes. I'm under the impression mushrooms too, but I'm not sure. I think basically any seriously mind-altering drug can have the effect of... Because I've heard that like cocaine can do it too. Like it's not like it's creating this in you. These are people who at some point would have started to experience these symptoms,

but it can bring it on earlier. It can make it, you know, a lot worse. It kind of like knocks over the first domino. Yeah. But the domino would have probably fallen over eventually anyway. Yes. And with Kerry... Shout out to my schizophrenic friends who are still awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously this is just like a thing he would have had to deal with either way. Yeah. No, totally. I don't think anyone... I just want to make sure everyone listening knows that it's just a thing, you know? Yeah.

It's just a thing. And this is a thing he would have had to deal with either way. I will say the fact that he is basically never not tripping on acid or smoking pot does not help him manage this. Yeah. Sometimes he'll come in and he'll be fairly calm and normal. And once he hits a joint, he won't be able to stop talking about this conspiracy to kill Kennedy and how he's wrapped up in it and the different things that he started to believe

about it. And he's kind of so aggressive about it that people... A lot of people can't spend time around him anymore because it's just like this thing that when he gets into it, he's incapable of even seeing the people around him. And Kerry goes further and further kind of off the deep end over the next couple of years through the 70s. He convinces himself that Oswald was really set up. He starts to believe that he may have, in fact, been Oswald's body double or otherwise

involved in the conspiracy to kill JFK and had simply forgotten about it due to CIA mind control radios implanted in his head. And one of the problems is that he has a lot of friends like... Robert... Oh, shit. The CIA is cutting off your microphone, Robert. Oh, no. This isn't the first time that you've mentioned that and then your microphone starts cutting

out. Yeah, yeah. That's how the CIA works. But you know how else the CIA works? By planting people with LSD so they trip and they don't know it. That's one way it works. So that they're more susceptible to advertising, yes. Yeah.

Well, I mean, Garrison, in an earlier time, with less sophisticated ads, they had to use LSD. Now, the quality ads on this podcast are much more mind altering than any fucking chemical that some Danish man cooked up in a lab. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Ah, we're back. I hope you all enjoyed the 12 hours of hallucinations that come with every behind the bastard's ad break. It's really ruined a lot of people's lives, but it helps us sell master's. But you know, it's financially lucrative for us. Yeah, exactly. It helps promote good, I got nothing.

Yeah, it helps promote good things. What this podcast is about. Yeah, good things. The good things cast. What a boring show that would be, am I right? Yeah, here's the problem. Kerry is, I mean, he's losing his mind. He is increasingly unable to tell what's real.

He's increasingly convinced that the government tried to, or someone tried to make him murder the president, that he may have helped murder the president, that he's being stalked by government agents. Periodically, he will go to his friends, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Shea, Greg Hill, and he'll try to talk to him about this. They don't really notice that he's serious because the language they all communicate with is like making up conspiracy theories. It takes them a while to realize like, oh no, Kerry's actually in some distress here.

There's a problem with our friend. What are the odds that he actually was involved in the assassination of JFK? He was living basically next to this guy who he claimed not to have ever seen again. I mean, for one thing, he wasn't in Dallas when it happened. The other thing, Kerry Thornley was actually incapable of hiding anything ever. When he comes to believe that he killed Kennedy, he tells everybody that he killed Kennedy. When he doesn't believe, I just don't think he would ever have been capable of being part of a plot.

He's not very good at, yeah, we'll talk about it. We're going to watch a little video with him later, but yeah, it's interesting. You can believe whatever you want about actually the Kerry's complicity in the Kennedy assassination. Literally, I've never cared about most conspiracy shit. It has never occurred to me to care who shot JFK. I do not care. I mean, wow.

Margaret, this is how the reality title starts. You are already on the path. You already asked the question. Took a shuffle load of dirt out of a tunnel. Cool. I hope it's like D&D when you get into the tunnels. Sometimes, sometimes. Filled with gold and Mannlicher-Carcano rifles.

Yeah. That's how I play D&D. All of Kerry's kind of mental collapse isn't quite the right word, but this process of sort of falling to his mental demons occurs over the course of about a decade. And while this is going on, he remains pretty intensely involved in radical politics. He has another ideological shift from the kind of individualist anarchism that had led him to discoreanism towards a belief system that is, I mean, this is not like a huge movement, like this is not like a huge pivot from individualist anarchism, but he comes

to describe his political ideology as supporting sex, drugs, and treason. That's true. He briefly considers, yeah, that's fine. He briefly considers slipping LSD into the water supply of a city, but eventually his acid trips convince him to drop out of society and integrate himself into what he calls a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe. And this tribe is one of the 1960s many acid cults called the Kerista. Kerry takes over their newspaper and he writes several influential articles.

And these guys are like, again, this is like an acid sex cult. It's also pretty, like their publication is reasonably prominent within the radical community at this time. So Kerry's articles wind up having, Margaret, you might be surprised by the influence this has actually, but he writes an article that includes this line. Kerista is a religion and the mood of Kerista is one of holiness. Do not, however, look for profusion of rituals, dogmas, doctrines, and scriptures. Kerista is too sacred for that.

It is more akin to the religions of the East and also the so-called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West. So what's interesting, like that may not seem like much, but what's interesting is that that is, and in this article includes basically the first, probably the first recorded use of people using the word pagan to refer to both a past practice and ongoing modern religious practices that had not really happened until, yeah. And this is, I'm not the one making this claim. This is a claim made by Margo Adler, who is a Wiccan priestess and an NPR correspondent.

In her book, Drawing Down the Moon, she claims that Kerry's writings helped spark the actual beginning of the neo-pagan movement. She's the one who credits him as the first person to use the word pagan to describe both past and present religions. This guy is everywhere. Yeah. He's really influential. It's wild because he's personally killed a president or two.

I'm not sure how many and also started. I don't know. It's just impressive. You know what? That is my headcanon now. I'm blaming the Kennedy assassin or crediting it to him. Why not? I think they secreted him away.

Actually, I actually don't know the conspiracy theories from JFK. Oh, so you're a Bubba Hotep believer. Oh, God. No, I don't think so. I've changed my mind. Everyone should watch the movie Bubba Hotep by Don Coscarelli. The premise of the film, starring Bruce Campbell, is that Elvis gives his life to an Elvis impersonator and then winds up in an old folks home as an old man.

And his best friend is a black man who claims to be JFK, who the CIA changed his skin in order to hide him to fake his death. And they have to fight a mummy. It's an incredible film. Okay. I'm back to believing it. Yup. All right.

Bubba Hotep, an excellent piece of art. So, Kerry, again, it's interesting. He is a very functional person in a lot of ways. He's deeply influential. He writes a huge amount. It's good writing as a general rule. But he's also an unmedicated and increasingly kind of falling into these increasingly complex conspiratorial holes.

And he'll just drop off the map for periods of time. He spends a decent chunk, particularly in the late 70s or the 80s, kind of living as a transient, but never when he doesn't want to. Right? One of the things his friends will say is that no matter how far out he got, when he wanted to, he would find ways to make money and keep a roof over his head. He always had this kind of degree of control over his life. It's more like he couldn't control his relationships with other people because he starts to wrap

them into these conspiracies that he's spending all of his time thinking about. Now, probably, I think, as far as I've read, the first of his friends to realize something is deeply wrong is Robert Anton Wilson. And Wilson would kind of very politely, when Kerry would start getting wrapped up in these claims, would be like, well, that I don't really, you know, I understand what you're saying and I understand that you believe that, but I want you to consider that maybe, like, that's not as true as you think it is. And, like, maybe there's alternate explanations for why you think somebody's following you

or this or that. Kerry decides that this means that Bob is his CIA handler and he's trying to trick him to manipulate him into, yeah, this is like a not an uncommon story, unfortunately. And variants of this kind of happen with some of his other friends. Now, so kind of the the side effect of this is that, especially kind of at the end of the 70s, Kerry is increasingly like isolated. A lot of his old friends, he doesn't talk to anymore. Greg Hill kind of gets very depressed at this point in time.

His wife divorces him and he starts drinking more and more. And so he kind of reduces his contact. And so Kerry does not have a lot of the moderating influences that he'd had earlier in his life. And his personal beliefs continue to evolve. And again, he's kind of gotten really into free love in this period that has sort of become the center of his political identity. And the next set of beliefs that he that he takes on, because he is a guy who periodically will just take on beliefs very strongly, is that the only way to create a utopia is to

build a world free of sexual hang ups. Now, this is where things take a really dark turn. Oh, no, Kerry believes all people are sexual beings. Sex is fundamentally a good. It's something that should form the center of human relationships. And if all people are sexual beings and all children are people, then sex with children can't be all that bad. So one is a real Peter Lamborn Wilson energy.

Yeah, I was I was wondering if they were communicating at this time because that is very, very similar types of logic. And they were both probably very, very active in like the early pagan community. I haven't seen that they were communicating directly, but they were certainly writing in some of the same magazines and in some of the same places. And the thing Kerry convinces himself is basically he's not committed to sexual liberation if he does not try to have sex with a child. So this did not come out until 2003, more than 2002, something like that.

The book came out 2003 when Grace, when Adam Go Rightly, who's who's written the book The Pranks During the Conspiracy, which is the best book about Kerry, he is looking into Kerry's life. He's talking to all of his old friends and one of his old friends, she is a Kerry would claim that they dated. She claims they just were friends who had sex one time and then she like wanted some space. This is another thing with Kerry. But this woman, Grace Kaplinger, she sends Adam a letter.

And this is what it says. There was an incident in Atlanta when Kerry and Kara and Craig were living across the street from me, Kara's his wife, living across the street from me and my family. He took my daughter, Marion, when she was around seven or eight into a room at the home of a family, close friends of mine who lived around the corner. He closed the door and began trying to fondle Marion. This was stopped by my friend, Jane, coming to the door and demanding that it be opened. She told me about it, as did Marion at the time.

And I know that I did not deal with this properly. Part of me was simply unable to understand the gravity, even the total reality of it. But it did happen. Fuck. And I have no reason to disbelieve that. Yeah, no, it is. It is consistent. And it's one of those.

I want to be really clear here because we've talked in other episodes, like when we talked about them, John Hinckley, Jr., about, you know, mental illness and when it does and does not like have an impact on someone's complicity in a crime. And I don't think that has any impact on what Kerry has done here. I think his decision to try to molest this girl is completely consistent with decades of how this guy functions. And what I mean by that is that when Kerry comes across deep poverty, you know, overseas in Southeast Asia and reads Marx, he becomes a committed Marxist.

When he reads Atlas Shrugged and falls in love with Objectivism, he describes himself as like a capitalist insurgent terrorist. When he finds anarchism, he devotes himself to causing as much chaos as possible. He is the kind of person who when he finds something attractive in an ideology, jumps into it with both feet and is immediately ready to give everything for it. And I think actually I have, there's a degree to which I have more condemnation and find him more unsettling than someone who is a pedophile in the sense of someone who is attracted to children and seeks them out because we have no evidence this ever happened again.

And I don't think this is the result of attraction. I think this is the result of Kerry believing he is not living his ideology if he doesn't try to do this. And I think a person who can do that is so much scarier than almost any other kind of person in the world. It's fucked up. No, and there's so much there about the history of, that's terrible, the history of pedophilia that runs through so many different subcultures and ideologies on all sides of the spectrum

and is like very rarely tackled head on because it's usually talked about in very bad faith, you know, like everyone calling trans people groomers or whatever, right? Or people don't want to talk about it because it's not a fucking nice thing to talk about. And it's complicated, but we, people need to know that, yeah, that's just like, what echo chambers can make you believe is reasonable? You know, I guess the kind of thing that they probably would call reality tunnels, right? Yeah, yeah. Like when you're like, you have these like self-reinforcing beliefs and you get a small

group of people who are like, yeah, and then this thing, and then this thing, you know, and it is a thing that like people have a problem with and it allows you to come up with horrific conclusions such as this one. And this is why Robert Anton Wilson was such an advocate of pan-agnosticism, right? Yeah. He's watching Kerry. I don't think he's aware of this when it happens, but he does write the forward to the biography that this is in.

Okay. So he does become aware of it at some point. Because that was only published a few years before Wilson died. It was right around, because I think he died in 2003 or 2004. Yeah, yeah. But so yeah, this is, I mean, that's unsettling. And it's interesting just to kind of make that point further, Go Rightly also talks to one of Thorne's longtime friends or Thorne Lee's longtime friends, Lois Lacy, to try and

understand why this happened. And Lacy's explanation is that Kerry really started to, like his behavior started to change for the worse, for the toxic, for the abusive. When he dropped his, the personal mantra that he had like kept with him most of his life, which was just the word no. And I'm going to read a quote from the book here, because I think this is interesting. As Lois explained, Kerry was fiercely anti-authoritarian. And prior to his bouts of paranoia, he had always stood up to whatever monolithic force

stood in his way, continually saying no, whether it was to the government, Jim Garrison or anyone else. This was Kerry's way of dealing with people who tried to tell him what to do. And this was the simple wisdom he'd imparted to Lois many years before. Just learn to say no, and people won't know how to react or what to do. And in most cases, would leave you the fuck alone. At some point, Kerry apparently quit saying no, and in essence, stopped evolving, while his friends, who in many instances had followed Kerry over the years, now began eclipsing

him as they continued growing, exploring, and entertaining new ideas and forms of expression. Kerry, Lois contends, became locked in this delusory world of conspiracies, which impeded his evolution. One time, Kerry explained his struggles to her in the following manner. It's hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking to you. Interesting. Yeah, that's the complicated thing to parse. It is a complicated thing to parse.

In a lot of ways, the path that he got set down, he did lay out the own stones for the path. He was encouraging himself along so much of this development, and then he just got lost along the way. But he was always capable of doing this, because he did it as a person. It's one of those things where, yeah, it's the same thing with the Kanye West stuff, same thing with whenever we talk about what degree does your mental health, or whatever diagnosis you might have, contribute to the actions that you take.

Yeah, and I think it's a matter of whether or not you understand the reality of what you're doing in a very basic way. For example, if Kerry had become convinced that a random person was stalking him and just shot that person, believing he was defending himself from the CIA, you're not morally culpable to that, right? That's fundamentally a decision you make because you believe you're in danger. I can't morally blame somebody for that. But yeah, the decision to rape a child is based on reinforcing your own personal sense

of ideology, which is just a weirdly fucked up thing to do. And that that matters more than, for example, the consent of the child or the ability, like obviously children cannot consent, but it's the sintering of his own need to be consistent with this thing he's convinced himself is his politics. That is, like, that's a bad thing to do. Well, this is depressing. You know what's not bad, Ed? Gold?

That's right. That's right, by some gold, everybody. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes gets to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks.

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stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're just having a good time, having a good time, never want to stop at all. So Gary gets divorced. He kind of loses his ability over time to function in mainstream society whatsoever. He becomes something of a wandering bum hitchhiking across the country, crashing with friends or on the street. Those who'd known him a long time learned that trying to help him inevitably brought allegations that they too were part of the CIA conspiracy.

One of his brothers is his kind of middle brother, not Dick, later writes this, which I think does a good enough job of kind of summarizing how Gary is treating people in this period. The last time I saw Gary was in the early 1980s. It was the last time our nuclear family was all together at the same time in years and it was Christmas. After the Warren Commission testimony, Gary gradually morphed from a fascinating, very charismatic, merry prankster, beaten-it kind of idiot savant intellectual giant, into

a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic. That Christmas we got together at my mom and dad's, the Nazi spy's house. Gary was intent on proving to me that he was being followed and watched and that he had thought mind control devices planted in his head, so he asked me to drive him to a local bus stop to prove his point. To put this in perspective, I had long hair, Gary had long hair, a full beard, and a bright orange sailor's hat on and was carrying a white purse. As we sat at the bus stop in this very conservative Palos Verdes neighborhood, Gary began to

point out how almost everyone who drove by was looking at us, so they were most likely spying on him and in fact some had been following him for days. That was such a shock to me to realize what a fine line it is between being an intellectual giant and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic. I never saw him again after that day. His whole story is so dark and tragic. You can see all this gets, there's the, his stuff that he was doing in school to prank his friends as a precursor to all this, how he would put up posters talking about killing

the president, as this thing that in the end has such a negative impact on your life but is seemingly an inconsequential joke, and then in the end it leads to this devastating train of things that just kind of shatters your mental grasp of reality. And it's, I think one, like what Wilson would say is it's the result of saying yes too many times, right? It's the result of being too convinced, and I think part of what, and I think this is part of where you need some of his brother's words here to help make sense of it, because the fact that what he says there at the end there, the difference between, the thin line

between being an intellectual giant, which Cary objectively was, his influence on the culture was massive and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic, I think Cary's conception of his own intelligence is a big part of why things go so badly for him, right? He thought he was smart enough that he was like, he was like catching these people, yeah, and he was fucking with them and I'm the one like, I'm the one who has like the control in the agency here, right? And I'm like, and I'm like the maybe logic side of things, it's like, you know, people looking at me at this bus stop, you know, that is proof that they're following me.

It's using that notion of like is and as opposed to thinking like, oh, they're looking at you or maybe it's because you have long hair and you're sitting next to someone else with long hair. Yeah. With a purse. You just look like weird hippies. We'll see him in a little bit, but I should note here, Cary never didn't look like a wizard. Like the whole period from the Discordian point on, he's got like this long beard and

these, he has wizard, resting wizard face is how I would describe the way Cary thoroughly looks. He did eventually find some sort of rough equilibrium. He wound up kind of making a place for himself in Atlanta's little five points neighborhood. Now at this point, that was the center of all things weird in the deep South. And it was ignored enough by authorities that it drew in traveling punk kids who wanted nothing more than to squat in old buildings and publish weird shit for other grungy leftists. What, what era are we in now?

We're talking the late 70s and the 80s. All through the Reagan years, basically, this is kind of what he's doing. He finds a sketchy living situation where he's basically, I think it's like a back house kind of thing that it's not entirely legal. Over the course of the time he's there, he fills it with exactly 13 cats. And because, because space in his house is so small, he had to build what he called a cat condo out of scrap wood and trash, creating a system of tunnels, ladders and platforms on the walls for his cats to like.

Yeah, I've lived in punk houses where you have like the resident wizard where everyone's like 25. And then there's just the like 70 year old anarchist who's like, eh, fucking, what else am I going to do? In this last period of his life. And his cat condo, by the way, the health department eventually makes him tear it down. That's fucked up. I know.

Let the man have his cat condo. I know. I mostly feel sad for the 14th cat that just hangs out outside and is like, come on, you're a crazy cat wizard. Let me in. There's no more space. Come on. So without the internet, the L5P community, little five points community keeps in touch

through a series of underground papers. And in the mid 70s, late 70s really mostly, Kerry has another one of his great ideas. So he starts by posting what he calls wall newspapers all around little five points. These are one page Xerox rants and he puts them up in strategic locations around town, like the punk bars and stuff that people hang out in. So folks like find these, they see them on like bathroom walls and stuff, and they read them and they talk about them to their friends who are all hanging out in the same area. And gradually like Kerry starts to become known around town for these these wall newspapers

that he's posting up. And he starts publishing more and more of these little Xerox rants and like arguments and like letters to the editor. People start passing them out to their friends or leaving them out at bars. This is the start of the Xen revolution because one of the things Kerry is doing while he's doing this in little five points, he's also part of the time living this sort of transient existence where he's like hitchhiking throughout the South, putting up these little like wall newspapers and stuff and like spreading.

So sometimes people like write notes and letters and stuff in Atlanta and he'll like print them up and then he'll travel down to, you know, Orlando and he'll put them up in places and stuff. And this is like other people start to see this and realize like, oh, this is actually a really cool way to like communicate and share information. And yeah, this is like kind of how the Xen revolution kicks off and that really starts in the 1980s. Thornley publications included Kocha, K-U-L-C-H-A, which focused on art, sex and religion.

And this is my favorite one. The Decadent Worker, which was a gossip column of like different like like drama that in the leftist community in little five points. Oh my gosh. Yeah. This is just like, this is like Twitter getting circulated in little five points. Okay, so when I lived in the squat scene in the Netherlands in Amsterdam, there was this Xen that had been going on for like 10 or 15 years, maybe longer.

That was just the gossip of who's fucking who in the squat scene in Amsterdam. And it was like terrifying, it was terrifying to me because I like, I didn't read Dutch and it was one of the, I don't know, but just the fact that there's this Xen that gets distributed about like who is new in town, who's fucking who. It's fucking scary. Yeah. And it's one of, I should note here, just because people will get angry online otherwise. This is not one of the, this is one of those things where like, it's not like Carrie runs

into a room full of punks and anarchists and says, I have invented the Xen. This is actually a little bit more like, you know, that situation we were talking about in episode one with like the creation of, or the discovery of calculus, right? Where he is doing this and a couple other people are doing similar things and it all runs together. But he is, since he's so influential and so skilled at getting his view of things out to people, he definitely has a massive, he's one of a handful of people who starts the Xen revolution.

And yeah, he also lays out, he also puts together a wall newspaper called the Cactus Flower Gazette where he lays out the basics of what's going to be his final ideology. He calls it Xen anarchism. Now here's what he wrote about his contribution to the Xen revolution. I like to think that over two and a half years of such activity, it's raised the vibes and my immediate surroundings considerably beyond the satisfaction of refuting a few of the lies the intelligence community spreads to counter my claims to bring light data about my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK matter and such related matters as the premeditated escalation

of the Indochina War and German breeding experiments right here in the U.S. There is no other profit involved and that's really interesting. The fact that he's like my my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder because he's only now realized that he had a hand in killing JFK. He also posts advertisements. I mean, anarchist got two of the precedents. Yeah, no. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. I'm not sure. Debateably, Margaret, he may still have been an objectivist back then. Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure. They can have that one. Yeah, they can have this one, Margaret, that's the best one.

He wanted JFK dead for Randian reasons. Oh, it's very funny. Yeah, so we will continue to talk about Kerry Thornley and give sort of the last stages of his life in the final part of this epic series and we will also talk about what happens after the original discordians and how their ideas get taken and changed and turned eventually into the sundry fascist manipulation campaigns that have had such an influence on our last couple of presidential elections and last, I don't know, dozenish public mass murders. But before we do that, Margaret Garrison, yes, you know, it hasn't been implicated in

any mass murders. Us. Us. As far as I know, we did a background check on you. No, you did. Well, I drove past the police department building and screamed, has Garrison committed any crimes and no one, no one called me back. That's good.

That's good. And you also went and found that Dutch zine and got someone to translate it from Dutch and found out that I had not done anything wrong. That's right. That's right. One of the main focuses on these days is your lack of complicity in various crimes. Yeah. I don't know if you have any old copies of Kerry Thornley wall newspapers from little

five points in the 1980s. Hit us the fuck up because I want to I want to see some of that shit. I want to read culture. Yeah. What do you guys got to plug? Well, if you want to try to find if you have any of those weird zines from from little five points or the walls or the wall newspapers can find me on Twitter and Instagram at Hungry Bowtie.

I just speaking of Atlanta just just finished up a four part series on the top cop city movement in Atlanta, Georgia, the week of action should be either ongoing or about to happen by the time this episode airs. So yeah. I excellent. I have a podcast. I have two podcasts. I have a podcast called live like the world is dying that is individual and community

preparedness. And I have a podcast on this very network. And it's called cool people who did cool stuff. And yeah, you can listen to it every Monday and Wednesday. And I have a book called escape from Insel Island. I have a bunch of books, but the most recent one is called escape from Insel Island. And you can read it. It came out.

You can get it wherever you steal, but wherever you books. Buy it, steal it, steal, you know, just go steal something everybody. Go steal the principia discordia. Yeah. Steal the principia discordia from a bookstore that has the temerity to sell it. And I don't know, so be what what kind of crimes are we allowed to advocate our listeners commit? Go go go back in time and shoot JFK.

Go do it. Chris just bleep me talking right now. Yeah. Wow, Sophie, I mean, yeah, I think that much thermite would take out the structural supports, but I don't know if a controlled demolition like that is going to lead to as fast a collapse as you expect. I think we'll have to I think we'll have to check this by legal before we air this air this episode.

Well, well, we'll get back to you all on that. But wow, Sophie, surprisingly intricate play and if any of it was bleeped out, it was actually the CIA who bleeped it out. Yeah, we don't do that. We'll just cut this whole section. But if the section runs, but part of it's bleeped out, it means that the CIA has altered this episode as part of an influence operation. And you can't trust anything that we say in this because as good as the technology has

gotten for deepfakes right now, there's no way to know if we actually said this or this is something that our CIA handlers are putting out using our voices. We may not even be alive anymore. You have no way of telling. I love that we haven't learned from the actual thing we're describing. We haven't learned from the history that we are in the process of describing. I was just going to do that thing where like a TV program gets pulled live on air that's just like bleep.

I mean, look, Margaret, the chief lesson of this show is that it is impossible to learn things from history and we live that message every day. Yeah. All right. End of episode. I stopped recording. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. There are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed

the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.