Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED: 1056 - Prophets Unveiled feat. Devin Thomas O’Shea (7/23/26)

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

NOW UNLOCKED! Devin Thomas O’Shea returns to discuss his book on St. Louis’ notorious Veiled Prophet society. We look at St. Louis history as a microcosm of America, the interwoven history of labor & racial suppression, Parade Politics, the public mystification of white supremacy, and how modern secret societies forget to have a little fun with it. Find Devin’s book The Veiled Prophet here and wherever you buy books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet

Actually, speaking of Missouri, I've got this on the bookshelf right now. I'm rereading this. Right now, this is a copy that I actually read in high school. I still have it. Yeah. And it's a testament to how good this book is. By the way, for listeners here, I'm referring to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Dwayne. Absolutely.

It's a book I read in high school, and I still have a copy of it. That's so sick. I love those Cignette classics, too, and you, like, break the back on it. And it's like, I don't know. I also read those in elementary school, and so it's like, Oh, yeah. That form of reading is really nice. Well, I'm connecting with the state of Missouri and its history today because listeners, I'm joined by the author of the recently released, The Veiled Prophet, Secret Society's

White Supremacy and The Struggle for St. Louis, Devin O'Shea, making his second appearance on Chopo, now that the book is in stores. Welcome back to the show, Devin. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Like I said, it's been a while since we first had you on to talk about the veiled prophet. So just for benefit of our listeners, let's just do a little refresher course. Sure. What is the Veiled Profit Society and how did you get onto this story? Like, how did this book start to come together?

When did you get the idea to write about this organization? Yeah, the Veil Profit Society is like a secret men's club that has a mascot that's sort of a Mardi Gras character, who also happens to be a Klansman as the book outlines. and I had sort of first come to it because I was like 2017 and I was doing an MFA looking for a way to do like a Thomas Pynchon-esque novel about St. Louis, even though Jonathan Franzen had already beat me to it. The 27th city is a pension-esque novel about St. Louis. And it has the veiled profit in it. There's like a scene. But I was like, okay, I can definitely do it better.

and my mom had actually tipped me off to like, you should look into this weird parade that used to happen when I was a kid. And so that kind of started me down that path. The veiled provis society, I feel like myself, like most Americans, I first became aware of it when the news broke that the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

was their veiled prophetess. You know, she was in bridesmaids and then it's just like, you see this photo of her. So like, where is the imagery and iconography? of this group come from. Yeah, this definitely is such a, I mean, what's interesting about the Vailed Prophet is that it is like something that is cast in Amber from literally 1878. And so it is like a first wave Klansman basically. It's got like some literary cover to make you think that maybe this is the reference to a Thomas More poem. But as I outline in the book, it was invented by a Confederate cavalry

officer. And when he first appears in the newspaper, he's got a pistol and two rifles and a bowie knife stuck in his belt. And he's coming to St. Louis. And he will not be stopped by any striking trolley workers. Well, yeah. The book begins with the great railroad strike that took place in this country in the 1870s. And I want to get into the history of that because it's fascinating. Yeah. But just like from a broader perspective, secret society. right like yeah they're they're they're they exist throughout history and of course like the the the the obvious interest is there among the public why because they're secret yeah you give you like sort of a a broad history of like groups like the freemasons right sure what like what is like a more

modern i know like they like to date themselves back to the temple of solomon you know but we're not to go back that far but like what exactly for a group like the freemasons which is kind of a template for the veil province society like what is i don't know like what is the like the class and kind of ideological makeup of this sort of particular kind of social construction. Like what needs does it fulfill? Like who joins it? And like what do they actually do? Yeah.

I think that that's so fascinating because you really are like the book is about St. Louis and about secret societies. But it's like a literary study of this character that they make the centerpiece of their thing. And what's so interesting about Freemasonry or the Odd Fellows or the Knights of Columbus is that they are making up a fictional sort of belief system. In the book, I talk about secret societies as they are, you construct like hidden knowledge, right? You have to like form a void and there's like a, there's an organic poll to want to know what they're up to in the meetings. Yeah. The eyes wide shut thing is like you just want to hear. I think what's so effective about

that film is that like you don't get hardly anything about what's going on internal politics wise of those guys, you know. Give up your inquiries. Yeah. It's useless. That is the only memo. And like you, you don't get the, uh, we have to have another fucking meeting because we need some more fucking dues in here, you know.

Well, yeah, like, okay, so they assume for themselves, uh, as part of their sort of heraldry, this, this kind of a, uh, deep historical mythology that they're reaching into some sort of past that they're drawing from. Yeah. They are guardians of some sort of. secret knowledge. But at the same time, like you said, most of these are just kind of boys clubs where, like, the fellas get together and, like, drink and party and get up to no good. Yeah, it's, like, I think most secret societies can be just re-described as sort of a drinking

club with Robert's Rules of Order. Like, the Freemasons actually are really important because basically every club, in my understand, there's, like, the golden age of Freemasonry. That's where the Morgan affair happens, where they, like, supposedly kill a guy. And, and who's about to publish a book about a secret society, not giving anybody any ideas. It's already out there. You can't get me now. But that dissolves basically in the Civil War,

and then you restart a big wave of secret clubs, and they're all modeled on Freemasonry. Yeah, the Free Mason is that, they provide the template for, like, all these other groups, right? Including the clan, yeah. And to construct, like, it's, like, archaic affectations, to say, like, Actually, we discovered something that's 40,000 years old, and we just, like, now have secret

knowledge about it, but it's been around. So, like, that's a major component. And the Vailed Private guys build their tradition. They invent it and then, like, keep it going, riffing on it every year. It's like, the guys who build this tradition, I mean, I think your book is about secret societies. That's kind of like, you know, that's the, that's the pull for the rear here. But really, I think the thing that most impressed me about this book is it is a really fascinating history of one American city.

Yeah. And that city is St. Louis. And what I found so interesting about that is if you look at the history of, you know, any city in America, what you're seeing is like a kind of laid underneath all of it is this cycle of like capitalist boom and bust of economic growth and collapse. Absolutely. So like how does St. Louis fit into that archetype? And who are the people who started the Ville profit and like what, where did they come out of in

St. Louis? And that point is history of the economy and collapse. of St. Louis. Yeah, that's a great question because I think what's so, you know, what's interesting about St. Louis is that it is like too big to ignore and too small to pay attention to. It is like in the blind spot. The gateway to the west. It's the gateway to the west, but the arch is also like a civil rights symbol too in the city. It's got all these contradictions of being, you know, to Southerners, we're Yankees, but to anyone north of us were a bunch of Southerners. You're at the edge of the Midwest. And the big, grand story of St. Louis is that at one time, it was going to be

the biggest city in the U.S. It was going to eclipse New York. They were going to move D.C. to St. Louis. This was in the 1890s. So it turns out that didn't have it. One time, Kingston, New York was the capital of the state. Yeah. And so, like, the big narrative is that everything that was happening in the city is basically over a century old and that it has been in some form of decline since basically the 40s and 50s. But that what's interesting about studying a city like that then is to see how the sort of ruptures and, you know, crises in capital sort of like ripple through St. Louis first sometimes before they get somewhere else like the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah, yeah, and obviously like

Ferguson sort of bookends this story and which is why it's interesting that you open with the great railroad strike of 1877. Could you give us some context for like both like how big the railroad industry was in America post-Civil War and

just like how widespread and how unbelievably violent this strike was and like because you know another thing about the history of American cities is that you can read onto them both the history of growth, of immigration, but also progress. Yeah.

Underneath all that, as well, is a history of counter revolutions or reactions to progress in terms of like, and then this is an American story. You're talking about progress in terms of like the enfranchisement of black people and labor rights. And that's where this kind of story begins. And the rail worker strike of 1877, did you give us some of the context for that? Yeah. I think it's really fascinating because historians have given it the most boring name possible. It's the great railroad strike of 1877.

It's like, oh, where the train's not running on time or something? Yeah, exactly. And in fact, what happened is much more exciting because I think there's a line in against the day in Pinchon where he says that the railroad network of this time is the iron skeleton of the United States. It is like the body and that like the strike starts in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or starts in Pennsylvania, Baltimore, moves west through Ohio. It moves to the skeleton of this country.

Exactly. Through the rail network. Another historian said it was like lightning struck the tracks and went straight west. Yeah. And then it gets to St. Louis and St. Louis is right on the periphery of like everything west of St. Louis is still deadwood country. Yeah. You know, it's just like, it's still the frontier.

And so at the very fringe in St. Louis, there's a general strike. It expands from just railway workers to everybody, marching in the streets, a bunch of workers with like coupling pins and like sort of a, a non-violent strike, but still bringing the armaments of their trade along with that. Like a sledgehammer, rail ties. Just in case.

Yeah. Okay. So what were they actually striking over? Because like the railroad's like, like the railroads were like the rail barons were like the richest people in America, the people who own the railroads. And this was like, you know, kind of like almost like the Silicon Valley of that area. If not even bigger. If not even bigger.

It was a huge, unbelievable sort of untrammeled wealth that was unimaginable. Yeah. What was like, what was the issue that was being that the workers were organizing and striking over? Yeah. I mean, this comes after the long depression, which is like, it was called the Great Depression at the time. And then we had an even worse one. So we had to rename. But this was right after the Civil War, right?

Another crisis of sort of boom and bust. and what economic collapse. And actually what's interesting about this strike is that this is a nationwide strike and the National Guard gets called in all different directions which makes it a more effective strike. And that it also signals the end of reconstruction because they literally move troops out of the south

to northern cities to put down the strike. So it's like the end of reconstruction, the beginning of labor struggle. And then St. Louis is specifically interesting for robber barons like Jay Gould. because, you know, it's hard to construct a big bridge over the Mississippi River at this time. And that just forms an incredible bottleneck for capital. And so if you can control that bridge to the west, you control all of the train traffic,

all of the goods going back and forth. And that's a powerful note. I mean, in your book, I mean, like, you talk about how, like, in the press of the day, you basically had this strike was thought of in apocalyptic terms by the elites of the day. They've freaked out. And how, you know, people, you know, giving voice publicly to the idea that all of these strikers should be killed. Yeah.

Like, by the military. And the strike was put down by former Civil War generals. Yes. A, uh, a, uh, a multi, uh, opinionated coalition of both union and, are, the city leaders appointed a union and a Confederate general to help put down the strike in sort of like shaking hands. So like, well, time to get to work. And it's really fascinating because they're like, the strike is being provoked by outside immigrants from red Europe. And they're over here stirring things up.

In fact, it was a totally organic strike. And it comes from the fact that everyone was completely emiserated and, you know, work in St. Louis. The other thing that was happening is that wages were not just flat, they were going down. There were wage cuts more and more and more. and you just needed a ton of bodies to actually operate like this mechanical form of capital, especially for railroad stuff. And in St. Louis in particular, like, how violently was this strike suppressed? Yeah.

And elsewhere, it was actually more violently. Like, there was a whole thing, I think, in Baltimore where it was just like the National Guard shot a bunch of guys and they got hurted into a roundhouse and then the workers set the roundhouse on fire in St. Louis. the strike is incredibly successful because the workers do not set fire to anything. They conceive of the city as their property and they clog the streets with parades. And then the strike committee gets a little wary. And the strike peters out and the National Guard assembles along with a bunch of deputized guys.

And then they eventually come to this crisis point where the strikers can either take the arsenal downtown and arm every. one or the whole thing peters out and the executive committee bulked and then the uh you know police forces charge into schoolyers hall and everybody has to run for their life and luckily you could just escape out west so you're just like okay well see a civilization okay so like this this is a story people might be familiar with the suppression of radical labor movements in america often by you know armed or military force yeah how does the veil profit come into this because i think interesting thing is like you have this nationwide display of worker power against the like the owners of the railroads and the banks owners of capital how does the veil profit and their parades

are another very interesting part of this book i want to talk about but like how does how does this formation of this kind of secret society and its iconography and the people involved in it like how how how is that created as kind of a cultural or sort of i don't know symbolic response to nascentia sent worker power in this country. Yeah, I mean, like you said, it would, the general strike for the year afterwards really freaked out the city

fathers. A bunch of them, like, left town. They were afraid that the workers were going to turn off water to their mansions and they, like, were going to make, you know, their servants go and fetch water from the bathtub for them. And in the newspapers, you can see them getting more and more paranoid.

And so, Alonzo Sleback, ex-Confederate cavalry officer and sort of democratic mob boss, a Bill the Butcher figure for sure. Now you taste my mutton. How do you like it, huh? Comes up with the idea that we have to have a parade, basically, in the summer, to commemorate our victory over the workers. And so on the first parade float that the Vail-D Prophet appears on, it's him. We know that it is the Chief of Police, who's plays the Vailed Prophet that year, John Priest's.

And he is with a executioner on top of that float and then between them is a bloody butcher's block. And so there's a very clear message being sent to the working class that like this is basically a Klansman. This is the monopoly on violence being deployed against you.

And obviously that's directed at workers. But also like there is their victory over the strike. But this is just a mere decade or so after their defeat in a civil war so there's a

there's a much larger defeat that loom and fear that looms over all of this and that is the abolition of slavery and the victory of the Union in the Civil War absolutely yeah because another thing that the general strike in St. Louis is truly unique because it

was a multiracial strike the roused about labor in St. Louis is where you have to haul things on and off steam ship and it was the first profession to be abandoned by whites and African Americans, many ex-slaves, did that job. And so the strike is like this multiracial coalition and especially where, you know, this is a,

I think Matt has talked about this a lot of just like trying to take the plantation system and then apply it to the factory system and how like it just doesn't work that way. And also there's a, There's an Eric Hobswain thing about how cities of this time are built to be almost like preternaturally disposed to getting a rabble together because there's no cars, right? There's no like, so you can literally walk out your door and go a few blocks down and suddenly join a giant mob of people. Everybody has to be pretty close together.

You know, I think about that because St. Louis is an example of a city that people use all the time where they show, where you show like photographs of what it looked like. like in 1900. Yeah. Versus now. And basically like an urban area that like was at the home to probably like 30,000 people is currently like a parking lot. Yeah. And like the ways in which cars and roads were used to kind of create literal physical

barricades against such the kind of general labor action or strikes or rabble that you're talking about. Exactly. That exists in pedestrian friendly cities. Yeah. I mean, it really is. This is the biggest problem with St. Louis today is that the interstate system totally carves up the entire city. It's also a city that is

meant to be huddled around that bend in the Mississippi River where the steamships come off of, and that hasn't been important economically for 120 years or whatever. And that, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff also in the book about this, you know, urban renewal, basically the getting, evicting Mill Creek, which was this gigantic middle class to lower middle class African American neighborhood pushing and redlining all African Americans in St. Louis up north into North St. Louis just in time for deindustrialization in the 60s and 70s.

There's sort of like, there's an ongoing point in the book that the Vailed Profit Society is like designing the city to be very, very segregated to have these big barriers. The Delmar divide is another big one. I want to talk about parades. I'm thinking about parades, like, and both like, you talk about, like, how, the importance of them to American society in the early chapters of your book. And in particular, you use a word here, though I hadn't encountered before, but I really liked it.

You refer to, like, the clan, and parades is a kind of psychological defense mechanism. Or the defeated is a way to kind of peacefully, but wink, wink, not so peacefully, sort of symbolically assert their power. And you refer to the Clinton as a Sherivari, which is a type of theatrical mob morality that is drawn from Europe. And, because you just like expand on that idea. Because I remember when I was in Belfast, I saw a version of this. Oh, really? Because they were getting ready for their, their

color days. Oh, yeah. Their parade days in Belfast, which are very much about, like, physically marking out the borders between Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. Oh, shit. The orange, they have these big bonfires. And they have these big bonfires. so they burn in effigy, you know, Jerry Adams or Irish Republicanism. But it's about like showing the color. And you march through and past the Catholic churches and Catholic neighborhoods. So it's about like marking up the borders of your territory, but also going to the opposing camp and saying, hey, just remind you, you know, here's our marching band.

Right. This is how strong we are. And if we need it to mobilize, we could do it. Yeah, exactly. So, like, how does that figure into the narrative that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, I think that is really fascinating. It's also called, what is it, a skimmington in England. Shrevery is this ancient medieval tradition where it's just like French for loud music.

So if you had a problem with somebody in the village, or maybe they were of the wrong religion or marrying the wrong kind of person, or they were stealing stuff from you, you have caught the ire of the community. and instead of like doing a usual filing a police report with the medieval sheriff, you just get a bunch of guys together and like hit a bunch of pots and pants. This is an anarchist criminal justice model. Exactly. But also you like put on a costume and you sort of do this fun little march to their house

and then maybe you hang them an effigy, like make a little doll of them. Or maybe you drag them out of their house and like beat them up or something like that. And that sort of gets carried forward by the clan, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War, where the rule of plantation violence has to be reasserted. And so there's like this dynamic of always rounding up a posse of guys to go and get rid of somebody who wants to enfranchise African Americans in the county. Whoever is the Republicans or the good guys at this time, whoever is trying to rally votes for the Republican Party. and that like do you have to put on a character costume? And so a lot of these early clansmen would pretend to be men from the moon or they would be the ghosts of Shiloh back from the dead.

Another interesting thing is you talk about like these sort of two eras of the clan in American history. And the interesting thing is like the era right after the Civil War. Yeah. That's very different than what we imagine the clan now is with the white hoods and the sort of the symbolism. and like, could you, what accounts for, like, those two eras of the clan that you talk about in this book? It's like, in the evolution and sort of, I don't know, mainstreaming of this kind of secret society.

Yeah, I think that's what's most interesting about the Veiled Prophet as, like, a literary character, because you are, like, getting an insight into the psychology of these guys that invent him, and the same way with, like, the clan. I just think about that because, like, of what we think of, like, the iconic Klansman figure, like the hooded KKK guy.

All those guys, like, they invented that in the 20th century after seeing the movie Birth of a Nation about the original guys. Exactly. Yeah. In fact, what's so weird about that is that the first wave and the second wave are totally different. Like the first wave is dabbling in a little bit of Satanism or having like a black mass or they're like demons. They're sort of like, or going back to Greek mythology. And then the second wave is much more focused on Christianity. They're very bigoted against Catholics and anti-Semitic. The first wave is very much about plantation violence and about just a purely racialized terrorist campaign that also like spreads through the newspapers as like a meme, basically.

So you hear about clan violence and then you can go recreate it. Birth of a Nation plays much more of a role in the second one. Speaking of planned terror campaigns, can you talk about the characters of Alonzo and Charles Slayback? Yeah. That's a real Dickensian name for these scholars. Yeah. Alonzo Slavek. Who is he, and how does he come into your story?

Alonzo is like the founding father of the Vailed Prophet Society. He's a true, like, he is a guy who fights every day for the like continuation and the prosperity of the slave plantation system. He's born in Missouri. He goes to bleeding Kansas and is like stockpiling arms and doing raids into, Kansas against free soilers. He joins the cavalry. He's very poetic.

He loves to write poetry and be engaged with like chivalry and like English chivalry. He had a group of like Lancers that called them. The Swayback Lancers. Yeah, the Swayback Lenters and they were obsessed with chivalry.

Yes, medieval chivalric clothes and honor. Which is like, yeah, you have to be brave enough to get on a horse and charge into like buckshot. So you do have to have to have like a really good like idea of what you're doing. And he was by all accounts like totally insane in that way. But then he was also, I don't know, he's a man of many shades because then he was also falling ill all the time and had to be nursed back to health by his wife. He has a brief

after the war ends. He ends up in Mexico trying to found another slave colony called the New Virginia colony that eventually fails as the Emperor Maximilian is on the way out. He has to come back to St. Louis. They just let him right back into being a lawyer. And then he becomes, he's like a political, gregarious, big personality. And then his brother Charles has worked his way up the financial ladder in New Orleans. The Long Depression hits. Charles comes up to St. Louis.

And now you've got Democratic mob boss and financial power starting the Vailed Profit Society with a bunch of barge barons and agricultural sort of, um yeah barons so outside the parades and the pageantry and the costumes and the fun like that what are these guys up to like i mean you mentioned a few of them like who are they and what are they actually doing it's like they're drawn from like you said the city fathers the the barren class of st louis but like what do they do you and like you described it as sort of uh stagnate with robert's rules of orders like what are they up to yeah i mean at first it's like that really crazy parade where there's like a executioner.

And then they all decide that we got to like back away from that. That's like a little too intense for everybody. And so they have to, they sort of cast around for like, now we're going to do sort of a fairy fete. We're going to all dress as fairies,

but we're men and we're like the biggest wholesaler in town. And so they're trying to be more fun and more Midsummer's Night Dream with it. But eventually, it also becomes very much about the debutante ball. And so there's like a dance after the first parade, but that then eventually morphs into not just having a bell of the ball, but crowning a queen of love and beauty,

which is really strange because when the queen is crowned, it is not anything to do with her necessarily. It's to do with what her father did for St. Louis that year. Okay. And so they're honoring each other. and then they're putting a crown on one of the daughters. And so the Debbie Tampal is this weird, you know, pretty Victorian way also of keeping a bunch of bloodlines intermarrying

and stuff like that. But also like you mentioned the first parade being one that's literally like a mock execution of like a striking worker carried out by like the mass head of the police department. Yeah. And then they're like, well, you know, okay, we've established that symbolically. Sure. But we need to grow and we need to offer something a little bit more optimistic. Sure.

Towards the public. And something for the ladies. It's something for the ladies as well. And like in the inclusion of like the daughter of the year, is it like, is it something to do with like, I don't know, not just having something for the ladies, but like representing, I don't know, youth or vitality and kind of, I don't know, like the future as a way of passing on this lineage, like you said, keeping the bloodlines and the money sort of, you know, like. out in the right hands. Yeah. I mean, I think it very much is about that.

And like, you know, putting your daughter into, I mean, it is very crassly using your daughter as like a business decision to like assure up ties

and a very game of thrones kind of way. Into like, yeah, to link yourself to somebody else who you think is like on the up and up.

Um, but then it's also, I think it is a patriarchal thing too to be able to like I can control who gets to be like the most I mean becoming the queen then becomes like you're kind of a celebrity automatically and like you appear. Well you get to be in bridesmen. Yeah exactly. You get to you get invited to like ribbon cuttings and like to visit the hospital sick children and stuff like that. And so it's like you have the power to create celebrity at the same time. And I think that's like I talk about secrets. societies as prestige economies and that like if there's more people with more prestige in the secret society then it like is totally in the black it's like a brokerage for prestige and so you get to like distribute it out to whoever you want including the guy who gets to play the veiled profit that year who then is like infallible is sort of the deal is if you get to be

the infallible VP for the year. I don't really know how. They didn't share a lot of their internal documentation with me, so I don't know how that worked exactly. So you get the, the Slaback brothers who sort of moderate the Prophet's image. But like, they also like are strongly

anti-ab abolitionists, obviously coming at that, but also like there was a great deal of German immigration to Missouri. Oh, yeah. In the 19th century. And the German population were anti-slavery. So what was the Vild's profits reaction to Germans?

Yeah, big problem. Huge problem. The Germans are really fascinating. Again, Matt did a great war nerd episode about the history of Germans and the Civil War. And, yeah. In St. Louis specifically, there's just a ton of 48ers to end up settling after the 1848 revolutions fail. And that was when Europe is sort of convulsing out of the medieval age into the capitalist age. and the proletariat or the bourgeois is going to take over,

and that's sort of the first wave of socialism. This is Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, like, contemporary with them. All these 48ers end up in St. Louis. They live in a district that is right next to the slave auction blocks in St. Louis, and they, like, have to witness the, like, disgusting, just, like, display day in and day out. and they see plantation owners as the same problem as monarchs, kings, people who can own other people. Well, I mean, like, and the people who love that shit, they self-consciously stalled themselves after a fashion of medieval feudalism. Yeah, it's no mistake that the Vailte Prophet is the monarch of Corosan, that he comes to St. Louis on a flying carpet and he's the king of Corrassan, where slavery is still legal.

And that's the Star Wars planet, right? Yeah, exactly. It's the one that's just a big city. It's the sand palace. You'll notice that slavery does exist in the Star Wars universe as well. At Jabba the Hutz Palace, you know it is. Those guys aren't free in there. No way.

So that's St. Louis as it emerges out of the Civil War and like, you know, starts growing as a city. But like it really takes off how does St. Louis expand and how does this story of St. Louis change and how does the story of the Villed Prophet change in the 20th century? as like a huge industrial boom grows the population of the city and its wealth and like becomes like a boomed down. Yeah, I mean, there's a very scary point in writing and researching the book where I realized how big the military industrial complex in the city is and that you can track sort of like there's the Olin and munition plant, right? And they're making bullets for people who are going out west and then there's shappley rifles. and those are being produced to like, you know, settle the frontier.

And then the Spanish-American war hits, and that kind of gets a little bigger. And then World War I hits, and that gets, like, way, way bigger. That World War II, by World War II, there's a guy named Bixby in St. Louis, who just becomes one of the richest guys in the country. By the end of World War II, there's a line about how every piece of armor in the U.S. military, like, has a Bixby, like, was from Bixby. basically. He was making train cars before that and just shifted it over to tanks and weaponry and stuff. And so there's a through line in the book in the 20th century around how, you know,

the Vailed Profit gets really popular at first. It sort of dyes down. There's these different parallel shadow governments in St. Louis, the big cinch. Yeah, yeah, I want to talk about the the big cinch. Who another group of elites of the cool name? Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is actually kind of like a hidden lesson to the book. If you want to wield power in America both covertly and also overtly, you need a cool name and you need like cool symbolism and heraldry. I don't think I'm being immodest when I say that joining the Christmas Adventurers Club means that you are a superior man. Right. Yeah. The big sense is perfect. It's good branding. Yeah. And it was, that was coined by William Reedy, who was like a literary editor because he was basically saying

like everyone in this town knows that everything here is rigged. Like all outsiders are being shut out of all the industry. It's only five guys basically who are making all the big decisions and they all meet at the Noonday Club together and they're the Big Sinch. And he was basically right. The Big Sinch basically gets the World's Fair done and they're sort of crossover between the Sinch and the Vailed Profits. It's just like this is prime.

robber baron hours. The only way to get anything done is just to get all of these guys with all of the capital to want to do it. And so you move out of the big cinch era and then the veiled prophets get super popular because Debbie Tompals come back in the 40s

as like an in vogue thing. And so by the 50s you just get into this like the apex of the queenship being on television and like people watching in taverns as like this big glittery ball and procession is put on with a bunch of like people in costumes.

There's a real fucked up era of wearing rubber masks with like that are, I don't know, styled as different characters. There's like Uncle Tom. Like there's a lot of blackface happening too. You might be surprised to find out. Yeah, you will eventually, you will need to do that too. Sure. In any secret society in America, at some point you're going to have to put the shoe box.

on. It's Mardi Gras. It's about role reversals. Yeah. And that's the ultimate one. Yeah. And so like the, it really culminates or gets huge and then it all builds up into the 1972 unveiling the big crescendo.

Well, as soon as you mentioned Mardi Gras in this kind of, you know, like the wearing of costumes of these kind of symbolic role reversals or like the Roman Saturnalia. Yeah. Where the emperor would like appear as a commoner. Yes.

You know, and then the commoner would put on, the purple robe of, the imperial. The Ville Prophet thing to me seems to be like, it's all that, but there's no reversal. Yes. It's just like, it's the people who rule you. And then they're like, we're dressing with funny costumes. We still rule you. You don't get a costume. Yeah. What if we took Montegro and sort of stop the role reversal and we just kind of, yeah, put on a goofy little hat. Yeah, I think that that is where there is like room to change how we do things in

St. Louis is to bring back the actual Mardi Gras sensation. Because like you say, there is a real, you know, the medieval ages, when Mardi Gras happening, it's because of the church and the state are so oppressive that there needs to be this giant party to just let everybody

fart and eat and fuck. Freemasonry grow out of like, people need to just do something with how fucking boring Protestantism was. Yeah. It was a big theme. It was like so stilted. They needed like some place to go to

fucking, you know. Exactly. The church is like losing the stained glass and the nice, like, music and it's just becoming more and more sterile. And they're like, what if we worshipped, like, uh, science, but it's God and lights and we do it in private? I think it is about having fun. And that like the veiled profit ball, like you say, is just like the ultimate irony of, uh, the commoners don't get to have fun. We're going to have all the fun for you. And we still expect you to feel libidinally satisfied. Right. through our, our,

you know, joy and depravity and, you know, and decadence, yeah. I think that hits right now.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially with the Peter Teal's Secret Society. Oh, yeah, I was going to get to that. Yeah.

Secret societies in the modern world. But as the book goes on, I mean, obviously, like, you go through chapter after chapter, it's like, here's another race riot

where a few hundred people are killed. Like, you know, and I go back to this idea about, about parades and particularly, like, in a post-reconstruction,

well, reconstruction was defeated, conclusively by removing troops to suppress workers else around the country which is amazing but like post civil war

and then eventually post civil rights movement when you see like today there's something about like how the culture of white supremacy in this country or the culture and ideology of like the white man's role

and the violent suppression of any challenge to that it finds this manifestation in these like not you know, pun intended, has to be veiled in some way. So it has to be like, and it appear in the guise of something else. And like, how do you see that in the veil prophet society? You're like this whole story.

Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's built into it that it has to slip through with some version of cover. So there has to be this poem that sort of covers things up because the grant administration made covering your face on the highways illegal because they were trying to crack down on the clan. They rounded up and imprisoned. and find the clan out of existence. So it had to be federally suppressed. And so the Vailed Prophet is perfect

and obviously comes from, there's all of this evidence about why he's a Klansman, but it's like, well, we can get through if we call it a little bit of theater and we have a little dress-up instead of being a perfect clansman or a bunch of guys in Klan's robes roaming around. I think it's because it's,

wildly unpopular that you have to do that. It is truly a minority position that really thinks that whiteness is supreme and that there's no room for other cultures or understandings of other people and that I think this is always endemic in reactionary right wing. Yeah, but it can't be too veiled, right? Yeah. Because like you want a little bit, you just want like enough of the wink that you, those in the know are all getting in the joke, but it can't be too discreet because you're, you just

you want everyone else to have that plausible deniability, but still just be like if you call someone out and you'd be like, oh no, we're just, this guy's dressed like Santa Claus. This isn't a clan. It's funny. They're all wearing sort of Hawaiian shirts now.

Or like, if it's too subtle, maybe Kyle Riddenhouse doesn't know exactly what to do at the right time. Because I think it is a, yeah, it is stoking a fire a little bit, a little bit at a time. Because if it gets too big,

I, yeah, I think this has been well said elsewhere, but it's just a wildly minority opinion. It has to be like propped up and encouraged. Like, I don't know. I just think about how Elon Musk controlling so much of the internet discourse or just the media consolidation is like, yeah, that's the only reason that these ideas can proliferate and become so ensconced in young men especially is like, yeah, the whole game is rigged. the whole thing is like it's rigged to do this subtle dog whistling thing

to channel people down that Nick Flantes road. But like if you are young man, like you're being, you know, if you're circling that particular fucking drain. Yeah. Like what's at the bottom of the sewer has to be something that seems a little fun, right? Sure.

It has to be like, like you said, having fun with the boys. Right? You know? Having some beers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Putting on a silly costume. And having a big, yeah,

I do think that that is, a really important people need to feel like they're joining a movement that is a party and that we're going to have fun while we do this thing. I mean, I think that it gets well represented even in what's the Edward Norton movie about being a Nazi? American History X. Yes. Like, they're having big parties every time you see all the white supremacists. Yeah, they have their own bands and, you know. All bands. They're drinking beer in the backyard, shooting guns in the air. Like, that is a big appeal. And I think that's also how fraternities work too. It's just like the fraternity gets to tell you whatever they want at the ideological level

because what they're promising is like you're going to live in a house that has basically a bar in it where all the girls have to come through the house to get drunk. So like that's the deal basically. But like but I think fraternities are a good example because yeah, everyone has fun. Then you graduate college and the social networks are still there. Yeah. You know, everyone's like, you know, everyone's dad gets some of fun. fucking job, you know.

Exactly. Get you a job. So the ideology persists, like, even if you're not aware of it. It transmutes itself through the pageantry, through the fun, even if you're so effectively because you might not even be aware of it. Yeah. And I think what's also important, like, is that the failed profits also, you have to pledge and then you have to get basically hazed or you have to jump through a bunch of hoops and

then you get initiated and then you become a member. and that like little pipeline is a intensely effective tool for binding people together. Like it will, I think it gets underestimated because it seems frivolous or something like that. But that does create almost like by design. Because you try to raise an alarm about how fucking weird and creepy this all is. They're like, just look, it's silly. It's just like, it's an idea of great. You don't want to get blackballed from here.

Yeah. You're like, we'll just pretend we don't know you and you'll ruin your life if you try leave or raise a flag about it. I think that is like, yeah, a big part of, I don't know, male friendship is a really difficult thing to be like earnest about and it is

true that like a lot of these guys get into these clubs in these secret societies mostly because they just want you know, 15 dudes they can go and hang out with whenever they want. So sort of like to jump ahead in history and to get this story like post-World War II in the 20th century. First of, wow, could you talk about, you've talked about how St. Louis is like, you had a sort of like a slightly chilling moment to realize just how much the city of St. Louis is involved in the military industrial complex and the arms industry of this country.

But I figure out I want to talk about that comes up in your book is Clark Clifford, who served in the Lyndon Johnson administration. Oh, yeah. Because you talk about like how he fits into this story. Yeah, Clark Clifford is like, this book is packed with guys. There's a lot of different guys. And Clark Clifford, I think, is one of the most interesting because he is the veiled profit man who gets in the door to D.C. through the Harry Truman administration, a Missouri machine politician. From Kansas City, the pender gas machine.

He gets in. And then Clark Clifford becomes immensely powerful because he controls Truman's poker games on Friday night. nights. And so he gets to say who gets to sit at the table and who gets in and who's out. And he translates basically being in the Truman administration where, I don't know, this is just a weird accident of history. Truman immediately crushes another railroad strike and like destroys a coal miner strike. And Clark Clifford is like famously the guy who's like, you got to get really hard on these guys. You got to not give an inch in this post, you know, World War II era where it's like, well, we were allied with the USSR to destroy Nazism,

and it's like, well, we could become a little bit more like the USSR, maybe. No. We're going to become a little bit more like the other one. Yeah. We're going to go the other way and consume a bunch of those guys and actually put some of them in NASA. And Clark Clifford were very good friends with. I have a friend of Bron. Favorite guy.

Yeah. Another guy, another great guy that comes up in this book. Clark Kifford also, huge advocate for the establishment for the establishment. of Israel. He like is, which is bizarre also that just like who, uh, basically greenlights the establishment of Israel. It's a bunch of guys from Missouri. Yeah. Yeah. Like, we're not sending our best. And believe me, like, I talk about parades again. I was, of course, reading your book, I was thinking about the Israel Day parades. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, there's another example of like, kind of the symbolic demonstration and power. And if you're like, uh, this, who's in the parade,

who's out? This sickness me that this fucking, like, these, war criminals are walking the streets of New York free and unmolested by the law or anyone else. They're just like, oh, that's not about them. There's a parade for Jewish people. And if you don't like that, you don't like Jewish people. Wow, that's a lot. May I should be going to all for a race.

Right, yeah. It is a powerful way of saying who's in, who's out, who supports this, and like who literally has control over the streets in a really strange way. But yeah, Clark Clifford then sticks around through like seven presidencies. He is, he basically invents lobbying and, like, is a big antitrust law guy.

He ends up, he does, like, real estate deals for JFK. And, like, he's the advisor to presidents. He's a guy that gets a lot of credit for telling Nixon, the Vietnam's a bad idea after basically starting the war. After starting it. After being, like, we could totally win this. So this would be so easy. Played by Donald Sutherland in the very great John Frankenheimer made for TV

movie The Path to War. Oh, beautiful. Yeah. That's the thing about Clark Clifford, perfectly quaffed hair. Yes, exactly. And very tall. And everybody remarks. He was a Villed Prophet. Oh, yeah. It was probably like, I don't know if he ever played the role, but there's a, when he gets into the Truman White House, it's just like, he is the guest of honor of the vet. He gets to like take the Queen of Love and Beauty up the aisle. Everybody's so proud of him. And he gets bankrolled by another guy in the Vailed Profit Society. And then he gets into a whole thing with Lin, in Johnson about like pulling out of it. He pretends that it was his idea at the pull out and that he's taking a big stand against, you know, this clearly idiotic war. I mean, yeah, a guy with a uniquely maligned influence

on American history and then it's just fun to find out that one of these names, you know, oh, they were the veiled prophet. Yeah. Now, to move to slightly to another Missouri and I, you know, I don't want to give a bad impression on Missouri because I opened up this interview talking about my favorite Missouri. Mark Twain. Mark Twain. One of the

greatest Americans of all time. For sure. But another Missouri, James Earl Ray, and I bring this up. Yeah. Because I did not know this. I'm quoting here. In 1978, the Vailed Prophet was brought front and center before the House Select Committee on Assassinations for the alleged actions that was one of its men who was very active in the 1960s. John Sutherland, a member of the Vailed Prophet, Provin Society, and a supporter of George Wallace. They were questioned in connection to what was called a player in the conspiracy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

That's right. So, I mean, this could be its whole episode. But like, yeah. In terms of like what, what you have, I don't know, researched into the assassination of Martin Luther King, what role if the, if any, did the Ville Prophet play? And what do you make of the whole? Because like, to me, this is a, this is an assassination that has as many sort of jaw dropping, are you really, is that for real? Yeah. As a Kennedy assassination does.

But it's one that's very much, like, forgotten about. I mean, not the assassination, but the idea that there is a conspiracy. behind it. Yeah. So how, how did the Vail profit get dragged before the

committee on assassinations in 1978? Yeah. There's, there's a guy in St. Louis,

who I say is like the reincarnation of Alonzo Slayback. He is John Sutherland. He is a lawyer. He is from the

South. And he is basically in charge of the white citizens councils in St. Louis. These were counter

civil rights organizations, as it, as maybe the title suggests, white supremacist, pro George Wallace. And John Sutherland is a big, veiled profit guy. He's in a bunch of different clubs. He's just like the biggest racist in town for a long time. And then there is a witness who goes before the House Select Committee who says, I was told to go out to John Sutherland's house in Sykeston, and John came to the door, and he was wearing a Confederate gray hat. And he invited me into his living room that had Confederate memorabilia all over the walls. And he said, I'll give you like $70,000 to kill Martin Luther King Jr.

And this witness was like, no way, I'm out of here. I won't even consider that amount of money. But then later, there's all this like stuff about it, James Earl Ray is in a Missouri penitentiary. He escapes from that and goes back to St. Louis to the Grapevine Tavern, which is owned by his brother. Also a big George Wallace hub there. And then he lights out for Canada, comes around back.

He's all over the place. He gets plastic surgery. It is like, the Ray's story is like totally insane and all over the place. And there's a bunch of books. William Pepper, I think, is the lawyer who wrote about. how, who wrote a really good one about the King assassination. But eventually, you know, the House Select Committee is not sure, basically, at the end of their conclusions. Although we are going to get more files next year about this, supposedly. But there's the St. Louis plot that would like,

factors in pretty heavily that just says, John probably busted James Earl Ray out of prison, met him at the grapevine, gave him the money, or at least proposed it to him, and then set him on this path after King. The problem that I've always run into, and that lots of scholars run into, is that that proposition was being done by a lot of different people all over the price. There's like an Atlanta conspiracy of businessmen who are doing the same thing in Atlanta prisons. There's a whole thing about the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi as being basically guns for hire. and then the pepper theory is that there is a team of snipers from the U.S. military who are dispatched to Memphis and they are who do it and that Ray is just like a fall guy. Yeah.

Who knows? Well, a lot of question marks there. Yeah. I never subject to the same speculation or narrativeization as JFK or his brother. Yeah. So, okay, getting closer to the present day. Like we have like, I said like these repeated cycles of boom and bust in the city of St. Louis of like an economy growing and then collapsing deindustrialization happening. You know, changes in infrastructure, waves of immigration, but like underneath it all, there's still a repeated story about racist violence, like racist policing, explosion, counter reactions to that and like these explosions of violence that occur.

And I said that your book is sort of is bookended with Ferguson. And I want to like, because you give our listeners some context into St. Louis history and why, why Ferguson became such a flashpoint, why it does still loom so large in the minds of both kind of like racist and in the racist imagination of America. Yeah. I mean, it is like, again, I think that's like a prime example of one of the fractural, I mean, there's fracture lines through St. Louis in the 30s and in the 60s. and in similar economic conditions, you get Ferguson.

There's a really good book that I cite in their Phil Neal's hinterland, which is basically arguing that like the civil unrest of our era will come from the suburbs, because that's where the, like, that's where the slip. Jay G. Ballard wrote many novels with that thing as well. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, man. If it's not going to be full of, yeah, appliances are like graveyards.

of appliances and stuff like that. Yeah, and that like Ferguson is... Well, Ferguson is a former sundown town. I totally forgotten that as well. Yeah. And I mean, it's because also St. Louis sort of grew off of the river westward and sprawled and then became this big constellation of counties and municipalities in order to hoard wealth into certain white walls.

But also, but in Ferguson especially, was a former sundown town in which the surrounding counties were basically funding a tax base through enforcement of things like traffic violations in Ferguson. So it was like a secondary form of taxation on the people of Ferguson imposed on them via the police through like the surrounding white suburban counties and districts. Which is like the ultimate I think like tragedy of Ferguson is that all of this national attention arrived at St. Louis and starts looking around and they immediately see that this municipality, as you're saying, is a machine for extracting money from poor people. It's like an emisseration machine. But it also happens to be home to Emerson Electric, a giant billion dollar Fortune 500 company that has their

campus out there. And so it's a bunch of impoverished people who are being just like ground down for jaywalking and for getting a parking ticket at a, you know, for running. a stop sign or something like that. And then there's this like extract, it's like almost a perfect encapsulation of neoliberalism. Walter Johnson wrote a very good essay about this called Ferguson's Fortune 500s. And that, yeah, that Michael Brown then becomes, you know,

the last straw for people everywhere and becomes such as like metaphor for the rest of the country. Like St. Louis throws off these metaphors, I feel like pretty frequently because then you have also the counter metaphor of like the McCloskey's pointing guns at Black Ice Matter protesters. They're sort of like

the symbolic infrastructure there just keeps... The joining of the continent of the sort of the continental shelves of the American imagination is sort of coming out of St. Louis. Yeah, they're like grinding against each other there. And the Vailed Prophet is like

sort of the uniting thing that's happening in the background of like, well, how did this municipality become this way. And it's like, well, if you look at the history of St. Louis, it's always been sort of controlled by this group of business elites. And it's always been trying to cook up this hyper-extractive form in all of these counties. Because the opposite is true in Lodoo, which is not very far from Ferguson, where all of the wealth in Missouri basically relies, resides. So the present day, like, in present-day St. Louis, for the present-day veiled profit society, like,

What are they up to you today? I'm like, have you, have they given any comment or reaction to the release of your book? They have not commented. They have not responded to my inquiries. Very surprising. They gave me the eyes wide shut card. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That was something portentious. That was embossed. That was on some nice, like, business card, you know?

Yeah. Come on. I'm worth it. Um, the, uh, wouldn't you know it? Two years ago, they said, hey, we heard, we've heard the outcry. And, uh, actually, actually, we got rid of the veiled profit right so now the group is called VP St. Louis and by the way VP doesn't stand for anything it's just letters okay okay okay and then the second part is that we

got rid of the guy so don't worry about that and then we waited a little bit for the ball to happen and then a bunch of photographs come out first of all bengal lancers in blackface and then there's a character on stage and he looks a lot like the veiled prophet but no that's the grand oracle stands for a vagina pussy by the way uh i mean like you have a line in the um sort of the epilogue to the book that i thought was fascinating and you write here that the largest threat to the contemporary veiled profit society is the fact that individual billionaires are powerful all on their own they don't need the coordinated influence of a group anymore. Yeah.

That's really true in St. Louis and I think everywhere else. It's just in St. Louis, there's a crazy libertarian billionaire named Rex Singfeld who's obsessed with chess. So he made St. Louis, he spent millions and millions of dollars making St. Louis is the chess capital of the world

or of the United States. He changed all the sidewalks to white and black squares. He would do that. Don't give him that idea. He would do that. There's like random chess boards everywhere. I can be a corporate and billionaire and money. But he's doing this chess move. And then on the other side, he's like funding the most just corrosive politics.

So it wants to bankrupt and destroy the public sector in the state. There's the Cargill lady. I forgot what her name is. But she's the inheritor of Cargill has a big stake in Cargill, which is a company that delivers grains from the field to the grocery store and owns basically the entire network of that agro system in the Midwest. And she's infinitely wealthy. Then you got David Stewart, who's an African-American CEO who's obsessed with Christianity, who sends prayers sometimes to his programmers, and he's in charge of worldwide technology. And then he also have, like, Bob Clark who's a cement baron who gave the mayor. When she was running for mayor, he gave her $100,000

and now suddenly a bunch of Bob Clark's data centers are being very greenlit put up, considered, talked about in this way, we're going to do it kind of differently and better here. Basically any individual, anyone with enough money and power, enough money and with the attendant power that comes with it, can sort of start for themselves their own secret societies now, which makes us to them the recent story about Peter Thiel's

like the Discourse Collective, for whatever it's called. And like, look, because it's Silicon, Valley because of our current, you know, the impoverished imagination of our current culture. Right. There's no cool code words or anything like that. This is just like another TED, a super exclusive TED talk. Yes. For like the top 50 business and like op-ed columnist or just Peter Kiel's friends.

But like despite the fact that it lacks the the pageantry, you know, the sort of the the mythology, the symbolism of your any of the fun. Any of the fun. Yeah. Yeah. Like, no. But it does strike me of that essentially like the same problem. and still persist for these people.

Yeah. Which is that they have all over money, they know it, and they want more of it for themselves to the expense of everyone else. But deeper than that, for guys like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel in particular, as you said, the idea that there's one master race or that there's one race that's superior in terms of value or IQ to everyone else. Yeah. Or the idea that universal suffrage is a bad thing and not to be desired is a very,

is a very small minority of opinion still in this country. Oh, yeah. So there is still this need to kind of create these kind of, I don't know, like subterranean or kind of, I don't know, countercultures to a mainstream of American life that still believes like, you know, in democracy and civil and equal rights for everyone. Sure. You need a dark enlightenment movement in order to make it seem, you know,

cool. That's a great example of that, of this same bullshit. It was like the enlightenment, but it's dark. But it's dark and kind of edgy. And yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, I think it also fits the mold of just like these people want to be able to hang out with each other and feel like they're in an in group and that they have friends. But they, I think the bigger goal is to, yeah, to try to set up an influence network of we're all on the same page about exactly what game we're playing here. Especially with like the things they're teaching of like, here's how you survive World War. three.

Dog, you're not going to survive World War III. I'm sorry. None of it. There's no way. Come on. But then also to be like, also we can improve your sex life with this class. With AI.

Yeah. Cool. As for Klein, like, steepling his fingers, listening in family. Interesting. But like,

yeah. But, you know, what, so like, for the, for the Peter Thiel and his accolice, what lessons are they failing to learn?

Yeah. From a Veld prophet or a Ku Klux Klan-style secret society. Is it just the lack of drinking, the lack of fun? Well, I think systemically, they made the mistake of trying to have an authentically secret secret society. Like, the whole thing with the skull and bones is like, we all know about that. That's what kind of adds to the allure.

That, like, creates the tractor being. It's always this, this contradiction because you can't have a secret society that no one knows about. Exactly. It defeats the whole fucking point. You have to have a big parade and be like, we're all anonymous guys. I think that is like that was the sauce that made the veiled profit society very successful is that everybody's anonymous but you know it's the biggest circuit judges and the mayor and the CEOs who are like they're yeah showing off to you that they can have their own secret club and be up to something but yeah dialogue was just like authentically supposed to not be talked about or rumored I don't know in the I Epstein files, there's like a whole thing about how Epstein says, yeah, Peter Thiel's been trying to put together secret society for decades or like, or for years or something like that.

And that's an email from, I think, 2016. So he's just getting around to it? Or that they're trying to do it again. Yeah, yeah. So he's been trying to do this for a very long time. And I think it's not working because, like, you don't understand that that's like, yeah, you need that public facing component. Yeah.

So to wrap things up here, like you mentioned the Epstein Fathers, right? And like, we are living in a time now where like if you are inclined to believe that the country, your life is secretly run by secret societies up to like

deeply evil, depraved, nefarious things, that like they are the reason that has like checkmated you at every point that indeed the system is rigged against you and it's being rigged by a shadowy cabal of people. Like if you, we are living in times now,

there is more fertile ground than ever for the belief in that. Yeah. In what ways do you think, like, the existence of something like the Vailed Profit Society is obviously a, you know, confirmation of that fact, but on the other hand, like, do you think it is perhaps like too narcotic

or too easy to adopt a kind of secret society analysis of how power and money and influence works in the world? Yeah. I think that a secret society is just a union for powerful people. Right. It's just an agreement that we're all going to pay dues to this one thing and then coordinate our efforts together. And that I think it is salacious and that people, especially you don't, aren't reading a bunch of Marxist history, sort of like would prefer to think of the Illuminati as being in control because it explains the class dynamic between the bourgeois and the rest of us. but that same thing can be applied the other way. Like the first unions are also secret societies.

Well, by definition, they would have had to have been because they were illegal. Illegal, yeah, exactly. The Knights of Labor famously had a bunch of crazy handshakes in secret code words. And I think that that, yeah, that the problem with really trying to analyze secret societies as, well, they created this world and they're doing all this stuff. It's not the thesis for me. The thesis is that the Vaila Prophet really well represents a symbol that the elite rally around that displays their psychology, that they want to be infallible, they want to be a patriarch, that they want to have slaves and dominate women and be in charge of all the money. And also sort of accrue for themselves the kind of the style and customs of like the Arabian Knights or medieval Europe or, you know, like,

of some fantastical, like historical period or people. Because I think that makes it without any guilt. Yeah. It's like guiltless wealth that you could, you wouldn't have to think about how it's, it doesn't give you any bad feelings to take that role on. Yeah, but yet it is like, what they want is a hierarchy of white overblock,

man over woman, owner over worker. Yes. And I think the interesting thing is like, underneath all this dumb gay shit that they do of this. It's like, this is a mechanism of class solidarity, right?

Yeah. Of enforcing and like, or rather reinforcing and sort of strengthening the bonds of class interest among a small group of people. Yeah. And the correlator would be like, what if there's a shared class interest

among a much larger group of people? Right. That were to organize and assert itself or maybe even adopt their own customs, parades, costumes. Perhaps. What would that look like? Or is there a system?

of government that there was describes that yeah it's almost like you could have a counter veiled profit ball where you could crown your own version of the queen of your ideal you know like and maybe that queen is uh you know not what the veiled profit decides is like the standard of beauty or whatever i've all the in the 60s there was the velvet plastic ball which was like the hippie spoof ball that they did and i would like to bring that back as like, you know, we had also mentioned that at the beginning, all of these Victorian guys were like, when they were playing Demeter, they were dressing up in drag. And so it's like the most powerful men in St. Louis in drag. We should just bring that component back, have a big drag,

Mardi Gras celebration that's a counter-veiled profit ball. Who is the new queen of America? That's right. Bugs Bunny when he dresses as a woman. That's right. That hot babe. Devin O'Shea, the book is The Veiled Prophet's Secret Society's White Supremacy and the struggle for St. Louis. It is a great book and it is a wonderful history of St. Louis and the whole sort of funny and fascinating ideas of a secret society that everybody knows about.

Devin O'Shea, thank you so much for your time and everyone, we'll have links to your favorite bookstore, wherever you want to get the book. Yeah, I'm sure you know where it's at. But yes, please check out the book. Devin O'Shea, thanks again so much for your time. Thank you for having me on. Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair.

Don't tell me the lights are shining any place, but there's the poochie-coochie. I will be your tootsie, whoopsy, if you will meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at