Part Five: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy and Garrison Davis for part five of our series, in which the story of the Illuminati takes a dark turn.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's Elon my moskks? This is Behind the Bastards, the
podcast that I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is listening to,
because within minutes, well like an hour of us starting
to record the last two parts of our series on
the Illuminati, he posted a very boomer Illuminati meme um

(00:22):
extremely funny. The timing was incredible. There's no other explanation
but that we have influenced his mind on a deep
and possibly a cult level. M You know, I think
what's probably to blame for this is last night I
ate on a huge quantity of room temperature shrimp covered
in thousand island dressing, and then I vomited on the

(00:45):
hood of an old tesla. This was this was my
emdomancy that I was that I was practicing, and I
believe it has allowed me to infect Elon's mind with
a why are you like this? Why did you? Why
did you have to like describe the shrimp? Why? Why?
Because otherwise if people don't smell the shrimp, they're not

(01:05):
going to believe the rest of the story. Sophie, Alright,
I didn't lie at people. You need details gross anyways
are here. Oh I'll add that anecdote to my growing
grimoire of a vomit related I thought you were going

(01:25):
to say, you're adding it to the list of things
that you tell your therapist about work. But you know,
actually a lot of crossover between my grimoire and things
I tell my therapist, you know, using vomit magic, one
time I was able to turn a Ukrainian couple's wedding
dinner into a bunch of vomit on a Ukrainian couple.

(01:47):
What what an amazing feet of alchemy that that that
transmutation is just simply mind blowing. I use it as
a spell to be slightly less drunk. See, limitless power
is available when you embrace the sacred truths of a midamancy. Um,
good times actually would be a pretty fun class to

(02:10):
make in like a in like a Pathfinder type setting. Um,
you could do a lot of fun with this. You'd
just be the human fly and that's like how you
attack and devour. That that's kind of based actually, like yeah,
digesting your opponents as you hit them with a sword
or something. Yeah, very cool is listening to this podcast

(02:32):
to hear about You know what else is cool? The Illuminati.
The Illuminati was mid but the guy that we're going
to start our episode today talking about Robert Anton Wilson
was pretty dope. Now we're talking mostly about Kerry Thornley
in this series for good reason. Number One, I think

(02:52):
he and Greg Hill were the I mean, they certainly
were the initial primary drivers behind Discordianism. M Carrie is also,
as we'll get to, the guy who kind of makes
the most sense to cover in detailment behind the bastards.
But my entry into like being interested in in the
not just like conspiracy culture in America, particularly as it

(03:15):
existed in the eighties and nineties, but into the Discordians,
into all of this stuff was through the work of
a guy named Robert Anton Wilson and Margaret are you
are you that familiar with Bob Wilson stuff? Okay, so
here's where I lose all of my credit. I am
very aware of the Illuminatus trilogy, and I have not
read it. Yeah, we'll be talking about the Illuminatus Trilogy
a little later. Essays quite relevant. Yeah, he's written a

(03:38):
lot of essays. He's if you really want a sense
for the guy, he made a documentary right before he
died called Maybe Logic that is available for free on
YouTube and whatever. It's the first thing I watched the
first time I ever took hallucinogens. So he had a
big impact on me. And he's a legitimately a really
interesting guy kind of He comes out of Flat Brooklyn

(04:00):
and he grew up as a little kid and what
he called like a New York's Irish Catholic ghetto. Um,
he did not have a lot of our so he
spent He's yeah. Garrettson Beach is the actual neighborhood that
he grew up in, which is kind of like out
in the middle of nowhere, so there's not a lot
of money. He is abused pretty profoundly by the nuns

(04:21):
who run his school. As a kid, he is like
beaten and mentally like tormented by these these nuns. And
he also has two bouts of polio as a little
kid that he survives. He has. This guy, of all
the people were talking about, Bob Wilson is the most
mentally healthy and also has like the roughest life. He
has a very hard life. Um, and uh, yeah, it's interesting.

(04:47):
One of the things that is kind of a key
moment in this guy's life is that the thing that
saves his life from polio is a treatment called the
Sister Kenney method, which is like alternative medicine today and
was kind of at the time in the thirties considered
like quackery. Um. And I'm not competent to like weigh

(05:07):
in on this, but he credits the Sister Kenny method
with saving him from his polio and the fact that
like this thing that people called quack medicine is what
saved him as a child is going to have a
really big influence on just sort of the the degree
of weight that he gives authority. I did not know that,
but that makes so much sense for the rest of

(05:29):
his life. Is so much about like how much value
we put into what we believe, and how much what
we believe kind of creates the reality around us. And
that is such an interesting things like I'm sure, I'm
sure Bob Wilson that later on is like talking about
like the placebo effect and all that kind of stuff
as as that comes up like in like chaos magic

(05:50):
a lot um and and he was a member of
the biggest chaos magic order. But that's just that's such
an interesting story. And I was unaware that he dealt
with polio that it was it was kind of quote
using this like a crank method. What's the methods I'm
imagining you go into this like convent and sister Kearny,

(06:10):
Kearny whatever. Kenny. Yeah, Kenny just hits you with a cane. Yeah,
I mean it's it's it's basically like a bunch of
hot compresses and like kind of passive movement, some of
which seems like it's it's sort of similar to like
massages um to reduce like some of the spasms that
are caused by polio um and yeah, it's uh, it's

(06:34):
it's interesting. Again, I'm not like a uh like an
expert on any of this, but it does seem She's
pretty well regarded within like physical therapy and consider to
be something of a pioneer in the field. So I
think it's one of those situations where he receives this
treatment that people call bullshit as a kid and it
helps him, and later on she's kind of to at
least some extent vindicated um and yeah, so this is

(06:56):
a big impact on Bob. The other than that has
a big impact on Bob is that just like three
years after he or a couple of years after his
like while he's sort of in the middle of this
polio shit, the War of the Worlds comes on the
radio and so Orson Wells is a huge influence on
this guy. As a young adult, he starts working at Playboy,

(07:18):
and he hooks up and gets married to a woman
named Arlen, and they are both in addition to being
because we're talking about these guys kind of in their
like intellectual weirdo prankster thing, he and Arlen are both
also very committed physical activists. They are both involved with
the Black Panthers. So these are not again, these are

(07:38):
not just people who like talk about shit like they're
taking on real risk. And in fact, at one point
while he's at Playboy, one of the editors there, an
executive comes up to him and says that, like tells
him his name has been added to the Chicago PDS
Red Squad or sorry, they're in Chicago, not LA and
which is like a list of radicals that the authorities
had under surveillance, and the Red Squad existed, we don't

(08:02):
actually know if Bob was on it or not. And
basically this guy tells Bob like, it's because they think
you're a gun runner for the Black Panthers, and Bob
is like, well, no, we're just part of the free
breakfast program. Especially right now, there's a non zero chance
Bob Wilson ran guns. That's not an impossibility. I'm not

(08:23):
gonna say that's one hundred percent, no full support. Yeah,
and he's he also again for kind of to talk
about like how rough this guy's life is. He has
several kids with Arlen. His youngest daughter, when she is fifteen,
is beaten to death in a robbery gone back, and

(08:44):
she becomes the first person, one of the very first
people in the world and the first person from at
least in the Bay Area to have her brain put
in a in cryogenic whatever stasis. That's the thing Bob
Wilson is into very early on. That is normally I
have very little sympathy as a general rule for the

(09:05):
life extension people, but I obviously can't blame a grieving
father for doing something like that, Like that's a perfectly
understandable series of actions, especially in the seventies. Yeah, that's
different than that. I want to be an immortal major.
Yeah exactly, Yeah exactly. Hey, hey, come on, So, while

(09:26):
Thornley and Hill kind of provided the initial impetus behind Discordianism.
Bob Wilson becomes one of the chief drivers, and he
probably is the most influential of them because he is
he is still to this day probably like one of
the number one voices out of the psychedelic movement and
the counterculture movement in the late sixties and seventies. Bob
Wilson wrote a bit about this in the late seventies

(09:47):
in a book he put out called Cosmic Trigger. It's
actually a series of books, and this is him kind
of describing the changes that occur in the American psyche
during the time that the Discordians are starting out their activism.
When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and
or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche. As
Jules Feffer, among others, has noticed, Kennedy was not a

(10:08):
universally beloved president, of course, nobody ever has been, not
even Washington. But he was young or youngish, handsome, cultured, brave.
Everybody knows the pt one on nine story and via Rile.
There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the
national psyche by the Daily Plaza Bullets, Camelot died, the
divine king had been sacrificed. We were caught suddenly in
the middle of a Fraser Freud reenactment of archetypal anthropological ritual.

(10:32):
The national psyche veered dizzily towards chapel perillus. Now, chapel
perillus is a term y'ell are familiar with. No, I
have no idea. It's a psychological term. I know, you
know the scars we've talked about this body. This is
a core part of my personal psychology. Yes. In researching

(10:53):
occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions
called chapel perillus. In the trade, you come out the
other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic. There
is no third way. I came out an agnostic, and
that's I still think is one of the more useful,
especially in the era of the Internet. UM, because a

(11:13):
big thing for and all of the early Discordians break
in different ways. They all react differently to chapel perilous.
And actually, one thing I'll quibbo with Wilson here is
I think there is a third way to react to this,
and we'll talk about that later. Um. But I think
Wilson's attitude is going to be because he is he
is a pan agnostic. Pan Agnosticism is kind of like

(11:35):
the ideology that guides him the rest of his life
in increasing ways. Um. And that's kind of if you
listen to like best practices from any of these like
people who work for traditional journalist outfits in disinfo, Like
they don't phrase it in as artful or attractive a
way as Bob Wilson says. But that's what everybody's trying
to urge people towards, right, not taking anything as gospel

(12:01):
or perfect truth, not getting it's not allowing one of
the things Wilson would talk about as the concept of
a reality tunnel. Right. And so when you start to
believe things about the world that kind of that changes
how you perceive the world. It changes effectively the world
that you live in. And you're going to like continue
to make more choices that help you bore deeper into

(12:24):
that reality tunnel which fears you away from everybody else. Right,
We've got with qan On is a huge chunk of
people who have bored a reality tunnel so deep outside
of kind of the consensus reality that a lot of
most of the other people live in that they can't
be reached. In a lot of cases, this is what
happens in those like somebody will like murder their family
or whatever, or set off a bomb because they've they've

(12:45):
fallen so deep down this tunnel. And one of the
things Wilson is he doesn't want people to close their minds,
but he doesn't want anyone to get like to bury
themselves too deep in a tunnel that leads them, you know,
that they can't get out from right Like that was
kind of the benefit of pan agnosticism. I mean, I
think another release instinct way is thinking about it is
it's the same name as his documentary maybe logic, as

(13:09):
in like maybe this thing is the thing, like a
big He has these speeches where he's tried he tries
to explain why we should remove the word is from
the English vocabulary because we say this thing is this thing.
You are now collapsing reality down into this succinct statement
that is probably going to cause problems when you create

(13:29):
that like um, when when you create that sense of
equalness um. So think of everything as like maybe this
is the thing, or maybe this is the thing like
it try to if you are a few times there. Yeah,
I mean you like using the word because because of
like linguistics, but thinking thinking of the world in that

(13:50):
maybe framework, yeah, is just a it's a safer way
to approach a lot of these things that try to
like mess with your psyche. Okay, it makes for worse writing.
Metaphors or general can seen as stronger than similes. So true,
that's true, And Bob Wilson will be at war most
of his life with the fact that he recognizes playing
with this stuff can be dangerous and also it's very

(14:12):
fun to do. But as a young man writing for Playboy,
he is not He's not quite as mature as he
will later be. And so, starting from the position of
these beliefs in kind of the value of pan agnosticism,
he decides that his goal should be to bring as
many people as possible to chapel perilous right. That is,

(14:33):
in Wilson's eyes, the goal of Operation mind Fuck is
to put stuff out here that causes as many people
as possible to hit this decision point where they either
become a stone paranoid or they kind of back away
and gain this ability to look at things from a
more objective standpoint, and a big part of like the
basic goal here is in order to stop people from

(14:54):
kind of going too far in these particularly the John
Birch directions. He wants to create art that causes people
to confront the fact that reality is not fixed and
emerge from that experience questioning their old assumptions. You know,
That's what Wilson sees as the actual like moral good
behind Operation mind fuck. So Wilson and his editor fellow

(15:14):
editors Shay, they start sitting down with Thornley and the
other Discordians, and it's from these conversations that they actually
come up with a name for Operation Mindful, because this
is just something they're doing for a couple of years, right,
They're sending off these letters, they're putting out these different
conspiracy theories in different magazines, but they haven't really named
it yet. And I'm I'm gonna read a quote from
The New Yorker about how that goes down through every

(15:36):
means available. Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan,
the mind Fuckers intended to attribute all national calamities, assassinations,
or conspiracies to the Illuminati and other hidden hands. So
they planted stories about the Illuminati and the underground press.
They slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal Innovator
and the new left newspaper Roger Spark. They cooked up
a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in

(15:58):
the Playboy Advisor. When a New Orleans jury refused to
convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting District
Attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison's booster
Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press got a
note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates. The
telltale sign none of them had a left nipple. What
if there really is an Illuminati, Wilson asked Thornley one

(16:18):
pot fogged night in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe they'll find
out about us and be pissed. I doubt if there is,
Thornley answered, And if they're, by some chances, they'd probably
be very happy to have wild ass fools like us
covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories. I really
love this idea that probably at some point they like
checked someone for it and then they're like, no, no,

(16:39):
it's not a left nipple and a right nipple. It's
two right nipples, just one of thems on the other side. Yeah, yeah,
they doubled the right nipples. So obviously none of what
they're doing helps this cloud of suspicion that's fallen down
on Carrie that he's deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination.
And by this point JFK conspiracy theorists have become aware

(17:01):
of the Discordians and thornley Is involvement and have decided
the Discordians are a CIA front, which, in fairness is
something to the Discordians claimed too. So this doesn't nowhere.
Um oh boy, So I'm not gonna fed jacket myself,

(17:23):
you know, I mean they do that immediately. Yeah. Um.
So Thornley becomes the constant victim of stalking by groups
of men in suits, and it's like he is legitimately
under investigation by the government. Some of these guys are
probably FEDS, some of them are probably conspiracy theorists also
carry as a paranoid schizophrenic who's taking LSD and marijuana

(17:46):
nearly every single day. So a lot's going on win
his head here, right, But like part of what's going
to make this so much more damaging to him is that,
like some of the stalking is real, which makes the
stuff that's not real a lot harder for him him
to doubt. He also, because you know this is Garrison,
you may not know this. People's phone numbers used to
just be like listed in a book that you can

(18:08):
pick up. So folks like who are into the conspiracy
get phone books for wherever he's living, and they start
like calling him, and some of them will leave like
cryptic messages, and these are some of these are probably
discordiants fucking with Carrie right where they're like continuing the
conspiracy by pretending to be a part of it to
mess with his head. Some of them are just dead air.
You know, they may just be people actually stalking him.

(18:30):
And yeah, it's it's it's impossible to say entirely what's happening.
But as we turn over to the seventies, Carrie increasingly
finds himself acting as a stone paranoid. Now, mental illness
does run in his family. His younger brother Dick suffered
from schizophrenic auditory hallucinations, and in this period Carrie increasingly
suffers from them as well. He is eventually diagnosed as

(18:52):
a paranoid schizophrenic. This is not like podcast Diagnosis Hour
with Robert Evans. Here Carrie Thornley was diagnosed and he
also starts escalating his drug use, which this is a
this is a seed during that do you know God
in the seventies, when is he born? Um, there's like,
what decade is he? I think like forties, He's probably

(19:13):
he's starting his thirties right now, if I'm not mistaken, Yeah,
it's like thirties, forties. I'm under the impression that's like
one of the time early thirties is like one of
the times that late twenties, early thirties is when people
often have schizophrenic breaks. And it can be I had
a I've had. This happened to a couple of friends
of mine. I used to live with a young woman
who was in her mid twenties, had just finished college.

(19:36):
Was like going through whatever program you go to to
become like a park ranger and then just kind of
one day loses it, you know, and yeah, I'm not
gonna give like the tails, but like it was, it's
it's it can come on very suddenly. And we know
one thing we do know is that both LSD and
marijuana can trigger schizophrenic episodes the martial too, But I'm

(19:58):
not sure. I'm I'm I think basically any seriously mind
altering drug can have the effective because I've heard that,
like cocaine can do it too. Like it's and it's
not like it's creating this in you. It's these are
people who at some point would have started to experience
these symptoms, but it can bring it on earlier. It
can make it, you know, a lot worse. It kind

(20:20):
of it kind of like knocks over the first domino. Yeah,
but the domino would have probably fallen over eventually anyway. Yes,
and with car right out to my schizophrenic friends who
are still awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean obviously this
is just like a thing he would have had to
deal with either way. Totally. I don't think anyway. I
just want to make sure everyone and I knows that
it's just a yeah, yeah, you know, it's just a thing,

(20:42):
and this is a thing he would have had to
deal with either way. I will say the fact that
he is basically never not tripping on acid or smoking
pot does not help him manage this. Yeah, and his
friends will note that, like sometimes he'll come in and
he'll be like fairly like calm and normal, and once
he hits a joint, he won't be able to stop
talking about this conspiracy to kill Kennedy and how he's

(21:04):
wrapped up in it and the different things that he
started to believe about it. And he's kind of so
aggressive about it that people, a lot of people can't
spend time around him anymore because it's just like this
this thing that when he gets into it, he's incapable
of like even seeing the people around him. And Carrie
goes further and further, kind of off the deep end.

(21:25):
Over the next couple of years, through the seventies, he
convinces himself that Oswald was really set up. He starts
to believe that he may have in fact been Oswald's
body double or otherwise involved in the conspiracy to kill
JFK and had simply forgotten about it due to CIA
mind control radios implanted in his head. And one of
the problems is that, like he has a lot of

(21:46):
friends like Greg Robert Danton Wilson, the CIA is cutting
off your microphone, Robbers, Oh no, this isn't the first
time that you've mentioned that. And then your microphone starts
cutting out. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that's how the CIA works.
But you know how else the CIA works by planting
people with that let's do so they trip and they

(22:06):
don't know it. That's one way it works. It works
so that they're more susceptible to advertising. Yes, yeah, yeah, well,
I mean Garrison in an earlier time, with less sophisticated ads,
they had to use LSD. Now though, the quality ads
on this podcast are much more mind altering than any
fucking chemical that's some Danish man cooked up in a lab. Ah,

(22:34):
we're back. I hope you all enjoyed the twelve hours
of hallucinations that come with every behind the Bastard's ad break. Um,
it's really ruined a lot of people's lives, but it
helps us. You know, it'stantially lucrative for us. I mean
exactly helps promote good got nothing, okay, yeah, it helps

(22:55):
promote good things. What this podcast is about, good thing,
the Good Things cast. So what a boring show that
would be him? A right here. Yeah, here's the problem
Carrie is. I mean, he's losing his mind. He is
increasingly unable to tell what's real. He's increasingly convinced that

(23:18):
that the government tried to have or someone tried to
make him murder the president, that he may have helped
murder the president, that he's being stalked by government agents.
And periodically he will go to his friends Robert Anton Wilson,
Bob Shay, Greg Hill, and he'll try to talk to
him about this, and they don't really notice that he's
serious because the language they all communicate with is like

(23:41):
making up conspiracy theories. So it takes them a while
to realize, like, oh, no, Carrie's actually in some distress here,
Like there's a there's a problem with our friend. What
are the odds that he actually was involved in the
assassination of JFK. He was living basically next to this
guy who he claimed not to have ever seen again.

(24:03):
I mean, for one thing, that he wasn't in Dallas
when it happened, But for the other thing, like Carrie
Thornley was actually incapable of like hiding anything every um.
I like, when he comes to believe that he killed Kennedy,
he tells everybody that he killed Kennedy. And so when
he doesn't believe, like, I just don't think he would
ever have been capable of being part of a plot. Um,

(24:26):
he's not very good at Like, yeah, he's, he's he's. Well,
we'll talk about it, like, Okay, there's a We're gonna
watch a little video with him later. Um, but yeah,
it's it's it's interesting. You can believe whatever you want about. Actually,
the carries carries complicity in the Kennedy assassination. Literally, I've
never cared about most conspiracy shit. It has never occurred

(24:49):
to me to care who shot JFK. I do not care. M.
I mean, wow, uh, Margaret, this is how the reality
the reality tunnel st arts. You're you are already on
the path. You you you already asked the question took
a shovel load of dirt out of a tunnel? M cool.
I hope there's some I hope. It's like D and

(25:11):
D when you get into the tunnels. Sometimes sometimes with
gold and manliquer carcano rifles. Yeah, so that's how I
play D and D. All of Carrie's kind of mental Um,
I don't collapse isn't quite the right word. But the
this this process of him sort of falling to his
mental demons occurs over the course of about a decade

(25:33):
and while this is going on, he remains pretty intensely
involved in radical politics. Um, he has another ideological shift
from the kind of individualist anarchism that had led him
to Discordianism towards a belief system that is, I mean,
this is not like a huge movement like this is
not like a huge pivot from individualist anarchism. But he

(25:55):
comes to like describe his political ideology as supporting second
drugs and treason. He briefly considers, yeah, that's fine. He
briefly considers slipping LSD into the water supply of a city.
But eventually his acid trips convince him to drop out
of society and integrate himself into what he calls a

(26:16):
sexually swinging psychedelic tribe. And this tribe is one of
the nineteen sixties mini acid cults called the Carrista. Carrie
takes over their newspaper and he writes several influential articles.
And these guys are like, again, this is like an
acid sex cult. It's also pretty like their Their publication

(26:38):
is reasonably prominent within the radical community at this time.
So Carrie's articles wind up having Margaret. You might be
surprised by the influence this has actually, but he writes
an article that includes this line, Carrista is a religion
and the mood of Carrista is one of holiness. Do not, however,
look for profusion of rituals, Dogma's doctrines and scriptures. Carrista
is too sacred for that. It is more akin to

(26:59):
the religions of the East and also the so called
pagan religions of the pre Christian West. So what's interesting
Like that may not seem like much, but what's interesting
is that that is and in this article includes basically
the first, probably the first recorded use of people using
the word pagan to refer to both a past practice

(27:19):
and ongoing modern religious practices that had not interesting happened
until yeah, and this is I'm not the one making
this claim. This is a claim made by Margot Adler,
who is a Wiccaned priestess and an NPR correspondent. In
her book Drawing Down the Moon, she claims that Carry's
writings helped spark the actual beginning of the neo pagan movement,
and she is the one who credits him as the

(27:40):
first person to use the word pagan to describe both
past and present religions. This guy is everywhere. Yeah, he's
really influential. It's it's wild because he's so president or too.
I'm not sure how many and also started. I don't know.
It's just impressive. You know what that is my head cannon.
Now I'm blaming the Kennedy assassin or crediting it to him. Um,

(28:03):
I think they secreted him away. Actually, I actually don't
know the conspiracy theories. Friend JFK. Oh, so you're you're
you're a Bubba Ho Tep believer? Oh god, no, I
don't think so, I've changed. You should watch everyone should
watch the movie Bubba Ho Tep by Don Coscarelli. The
premise of the film, starring Bruce Campbell, is that Elvis

(28:24):
like gives his life to an Elvis impersonatorum and then
winds up in an old folks home as an old man,
and his best friend is a black man who claims
to be JFK who the CIA like changed his skin
in order to like hide him to fake his death,
and they have they have to fight a mummy. It's
an incredible film. Okay, I've got I'm back to believing it. YEA,

(28:45):
all right, Bubba Ho Tep excellent piece of art. Yea,
um so Carrie Again, It's interesting. He is a very
functional person in a lot of ways. He's deeply influential.
He writes it huge amount. It's good writing as a
general rule, but he's also in like he's also an

(29:06):
unmedicated and increasingly kind of falling into these increasingly complex
conspiratorial holes, and he'll just drop off the map for
periods of time. He spends a decent chunk, particularly in
the late seventies early eighties, kind of living as a transient,
but but never when he doesn't want to write. One
of the things his friends will say is that like,
no matter how kind of far out he got, when

(29:27):
he wanted to, he would find ways to make money
and keep a roof over his head. So he was
he always had this kind of degree of control over
his life. It's more like he couldn't control his relationships
with other people because he starts to wrap them into
these conspiracies that he's spending all of his time thinking about. Now.
Probably I think the first, as far as I've read,
the first of his friends to realize something as deeply

(29:50):
wrong is Robert Anton Wilson. And Wilson, you know, would
kind of very politely when Carrie would start getting wrapped
up in these claims, would be like, well that I
don't really you know. I I understand what you're saying,
and I understand that you believe that, but I want
you to consider that maybe that's not as true as
you think it is, and like, maybe there's alternative explanations
for why you think somebody's following you or this or that.

(30:12):
Carrie decides that this means that Bob is his CIA
handler and he's trying to trick him, to manipulate him
into Yeah, this is like a not an uncommon story, unfortunately,
and variants of this kind of happened with some of
his other friends now. So kind of the side effect
of this is that, especially kind of at the end

(30:33):
of the seventies, Carrie is increasingly like isolated. A lot
of his old friends he doesn't talk to anymore. Greg
Hill kind of gets very depressed at this point in time.
His wife divorces him and he starts drinking more and more,
and so he kind of reduces his contact and so
Carrie does not have a lot of the moderating influences

(30:54):
that he'd had earlier in his life and his personal
beliefs continue to evolve, and again he's kind of gotten
really into free love in this period that has sort
of become the center of his political identity. And the
next set of beliefs that he that he takes on,
because he is a guy who periodically will just take

(31:14):
on beliefs very strongly, is that the only way to
create a utopia is to build a world free of
sexual hang ups. Now, this is where things take a
really dark turn. Carrie believes all people are sexual beings.
Sex is fundamentally a good. It's something that should form
the center of human relationships. And if all people are

(31:36):
sexual beings and all children are people, then sex with
children can't be all that bad. So one of them
real by Heater Lamborne Wilson Energy. Yeah. I was wondering
if they were communicating at this time, because that is
very very similar types of logic, and they were both
probably very very active, and like the early pagan community.

(32:00):
I haven't seen that they were communicating directly, but they
were certainly writing in some of the same magazines and
in some of the same places. And the thing Carrie
convinces himself is basically he's not committed to sexual liberation
if he does not try to have sex with a child.
So this did not come out until two thousand and three,

(32:22):
more than two thousand and two, something like that. The
book came out two thousand and three when Grace when
Adam go Rightley's who's written the book The Pranks during
the Conspiracy, which is the best book about Carrie, he
is looking into Carrie's life. He's talking to of all
of his old friends, and one of his old friends
she is a Carrie would claim that they dated. She
claims they just worked friends who had sex one time

(32:42):
and then she wanted some space. Yeah, this is another
thing with Carrie. But this woman, Grace Kaplinger, she sends
Adam a letter and this is what it says. There
was an incident in Atlanta when Carrie and Kara and
Craig were living across the street from me. Kara's his
his wife, living across the street from me and my family.
He took my daughter Marian, when she was around seven

(33:04):
or eight, into a room at the home of a
family close friends of mine who lived around the corner.
He closed the door and began trying to fondle Marian.
This was stopped by my friend Jane coming to the
door and demanding that it be opened. She told me
about it, as did Marian at the time, and I
know that I did not deal with this properly. Part
of me was simply unable to understand the gravity, even
the total reality of it. But it did happen, fuck,

(33:27):
and I have no reason to disbelieve that it's one
of those I want to be really clear here because
we've talked in other episodes, like when we talked about
them John Hinckley Junior, about you know, mental illness and
when it does and does not, like have an impact
on someone's complicity in a crime. And I don't think

(33:52):
that has any impact on what Carry has done here.
I think his decision to try to molest this girl
is completely consistent with decade of how this guy functions.
And what I mean by that is that when Carrie
comes across deep poverty overseas in Southeast Asia and reads Marx,
he becomes a committed Marxist. When he reads Atlas Shrugged

(34:13):
and falls in love with objectivism, he describes himself as
like a capitalist insurgent terrorist. When he finds anarchism, he
devotes himself to causing as much chaos as possible. He
is the kind of person who, when he finds something
attractive in an ideology, jumps into it with both feet

(34:34):
and is immediately ready to give everything for it. And
I think, actually, I there's a degree to which I
have more condemnation and find him more unsettling than someone
who is a pedophile in the sense of someone who
is attracted to children and seeks them out, Because we
have no evidence this ever happened again, And I don't
think this is the result of attraction. I think this

(34:54):
is the result of Carrie believing he is not living
his ideology if he doesn't try to do this. Yeah, Like,
and I think a person who can do that is
so much scarier than almost any other kind of person
in the world. Yeah, it's fucked up now. And there's

(35:16):
so much there about the history of its terrible the
history of pedophilia that runs through so many different subcultures
and ideologies on all sides of the spectrum. And it's
like very rarely tackled head on because it's usually talked
about in very bad faith, you know, like everyone calling
trans people groomers or whatever, right, or people don't want

(35:41):
to talk about it because it's not a fucking nice
thing to talk about, and it's it's complicated, but we
people need to know that. Yeah, that's just like what
echo chambers can make you believe is reasonable, you know.
I guess the kind of thing that they probably would
call reality tunnels, right like, yeah, like when you're like

(36:02):
you have these like self reinforcing beliefs and you get
a small group of people who are like yeah, and
then this thing and then this thing, you know, and
it is a thing that like people have a problem
with and it allows you to come up with horrific
conclusions such as this one. And this is why Robert
Anton Wilson was such an advocate of pan agnosticism, right,

(36:26):
it's part he's he's watching Carrie. I don't think he's
aware of this one. It happens, but he does write
the forward to the biography that this is in. It
doesn't become aware of it at some point because that
was only published a few years before Wilson died. It
was right rat because I think he died in two
thousand three or four. Yeah, yeah, but um, so yeah,
this is um, I mean, that's unsettling and it's interesting

(36:48):
just to kind of make that point further go Rightly
also talks to one of Thorny's longtime friends, or Thornley's
longtime friends, Lewis Lois Lacy, to try and understand why
this happened, and Lacy's explanation is that Carrie really started
to like his behavior started to change for the worse,
for the toxic, for the abusive, when he dropped the

(37:11):
personal mantra that he had kept with him most of
his life, which was just the word no. And I'm
going to read a quote from the book here because
I think this is interesting. As Louise explained, Carrie was
fiercely anti authoritarian, and prior to his bouts of paranoia,
he had always stood up to whatever monolithic force stood
in his way, continually saying no, whether it was to
the government, Jim Garrison, or anyone else. This was Carrie's

(37:33):
way of dealing with people who tried to tell him
what to do. And this was the simple wisdom he'd
imparted to Lois many years before. Just learned to say no,
and people won't know how to react or what to do,
and in most cases would leave you the fuck alone.
At some point, Carrie apparently quit saying no, and in essence,
stopped evolving, while his friends, who in many instances had
followed Carrie over the years, now began eclipsing him. As

(37:55):
they continued growing, exploring, and entertaining new ideas and forms
of expression, Carrie Lois contends, became locked in this delusory
world of conspiracies, which impeded his evolution. One time, Carry
explained his struggles to her in the following manner, It's
hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking
to you. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's a that's the complicated

(38:19):
thing to parse. It is a complicated thing because in
a lot of ways, like the path that he got
set down, he did lay he did lay out the
own stones for the path, like he was encouraging himself
along so much of this development and then he just
got lost along the way. Um. But but also he
was also just like he was always capable of doing

(38:40):
this right because he did it as a person. So
it's it's it's one of those things where had it.
It's the same thing with the same thing with like
the Kanye West stuff, same thing with whenever we talk
about like what degree does does like your mental health
or or you know, whatever diagnosis you might have like
contribute to the actions that you take. Yeah, and I
think it's a matter of whether or not you understand

(39:04):
the like the reality of what you're doing in a
very like basic way. Like, for example, if Carrie had
become convinced that a random person was stalking him and
just shot that person, believing he was defending himself from
the CIA, You're not morally like culpable to that, right, Like,
that's fundamentally a decision you make because you're you believe

(39:25):
you're in danger. Yeah, and like I can't morally blame
somebody for that, but yeah, like the decision to rape
a child is based on like reinforcing your own personal
sense of ideology. Yeah's just the weirdly fucked up thing
to do that, and that that matters more than, for example,
the consent of the child or you know, the like
the ability like obviously children cannot consent, but like the like,

(39:49):
it's the centering of his own need to be consistent
with this thing he's convinced himself as his politics. Yeah,
that is like that's a bad thing to do. Well,
this is depressing. You know what's not bad? Gold past,

(40:10):
buy some gold. Ah, we're back. We're just having a
good time, having a good time. Never want to stop
at all. So Karrie gets divorced. Um he kind of

(40:30):
loses his ability over time to function in mainstream society whatsoever.
He becomes something of a wandering bum, hitchhiking across the country,
crashing with friends or on the street. Those who'd known
him a long time learned that trying to help him
inevitably brought allegations that they too were part of the
CIA conspiracy. One of his brothers is his kind of

(40:52):
middle brother, not not. Dick later writes this, which I
think does a good enough job of kind of summarizing
how Carrie is treating people in this period. The last
time I saw Carrie was in the early nineteen eighties.
It was the last time our nuclear family was all
together at the same time in years, and it was Christmas.
After the Warren Commission testimony. Carrie gradually morphed from a fascinating,

(41:14):
very charismatic Mary prankster beaten at kind of idiot, savant
intellectual giant into a full blown paranoid schizophrenic. That Christmas,
we got together at my mom and Dad's the Nazi
spy's house. Carrie was intent on proving to me that
he was being followed and watched, and that he had
thought mind control devices, got mind control devices planted in
his head. So he asked me to drive him to

(41:34):
a local bus stop to prove his point. To put
this in perspective, I had long hair. Carrie had long hair,
a full beard, and a bright orange sailor's hat on,
and was carrying a white purse. As we sat at
the bus stop in this very conservative palos fared as neighborhood,
Carrie began to point out how almost everyone who drove
by was looking at us, so they were most likely
spying on him, and in fact, some had been following
him for days. That was such a shock to me

(41:56):
to realize what a fine line it is between being
an intellectual giant and a very smart, paranoid schizophrenic. I
never saw him again after that day. Oh that his
whole story is so dark and tragic. Um. Yeah, it's
like but you can see, like all all this gets
like you know, there's there's the his stuff that he

(42:17):
was doing in school to prank his friends as like
a pregurs for all this, how he would put up
posters talking about killing the president as like this this
thing that in the end has such a negative impact
on your life, but is seemingly an inconsequential joke, and
then in the end it leads to this devastating train
of things that just kind of shatters your mental grasp
of reality. And it's yeah, I think one like what

(42:41):
Wilson would say as it's the result of saying yes
too many times. Right, it's the result of being too convinced.
And I think part of what and I think this
is part of where you need some kind of some
of his brothers um words here to help make sense
of it, because the fact that what he says, they're
at the end there the difference between the thin line

(43:02):
between being an intellectual giant, which Carrie objectively was, his
influence on the culture was massive, and a very smart,
paranoid schizophrenic. I think carries conception of his own intelligence
is a big part of why yeah, yeah, go so
badly for him. Right, he thought he was smart enough
that he was like he was like catching these people yum,

(43:24):
and its fucking with them. And I'm the one, like
I'm the one who has like the control and the
agency here, right, and I think and I'm like, and
I'm like, the maybe logic side of things, it's like,
you know, people looking at me at this bus stop,
that is proof that they're following me. It's it's it's
it's using that that that notion of like is and

(43:45):
as opposed to thinking like, oh, they're looking at you,
or maybe it's because you have long hair and you're
sitting to someone else's long hair with you just you know,
you just look like weird hippies, like like, we'll see
him in a little bit. But I should note here
Carrie never didn't look like a wizard, like the whole
period from the Discorian point on. He's got like this

(44:08):
long beard and these he has wizard rest in wizard
face is how I would describe the way carry authorically looked.
He did eventually find some sort of rough equilibrium. He
wound up kind of making a place for himself in
Atlanta's little Five Points neighborhood. Now, at this point that
was the center of all things weird in the Deep South,

(44:30):
and it was ignored enough by authorities that it drew
in traveling punk kids who wanted nothing more than to
squat in old buildings and published weird shit for other
grungy leftists. What Carrie Sarah are we in now? We're
talking the late seventies, in the eighties, all through the
Reagan years. Basically, this is kind of what he's doing.
And he finds a sketchy living situation where he's basically

(44:52):
I think it's like a backhouse kind of thing that
it's not entirely legal. Over the course of the time
he's there, he fills it with exact thirteen cats. Um.
And because because space in his house is so small,
he had to build what he called a cat condo
out of scrapwood and trash, creating a system of tunnels, ladders,

(45:12):
and platforms on the walls for his cat. Like, yeah,
I've lived in punk houses where you have like the
resident wizard, where everyone's like twenty five, and then there's
just the like seventy year old anarchist who's like fucking
you know that's in this last period of his life. Yeah, um,
and his his cat condo. By the way, the health

(45:33):
department eventually makes him tart tap that man. I know,
let the man have his cat condown. You know, I
mostly feel sad for the fourteenth cat that just hangs
out out of side and is like, come on, you're
a crazy cat wizard. Let more space. Come on. So,
without the Internet, the L five P community, a Little
five Points community keeps in touch through a series of

(45:56):
underground papers, and in the mid seventies, late seventies really
mostly Carrie has another one of his great ideas. So
he starts by posting what he calls wall newspapers all
around Little five Points. These are one paged xerox rants,
and he puts them up in strategic locations around town
around like the punk bars and stuff that people hang

(46:17):
out in. So folks like find these, they see them
in like bathroom walls and stuff, and they read them
and they talk about them to their friends who are
all hanging out in the same area. And gradually, like
Carrie starts to become known around town for these wall
newspapers that he's posting up, and he starts publishing more
and more of these little xerox rants and like arguments

(46:37):
and like letters to the editor. People start passing them
out to their friends or leaving them out at bars.
This is the start of the Zene Revolution because one
of the things Carrie is doing while he's doing this
in Little Five Points. He's also part of the time
living the sort of transient existence where he's like hitchhiking
throughout the South, putting up these little like wall newspapers

(46:58):
and stuff and like spreading. So some times people will
like write notes and letters and stuff in Atlanta and
he'll like print them up, and then he'll travel down
to you know, Orlando, and he'll put them up in
places and stuff. And and this is like other people
start to see this and realize like, oh, this is
actually a really cool way to like communicate and share information. Um,

(47:20):
and yeah, this is like kind of how the zine
revolution kicks off, and that really starts. In the nineteen eighties,
Thornley publications included Colcha u Kulccha, which focused on art, sex,
and religion and and this is my favorite one, The
Decadent Worker, which was a gossip column of like different
like like drama that in the leftist community. And Little

(47:43):
five Points. Oh yeah, this is just like this like
Twitter getting circulated. Twitter, guys. So when I lived in
the squad scene in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, um, there
was this zine that had been going on for like
ten or teen years maybe longer. That was just the
gossip of who's fucking who in the squat scene in Amsterdam,

(48:06):
and it was like terrifying. It was terrifying to me
because I, like I didn't read Dutch and it was
one of the I don't know, but just the fact
that there's this zine that I guess distributed about like
who is new in town, Who's fucking who? It's fucking scary. Yeah,
and it's it's one of I should note here just
because people will get angry online. Otherwise. This is not

(48:28):
one of these This is one of those things where
like like, it's not like Carrie runs into a room
full of punks and anarchists and says, I have invented
the zine. This is This is actually a little bit
more like, uh, you know that situation. We're talking about
an episode one with like the creation of or the
discovery of calculus, right where he is doing this and
a couple other people are doing similar things and it
all runs together. But he is since he's so influential

(48:51):
and so skilled at getting his view of things out
to people, he definitely has a massive He's one of
a handful of people who starts the Zine Revolution, and yeah,
he also lays out he also puts together a wall
newspaper called the Cactus Flowery Gazette, where he lays out

(49:12):
the basics of what's going to be his final ideology.
He calls it zin anarchism. Now here's what he wrote
about his contribution to the Zine Revolution. I like to
think that over two and a half years of such activity,
it's raised the vibes in my immediate surroundings considerably beyond
the satisfaction of a feuding a few of the lies
the intelligence community spreads to counter my claims to bring

(49:33):
light about light data about my belatedly discovered involvement in
the JFK murder and such related matters as the premeditated
escalation of the Indochina War and German breeding experiments right
here in the US. There is no other profit involved.
And that's really interesting, the fact that he's like my
belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder because he's only
now realized that he had a hand in killing JFK.

(49:58):
He also posts advocate anarchist two of the presidents. Yeah, yeah,
that's right, that's right. Yeah, Actually, I'm not sure invatably market.
He may still have been an objectivist back then. Okay, yeah,
I'm not sure. Remember they can have that one, Yeah,
I can. He wanted JFK dead for Randy in reasons.

(50:24):
Oh it's very funny. Um yeah, so um we will.
We will continue to talk about Kerry Thornley and give
sort of the last stages of his life in in
the final part of this epic series, and we will
also talk about what happens after the original Discordians and
how their ideas get taken and changed and turned eventually

(50:47):
into the sundry fascist manipulation campaigns that have had such
an influence on our last couple of presidential elections and
last I don't know dozen ish public mass murders. Um.
But before we do that, Margaret Garrison, Yes, you know what.
It hasn't it's been implicated in any mass murders US

(51:09):
US as far as I know. We did. We did
a background check on youth of you. Well, I drove
past the police department building and screamed, has Garrison committed
any crimes? And no one, no one called me back.
That's good, that's good. And you also went and found
that Dutch zine and got someone to translate it from

(51:31):
Dutch and found out that I had not done anything wrong.
That's right, that's right. That's all the Zene focuses on
these days is your lack of complicity in various crimes. Yeah, um,
I know. If you have any old copies of Kerry
Thornley Wall newspapers from Little Five Points in the nineteen eighties,
hit us the fuck up, because I want to I

(51:53):
want to see some of that shit. I want to
read kulcha um. Yeah, what do you guys got to plug? Well,
if if you want to try to find if you
have any of those weird zines from from Little five
Points or the Walls or the Wall newspapers, can find
me on Twitter and Instagram at Hungry Bowtie. I just
speaking of Atlanta. Just finished up a four part series

(52:16):
on the toptop city movement in Atlanta, Georgia. The Week
of Action should be either ongoing or about to happen
by the time this episode airs, so yeah, excellent. I
have a podcast. I have two podcasts. I have a
podcast called Live Like the World is Dying that is
individual and community preparedness, and I have a podcast on
this very network and it's called Cool People Who Did

(52:37):
Cool stuff And yeah, you can listen to it every
Monday and Wednesday. And I have a book called Escape
from Insul Island. I have a bunch of books, but
the most recent one is called Escape from Insul Island
and you can read it. It came out. You can
get it wherever you steal, but wherever you books buy it,

(52:58):
steal it. Steal you know, just go steal something everybody stidia. Yeah,
steal the Principia discordia um from a bookstore that has
the temerity to sell it um. And uh, I don't know, Sophy,
what what kind of crimes are we allowed to advocate

(53:21):
our listeners commit go go, go back in time and
shoot JFK, go do it? Chris, just bleep me talking
right now? Yeah, wow, Sophie, I mean, yeah, I that much.
I think that much thermite would take out the structural supports.
But I don't know if a controlled demolition like that

(53:43):
is going to lead to as fast a collapse as
you expect. I think we'll have to I think we'll
have to check this by legal before we air this.
Are this episode Well, well, well we'll get back to
you all on that. But wow, Sophie surprisingly intricate player,
and if any of that was bleeped out, it was
actually the CIA who bleeped it out. Yeah, we don't
do that. We'll just cut this whole section. But if

(54:04):
this section runs but part of it's bleeped out, it
means that the CIA has altered this episode as part
of an influence operation. And you can't trust anything that
we say in this because as good as the technology
has gotten for deep fakes right now, there's no way
to know if we actually said this, or this is
something that our CIA handlers are putting out using our voices.
We may not even be alive anymore. You have no

(54:26):
way of telling I love that we haven't learned from
the actual thing we're describing. We haven't learned from the
history that we are in the process of describing. I
was just gonna talk to do that thing where like
a TV program gets pulled live on it. It's just like,
I mean, look, Margaret, but the chief lesson of this
show is that it is impossible to learn things from history.

(54:47):
Can we live that message every day? Yeah? All right?
Scording by Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool
Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media at our website,
coolszonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.