Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Power of Magical Thinking (False Alarm! part vii)

Episode Date: July 11, 2018

Magic! That’s what alt-right face-punchee Richard Spencer claims brought Trump to the White House. Esoteric historian Gary Lachman investigates and discovers an unholy alliance of memes, chaos, and positive thinking. Michael Hughes, author of Magic for the Resistance offers us some counterspells. Also the Hitler’s Magician controversy, the magician at the heart of the CIA, and the Fox Sisters take their spirit knocking to Rochester. Plus your host takes a magical ride down the Trump Tower escalator. 2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s people turned to the the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. In phase two of False Alarm! we’re going to bounce between the second half of the 19th century, the interwar years and the present to find out if we are doomed for a repeat?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Power of Magical Thinking. American intelligence is rooted in magic. Do you mean like the American IQ? No, I'm talking about the CIA. One of the CIA's first hires was a magician, a guy named John Mulholland. He wrote one of the seminal documents for the organization, the Deception and Trickery Manual. How did he even get hired? Well, he was super connected. He knew all the movers and shakers in the intelligence world from the work he did with Houdini.

The two of them did performances together where they would debunk spiritualist gurus like charlatans. Houdini pretty much subcontracted Mulholland out during World War I to perform for the troops and police departments. Orson Welles, who was one of America's most prominent magic enthusiasts, was also a friend of his. Mulholland was the guy at the top of everyone's magic list. But why did the CIA want to hire a magician in the first place? Well, CIA started right after World War II. It came out of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. And the U.S. was really behind in the intelligence game. Everyone was terrified by rumors about the Soviets and the Chinese having magical powers and ability to do brainwashing. And our allies, the British, apparently had some success hiring magicians during World War II. They also needed someone to run the LSD team. Wait, what?

Oh yeah, Mulholland was into magic and LSD. This is why they put him on Operation Midnight Climax. Yeah, I don't remember that one. Operation Midnight Climax. Basically, they were training prostitutes to control their John's mines with acid. Mulholland believed LSD was the key to mine control. So does that mean he was part of the MKUltra team? Yeah, Mulholland was the main guy. Think about it. There are now, I don't know,

countless books, articles, movies, documentaries on MKUltra. But still, people are unable to wrap their heads around the basics of what was going on. Was the CIA dosing its own people? Was this part of a brainwashing study? Why did Agent Olson jump out of that window to his death? What the hell was the CIA even doing with LSD?

That's true. I have actually read a number of these books, seen a few documentaries, and the truth seems still out there. But are you saying this is because of magic? That's what Mulholland called it, but many of those first guys from OSS were much more comfortable with the term misdirection. It doesn't matter whether you believe in magic. If the practice of magic, from performing card tricks to actually manipulating sound and light, allows you to manipulate people, that's what's important. We introduced Eric Kurlander, author of Hitler's Monsters, a supernatural history of the Third Reich last episode. He explained how the majority of the Nazi leadership

was plugged into something he calls the supernatural imaginary. But the Nazis didn't just throw money and resources at any weird or magical thing. They wanted magic that worked. The Nazis, I argue, are almost completely emblematic of what occultists and magicians have been doing since the late 19th century which is claiming that what they do is serious magic but their rival is just a charlatan exploiting old ladies so the nazis rarely dismiss supernatural thinking out of hand they simply say oh that's popular occultism, that's boulevard Jewish occultism. What we support experimenting with, and Himmler

and a bunch of Nazis say this, is scientific occultism, the kind that can actually yield results. When it came to magic, the Nazis had a number of systems to determine what was real and what was fake, including a bunch of John Mulholland debunker types who they would hire to perform for the troops and country people. They would usually be hired to perform a bunch of magic acts and then afterwards they would be encouraged to show how those acts were done. But there was another camp of Nazi magicians who did not take kindly to these guys who were debunking their tricks.

The Reich Magicians Association got frustrated with this and started protesting. They're giving away our tricks. It's undermining our ability to dazzle audiences and convince them a lot of this is real. This is the genesis of the Hitler's magicians controversy. On the one side, debunkers, people like the magician Albert Stabhagen and the Nazi police commissar Karl Peltz, and on the other, the Reich's Magician Association, otherwise known as the Magic Circle. This side had the advantage because their president, this guy, Helbert Schreiber, was pals with Hitler. There's pictures of him with Hitler and young women, you know, sipping wine. For me, that's fascinating that this guy, who basically heads the Magicians Association, can go directly

to Hitler. The debunkers didn't have this kind of access. Whatever Hitler says goes, so they lost. The Gestapo gets involved and says, look, debunking is all well and good, but you're really revealing too much about magic. And the Fuhrer doesn't like it. They're basically told they can't perform at all anymore because, you know, people like magic. Hitler likes magic. The Gestapo isn't going to do anything about magic. And these debunkers are undermining that popular belief. Now, the debunkers themselves were also plugged into the supernatural imaginary. So this isn't the Nazi version of Houdini versus the spiritualists. But for Eric Kurlander, this story about the magician's controversy does debunk the idea that the Nazis were opposed to magic because magic clashed with science and pure thinking.

One of the chief debunkers is himself part of a supernatural group of people who want to bring back some kind of pagan religion and who think there's evil priests in Tibet, part of an international conspiracy against the Aryans. I swear to God, they believe this. My point is, it's actually very hard to find any group that's truly secular in a kind of liberal, western, empirical way. There just isn't that kind of steady diet of rationalism that I could find. The Fox sisters' first big public seance was held on November 14, 1848, at Corinthian Hall, a large venue in Rochester, New York. The Fox sisters had moved from Hyattsville to Rochester at the insistence of their older sister Leah, the toughest of the Fox siblings. Leah came up with a plan to exploit her sister's gift for their profit as well as her own.

Advertisements placed in the local paper read, quote, The admission fee was 25 cents per person. The evening began with a speech by a respected local figure. He compared the girls' discovery to those of Galileo, Newton, and Fulton. People laughed at them too, he said. This was new science, not just religion, he said. The girls would be tested before the crowd, he insisted, and found to be sincere. Young Kate was said to be indisposed, so Leah took her place. Leah led Maggie, looking even younger than her 15 years in a pale blue dress, onto the stage, and they tried to tune out the audience's crude comments. They were seated at a wooden table. The lights were dimmed.

Five influential members of the Rochester community sat in chairs on stage, providing a silent endorsement. Silence filled the great hall, and then someone asked if the spirit was with them. After a dramatic moment, a clear, loud rapping broke the silence. Yes. The demonstration continued with a series of questions and responses. When Leah and Maggie left the stage, the applause from the believers was deafening. But there were plenty of jeers, too. Either way, they were instant celebrities, divine to some, absurd to others. And for two more nights, the girls would return to Corinthian Hall, where investigators would declare that they had been able to uncover no deception.

The groups of respected local figures charged with verifying the girls' authenticity had indeed looked them over closely. Soon after the performance, Maggie and Leah were brought into a private room charged with verifying the girls' authenticity, had indeed looked them over closely. Soon after the performance, Maggie and Leah were brought into a private room where a committee examined them for concealed tricks. The examiners put Maggie on a feather bed, both with and without her dress on. The second test was supervised by a group of deputized women.

And the raps continued. The insinuation that the girls had let themselves be investigated signified to some in Rochester that whether the girls were lying or not, they were certainly not ladies. The sisters stayed in Rochester by now a city of 70,000 for four years, holding seances at the Fox Fish Home and elsewhere, day and night. They received a steady stream of mostly enthusiastic press. Newspapers called them the spiritual mockers from Rochester,

and they began to collect invitations to visit Troy and Albany. The dark side of fame was soon in evidence. Men yelled vulgar things at the girls as they entered and left theaters. Many men assumed that these mediums fell into the category of girls who did things in the dark for money. Having been groped and catcalled repeatedly, Maggie was already growing tired of the routine. But Leah wouldn't let her quit. In 1850, Leah even decided they needed a bigger platform. She told her sisters that it was time to move to New York City. Great to be at Trump Tower. It's great to be in a wonderful city, New York.

He put so much reality into the television. I said to myself, well, after a while, isn't something going to pop out to the other side? When writer Gary Lockman watched Donald Trump step off the escalator in Trump Tower and announce his run for president, he knew he would win. And in his new book, Dark Star Rising, Magic and Power in the Age of Trump, he explains how a mix of positive thinking and chaos magic opened up the portal from which Trump stepped through. The simulation becomes reality. People have been talking about that for a long time, and that's at the heart of postmodernism and so on and so on.

So in one sense, it's nothing new. What I think is new is that it's come down from the metaphysical heights, let's say, and got down to the lowlands of everyday. I mean, it's what I call trickle-down metaphysics. People discussing notions of reality, what's real, what's not real, and so on and so on. That's been going on for quite some time. But now it's settled in to our everyday life, and people are just taking advantage of it.

They're going for it. If reality is up for grabs, then why not? Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory! The alt-right was undeniably a factor in Trump's rise, but Gary Lachman and other students of magical thinking took notice when, after the election, Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right, claimed full credit. It was that moment when we knew Keck had smiled upon us and that magic was real. And though we might use these terms half-jokingly, They represent something truly important, the victory of will. We willed Donald Trump into office. We made this dream our reality. One fellow, a guy named Harvey Bishop, who is a new thought blogger, a kind of school of

philosophy. Fundamentally, it means that thoughts are things. Thoughts create reality. How we think determines the kind of world that we have around us. So strongly held intention, you know, vividly visualized will come to pass. But Harvey Bishop, he wondered, you know, were the alt-right somehow using these techniques in order to put Trump in the White House? The way they were supposed to have done this was by what's called meme magic. somehow using these techniques in order to put Trump in the White House. The way they were supposed to have done this was by what's called meme magic.

Fundamentally, it's a way of using the internet to somehow perform magic rather than traditional methods. There were a lot of memes during the 2016 election. Memes that glorified Trump, memes that vilified Hillary Clinton. The most popular ones featured Pepe, the cartoon frog. In fact, Richard Spencer was explaining the meaning of Pepe to a reporter when

he was famously punched in the face. Pepe's become kind of a symbol. But what caught Gary Lockman's attention was how these memes were making their way from the internet into real life, especially the ones that were posted on 4chan. What happens when you post on 4chan is that it's anonymous. Nobody knows who you are, but you're given a number. There's an eight-digit number that's assigned to your post.

And when people were posting about Pappy or posting about Trump, they started to notice that in that eight-digit number, they used to get doubles or triples or quadruples. What this struck them as was a kind of approval. Somehow, you know, the internet world or whatever was, you know, behind it was approving. This all seemed to suggest to them there was some kind of intelligence at work behind there. The Maga posters named this intelligence Keck, which is synchronistically both gamer slang for LOL

and an Egyptian god with a frog head that reminded them of Pepe. The cherry on the top of this is, what is Keck the god of? Chaos. This whole meme magic business is a kind of offshoot of chaos magic. Chaos magic was invented in the 1970s, also known as results-based magic. It's the combination of traditional occult magic techniques and postmodern ideas. When it comes to Trump supporters and Trump himself, Gary sees chaos magic everywhere. What's the first word that comes to your mind when you think about Trump and his presidency?

I would say chaos. Now, Trump himself doesn't need to be a chaos magician or even aware of the term in order for all of this to make sense. Because Trump is versed, very well versed, in a powerful version of chaos magic, positive thinking. Take charge of your thoughts. You can do what you will. That's Norman Foster Peale, author of the world-famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking. He was the pastor of the church that Donald Trump attended as a child. He's the man who put Trump on the magical path. You form a goal.

You establish an objective. Then you put it in the conscious mind. And you hold it there. Until, by a process of intellectual osmosis it sinks into the unconscious and you give it constantly the good old positive follow through. Trump has said that Peel was his mentor. He's one of the few people that he respected. One of the two, the other one was his father. He said that he himself was Peel's greatest student. You think positively in order to send out positive emanations to reproduce themselves in kind in positive results.

Trump would hear these sermons on success, on winning, on winning being everything. And this was something that was drummed into him at an early age. And on this basis and by this method, positive thinkers always get positive results. The whole idea of positive thinking, it grows out of this magical way of thinking things. It's about how you can think reality into being if you focus intently enough, strongly enough, long enough, whatever you wish for will come true. And you focus your intention exactly only on what you

want and you disregard everything else. Facts don't matter. It's our attitude towards facts that matter. You know, I've been watching like everyone else as children are gunned down in schools and all we hear is thoughts and prayers. Well, I got tired of thoughts and prayers. How about it's time for some spells? That's Michael Hughes, author of a book a lot of you out there in listener land might be interested in, especially after everything you just heard. It's called Magic for the Resistance, a magical how-to slash history book.

Magic is very much a tool of the oppressed, people who essentially have no other means to change their environment. If you're a serf in medieval Europe, there's nothing you can do to change your living conditions and your station in the social political realm. But what you can do is magic. It always seems to be a tool of the oppressed. All the way up through World War II,

when witches were raising a cone of power to stop Hitler. And, you know, the 60s, when there was a group called Witch that hexed the patriarchy and did a spell against Wall Street, which coincidentally tanked the next day. Maybe not coincidentally. A few months after Trump's election, Michael posted one of his spells, a binding spell for Trump and his cronies on Facebook. It went viral.

Thousands of people, including myself, burned orange candles and chanted a binding spell at midnight to bind donald j trump so that his malignant works may fail utterly that he may do no harm to any human soul nor any tree animal rock stream or sea your fire your fire your fire I have to admit, I was a little disappointed waking up the next morning and learning that Trump was still in the White House and not on his way to jail. But I also felt good, like I'd done something. For Michael, that's proof the spell worked.

To be perfectly honest, if that's all this ritual and the other rituals in the book do, is help people feel better, I think that's important. And that's what people say when they do these rituals. After I'm done, I feel better. I feel like I've gotten my power back. Every time I do this ritual, I feel better. I feel like I've gotten my power back. Every time I do this ritual, I feel better. I feel like I've grabbed my power back from this Trumpian egregore that's sort of sucking the life out of me otherwise. It's magic if you can read a few words and perform

some simple ritualistic actions and feel better. Well, what I really appreciate about your book is this idea that we can take matters into our own hands. I actually had no idea that I had the power to create my own rituals and do my own magic. So thank you for inspiring me. But to be perfectly honest, I'm looking for a little more than just feeling better. I'm kind of done with resisting. I'd like to use this magic stuff and go in more of an offensive direction. Yeah. Well, not all magic is safe. I wouldn't advise people doing necromancy and trying to raise up spirits of the dead to work against the president or anything like that. I mean, the magic in the book is very simple. It's very straightforward. The intention is for a better future, a positive future. Here you go. All right, so here we are.

We're drinking Starbucks lattes in the atrium of Trump Tower. Undercover. We've gotten past security. We are here, ready to perform some magic. Fuck yeah. So what exactly have you come up with here, Benjamin? Here's the way I see it, Andrew. There's really only one person

that can take Trump back through the portal. You? No, no, no, no. Stormy Daniels. Good guess, but actually, it's the person who brought him here. His mom. That does make sense.

You know, she brought him in, and she can take him out. And I think she might be amenable to this, because she said later in life to Ivana Trump, what kind of son have I created? That's brutal. Do you know much about Mary Trump? No, I don't think I know anything about her at all.

So they owned these housing projects that they were famous for, the government lawsuits for the racial discrimination right but mary trump would cruise up to these projects sometimes in her rolls royce with the vanity plate mmt she would get out in her furs and go into the basement laundry rooms and like empty out the machines and quarters because she thought that know, they were rightfully hers. Oh, that's how you stay rich. Right? So I've brought a couple quarters that I'm going to throw here to invoke her. You've seen what she looks like. Oh, wow.

And the hair department, it's genetic, I suppose. So I think what I'm going to is I'm gonna rip the photo here since we probably can't burn it without attracting the attention of the Secret Service agents. Well, there's a guy with lots of guns. So, all right, let's take this photo and then I'm gonna rip it out.

All right, so I've got her attention now. Uh-oh, now she's mad. So basically, here's how it's gonna work. I'm gonna ride the escalator down, the same one that Trump did over there. Went in for the announcement. Yeah. Did you know what song was playing?

No. It was Rockin' in the Free World, Neil Young. So I've reversed it. And I'm gonna play it backwards. As I go down the escalator. Doing my spell. And throwing the quarters. We're going to undo.

This is the big command Z on this tree. Yes. I'm gonna take my spell. Should I head down ahead of you for a video? Yeah. Alright, we're doing it. Ready? Sure. Mary Mary. MMT.

Come and make things right. Mary Mary. Dead and buried. Come and choose a light. Mary Mary. Come and get things right. Merry, merry. Dead and buried. Come into the light. Merry, merry. Come and get your son. It's time to uncreate. Merry, merry. Quite contrary.

Make America great. Thank you. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Power of Magical Thinking. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, with Andrew Calloway. And it featured Eric Kurlander, Ada Calhoun, Gary Lockman, Michael Hughes, and TOE's special correspondent, Chris. We talked about a bunch of books for this episode. Most of them are new. You can find links to them all and a video of me doing the spell in Trump Tower at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. And also, there are a few Benjamin TOE coins left,

so get yours before they're all gone. That's theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Listen to them all at radiotopia.fm. So, the way I see it, there's really only one person that can drag Trump back. Radiotopia. From PRX.