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

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

We continue our discussion of Kerry Thornley, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and resurrector of the Illuminati.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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Wow, Sophie, I did not expect for you to take personal responsibility for the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I had always blamed it on Lee Harvey Oswald. Yeah, that's a lie. You have blamed it on a lot of people. I know. And it's possible someone might say that I'm just blaming yet another person for the assassination of JFK. But really what I'm trying to let people know is that Sophie can land three shots within a roughly dinner plate size target at a surprising distance. Also moving target. Moving target, too. You've got to lead that. Very impressive.

I believe in you, Sophie. I believe in your ability to take out John Fitzgerald Kennedy if you'd had to. That's why we've built you this time machine. If he was coming at you with his limousine and you were sheltering in a book depository, I think you could have done it. Thanks. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I didn't know how to introduce this one, so I decided to blame Sophie for a historical crime. I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast ostensibly about the worst people in all of history.

We are getting behind some bastards because all right-wing politics today is rooted in the series of conspiracy theories that we are explaining right now for you in 300-ish years of history. Condensed into, I don't know, like five podcast episodes. Anyway, my guests to continue this glorious journey in part four are Margaret Kiljoy. Hello. And Garrison Davis. Good morning or afternoon or some other time. Yep. It's whatever time of day you're listening to. So, folks, here we are. Let's get back into the story.

For the next year or so after the Kennedy assassination, conspiracies around Kerry kind of flared and then eventually seemed to subside. His friend Greg moved back to New Orleans. Greg kind of was back and forth between Whittier and New Orleans. You know, it is being being young. You can't make rent for a while. You move back in with your parents, then you come back. It's life. And once he comes back to the city, the two start work on their long-shelfed plans to create a satiric religion based on the Greek goddess of chaos, Eris. Now, Gary wrote most of the first draft of a tract that would later become... This is a little bit before zines were a thing, but it also is kind of a proto-zine. And its title is Prinscipia discordia, or how I found the goddess and what I did to her when I found her. And this is...

It's a good title. It's a good title. These guys are very funny. And this is... It is kind of framed as... It's a mix of like a religious tract. You know, actually what it's kind of framed as, remember when I told you about how that illuminated member of the Illuminati got struck by lightning and found by the cops? A lot of the Prinscipia discordia kind of has the feeling of like intercepted communications from like, yeah, this like weird underground cult. That's intentional. They know the history that I related to you all in the first... In fact, are quite knowledgeable about the history that I related to you all in the opening episodes of this series. Aspects of it are kind of framed as a religious tract. And the faith that this is a tract for is called discordianism. Now, by this point, Kerry had already started reading guys like Max Stirner, and he had found himself pulled out of his objectivist trend of his Ayn Rand support and towards a more sort of individualist anarchism. Max Stirner is a guy who wrote a book called The Ego and Its Own. And I am not the person to summarize that egoism is kind of is one of the things that like that kind of anarchism is called. I am not the person to summarize it to you.

But the main impact it has on Kerry is that he finds himself pulled towards anarchism as opposed to this kind of... And he'd always been an anti-state guy, right? That is a thing that is pretty consistent. That's a thing that he believes when he considers himself a capitalist revolutionary. The main thing that Stirner does for him is he drops the capitalism, right? And is just kind of now anti-state. And he and Greg are also getting increasingly interested in the occult in this period of time. Kerry does a pass on the Principia Discordia, and then they start mailing it off to an ever-expanding group of their friends who are mostly artists and weirdo pranksters who all like the idea of a religion centered around chaos. By the mid-1960s, American conspiracy culture had taken off to new heights thanks to the Kennedy assassination and all that shit that was going on with UFOs. Conspiracism is also taking off increasingly among the right wing, too. And the conservative political establishment is starting to have its first big break away from what you might call consensus reality, which is existing and accepting a plane of basic reality that is similar, or if not basically identical to the ones that the liberals accept, and towards a more darker splinter reality defined by conspiracism.

And the author of this switch, probably the single figure most responsible for the splintering of the reality tunnels in mainstream American politics, is a guy named Robert H. Welch Jr. We have talked about on this show, he is the founder of the John Birch Society. Now, again, if you want to listen to those episodes on Bob Welch that we do with the Knowledge Fight guys, I do recommend them. But in case you haven't heard those, or you're just rusty on the subject of the John Birch Society, I'm going to quote from our friend Hofstadter again, who wrote the paranoid style in American politics in November of 1964. So that article that I quoted to you earlier that talked about the Illuminati and its influence on kind of conspiracism in America earlier, like two episodes ago, that article was written during the period we're talking about right now, November of 1964. That's wild. Wow. Yeah. A few years ago, Welch proclaimed that communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government. Note the care and scrupulousness of that almost.

He has offered a full-scale interpretation of our recent history in which communists figure at every turn. They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure. They contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse. They have stirred up fuss over segregation in the South. They have taken over the Supreme Court and made it one of the most important agencies of communism. That's how Hofstadter described this is where, and that is, if you replace communism with the Illuminati, it's the same kind of shit that people were saying after the French Revolution, right? It's the same playbook, and it very much is a playbook for a lot of these people. In the early 1960s, Welch came across a pair of books that had a massive influence on them, and these books were Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements from 1924,

and American evangelist Gerald Winrod's book, Adam Weishaupt, A Human Devil from 1935. That is a banger title. Dude, if anybody writes a book about me, Robert Evans, A Human Devil, I will be the proudest I'm capable of being. What an honor. I had a satanic scare at the last place I lived with like a local news person about one of my music videos, and so we just printed up the next band shirt was just all of the like axe-wielding terrorist women, antifreeze anarchists, sacrificing babies in the woods or whatever. That's how you do it. So both of these books, and this is going to really shock you guys, were profoundly anti-Semitic.

What? This is kind of the start of a European school of thought that saw Jews and the Illuminati, and in some cases the Freemasons, as co-authors of the French and Bolshevik revolutions together, that this is all tied together. And this is a big part. Hitler is espousing aspects of this. If you look at what Hitler actually said about the conspiracies he believed, he would often call it Judeo-Bolshevism, right? Hitler's not so much into the Illuminati stuff, but the stuff Hitler believes is very much descended from a lot of this stuff. So Welch jettisoned the anti-Semitism he found in these books, some of it at least, but he kept the rest,

particularly the obsession with a grand Illuminati conspiracy theory. And I'm going to quote now from the book The World of the John Birch Society. Welch's first public mention of the Illuminati, but not yet the insiders, came in his more stately mansion speech, delivered before a crowd of 1,700 at the Conrad Hilton in Chicago on June 5, 1964. He told his biographer that although he had been studying this subject for a number of years prior to this, he understood that you couldn't start putting it all out in one go because nobody would believe you. Instead, he'd endeavored to lead the Birch Society's members little by little to where they would be interested. Despite these concerns, Welch's idea of the insiders was quickly incorporated into the Society's official worldview,

with Birch writers like Medford Evans amusing about whether Dean Rusk was the insider's quarterback, for example. But just as often, the conspirators continued to be identified as the communists, the liberals, the establishment, the liberal establishment, or simply the conspiracy. The seeming interchangeability of the terms reflected the fact that appearances to the contrary, notwithstanding, Welch's turn to the Illuminati hadn't really changed his basic analysis. So that's interesting. Number one, Welch is kind of doing a little bit of an atom vice-shop with his society, right? Where he's like, well, you can't tell everyone the whole truth at once, you have to kind of like lead them there.

But he's also, he comes to believe in these Illuminati conspiracies, that they're behind the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and all of these social justice movements. But he also consciously loops them in with both this blaming it on insiders, right? The Illuminati are the insiders, and you might call them the deep state, you know? But he also identifies them in the same breath as not just the communists, but also the liberal establishment, right? All of this is the conspiracy. All of this linked together is the conspiracy. The right is going to believe in from 1964 up to today.

In November of 19... Oh, it's just, it's so based on antisemitism in terms of the way that, like, people think of antisemitism as like, racism but confusing because applied to this group of people that's often white. But it's like, it's not. It's just this entirely different system of oppression that's based on this... I don't know. It's based on this fucking secret... It's based on this, it's based on this belief that there is a fragment of society within your society that is different and fundamentally is trying to push all of these modernizing elements for sinister reasons, right?

Of their own power. Right, totally. That is the core of antisemitic belief, and it is focused obviously on the Jews being that fragment. But once you start to believe that, it's not hard for you to move on to just like, well, beyond that, it's the Illuminati. Right. It's the communists, it's the liberals establishment. All of these different...

Like, you've accepted that there's this... That any sort of movement towards a progressing society is based in a conspiracy to destroy it, right? And that's the most important step to take. And it also goes the other direction too, now that you get people to believe in lizard people or whatever other Illuminati thing, you can then get them to also just become antisemitic. Yes, it works backwards and forwards. Again, it's very syncretic too. So you can...

People who are just convinced that there's lizard people or Bigfoot or UFOs, if you loop that into like, well, the Illuminati doesn't want you to know about Bigfoot or the UFOs, right? And they're keeping that... then that is also an inroad to get those people believing that the Jews are behind everything bad in society. This is a pretty durable and proven thing that happens within conspiracism. Yeah. In November of 1966, roughly a year after the publication of the Principia Discordia, Bob Welch published an essay in a John Birch magazine titled, The Truth in Time, in which he revealed his discovery of a master conspiracy older than communism.

The communist movement is only a tool of the total conspiracy. As secret as the communist activities and organizations generally appear, they are part of an open book compared to the secrecy enveloping some higher degree of this diabolic force. The extrinsic evidence is strong and convincing that by the beginning of the 20th century, there had evolved an inner core of conspiratorial power, able to direct and control subversive activities which were worldwide in their reach, incredibly cunning and ruthless in their nature, and brilliantly farsighted and patient in their strategy. Whether or not this increasingly all-powerful hidden command was due to an unbroken continuation

of Weishaupt's Illuminati, or was a distillation from the leadership of this and other groups, we do not know. Some of them may never have been communists, while others were. To avoid as much dispute as possible, therefore, let us call this ruling clique simply the insiders. It's just people falling for the bait, thinking that they're smart. Yeah, and Bob Welch is both high on his own supply, but also recognizes this is a good way to manipulate people. And it's interesting, 1964 is Welch's first meet mention of the Illuminati, whereas I've got to prep the ground for people. 1966 is where he comes out with his big speech talking about the Illuminati. 1965 is when the Principia Discordia gets published.

We should say that the Principia Discordia has a decent section in it about the Illuminati. I'm about to get to that. We will be reading from it right now. Yeah. The Principia Discordia was written for people like Greg and Kerry, because it was written by people like Greg and Kerry, right? Intelligent, well-read weirdos on the fringes of society who are natural skeptics, but who are also drawn irresistibly towards conspiracism. It's fitting that chapter one, authored by Kerry and attributed to his pseudonym, Lord Omar Kayem Ravenhurst, was called The Epistle to the Paranoids. It is essentially a message to the counterculture of the 1960s.

And at this point, as he's had his sort of break into anarchism, he's finding himself increasingly angry that the objectivists where he'd formerly kind of like found identification and the Marxists who he'd once identified with and the anarchists who he now identified with all hated each other and were all fighting each other rather than fighting the state, right? And the Paranoids, that's who he's talking about, is these people on the counterculture who are all in opposition to the state, but who can't get along with each other. And this message in the Principia Discordia is essentially a message to this fragmented chunk of the counterculture that he was like, you guys are fighting too much to oppose the state in a meaningful way.

And I'm going to read a quote from that now. And this is, again, The Epistle to the Paranoids. Number one, you have locked yourselves up in cages of fear, and behold, do you now complain that you lack freedom? You have cast out your brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting that you've been left to fight alone. All chaos was once your kingdom, verily held ye dominion over the entire pentiverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark corners, nooks and sinkholes. Oh, how the darknesses do crowd up, one against the other in ye hearts. What fear ye more than that what ye hath rotten?

Verily, verily I say unto you, not all the sinister ministers of the Bavarian Illuminati, working together in multitudes, could so entwine the land with tribulation as have your baseless warnings. Are you just trying to talk shit off Twitter? Yeah, that's not a thing that anyone involved in radical politics today would identify with on a deep and emotional level, right? Yeah. It's well written, too. I find a lot in this piece. Now, the next section of the Principia was an ad, and it's framed as an advertisement, as like a hokey 60s style advertisement, to join the Bavarian Illuminati, which is listed as the world's oldest and most successful conspiracy.

Greg and Kerry give their version of Illuminati history here, which puts the creation of the organization at around 1090 by Hassan-e-Saba, a medieval warlord credited with creating an order of hash-fed, fueled assassins. People get the exact history on that a little bit. Quite a lot wrong. Obviously, Hassan-e-Saba had nothing to do with the Illuminati, and they knew this. This was a joke for them, right? The advertisement is very tongue-in-cheek. It also references HP Lovecraft's creation, Yogg-Sothoff, as well as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Among other things, the Principia is a satire of real cults, but also a satire of American mass media, and in fact, that ad to join the Bavarian Illuminati ends with these lines.

If your IQ is over 150 and you have $3,125 plus handling, you might be eligible for a trial membership. If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our underground agents will contact you shortly. I dare you, tell no one. Accidents have a strange way of happening to people who talk too much about the Bavarian Illuminati. Maybe we warn you against imitations. Ours is original and genuine. Didn't Jamie do a podcast about this? Yeah, exactly, right?

Yeah, there's some Mensa mixed up in there, right? There's also Coca-Cola ads, kind of like, this is the original flavor, you know? They're making fun of all this stuff. Speaking of advertisements that will instruct you to bury your money and throw it away, here are our ads. God, I hope it's a gold ad. I wish for each of you a gold ad at this point. 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 gotta 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 was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-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 heaven. 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 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! So one thing that becomes clear going through the Principia, and by the way, you can pronounce the Principia Discordia however you want, because nobody actually knows how ancient Latin was pronounced in its entirety. We have Ecclesiastic Latin, which is a bit different. So if you want to be like, I don't even pronounce it that way, you can go fuck yourself. I took three years of Latin. I'll say it however the fuck I goddamn want. Go to hell. I love you.

Don't study Latin in high school, kids. Wait, that's what I did too. It's all wasted time. I did too. Look at us. We are such a bunch of suckers. I know, absolutely. My friends are all learning Spanish that they didn't travel with, and I'm stuck there learning about how fucking Caikilius and his buddy. It helped me have a conversation with my nun aunt about whether or not you pronounce Latin certain ways.

That's what I got out of three years of Latin. Look, we just did some episodes on Bobby Fisher, and some people thought I was intending to just kind of joke about the fact that he was a nerd, because I was also a nerd, which is why I brought up Warhammer so much. But I took three years of Latin so that I could understand all of my Warhammer books. That was why I did that. So there you go. Anyway, whatever. One thing that becomes clear going through the Principia and doing all this research on the Illuminati is how knowledgeable Greg and Kerry and their other friends were about the actual history,

not just of the Illuminati, but of other secret societies and conspiracies. These guys have like an academic level understanding of this history, which is why they are able to parody it so successfully. The Principia contains a number of letters in which members of the Illuminati, all of which are, and they take, as did, we didn't really get into this in those, but all of the original Illuminati people took on pseudonyms that were themed after ancient Greek and Roman history, like Achilles and Ajax and stuff. And all of the new Illuminati, the Discordians, take on pseudonyms as well.

As I said, Kerry's is Lord Omar Cayam, Ravenhurst, Greg Hill's is Malaklips, the younger. And yeah, they give, you know, so these guys are very much consciously like aping Adam Vyshopped. And in their conspiracy document that they put out, they each provide kind of different and often contrasting theories about the actual age and origin of the Illuminati. Usually this winds up stretching back to prehistory,

and they're kind of continuing why shops lie here, right? Like consciously continuing, because like he would pretend it was an ancient society, they're doing this intentionally. And it also includes bits like this, which are clearly satirizing the John Birch society. Your publication is timely, so mention that in addition, and this is part of like a section of it that's framed as like intercepted letters basically, right? Your publication is timely, so mention that in addition to the old fronts like the masons, the Rothschild banks, and the Federal Reserve System,

we now have significant control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since Hoover died last year, but that is still secret. The students for a democratic society, the Communist Party USA, the American Anarchist Association, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Black Lotus Society, the Republicans Party, the John Dilliger Died for You Society, and the Campfire Girls. It is still useful to continue the sham of the Birchers that we are seeking world domination, so do not reveal that political and economic control was generally complete several generations ago.

It's so funny. It's so good. Yeah, this is a response to the John Birch society as much as it is anything else, and they're fucking with people, right? Like, that's what's going on here. Okay, but wait, was there a Campfire Girls, or did they make that up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was like a Girl Scouts kind of animal that may still exist for all I know. I'm not a Campfire Girls expert, although soon we'll have our six-part series on the Campfire Girls. You already did the Boy Scouts. We could have done a couple more episodes on the fucking Boy Scouts.

So, they write this silly zine, and I know some of you who are not like, as into this stuff as all three of us are, are probably like, why are we talking about like this weird joke that some dudes made in the mid-60s? Oh boy. Trust me, it matters. So they write this weird zine, and if you know anything about kind of like pre-internet erosines, you know that the thing they're going to need next is a photocopier. Now, in the mid-1960s, photocopiers existed.

You could get access to them, but they, like, owning one would have cost, you know, probably like what a car does today. It was not easy to get, like, to purchase one. Most people didn't have access to one unless they had access through an institution. And so if you were going to use such a machine, you either were like at a school that had one, or you had maybe an employer that had one, and you could kind of like get some time on it. So it just so happened that Greg Hill, when they decided they want to start making a bunch of copies of this thing they had out, Greg Hill had a friend named Lane Kaplinger.

And Lane worked as a secretary for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. If you've ever watched the movie JFK by Oliver Stone, Garrison is the guy played by Kevin Costner. So he would go on to write the first major Kennedy assassination conspiracy book titled On the Trail of Assassins, which is what Stone's JFK was based on. This will be relevant soon. So Greg Hill and his friend sneak into Jim Garrison's office, and they use the photocopier to produce several copies of the Principia Discordia,

which they start handing out to friends who read it and find it funny. These people then... I will say, as someone who is also interested in this history, this claim is heavily disputed. Yes. We know there's at least one zine they did use Garrison's photocopier on. It's not provable that it was the Principia Discordia. Well, and they also claim that the first copy of the Principia was typed out using Garrison's typewriter.

Yes. There's a lot of weird claims about Garrison specifically because... Yes. ...of his involvement in JFK stuff. Well, he's the one who wrote it. Oh, not just that. Yeah, no, you're right, Garrison. This may not have happened.

We do know that they used... Because they were writing other zines. Yeah. It's pretty well known that they used his photocopier for one thing a couple of years prior to this. There have been claims since that they used it for this, and like you said, that they used his typewriter. We don't know what's true because these guys, again, part of what they're about to start doing is telling a bunch of funny lies.

This is so good. It is known that Hill and a friend got access to his photocopier at one point, right? I chose to tell people the version that I found most funny, which I thought was in line with Discordian traditions, but yes, that is useful context. So they start handing this stuff out to friends, and in the way that things spread back then, these people read it, a lot of them like it,

they find their own access to like mimeograph machines or whatever, they go to the library, they start making copies of it and handing it out to friends. And in a couple of different cities, people start to decide to start Discordian chapters, which are themed as both kind of secret societies and sets of a religion. That's like what they are consciously aping, but in reality, it has a lot more in common with like modern nerds subculture today. And to kind of go through this process,

I'm going to quote now from the book KLF by an author named JMR Higgs. Slowly, Hill and Thornley recruited a few like-minded friends into their new religion. Their aim was to undermine existing belief systems by spreading confusion and disinformation with as much humor as possible. To this end, they each adopted a host of new names under which their Discordian endeavors were credited. Many new Discordian chapters were founded. The majority of these contained only one member, and some contained none.

Discordians then wrote essays and letters under these aliases, only to follow them with completely contradictory essays and letters under a different alias. So this becomes sort of the first act of worship of the Discordian church, is to write essays and letters about conspiracies and then send them out to different magazines and different publications under a variety of aliases. Now, as for the actual religion itself... We all know you actually meant aliens.

I did. My book on the Illuminati by that one crank does talk a lot about the Anunnaki. Apparently, the Babylonians talked about them all the time, so no one's more credible than the Babylonians. But the actual tenets of the Discordian faith, which is again a satire of religion, there's a variety of things. Everybody's a pope, which is not an original thing.

Initially, it is actually very centralized. It's kind of one of the big changes in the Discordian faith over the years, is the decision that everybody gets to be a pope. They don't have religious dogmas. They have catmas, which are relative meta-beliefs rather than strict beliefs in something. There's kind of a general prescription in the Discordian church against believing too hard in anything.

Like every religion, they have foods that you're banned kind of arbitrarily from eating. In this case, it's hot dog buns. So there's a lot of just hot dogs handed out at Discordian events in this period of time. And again, this is meant to be... She would love this. It's a joke. It's yucks. But what you should have realized right now by the passage I read earlier, where they're spreading all these jokes,

but they're also spreading all of these different claims about the things they've done as a conspiracy, what they've done, what hillanthornly particularly have done, is create a series of memes, which start to spread through the underground media of the day, through this kind of growing underground network of what's going to become zine culture. Now, because this faith gets founded in 1965, right as the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories pick up steam, conspiracy theories become sort of the language that Discordians choose to do their messaging in. Now, this is what brings us to Playboy Magazine.

The mid-to-late... I know a place Jamie Lopez worked. She did. She's deeply tied to all these inspirations. Jamie has involved in this. She knows. She's so much. We are through the looking glass here, people. Oh, my gosh. When I say Playboy today, you either think of all of Hugh Hefner's many sex crimes,

or you think about, oh, yeah, that website or that magazine that used to be big and is no longer profitable and turned into kind of a sleazy internet brand. In the 1960s, Playboy is hugely influential in the counterculture, not just because there's pictures of attractive naked people, but because of the articles. There are a lot of very influential writers... Who read it for the articles. Sorry.

This is a thing. And two of the guys who are writing it for the articles are a pair of editors for Playboy Magazine, named Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Oh, my God. I had no idea. There's so many fucking Roberts. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of Roberts involved in this story, too. But yes, Bob Shea and Robert Anton Wilson are both editors for Playboy Magazine.

And they're both kind of in to a lot of the same stuff that Carrie and Greg are. They find the occult, they're both very much into the occult, especially Robert Anton Wilson. They are taking huge amounts of LSD. And by the way, so are Hill and Thornley by this point. And, you know, they start to notice, because Playboy publishes letters. And one of the places, the easiest places for Discordians who are writing these nonsense conspiracy letters to get their shit published is Playboy.

And Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea start to notice like, we're getting a lot of weird letters from guys writing about the Illuminati and Eris and stuff. That's peculiar. So they start responding to some of these letters. Wilson, being a prankster himself, decides he's going to fuck with whoever is sending him these joke letters by publishing all of the weirdest ones. And his particular thing is in the ETSU,

he likes to publish conspiracy theories, like letters that are conspiracy theories that specifically contradict each other, like incompatible theories about the Kennedy assassination and stuff like that. Because he thinks that's funnier, and it is. And I'm going to quote now from a summary by a writer named James Burt. Wilson said he did not consider the Soprank or a hoax, but guerrilla ontology. He became increasingly exasperated with the fixed views on both the right and left of politics, and he wanted people to question the information they received,

to stop seeing their beliefs as inherently true. Now, ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies, among other things, the nature of reality, like what is true, right? Again, this is a philosophy discussion on a podcast, so we're flattening things here, but that's the basic of it, right? It is the science of, like, what is how to classify and explain objects and entities. Wilson and Shea, like the Discordians, saw themselves as waging a necessary war against people's widely accepted definitions of reality,

and they are looking out at millions of people being massacred in Vietnam, at police in the street beating civil rights marchers, and they are responding to what they see as all of the people perpetuating these crimes have locked themselves into what Robert Anton Wilson will later call a reality tunnel, which is this, like, very solidified belief about the nature of the world that is wrong but justifies violence, because the world itself will not conform to this errant belief, and so if you can't accept anything else as real,

you're going to do violence on the people who insist in living in a way that does not conform to that belief you have about the world. So the thing Wilson and Shea want to do is soften people's understanding of what reality is and the hope that it will stop a lot of this horrible shit from happening, right? That's the goal, okay? Okay. This is not going to work out perfectly, but you understand where they're coming from, right?

Yeah, I mean, I do. I feel like sometimes we think that, like, oh, we'll use sarcasm and parody and irony. I feel like people who are versed in the Internet will know why this doesn't work. Yes. You know? And the spoiler is that it doesn't. Yeah. But you know what does work, Margaret?

The exchange of money for items. Oh, I was going to say advertising. Oh. It has a more profound impact on human cognition than almost anyone understands, and in fact, in the future, we'll be considered to be a health hazard on the same level as cigarette smoking. But for now, it's what keeps podcasts on the air. So enjoy your information hazard, 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. As the FBI sometimes, you've 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 was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and on the good-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 heaven. 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 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. Ah, we're back. And have your kids considered the benefit of smoking Paul Mauls? Paul Mauls aren't just the tastiest cigarette on the market. They're the cigarette that has an extra-long filter, which helps those tiny hands grasp it and smoke safely. Don't worry, Garrison, I've already asked Chris to cut it. Sophie, you don't want kids to hear the good news about Paul Mauls cigarettes? The cigarette crafted with tiny hands in mind? By tiny hands?

I thought you were a camera guy. I'm hurt. Look, one of the tragic lessons about advertising is that sometimes people consume different products than they advertise. Yeah, fair enough. I actually kind of more into silver. Well, it's like, you know, I talk about how Lasik provided me with laser eye surgery. But the reality is that I lashed a banshee to a rock in my backyard. Can you just do your job? Sophie, I can't talk about how I trained a banshee to fix my eyes with the ice.

Okay, whatever. Sophie, Jesus. Unfair. Anyway, discordians. So, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea start publishing all of these weirdo letters by these weirdo discordians and eventually, like, realize something is going on here, that it's not just an increasing number of crazy people sending them conspiracy theories. But a conspiracy of conspiracies. Yeah, exactly. And Robert Anton Wilson, when he finds this out, is like so on board. He's like, this is the best thing I've ever heard of.

And he travels and he meets with Kerry Thornley in 1967. And as soon as Thornley explains the game to him, Robert Anton Wilson becomes a discordian. He is immediately on board with all of this shit. Now, some other stuff is happening while all of these figures are meeting. At this point in time, a book called The Second Oswald has been published, which is the first organized conspiracy theory about a second gunman on the grassy knoll. At the same time, through this, yes, it comes out in this book that Kerry Thornley, this weird counter-cultural figure, has ties to all of these people adjacent to the conspiracy in The Second Oswald. And the nature of this coincidence that he's just sort of tied to all these people,

that this book has argued we're like helping to carry out the assassination, is too much for a lot of people. And a growing chunk of the conspiracy culture of the time convinces itself that Thornley was the second gunman. In some versions of the conspiracy, he's like an Oswald double who is there to, like, distract from the fact that, like, yeah, like there's multiple Oswalds, basically, right? And a lot of people, because Thornley looks like Oswald and knows him, think that he's the second Oswald, right? One of the people who decides this is what's happened, one of the people who comes to believe this about the Kennedy assassination, is Jim Garrison, the DA of New Orleans. Oh. So Garrison, yeah. That's not going to work out well. That's not going to work out well for anybody.

Garrison, Garrison, hi Garrison. This is going to get so complicated. I know all of our names except for Margaret so far have been deeply implicated in this conspiracy. So, Jim Garrison starts investigating Kerry Thornley in January of 1968, right after Kerry and Bob Wilson made. And he actually subpoenas Kerry Thornley so he can ask Kerry about his relationship with Oswald. Now, Thornley denies that he had been in any contact with the assassination and any assassin in any manner since 1959. But Garrison comes to believe that Thornley is part of the conspiracy and acted as a body double for Oswald. And he also finds out that Oswald moved to New Orleans right after Thornley and that the year before the assassination, they were both in Mexico City at the same time. So he charges Kerry with perjury.

This is like a year's long fight. Kerry has with like a perjury charge over lying about his associations with Lee Harvey Oswald. And this is a very situation. Kerry had actually been called in, a lot of people don't know this, Kerry Thornley testified to the Warren Commission in 1964 because he had published his book, The Idle Warriors, which was about Lee Harvey Oswald. And all he's talking about in the Warren Commission stuff is what he knew about Oswald, right? But because he says he had no more contact with him, this is a really, you can get in shitloads of trouble for lying in a congressional inquiry like this, right? Like, you are not allowed to do that. So the fact that they're... And a year after he testified, he also released a book just titled Oswald. The same exact year that the Principia was first being distributed. And by that, I assume, right?

Because if I'm not mistaken, when he... No, no, no, because he becomes convinced after a while, I believe that Oswald was innocent. He starts believing that Oswald was innocent and then he comes to believe that Oswald did it. And eventually comes to believe something very similar to what Jim Garrison believes. But he writes the book Oswald kind of in the middle of all of these beliefs. Because he knows the guy and, yeah. So, Kerry starts to get very paranoid at this point because in the middle of creating a religion about secret societies where they claim to be the Illuminati pulling the strings, he has also become the center of the JFK assassination conspiracy theory and is now being charged with poetry. This is what we call a fucker-outed-fied-up moment.

Yes, yeah. Don't spend a year putting up flyers asking for a president to be assassinated. If you don't want people to think you might have done it. Mm-hmm. Now, you remember back when that Nazi paid him to do research on the Hitler book? Oh, God, yes. Okay. So the book is titled because like, Hitler was not a bad guy, right?

Yeah. Kerry becomes convinced that the guy, and again, this Nazi is not a real person. Like, there was a person there because people saw Kerry talking to him. But the name he gives is not a real person, right? So that's part of why this guy gets wrapped. We don't know who this was. Kerry becomes convinced that that guy was a fed who paid him to do this research. So there would be a bunch of writing about Hitler under the title,

Hitler was not a bad guy, in Kerry's handwriting, and the state could put it up as a manifesto after framing him for killing JFK. What? I wouldn't put it past him. Yeah, that's what Kerry starts to bleep because he's like, no one knows who this guy is. This is such a weird thing that somebody paid me to do. Yeah.

Someone just wanted my name on this like Nazi thing so they could argue like I was involved in it. Because he also sees that what Garrison is doing is trying to like bring him into this and blame the assassination on him. So he's not, there are people in the government trying to pin the assassination. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But he's also locked in this conspiratorial mindset now in part as recreation. So he kind of just starts to go crazy.

Yeah, that tracks. Kerry is also at his heart a prankster. And despite the severity of the situation he is in, he cannot help himself but fuck with Jim Garrison. And I'm going to quote, I'm going to quote from the very interesting book, The Prankster in the Conspiracy, which is by that, that Go Rightly guy, and is a biography of Kerry primarily. Quote, sometime in 1968, during the course of the Garrison investigation, Kerry discovered that one of Garrison's aides, Alan Chapman,

believed that the JFK assassination had been the work of the Bavarian Illuminati, that ancient and fraternal order much ballyhooed by right-wing conspiracy theorists such as the John Birch Society. As a centuries-old secret society behind communism and damn near every other socialist inspired ill, then corrupting the world and poisoning our precious bodily fluids. In response to all of this Bavarian Illuminati paranoia, Kerry, in the midst of Garrison's probe, decided to mind fuck Garrison all the more by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he, Kerry, was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. These communiques were sent under the auspices of the Discordian Society.

The mind fuck eventually got Kerry interested in the history of this mysterious secret society, and the more he read about the Bavarian Illuminati, the more fascinated he became. Eventually, Kerry and his fellow Discordian conspirators started planting stories about the Discordian Society's age-old war against the Illuminati, accusing everyone under the sun of being a member of that sinister and sneaky organization, from such politicos as Nixon, LBJ Daily, and William Buckley, to Martian invaders, and various conspiracy buffs, plus members of the Discordian Society itself, which made it all very confusing and extremely hilarious.

So he starts sending fake letters, claiming that he's an agent of the Illuminati, to one of Garrison's aides who believes that the JFK assassination was the work of the Illuminati, and is actively investigating him for his complicity in that crime. Damn. Look, whatever you think of the wisdom and ethics of this, you have to respect that commitment a bit. Yeah, no. If someone's like, that'd be like when people are like, oh, you're an evil Satanist, I'd be like, yes, I personally brought Satan back from the dead

and used him to do this actual crime that happened. I am the literal Christian devil, and I killed all those kids at that elementary school and whatever the one that started the Satanic Manic was. Yeah, I forget. Mountain Meadows seemed, no, that's the Mormon massacre. I've lost track, you know, whatever. By the early 1970s, Cary Hill and Robert Anton Wilson have a name for this combination prank act of political terrorism that they've sort of lapsed into committing. They start to call it Operation Mindfuck.

JMR Briggs writes, The aim of Operation Mindfuck was to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced with some form of enlightenment. Now, that may have been optimistic. Yeah. It is worth noting that the Discordians are not the only anarchist weirdos thinking along these lines at the time. In 1987, another group of anarchists on the UC Berkeley campus had formed a group called the Bavarian Illuminati

and had started sending out weird press releases with the goal of giving conspiratorily-minded people something to get paranoid about. And the lady who found this group at Berkeley later becomes friends with Thornley and becomes a Discordian and is now a right-wing crank journalist. Oh no! What? No! No! This is the worst thing that's happened in this episode. Oh no, don't worry something a lot worse is coming, Margaret.

Oh no, okay. But also, this type of stuff is not super dissimilar to the situationist. Yes, which we'll be chatting about them in a little bit too, which I think is useful context to give people. Operation Mindfuck becomes a mix of deliberate paranoid incitement and anarchist political project. Some of the press releases they send out are just like conspiracy nonsense, but others are comparatively serious where they are advocating for specific political acts. They put out a big paper urging a permanent universal rent strike and their idea is that everyone should just stop paying rent and go about their lives as normal.

So it's this mix of like, here are things we actually believe and here's a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories. This mix of conspiratorial incitement and sincere attempts to push some political change was a conscious aping of a strategy that Greg Hill, who wrote under the name Maliklips the Younger, had come across in a book titled The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The authors had argued that the only strategy an opponent can't predict is a random one. Hence what became the new religion's maxim. We Discordians must stick apart.

Now, yeah, it's like, what they're doing is like a thing in game theory. We do actually talk about this in the chess episodes where like, if you're like a random weirdo, like you can sometimes beat people in these games who are much better than you, because you just are not acting in a way that they can possibly predict, right? There are arguments that I've been reading a little bit and forgive me, I know very little about Go, but basically one of the things that people will say is that like, a good chess computer cannot be beat by humans, right? Like when it's playing and it's like, we are past the point where human beings can beat the machines in chess.

But they kind of don't have computers at Go that are that reliable at beating human beings. They're good. And some of this has to do with there's just been less work in doing this with machines that play Go. But one of the things people will notice that because there are so many more possibilities in Go, human players can just do crazy shit and the machine gets kind of tripped up, right? In a way that's not as possible with chess because there's less sort of options that you have in a game of chess than you do with Go. Anyway, I find this interesting, not an expert on Go.

Another inspiration for Thornley Hill, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, and the other early Discordians are the situationists, as Garrison just said. Now, these are a group of avant-garde artists and activists. They start out in France. They're basic contention. This is in like the 50s, right? So this is in the period of time and when like Greg and Kerry are like teenagers and young adults is when the situation is kind of at their most influential.

And the basic contention that the situationists have is that culture in the form of advertising and increasingly slick mass media is being forced upon us. The situationists believe that you should resist cultural homogeneity with a sort of artistic judo, taking the momentum of mass media and turning it back against its wielder. Situationist art projects were supposed to have no single author or creator as they valued decentralization of creation. Artists would work together under shared names and rejected the idea of the visionary auteur. Again, you can see how this had a big influence on what Greg and Kerry and the others are doing.

Key to this thinking is the idea of the spectacle, originally defined by Guy de Borde as the autocratic reign of the market economy. The media is one outward expression of the form of this autocratic reign. As de Borde wrote, rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term media and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service. Now, this is all a little bit wonky, so I want to turn to a paragraph by Tirman Morgan and Laurie Purgey explaining the concept in more detail.

De Borde describes the spectacle as capitalism's instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during de Borde's lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you ten things you need to know about X. The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For de Borde, this constituted an unacceptable degradation of our lives.

And by the way, all of this stuff has a huge influence on the Wachowskis and is kind of like the basis of the Matrix movies. Which also ties into the fact that that shit gets fucking turned around. Yes, it sure does. This is one of those things where I have a lot of sympathies with the situationists and I like that style of praxis, but also this thing can get turned in on itself, turned in on itself. You can never actually escape the loop. You can only try to loop it even tighter and then hopefully it will collapse in on itself.

Hold on to that thought because we haven't described the loop that de Borde sets up quite yet for people. But hold on to that thought because I do want to come back to that in just a second. So de Borde is convinced that art has failed and is essentially dead as a thing capable of carrying meaningful counter-cultural messages. And this is because the spectacle is an expert at something called recuperation, where ideas and individuals that were initially subversive are trivialized, cleansed of their revolutionary potential and re-incorporated to mainstream capitalist society's commodities. The easiest example of this is like a Shea Guevara t-shirt. This communist revolutionary being turned into this shirt that you buy at a hedge shop that's owned by a hedge fund.

There's a podcast about like cool revolutionaries in history that's like on the largest corporation that's ever existed. These are all good examples, Margaret. Thank you. No problem. Came out of my head. The way the situation is suggested fighting against recuperation was called deterrent, which is what Garrison was talking about a little bit ago. And it is the recontextualizing of an existing work of art in order to shift its meaning towards something that inspires revolutionary feelings. Now, the situationalists are also motivated by the concept of psychogeography, which is a way of describing one's surroundings in order to like influence their emotional state.

It's a little bit difficult to describe some of the situationalists art over a podcast, but one thing that they would do in Paris is they would like cut up and reshuffle maps that were then given to people in order to encourage people to wander to different parts of the city that they would not otherwise have traveled to and thus build connections between them, right? This is kind of part of what they're trying to do here is trying to cut what they saw is the power that maps had over how humans thought about the geography of their cities. This is also a response to the fact that city planners like set up cities in such a way to keep certain groups of people apart, right? I mean, you can think about the way this exists in whatever city you live.

This is a part like look at the way bike lanes are always set up, right? They don't go to poor neighborhoods as a general rule. They connect affluent parts of town to affluent parts of town or places where people shop. That's not 100% of the case, but that is a lot of them, right? This is a thing that the situation is still recognizing. This is one of the things in which the kind of art that they're doing is trying to fight against. This all sounds very heady, but situationalist art is often credited with sparking a massive series of riots in Paris in 1968, which is right within the time period we're talking about.

Obviously, the situationist international kind of falls apart eventually for the same reason most left-wing movements do, but the tactics that they've pioneered and the goal of their work gets kind of stuck in the teeth of the global left. That's all happening kind of in the period of time before and right at the start, at least, of what the Discordians are doing. All right, now we can talk about it, Gareth. Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things that we've even seen. This situation has tried to get ahead of that type of recuperation, and it's just a very hard thing to do. It is one of those things that eventually there are attempts to even put that recuperation and commodify that even aspect of it. It's like one of the few good jokes in Rick and Morty that I stand by is the freedom wafer selects

of distilling this brain juice that gets grown during an act of rebellion and selling that back to you so you can consume and have that same feeling of rebellion. And it's this mechanism that can just keep on going into itself, and trying to break out of that is a topic of a lot of this type of political theory. Yeah, it's this... Oh, sorry, Margaret. Oh, just like this idea that the detournament thing used to make a lot of sense to me. I grew up in adbusters and stuff like the late 90s, early aughts. We'll chat about them a little bit later, too.

Yeah, I was in art school and adbusters came around, and then I dropped out of art school to go travel and try and do anarchy or whatever. And these are related thoughts. And the detournament and all that was a big part of it. But seeing detournament then loop so many times, I'm kind of back to just regular, direct cultural attacks. Just making art? Yeah, you just fucking do the things you believe in, and you say the things you believe into people, and you just fucking cry. Instead of the judo thing, you just punch them in the face, you know? Margaret, I hadn't thought this until just now, but it kind of occurs to me that you can argue that the situationists part of what they're doing is similar to what Weishaupt was doing way back in the day.

It's this thing that you have to hide your message one way or the other, right? That has to be a part of it. It's interesting this like because I'm thinking about like I can remember there's a lot of folks on the left who part of like will celebrate. And I'm not saying this is wrong, but like one of the things they love about The Matrix is that it is so clearly inspired by the situation. It's like down to the fact that like at the very beginning of the movie, Neo has a copy of a book called The Society of the Spectacle, right? Well, I believe he has a simulacra and simulation. Oh, sorry, sorry. It's right.

Which was inspired by the writings of Society of the Spectacle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like, is that an example of an insurgent form of art being snuck into a massive Hollywood blockbuster? Or is The Matrix itself an example of the recuperation of what the situationists were doing because it's this multi-billion dollar franchise? And then even The Matrix's rebellious messages get recuperated by fascism with the Red Pills. And now Elon Musk is talking about Red Pills while one of those Chavsky sisters screams at him. But then the fourth Matrix film is about the recuperation of the first Matrix film and it's looping on itself endlessly and this is what Operation Mindfuck is really after. It's about causing this loop to destroy people's brains and make reality incredibly malleable.

And that is the goal of this sort of thing. I would argue they're not trying to destroy people's brains. And I think that because again, the story we're building to is this does all go terribly wrong. But I think an argument you could make if you're pro-mindfuck is that, well, the situationists were cool, but also it would have been a real bad thing if people had believed too strongly in what they were doing. And come to treat these ideas of deterrent as if it is something you should take that seriously as the most effective way of fighting against capitalist modernity. And maybe getting people to think this way and start looking at these kind of loops of recuperation in which these things, the situation list created this multi-billion dollar franchise. And then maybe that causes people to take all of it a little bit less seriously and treat it more like a tool in the toolbox rather than something that should be the core of your personality. And I also feel like some of the recuperation stuff, it's like people get mad because they punch someone and then they got punched back.

It's like, I'm going to do this thing that attacks capitalism. Capitalism is going to look and be like, all right, well, what's the best thing I can do? And they might try and use that back against me. Like, of course they are. We're fighting. Like, I punch them and they punch me. And this is like, yeah, it's a conflict. And in a conflict, you learn from the actions of your adversary, which is why you have this very interesting anarchist group called Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. This is who I was thinking about during all this, yeah. Cut the fence at Woodstock, which makes Woodstock what it is in a lot of ways. And then Woodstock winds up in Pepsi commercials. Life, huh?

And actually the situation has kicked out the British situationists because they liked Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. Yeah, and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers had a conflict with the... This is all... Sorry. We didn't need to go in all this way. But if you want, I have a whole episode of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers came out recently. Excellent, excellent. Well, we are going to cover all of this in more detail lately.

But I wanted to talk in this by talking about the situationists because as the discordian church really starts to take off in the early 1970s, that's the goal that Thornley and Hill and Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea and all their friends kind of have is to, in a very situationist manner, take the cultural weight of these conspiracy theories that the John Birch society and the right are... See as a method of power and are using still to this day as a method of power. And they are trying to, in a situationist manner, kind of like judo, turn the weight of this stuff back against itself by, as Garrison said in some ways, kind of breaking the brains of the people who believe this by widening the field of play conspiratorially, right? Instead of the John Birch society being the only word on the Illuminati. Well, let's expand what this fucker can be well beyond what they can control.

And maybe the hope is that they can't manipulate people as effectively. And that maybe people even become less manipulatable. Now, spoiler, this is debatable as to whether or not it works very well. Some people would argue that what the Discordians are about to do is build a very well-crafted gun and then leave it on the table in a room full of four-year-olds. But we will talk about that next week. Y'all got any plugables to plug? Well, if you want to support people trying to use some of these same type of tactics in Defense of the Forest, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.

One of the posters I saw around Atlanta about the Stop Copsity stuff, it ended with a very situationist-esque motto, which was, reality is the battlefield. And yeah, so this type of thing is continuing on today and it's not just people making propaganda. It's also people like doing stuff physically in the real world and facing... As the situationists did, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And there's people facing legal consequences for it. And if you want to support those people that are experiencing state repression, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Yes, donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.

And it is good to keep in mind... This is why one of the things I would like to leave liberal type folks, and I don't mean that as like a slur, but like folks who are kind of like more centrist and liberals, we have a lot of listeners who are of that tendency. What I would like to leave you with is the next time you hear someone on the right say something that is objectively, factually wrong and feel the desire to dunk on them, consider whether or not you're just feeding the loop, right? Because reality is the battlefield and you may not in fact be able to damage their cause by locking into an argument with them, right? That may be a doomed tactic.

In the way that we're talking about a doomed tactic that is much more in line with the people that I tend to admire politically. There's no political side has a monopoly on doomed tactics. But I think it is worth saying that if arguing with conservatives about the nature of reality could change things, we would be in a different situation right now. And perhaps other tactics are necessary. My plug is for the derive, my favorite of the situationist tactics, which is go for a walk. And go for a walk where you don't normally go for a walk. I love the idea of that as like a way to change your scope of reality.

I think that they did a really good job of that. And then also I'll plug that all of the references earlier about Jamie doing all of this and that is Jamie Loftus, who has a bunch of podcasts on this very network, including my year in Mensa and a bunch of other ones. And did Jamie do 9-11? We can't say she didn't. I actually think we probably can. She comes from the northeast, Margaret. That's true. I don't know if that's true. Suspicious.

She was in like the third grade. The third grade, 9-11. Three times three is nine. Sophie. Also didn't we just read that the Illuminati was controlling the Girl Scouts? They are specifically going after organizations with kids to recruit them to do these types of acts. Powerful. That it all makes sense now.

Because if we've learned one lesson in this series, it's that joking about this stuff never has consequences. No consequences. I was just so proud that Garrison got those things all in one reference. That was good. All right, everybody, go make a conspiracy somewhere. I'll add to what Margaret said about taking a walk. Another anarchist thinker. David Graber.

Yeah, David Graber. One of the arguments he made was that when you're out walking in a city, as often as possible, cross somewhere other than where you're legally supposed to cross. But look both ways. Yeah. But look both ways. Don't get hit by a car, folks. Anyway, goodbye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the 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 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 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. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.