It Could Happen Here - Meme Magick & Esoteric Kekism: Spooky Week #2

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Dive into the frustratingly relevant world of magical memes and ancient Egyptian gods. We explain how a frog comic went from a meme to a symbol of Trumpian chaos, to an internet religion with power to alter reality. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm so close to clicking leave meeting every time that that bullshit comes up.

It's like, yes, I consent. That's why I'm fucking here. All right, so we're starting with that line comes up. It's like, yes, I consent. That's why I'm fucking here. Alright, Sophie, we're starting with that line from Daniel. Welcome to Spooky Week on It Could Happen Here.

Today, we are discussing a truly spooky topic, one that everyone is just really gonna hate. And it's, we're talking about uh-huh let's say esoteric keckism and meme magic so chatele my brothers and sisters come along on a ride chatele we read a whole book for this oh at least i did you read a book just for this i would say that like all of the books i read from age 19 to 22 prepared me for this.

Have I been preparing you for this? Yeah, the books I read while I was doing psychedelics twice a week all really were good background on this subject. That is true. You want to kick us off? I don't. So I think first thing we're going to talk about, we're going to emphasize awareness over amplification. My goal for this is that we can all be more aware of the power that images on the internet can have over influencing the actual world and talking about people who believe this to a ridiculous degree and how they actually have been able to institute change, not only because of this belief, just because of their dedication to this practice. Because it's a thing that exists and it's had real world ramifications. And it's good to understand that that's a thing.

And that also maybe we can influence the way we, like us, use the internet to also maybe make good things happen as opposed to just being doomers all the time. Hell yeah. So that's kind of what I wanted to start with. Many dubs to that, Garrison. Complete keck with you. God, no. Although to be fair, the past few days I have just

been spamming the It Could Happen Here group chat with horrible nonsense around keck it has been the most insufferable week of my life horrible nonsense like paragraphs paragraphs walls of text so big any any actually safe working environment that cared about its employees would have fired you long ago yeah so i think the other thing that we should definitely mention is that any type of like occultism mysticism or like woo woo um has actually does have a decent history within uh right wing political ideas and specifically like

you know like more extreme like right wing um stuff from the past few hundred years. Most people know that the early Nazis had some mystical stuff going on. There was a lot more stuff going on behind the scenes. A lot of their favorite authors also were practicing occultists. This is a thing that goes back a while. You can even see this to some degree with how close Christianity is to a lot of the modern-wing, to a lot of the modern right-wing in the States as well.

A lot of what we would consider evangelical Christianity has a lot of stuff that's actually very similar to occultism. They just use different terms because occultism and magic is taboo, but it's actually the same thing. It's all like, it's interacting with the same systems, just with different words. So this is the

thing that is not just on the Internet. This is the thing that's been going on for thousands of years. In particular, the past 100 years, we've seen a big rise in the amount of like of occultism and mysticism specifically tied to politics. Yeah. And there's this I mean, there have been a couple of articles written just recently about the fact that a lot of like the woo woo left the kind of um not really esoteric but kind of mainstream occulty left like the the pop occulty left has increasingly turned towards stuff like q anon and a big chunk of it is like this this openness to like feel power and coincidences synchronicity would be the synchronicity would be the term. Synchronicity is the term. Yeah, and just a general open-mindedness to maybe too many things. Sure. Yeah, I mean, you can see this on a lot of sites.

Yeah, it is definitely not just the right wing. I mean, the biggest example of this would probably be facets of QAnon the past few years have done very similar types of things. There's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes, like how Pepe operated was very similar to that, which is what we're mainly talking about today. But, you know, there is also stuff like this on the left wing, whether it be like new agey type stuff that seems to kind of mostly be bullshit. But there's, you know, other type of likes like of like of like folk magic or

like indigenous uh traditions that have that have uh i would say slightly more uh significantly more like there's actually reasonable actually stuff going on uh yeah as opposed to just like new age selling books and that kind of stuff yeah one of the things that also separates actual religion from religion that kind of has formed in this mematic way recently is that all of this stuff particularly what we're talking about today formed simultaneously with political sentiment and as and and was was crafted and in a lot of cases like they they state facts wrong specifically because they are trying to craft a political narrative alongside this like weird quasi-spiritual thing i mean and speaking of spiritualism coming to the same

kind of coming to the same this is you know we're all kind of anarchisty adjacent here and one of the things that really came up around the same time as anarchism in the 20th century was a concept called chaos magic uh which was really really tied to a lot of all really tied to a lot of like anarchist thought and anarchist kind of thinkers some of the most famous chaos magicians are like explicitly anarchist someone like grant morrison um others are like discordians which have a lot of like anarchist crossover stuff like like robert anton wilson which kind of operates in that same ocean yeah he played a big role in kind of pulling me away from proto-alt-right style beliefs.

And I think also a lot of his work was very intelligently crafted because he wrote about conspiracies, he wrote about esoteric magic, but always with a really intent eye on increasing people's defenses to this kind of stuff, what we're talking about today. He was very cognizant of that like he wrote about conspiracy as an enthusiast but also as someone who was trying to stop um kind of unchecked conspiratorial belief yeah he went about that in peculiar ways but he was an odd man yeah and the reason why i i've been getting more into this type of stuff the past year

uh increase and the reason why i really like chaos magic as i like it as like a post-modern system of magic of looking at how basically if magic is just ideas and trying to figure out how our brains can interact with the physical world then chaos magic introduces a lot of interesting stuff around like late stage capitalism uh because it is it's explicitly tied to postmodern art and postmodern thought, and the way brands and marketing and specifically the internet all affects our minds. All this stuff gets talked about in Chaos Magic a lot, and I really like using that framework for things.

And speaking of that kind of stuff, specifically around the internet, we're going to be talking about... The first thing I want to mention is the concept of searching for something and then you're like you're and you're gonna find it whether that you know robert entom wilson and um like the illuminati trilogies has like and like and discordianism has like 23 and the law of fives right i i read that book when i was 20 and i have been like seeing 23s repeatedly repeatedly at significant moments in my life for the last 14 years or so. Yeah.

Once you get that kind of meme implanted in your brain, it can stick with you for forever. And this happens to everything. This happens to everyone. Once you learn about a new topic, the next day you'll see it somewhere, right? You'll be like, oh, you'll be like- You learn a new word and suddenly it's in a song.

Yeah, and it's in all these places that you didn't see it before. This happens all of the time with everything. This is how synchronicity works. And this is where religions come from. And this is what religions are. Yeah, throughout history. And it's because this all has its roots in why we're very good hunters.

We are pattern – and why we're good gatherers. We're pattern recognition – like our brains are pattern recognizing machines. That's what we're best at. And it means that we're good at spotting berries and tracking deer. And it also means that we can't stop making religions. We can't stop making religions and cults. And if we have one too many synchronicities, we can change the entire way we view about the whole world, which can have varying degrees of effects. Sometimes, if it's just a little bit, that can

maybe actually be very helpful. If you join a weird cult that does messed up stuff, then it's like, yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, sometimes it ends in Burning Man, and sometimes it ends in Burning Men. Drop the bomb on that one.

So, first thing I want to discuss before we get into the actual timeline of how pepe and kekizem became a thing i want to just do a brief overview of uh sigils and memes um and this idea of what like let's let's take the original concept of the meme which is like you know the the it's genes are genetic memes are cultural these are cultural ideas that can spread like a virus um and usually memes in the since since since the internet has become way more popular memes have become more tied to images like like memes are a much more visual thing now whereas in the 90s, they were more of just like an idea concept, but now they have like this extra visual backing.

So a sigil is a magical concept tied mostly to chaos magic, which is basically an abstract concept or like a specific concept put into an abstract image that then gets charged and then it's going to manifest itself in your life. The reason why this works is because part of this desire gets implanted deep in your brain when you charge it

through like a trance, or there's different methods of charging sigils, but you have this concept and this idea and this desire, and it gets put into you, so you're going to kind of subconsciously do things that influence it into becoming something that you can see. Just like, you know, if you hear about 23, you're going to see it. Same thing for this. It's the same kind of base concept. And then Grant Morrison of Comic Book Writers, my favorite comic book writer, he's really the only person that's developed sigils more since their inception with the concept of a

hyper sigil, which is taking the same idea of like wanting to influence change in the world via this visual medium of a sigil. And instead of just having it be like an abstract glyph that you charge, a hyper sigil is an entire work of art with this express interest. So everything that you do in this is trying to get some type of real world change. And it's very, very intentional, right? A lot of art already operates like this. This is why a lot of postmodern magic is very similar just to like making art, because it's the same kind of basic idea. Whether that be something like, you know, like the Matrix or, you know, any type of art kind of does this already if it is good, and it can find ways to influence reality.

So memes operate on this the same way, and eventually people actually found – eventually people on 4chan realized that they were doing sigils and started using this word because it's really the same thing. When you're altering all of these images of this frog and posting it into all these different kind of more abstract, more like ugly, obscure, kind of like weird, like surreal types of memes and you're spamming them on politicians' Twitter account. You're basically doing a group sigil and a group hyper sigil because you're all making these individual things and you're spamming them into the world.

And because there's so many of them, yeah, they're going to have a real world effect. Yeah, and they're going to have a real world effect in part because of the way human brains work and in part because of the way algorithms work. Yep. Which is one of the things where it's easy, especially if you're an impressionable kid, to mistake the algorithm doing what it's designed to do, which is find patterns, groups of people sharing something, and expand that to a larger group of people. Because, oh, if this cluster of people likes this, this will probably be something that's very successful. Algorithms are great at making synchronicities because that's what they're designed to do. Because that's what they're supposed to do. That's the whole point of why they exist.

And that's why this is – that's why our – because as you stated a little earlier, in one of these days on Bastards, we're going to talk about Helena Blavatsky and the theosophy movement in more detail. And all of the occult stuff that fed into the third the early stage of the third reich but the occult back then is very different from the kind of occult feeding into fascism now which is heavily based around synchronicity because it's also heavily based around social media and the way memes spread yeah that's why I think chaos magic has really gotten kind of a resurgence the past few years with social media and how algorithms develop because they do mirror a lot of the concepts within chaos magic because the internet is kind of a chaotic place. But also it's not just pure chaos.

It is chaos within a framework of order, which is why I like the chaos star, like the actual chaos sigil. Yes, the arrows are pointing in every direction, but you can make a perfect circle around all of the arrows. It's because it's not just pure chaos. It actually is contained within this other framework. And by the way, Garrison, when you started talking about synchronicities and sigils, I checked my phone for a second and saw that it was 5-17 on October 23rd. Five, of course, contains both two and three and is thus a sacred number. October 23rd, I shouldn't have to explain why that's significant. Robert, Robert, 17 is a sacred number. Robert, it's the 22nd.

Yeah, but it's the 23rd on my phone. Why is it the 23rd on your phone? Because that's the universe, baby. That's the synchronicity. I'm living in the future, motherfuckers. and what time is it that it's not right now it was 5

17 on my phone and the other time it is I don't I don't I don't need to know what time it is Sophie your default reality no no yeah you are on a different different dimensional plane now we have split into two into two different ones why is mine

wrong I think I think this I think this gives us plane now. We have split into two different ones. Why is mine wrong? I think this gives us a perfect opportunity for the audience to find their own synchronicities in these ads. Because who knows what's going to happen? Who knows what's going to play? So look for patterns and you'll find them. Here's some ads. I hope it's an ad for the Egyptian goddess, Maat. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America gasoline counters with sheep shippers to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. We're gonna now actually

kind of get into some of the actual Pepe nonsense. I think another important another important part to mention is that like for a lot of people doing this online this this is like an online pattern that happens all the time um it happens with it happens with stuff like this it happens with with with cat boys it happens with a whole bunch of stuff is that like stuff starts as a joke and then you do it a lot and the repetition basically makes you do it genuinely yeah like me talking about getting all of my followers to a compound in idaho where we die

fighting the fda exactly eventually that turns into an actual death cult so it's it's it starts as a joke and then under repetition it becomes genuine this happens to basically almost everything on the internet yeah yeah this this this this this leads to Garrison and I doing the inevitable Robert Evans Behind the Bastards episode. That's our last episode. Yeah, that's the last one. That's a three-parter if I ever heard one. You hope so. You wish.

Hold on. What are Catboys? That is a different podcast. I'm so glad you're here. That is a different podcast, I think. Yeah,'re here. That is a different podcast, I think. Yeah, hi. Sorry. I know I only interject briefly.

Is that, are they like pre-furries? Is that something different entirely? No, Catboys. Kind of post-furry? It's kind of like post-left? It's re-humanizing the furry. So like the same way that- They're humans too.

The same way Sonic the Hedgehog is a re-Mickeyification of vegeta uh cat boys are a re-humanification of furries this is a whole process on the i can explain this in great detail in a later episode you're good but i think we have enough we have enough to talk about already understood thank you so much i'm gonna go get dog. Okay, sure. Would someone be willing to sacrifice their own mentality to describe the rise of Pepe originally in the early 20-teens? Yeah, so it started as this guy's comic.

There was nothing particularly weird about it. Yeah, it was a dude's comic. He was like a feels-good man. Feels-good man. He was a chill dude. He was like, feels good man, was kind of his kind of phrase. Feels good man. He was a chill dude. He was a chill dude. Yeah, not a fascist. Comic Pepe is actually pretty fun.

Yeah, Comic Pepe is great and the artist is lovely. He's like a millennial slacker who doesn't really know what to do with his life after 9-11, after the financial crash. He's just trying to kind of get by. The comic's fine. Yeah, the comic's fine. She's just trying to kind of get by. The comic's fine. Yeah, the comic's fine.

But the art, just like kind of the specifics of how he drew Pepe made him very well suited for a meme because he's expressive. And so he shows up and starts getting spread in 4chan. And, you know, that kind of idea goes viral. And it particularly gets attached to a lot of like the political shit on poll and the people who are like churning into Gamergate and the alt-right. Sad Pepe gets very popular. Smug Pepe gets very popular. Yeah. Yeah. And then as,

uh, so Keck is, I mean, but that does tie into the frog shit. Keck is a bit later on. I think we'll go over more for like how Pepe is like the cartoon character got, you you know as soon as it becomes a meme it spreads out into all corners and the people who memed this hardest

were were on fortune so this is how pepe became yeah kind of tied to this and i think the last bullet in pepe really solidifying him as as an alt-right meme specifically was the richard spencer punch uh yeah i think that's the thing that actually was like done it's like no pepe is just this now he can't be anything else because when richard spencer was being punched he was describing what pepe was that was what's happening in that specific viral moment if you want to talk about like magical terms this is pepe getting like charged like this is the idea of like this idea getting getting charged because it is now going to be percolated to the masses in this in this moment of like pure emotion. So that's when Pepe really gets tied to that. And I think Hillary Clinton made it very, very worse.

Yep. The way she talked about this kind of stuff on her speeches basically gave gave the alt right a baseball bat to hit her with the the problem that clinton and everyone else because like a big part of i would argue that like the largest part of why pepe became a thing that was destined to last was that pundits and politicians including hillary and media people kept talking about it as a fascist symbol yeah and kept discussing like what it was and that anyone who grew up on the internet, who grew up around these communities knows that you ignore them as much as possible. To the extent that that's possible,

you don't feed the trolls. You don't give them power. Yeah, you don't. And talking about it, again, this is like chaos magic shit, like referencing it, bringing it up, bringing it into the real world gives it power. That's the thing that feeds it.

Yeah. So that's how it got so much more power. The more Clinton talked about it, the more news media wrote about it. Everyone got so excited on the 4chan. That's like that is them winning. Them seeing this thing. And then

this goes back pre even it being far. I can remember because I was in these spaces when they first started doing shit like raids on the Church of Scientology. Every time there would be actual news coverage of what people on the internet did Scientology being like a precursor to this type of like meme magic of this thing of like of like internet forums influencing the real world through repetition and getting getting to grow power but getting people who don't use internet to talk about these same things yep uh it was like a precursor to then what we what we saw on the

alt-right which is which is a pretty a pretty common opinion. And then enter the Egyptian gods. Robert, do you want to discuss... How did we get to that? That's what we're going to say next, is how this intersects with Egyptian gods. So the ancient pharaohs played a card game of ancient and terrible power. Man, did nobody watch Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid?

No, man. I'm surrounded by heathens. No. Man. Robert, do you want to discuss Keck? Yeah, I mean, so way back in the day, and I think this even predates World of Warcraft. I remember it first happening on StarCraft games online.

There would be gamers from Korea, and when you were doing a Zerg rush or something, which is when you have a bunch of guys and they all attack the enemy base or whatever, they would type out their term for LOL, which was like kek. K-E-K, yeah. K-E-K. So it would usually just look like a stream of K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K. K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K. So it usually just looked like a stream of K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K. K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K. Like over and over and over again.

This really took off in World of Warcraft where like there were Korean gold farmers were a big thing and like K-E-K was something that like everyone kind of knew what it meant because it was often the only thing you could understand as an American that like these people would be typing. And it – as a result of kind of all of that, it took off in internet culture as just an LOL. And specifically like one of the things that's going on here. So as the mid-aughts dawn and the internet becomes serious business and like social media really – and everybody's – even before social media is dominant. But just when everybody is taking the internet seriously, it's clear there's a lot of money in it. It's mainstream. it's clear there's a lot of money in it. It's mainstream.

You have this kind of second generation of internet people who got on in the late 90s, early 2000s when they were kids who get frustrated at the fact that all of these different terms and phrases and like bits of internet culture that they had identified with are going mainstream. And normies are using them. Yeah.

Yeah. And Keck is, everyone knows what LOL is. People don't know what Keck is. So in places like 4chan, that becomes a really popular thing. And Keck kind of is like, so Keck as a term for laughter is like floating around

at the same time as like Pepe memes. And so whenever you like meme something into the mainstream, whenever like some 4chan op or whatever you want to call it like succeeds in getting mainstream coverage, you would hillary clinton mentions pepe on stage everyone goes kek because they're laughing they go and they say stuff like top kek and whatnot and and

eventually somebody realizes that there's an egyptian goddess one of the translations of that god goddess's name is kek um now there's a couple other translations there's there's a whole bunch of issues with this if you wanted to look at this with a rational kind of brain it's because like this there was this old family of gods they're very very old old egyptian gods they all had male and female versions the male versions all had frog heads um and but around frogs can change their gender yeah because the Jurassic Park taught us. So like so like all of the all this whole era of Egyptian gods all had frog heads. So there was one of them that was named Keck, who was a god of chaos. And this also played into how 4chan was using Trump because like they they liked Trump mostly as like as like a chaotic force that got people angry.

Yeah, because that's what that's what 4chan wanted to do as well. They wanted to be a chaotic force that gets people angry so that's why they really latched on to trump um and then when they found out that oh there's this god named kek who is like the lord of like like like um like pro what's the word um yeah primordial darkness primordial darkness yeah and this idea so not even chaos as much as pre-being. Kind of like Uranus in Greco-Roman faith. Like a god kind of before the gods that are more well-known. But this was a synchronicity, so they took it as the same way religions take synchronicity and create divinity.

They took this as divinity they took this as like a this take they took this as like divinity now again this this starts as a joke but you do it enough and you start to take it seriously and there's a you get a mix of um you get a mix of of real like egyptology which is that yeah there was a god named kek like among a bunch of other gods one of the ways he was depicted was with a frog head but also like bad Egyptology. Like I found an article on the Wordpress blog, Pepe the Frog Faith, which. Oh, I'm sure this I'm sure this is a bastion of archaeology. Yeah. And the title is Amateur Egyptologist Weighs In on the Frog Statue Hieroglyphs. And one of the things he points out.

Oh, are you talking about the frog statue that isn't a kek, but they thought it was kek? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a number of things. So, like, one of the things this guy claims is that the hieroglyphics for kek are a frogman and then a couple of what he calls baskets. First up, they're cups, not baskets. Second, the actual hieroglyphics for kek don't include the little frogman. They're, like, two of the little cups in this weird T-shaped thing. Like, it's all, like, it's bad because again amateur egyptologist like he's just a kid who was googling stuff and like got some either lied or got some hieroglyphics wrong but this kind of stuff compounds but kek as like an idea is like now we have a backing of an ancient god

again first as a joke but then some people started to take it more seriously really really caught on uh among people because because it's funny like it's it's just funny and ridiculous it is funny it's extremely funny of course it's gonna catch on on 4chan because it's hilarious yeah right so they're gonna start using this and and repeating this and creating whole new memes creating like there's like there's like an eight eight part book series that's like fake books written by like someone who's like just memeing but pretending to take it seriously. But like the authenticity doesn't actually matter because it exists. It doesn't actually matter how authentic it is. Yeah, like and there's weird coincidences that continue to occur.

Like one of the biggest being there's this like phrase chatelet which creeps up in all of this and becomes like this exhortation that they use, like a way of like exclaiming and such. And then somebody figures out that Châtelet is also a song like an Italo disco song, I think, from the 70s. And the album that Châtelet is on has like a frog man face on the cover. And so they're like, oh, it's a sign. Because you're going to find frogs wherever you look now because that has become the new 23 thing you're right frogs are not uncommon frogs are everywhere you're gonna find

them everywhere now and there are every ancient religion everywhere in the world I'm gonna guarantee you there's some fucking frogs in it because like they're everywhere and they're weird creatures people pay attention to frogs they've been around for a long time yeah there's a lot ofs have been around a while. Kermit the frog.

The other thing that happened, people not only basically created their whole mythology around this, creating different types of religion. There was like Kekism as a religion, the cult of Kek, Esoteric Kekism, all their own distinct differences because these people spend all their time on the internet.

They developed these things. And they also found this old frog statue that they said was Keck. It isn't. It's actually a gold called Hecate. But on the basis... But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

But on the base of the statue, it had glyphs which appear to us modern humans as they look like someone sitting on a computer. Like they look like someone sitting in front of a monitor on a keyboard. And on the other side of the keyboard is a DNA – is like what looks like a DNA spiral. So this is like genes, right? Genes are DNA. Memes are cultural DNA. This is a glyph of the god Keck on a statue with someone on a computer with a DNA spiral. Of course you're going to take this as some message from the gods.

You're like, yes, I'm supposed to be – I am supposed to be – by my memeing, I'm doing Keck's work to put Trump into office. Yeah, it's – god, that's frustrating it sure is uh it sure is but like all of those in the in-group this is like the statue was just a depiction of what the keck people and the pepe spammers were doing posting on the internet to manifest real world change and that's that's all it is if you want to see other examples of this like if you look at the ancient alien stuff there's this like famous mylan myan hieroglyph of the astronomer that's like if you if you know what a telescope is because you're looking at it a thousand years after it was carved it kind of looks like it might be a telescope and it's part of what like people say like oh this is proof that like that this is

an alien like he's looking at a fucking telescope no it was there's other explanations for it it was something like that somebody carved yeah i think there's another thing that you start running into here like i see this like not even like i see this just this is just on the internet all the time like i see leftists do this or like so like okay so you learn something and then oh it's not true but then people will keep spreading the thing because they'll say and i've had people say this like well it it might as well be. It might as well be. It has more power with it, so you're still going to believe it.

Yeah. Like when I talk about the fact that Wil Wheaton murdered three people in 1998. If you repeat, this is the message. Yeah. Yeah. With a knife. What? It's horrible.

Yeah. Now, I mean, he was in Thailand at the time, so he was able to get out and we don't extradite. So he's he's he's got out scot free. But yeah. OK, word. But I mean, like this is like the same. He's a murderer. This is the same thing that Trump does, which we'll talk about a bit.

We'll talk about a bit is like if you repeat the thing enough, it becomes true for large swaths of the population. That's that's all truth actually needs to be for people. truth actually needs to be for people. I think we're going to go on break and come back and close this up and finally finish this horrible discussion. Anyway. You know who won't meme fascism? Well, actually, KFC.

Yeah, you're right. Have you seen the KFC fascist posting on Twitter? Yeah. There's like a the KFC fascist posting on Twitter? Yeah. There's like a Spanish KFC account that has been doing, that is up to some shit. Yeah. That's funny.

I hate that that's a sentence that you got to say. I just hate it. Products. products welcome i'm daniel won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology

of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. I have finished an entire dark meat bucket and I am so full. Yep. And now I'm sad. I'm sad because i'm still thinking of the fascist kfc twitter account um so we we the other thing i want to do want to mention is kind of trump's own

uh power of belief kind of idea and how trump was basically using esoteric terms was able to basically create an alternate reality for millions of people to live in. And there's really no getting through to them now because they are literally just in a different dimension. There's no way to pierce that other dimension. They're basically living in just a totally alternate reality.

There's no use saying that it is the one that we live in. So Trump was obsessed with a few of these ideas. He's less interested in the woo and more interested in the power of positive thinking, power of your own belief. Yeah. He grew up in a movement and a specific church. Norman Vincent Peale stuff. Yeah.

He grew up following a specific movement and church that falls under the umbrella called New Thought. Yup. that falls under the umbrella called New Thought. Yup. Which is where Trump's, you know, Trump's like, how strong Trump's ego is comes from this idea of that you need to reinforce yourself

and reinforce your own victories because if you do that, you're gonna find them. If you're looking for 23, you're gonna find it. If you're looking for your own victories, you're gonna force them to happen even if they don't happen to other people. So we see this happening successfully with the 2016 election. We see both – all of the memeing, everything that happened in the 2016 election worked for Trump.

And of course he didn't win the popular vote, but that doesn't actually matter. But it worked in getting him to office. Now, it worked less well for the 2020 election. But still, his reassertions that he won still gave us a lot of real

world results, like the January 6th Capitol insurrection. So this type of idea that if you reinforce real world results, like the January 6th capital insurrection. So like it's this, right? So this type of idea that if you reinforce this thing, if you reinforce this belief, if you have this idea and you keep putting it out into the world, it's going to manifest some type of real world result. And that was January 6th.

That's what that was. Yeah, baby. And that's the kind of the world we live in now. It's like the weaponized unreality world where people, because of how media works, because of how the internet works, they're able to create this chaotic

sphere of energy and ideas that can spread so much faster than anything used to be that everyone can segment their own reality into two degrees that we've never really seen before because of how fast information can travel now. It is a relatively new thing, the way that this can operate. So memes themselves, like Pepe and all this kind of stuff, undoubtedly had an impact on not only just the 2016 election, but just the entire political climate surrounding the whole Trump presidency.

Now, to the degree to which we can credit meme magic or the god Keck, that part is meaningless because the effect is the same. The synchronicities were still experienced, and truth is just experiential. we're still experienced and and truth is just is just experiential so it the beliefs that we kind of hold will shape how we experience things anyway and that will experience what the actual truth is there is there is a great robert anton wilson quote that is like reality is what you can get away with yup and that's that's like that that like summarizes how Trump was able to be so successful because he was able to shape reality. Right. I think me and me and Chris were talking about this the other day about how Chris, do you want to say the thing about like the Democratic Party and Republican Party and how. Oh, yeah. OK, OK. So there's there's there's there's a thing. There's a thing, and Garrison, I think, was too young for this, but there's a very famous thing that one of the Bush administration people said about how Democrats lived in the reality-based community.

And this was like a whole thing in the 2000s. This is during the Bush administration. And everyone loses their minds. And this is like a whole meme on the Democrats that's like, oh, we're the reality-based community. And they're not. But this is the interesting part. of the reality-based community and they're not but but then this is the interesting part if you look at the second part of that quote right what he's actually saying is that so the democrats are the reality-based community right they they analyze reality the republican party is the party that creates reality because other people in control of the empire and this is this is what neoconservatism

was right and you know the argument here basically is that the democrats are you know they're always going to be a step behind because they're merely analyzing reality whereas republicans are using the powers or the state to you know change and define it and this this worked for them you know i would argue this is how they came into power this is how there's this is what they're still doing yeah yeah this is why every president since ronald reagan has just been ronald reagan with a mask yeah but but i think i think there's something very important here specifically about how Bush took office, right? Because Bush steals the election, right?

Bush does, like the thing that Trump was trying to do is what George Bush did in 2000. With a riot, just with a very specific kind of riot. Yeah, but this is the thing that Bush and the neocons understood that the Trumpists kind of understand, but never quite solidified because they're not sort of insider political actors, which is that, okay, so all of the stuff about saying something and it becoming real, right? There's sort of a limit to this. If you don't have a gun.

you don't have a gun. Now, if you have a gun, then the limits of that are, you know, you can do basically whatever you want because you can just, you can force everyone else to also accept this as reality.

You know, this is what the state is, right? There's a whole thing. This is a couple of performance theories. It's like, yeah, so like you saying the thing makes it so, right?

Well, this is what a state is and this is how Bush won the election because he, unlike Trump, whose people tried to like take power directly by like storming the capital bush was smart and bush was like oh okay i i'm gonna i'm gonna declare that i won the election and but but but instead of like

openly doing it right i'm going to get the supreme court to declare that i'm president and you know and this this this requires the brooks brothers riot stop accounts and bones all the stuff we were like you know it doesn't yeah yeah it's great but it's like it doesn't it doesn't matter that you know he didn't win florida like if if if if if the if the votes had actually been counted he would not have won florida but because he was able to get the court to say that he was president he was president and and that's that's like that is the concept of magic words yep yep and this is this is this this is this is all the state is, right? The state is magic with a gun behind it.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, the state is magic because it's like – yeah, you're right. It's like magic can't have a hard cap. There's going to be a certain amount of people that – with Trump's reality-altering kind of power, there's a certain – there is a hard cap on how much that can influence the general population. But if you have a gun behind that, that gives it so much more enforceable power. To go back to Egyptian mythology, one of the attitudes they had about the pharaoh is that reality was whatever the pharaoh declared. A lot of societies have this idea towards their monarchs and the duty of his people is to make reality conform to the pharaoh's will and like that's that's what the gop does like that's what fascists always do i i think i think the quote surrounding

like yeah the democrats are the reality-based party because they because they you know observe reality except the reality and like and yeah and like and like and like libs and democrats are like yes they they like they they take this on prior. Like, yes, we are rational. We observe reality. Meanwhile, the Republicans are like, no, you just observe it, but we can just – we can create it. I think that is a great example of how those two parties operate politically and how – because like, yes, they're both right-leading parties, but here's the difference for how they actually operate. Here's the difference for how they actually operate, is that one of them is way more passive in their observing of reality, and one is okay with getting their hands dirty and actually forcing this type of reality-altering changes. I will say, I think one thing to close this out is that we can tie this all the way back to the second part of the Jewel of Horror episode, which is that the Neocon neocon project doesn't work and the reason it doesn't work is that you

know they they like basically they lose militarily and that just that implodes the entire project and so you know and if if you look back at like all of this stuff about how we can shape reality we can shape reality we can shape reality that stopped being true the moment that you know like they lose control of basra or like you know all like yeah they run into other people uh uh uh Moktada al-Sadr yeah to be unkillable by all the weapons of empire yeah yeah it's like you know and Sadr and Sadr does this by like you know Sadr sets up a bunch of baby clinics right he's like here's a bunch of clinics here we we will give help to pregnant mothers like you guys really gonna shoot us you know he builds a militia around this and he's able to

he's one of the smartest people on the planet he's extremely good at what he does he's not a good guy but like able to just completely shatter the neocons like they're dead like they don't that project which was like the culmination of this incredible this incredible intellectual project

this incredible military project and they got their absolute ass kicked by a bunch of people doing dual power yep i think and i i i really i i do want to talk more about kind of chaos magic and there's a lot on the pot in the future good grounding and i think but yeah i think this is a great intro how of the how these concepts overlap with politics and i'd like to disagree on the end of this with one aspect garrison because you said their reality can't be pierced but the ancient texts speak of a spear that once pierced the side of christ itself and while hitler held it his armies were ascended

but it was stolen and if we can find the sphere of longinus Garrison. We can pierce their reality. I have a fedora. I have a whip. We can do this. We all have fedoras, Garrison. Let's do it. Let's go. Alright. We are off to find the Spear. That signs us off. The Spear of Destiny. You can follow our adventures on

Happen Here Pod and CoolSignMedia on Twitter. I'm sure we will give you updates for our spirit ventures of the pod yeah Sophie we need half a million dollars to find the spirit of destiny okay okay great see you on the other

side it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website cool coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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