Part Six: A Complete History of the Illuminati

The Epic story of the Illuminati concludes with some, admittedly, messed up stuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ah, Welcome back to the Conspiracy Cast with Robert Evans,
where every week I try to put irresponsibly out something
that sends a chunk of our listeners down a very
dark road. Now, Margaret, you were just telling us all
that you've been snowed in recently. Yeah, why why don't

(00:26):
you talk to me about that? Just a little bit? Okay,
it snows. I live rurally. I can only I can
get out with my you know, giant pickup truck or whatever,
but the mail can't cut up the driveway, the gravel road.
So you you, you were, you were? You know what
happens when there's so much snow that it's difficult to
leave your house. How would you describe that state of affairs?

(00:47):
I love it. I'm a prepper. My house is completely
self sustaining even if the power out. I like, yeah, Margaret,
is it true that you secretly were in the United
States military and stole government documents? Oh, I'm snowed in.

(01:08):
That took a lot of setup. That was mostly failure,
but I know it in the end, was it was it? Really? Uh? Yep?
It sure was. I was surprised that you're you're sticking
to these like low level. I mean that stuff you

(01:29):
were just saying is true, but I'm surprised that you
haven't gotten into the real conspiracy about how gold is
actually corrosive and it destroys your brain if you're near
large quantities of it. Wow, Margaret, I mean, what's the
responsible thing to do then with all of your gold?
If you have it and you can feel it impacting

(01:51):
your brain, Robert, you should bury your gold. I think
that's too dangerous. I think people need to send their
gold to our po box and our actually trained a
romancers will will will decontaminate the gold, um, and and
find a safe place to bury it. We'll put the
Midas touch. That's right, that's our motto. Is this the

(02:13):
last episode of the series. This is the last episode
of the series. All right, we have to we have
to we have to get we have to get all
of all the last bits in now before him. That's right. Uh.
And speaking of ending, um, it's about to be the
end of Carrie's life. UM. Not a particularly long life. UM,
with the exception of Bob Wilson, Uh, none of like

(02:36):
the kind of most prominent early Discordians live crazy long life.
There's a couple of them that there's a lot of guys.
Yeah JFK still bouncing around down in Texas after fighting
that mummy. Yeah. Um yeah, so he's he's kind of
like the last years of his life he spends rambling
throughout the South and making zines in Atlanta's little Five

(02:58):
Points neighborhood. Um, one of the ways he gets by
kind of he never really makes a profit at it.
But like if you if you send him a dollar,
he will send you a bunch of random wall newspapers.
And if you send him a letter saying I don't
have any money, he'll also send you a bunch of
random wall newspapers. Basically, if you send carry either currency

(03:19):
or anything else, he'll send you a bunch of his zines.
And that's just he's kind of able to maintain a
marginal like living by doing that. We do but with gold.
If you send us gold, we will either send you
a zine or not. Yeah, one of those two things
will happen. And if you later encounter razine in like
a bar or something, just assume that was us too, YEA.

(03:42):
In that way, if you don't receive anything, you won't
feel ripped off. Now, the other thing that's happens in
this is that like again, all these kind of like
punk kids are coagulating in little five Points because it's
a place you can get by without having sort of
a very regular income. There's not like a lot of
attention from the local government on that part of down yet,
and all of these people, particularly a lot of young

(04:03):
punk ladies, find Carrie and kind of adopt him as
a guru. Um he should not be yes, um this
there there are some problems with this, these these young
women who call themselves the thorn Lyett's um. Because that's
not that's not good for Carrie. That's not the thing
what this guy's brain needs. UM. Now Again, Carrie never

(04:28):
seeks treatment in or help in any meaningful way. UM,
and his conspiratorial beliefs continue to evolve. This starts with
kind of his anger at his ex wife, but it
eventually he becomes convinced that both her and every woman
that he has ever slept with, like every woman who
approaches him, who hits on him, are all part of
a conspiracy. They're all Nazis who were secretly sent over

(04:50):
to the United States to have sex with him and
breed a future fearer. UM. No, though he is. He
is just like fully solid into his own his own
hole that he does yeah, yeah, and you know that's
actually very sad. But it is also like the kid
on TikTok. There's a kid on TikTok who's like a

(05:14):
fan fiction kid who like does yeah, some sort of
part of nerd culture I'm not familiar with, but he
has convinced himself that he's the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler
and has gotten a like nose piercing that when his
Harris styled a certain way, he looks kind of like,
honestly not a bad resemblance. And I'm gonna be again,

(05:35):
to be totally fair, if Hitler was reincarnated, that's exactly
the kind of person he'd be in twenty twenty three. Robert, Yeah,
Robert can't take all the blame for that one. No, no,

(05:55):
get it, get get get ready for the six part
series on twink Hitler. Oh, that's that's going to be
more than six parts. Garrison Behind the Twinkler. We're just
launching a new weekly. Oh god, keeping up with him. Um. So,
one thing that seems undeniable is that Carrie's belief in

(06:15):
a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination only deepened with time.
He came to be convinced that he was a central
part of the plot, and one of his last public
appearances was in nineteen ninety two on a TV show
called A Current Affair. We're gonna play a segment from
this let's just let's just watch this incredible piece of

(06:36):
nineteen nineties television starring our friend Carrie Thornley. He emerges
from the shadow, Okay, grim shadows that have cost up
all over a man with a frightening secret, a terrible boast.
I wanted to shooting. I wanted to assassinate him very much.
You've just seen and heard a man called Carrie Thornley

(07:00):
use the exotic background of New Orleans as his headquarters
for a deranged plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy's
one regret his good friend of marine buddy Lehi Voswald
got there before him. In fact, he was so close
to Oswald that he even read a book about him
before the assassination. Now again, listen to the words that

(07:21):
Terry Thornley and shot up. I wanted him dead. I
would have shot him myself. I would have stood there
with a rival and pulled the trigger if I'd had
the chance. Terry Thornley talked for the first time in
history about the hybrillest competition imaginable a rate to kill
President Kennedy, and Thornley wants the world to know he tried.

(07:42):
He's heart I told the Secret Service. I said, the
only reason I didn't kill him was because I wasn't
in the right place at the right time with a gun.
The world met Terry Thornley in the nineteen sixty four,
So you see what's happened here at number one, Kerry.
It's moved on from like you know, I was mind
controlled to like I had my own plan to kill Kennedy,

(08:02):
and I was like fighting with Oswald to pull it off.
But what's really happening here, more than anything, is that
these like sleazy daytime TV fucks are using a very
sick man in order to make content, Like this is
his mustache. They stole his mustache. He does have like
an amish beard do, but that's pretty messed up, like

(08:23):
he's they it's very They're like framing all of this
almost like an episode of like Unsolved Mysteries. In between
as they cut through to like this footage of Carrie
walking down like a darkened street and everything. It's pretty exploitative.
But yeah, that's kind of like the last big public
thing that Carrie does. And I'm not one for conspiracy theories.

(08:44):
It is kind of sad. I'm not, you know, one
for conspiracies, but from just in order to be perfectly responsible,
I do think I need to show you both the
logo for the show that he has his last appearance on.
Oh it's a pyramid. It's a pyramid. Yeah, there's a
pyramid directly behind the current affair logo. So interesting. Interesting,

(09:09):
What a year was this? Um, this is nineteen ninety two,
So this is this is a year after after he
published zen Archy, which is kind of one of one
of a weirdly long lasting text that he wrote towards
the end of his life. Yeah. Um, and yeah, that's
that's kind of his last like TV type appearance, although
I think the last appearance he actually makes is right

(09:29):
before he passes on. He dies in ninety eight. Um,
a bunch of because Discordians were some of the very
first people on the Internet. We're talking like Usenet days,
and like there were a bunch of different kind of
fan websites to Thornley and Bob Anton Wilson and all
all of these other guys, and one of them gets
him and like sits down with him and conducts a

(09:51):
live chat session interview where a bunch of Discordians around
the world are able to like ask him questions. And
I think it's one of the first times anyone had
done this. This is the late nineteen nine, so there's
not a lot of people who beat him to that
sort of thing. That is now like the language through
which fandoms are conducted, which is also interesting. I was

(10:11):
terminally online in the late nineties and I was telling
Garrison about this, that a lot of overlap with them
Discordian and especially like Church of SubGenius and all of
these sorts of things, and so it's just like that
just really tracks to me. And it was like these
like slightly older people who were like the cool weirdos
on the internet that I was like, whoa, look at

(10:33):
these cool weirdos on the Internet. I would go on
IRC chat and like, yeah, meet all these Discordians. Now. Unfortunately,
Carrie in the state that he's in, is not taking
He's not like visiting a doctor regularly, and he also
just doesn't have access to particularly good healthcare, and this

(10:55):
becomes particularly a problem when he gets evicted by the city.
They kind of like coming in clean house and Little
five Points and kick out a lot of like the
crusty radicals. And so he and a bunch of yeah
these kids all wind up sleeping in a very specific
forest in Atlanta, where he gets sick and is eventually
hospitalized and dies. Um. Wild. That happens in November of

(11:18):
nineteen ninety eight. He is sixty years old when this occurs. Um,
And uh, yeah, I think that's interesting. Um. And that's
the specific forest that is now being turned into copsody
as far as I can tell. Yeah, I mean it's
it's right outside a Little five Points. If if you
have more details on that, I could I could probably

(11:39):
confirm that, um, if he has not found them, but
I yeah, it's worth looking into because it I mean,
it is the Melanni Forest is just like a few
miles directly south from Little five Points. There is there's
a road that connects you straight from from a Little
five Points towards to that section of the forest. The

(12:00):
late eighties that we're sorry, in the late nineties. That
that would have been right right after the city shut
down that area of forest that operated as a prison farm. Um,
so that would have been it would kind of entered
its first stage of like not really being used for
anything for the next like twenty twenty years or so. Yeah. Um, yeah,
it's it's not a kind of thing I know exactly.

(12:21):
They just say, like the forest kind of near a
little five points but interesting. Yeah, it's kind of one
of the last places he spends any time. So he's
actually still living. I'm sorry this all making up conspiracy
things too much fun. Still living under the forest, and um,
I don't know where to go from there. If only
um obviously he is not a man who had an
easy life. The high Discordian leaders did not in general

(12:44):
have easy lives. Um. Greg Hill, as we've said, kind
of collapses mentally after his divorce from his wife. Um,
he gets a job. He eventually becomes a like upper
mid level executive at Bank of America. Oh that's well, yeah,
it's even sadder than that, because he will work as
a bank executive during the day and then for the

(13:06):
rest of his life he just comes home. He does
not interact with anyone and he drinks himself to death.
He drinks himself to death like it's a job. Yeah,
and that is that is how Greg Hill leaves the world.
Robert Anton Wilson lives the longest of the guys we've
been talking about, into the early two thousands. He is

(13:27):
a much healthier person. There are some like criticisms of him.
He kind of he has some like very specific critiques
of feminism that I think some people have uncharitably compared
to being an early men's rights advocate. That's not actually
what I mean. From one thing, his wife was a
fairly influential feminist activist in her day. He had a
lot of specific issues with specific things certain feminists were

(13:50):
saying that he criticized, but was not like anti woman
in any particular way. Now he is. He is a
guy in who's writing shit in the sixties and seventies, um,
which falls over time, right, Like there's some misogyny you
can find in this early stuff. It also afferent, yeah, yeah,
at the time when a lot of the feminism is
specifically anti porn. Also yeah, yeah, he is someone who

(14:13):
changes over time. And nothing that I've seen of his
is like like hateful, you know, like, he's not like
a cool or a violent person. He's just you know,
if you if you go in and read a bunch
of his stuff, you'll find some stuff that doesn't age
well and some stuff that you disagree with, which is
going to be the case with everybody who thought of
things that were interesting at any point in history. Not me,

(14:33):
not not Margaret future actually hum yeah, and and not me.
You can find Maya. It's actually kind of a sequel
to zinn Anarchy. It's called put the lead back in
the gas tanks. Comma fuck them kids, And it's sort
of my manifesto. UM. And I think really people are
going to get a lot of good out of that.

(14:54):
I also think bicycle helmet should be illegal, So you know,
check that book out. Follow my five pillars of making
sure children don't graduate school at accelerated rates, um, all
good stuff. School zone speed limit should be fifty five
miles an hour. It's interesting because as we're kind of discussing,
like the the end of the lives of these people, UM,

(15:16):
a few years before of a few years before Greg
Hill died, he gave an interview UM to loom Panics. Yeah,
he is like a was a publisher for both weird
left wing and right wing Esota Rica. Yeah. Yeah, yeah
that he he He talked about how, like his pen

(15:37):
name Maloclipse the younger he like described it as like
as like a spirit that like entered him and he
was he was, he was, he was, he was. He's
able to like channel writing through through the spear, which
is why he credited the work to to this to
to to this entity. But he also says that like, um,
that the entity kind of left him once. Yeah, once

(15:59):
Principia was writing, he kind of like it left and
like that. Yeah, part of him is like it like
disappeared over time. We'll actually talk a little bit more
about that in a second. I've got to call from him.
You'll find interesting, Oh awkward interjection. Robert forgot to do
the ad break back when he was supposed to. So
we're editing this in crudely, probably in the middle of

(16:20):
a sentence being spoken by Garrison, and we'll probably come
back from this ad break mid sentence spoken by Garrison,
just to fuck with him. But yeah, Bob Wilson is
the guy who kind of lives the longest and he
you know, the last years of his life are racked
with pain due to post polio syndrome, but he remains

(16:43):
extremely productive. And the thing that he has that that
I don't think really any of the others had, particularly
not Hillan Thornley. Bob Wilson is a weirdo. He's into
all this esoteric shit. He's also a professional, like a
professional writer who writes for a massive publication. He knows
how to pack gage ideas in ways to get a
lot of people to pay attention to them. And so

(17:04):
it's Bob Wilson. It's his work that's going to kind
of bring Discordianism to its widest audience and also have
the biggest long term cultural impact in mainstream conceptions of
the illuminati, because that's the thing that Wilson does the most.
That Wilson's work does the most. In nineteen seventy five,
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shay, his fellow editor at Playboy,

(17:26):
start to publish a series of three novels, eventually known
as the Illuminatus Trilogy. The book is a very weird
piece of fiction. One of the things they're doing during
this is like every chapter, basically they switch off, and
so they were kind of trying to write each other
every chapter into a corner that the other couldn't get
out of. Assos. I know, it's it's not structured the

(17:50):
way most books are. The foundational premise is that all
conspiracy theories, even the conflicting ones, are true, and the
history of the world is largely determined by a secret
war waged between the all controlling Illuminati and the Discordians,
who are like the insurgents fighting against the Illuminati and
also are part of the Illuminati. It's a very it's
that kind of book. Um And again, one of the

(18:12):
things actually because like they're everyone is a double agent, right,
and like the Discordians are actually deeply enmeshed in the Illuminati.
One of the things that's happening here that Wilson is
talking about is the fact that if you were a
radical in the sixties, you came to the realization that
like a significant chunk of the people you organized with
were Feds, and so like that's one of the reasons
why all of this is like that's such a like

(18:34):
there's so many different like quadruple agents and stuff in
this in this series. Um, so it's just like working
for like mainstream publications Uh, yeah, you're you're critiquing capitalism
or participating capitalism. And I don't actually think that's like
bad obviously, but it's it's messy, and I could leave
you with that sort of sense of yeah, and it's

(18:55):
it's it's a very messy book. And so this is
a hugely influential book. You know, we'll talk about this
in a second, but like you, it's one of those
things that's influential in ways that are mostly not super visible,
because when people put hints and references to this stuff
in their work, they're often very coy about it. And

(19:15):
just because of how influential this was and sort of
conceptions of the illuminati and conspiracies, a lot of it's
faded into the background since then. But yeah, I want
to I think probably the best way of kind of
talking about the way this stuff works is the idea
of the twenty three enigma, which is a big thing
in the Illuminatis trilogy, and it's it's basically like one

(19:40):
of the things that Wilson does in this book is
he finds there's all these different specific dates in history
that are influential that involve the number twenty three. There's
a lot of like very specific fucked up historical shit
that happens in nineteen twenty three, and he'll he'll pull
all of these different dates in moments and stuff together,
because if you start listing enough stuff like that, the

(20:02):
kind of pattern recognition chunk of your brain lights up
and you start to attach a specific like significance to
the number twenty three. And so, like Wilson's kind of
goal here, this was another little way of bringing people
to Chapel perilyss is if you kind of like list
out all these different ways that the number twenty three
is significant in history, maybe people will start to question

(20:23):
whether or not the Illuminati is like picking spis you know,
is there a conspiracy that's doing certain things, that's carrying
out all these assassinations and revolutions on dates that have
a twenty three in them. Are they doing it because
like they're trying to signal to people what they're doing.
Is this some sort of message or is it just like, yeah,
you know, a bunch of like like, if there's enough
things happening in the world that if you like pull

(20:44):
out every significant event that happened on the twenty third
day of a month, you'll get a bunch of weird shit, right,
which is the where I tend to land on things.
But this kind of like works never one. If you
read the Illuminatus trilogy, you're going to wind up like
just noticing twenty three's forever, but also because of how
influential the books are, sit down and watch the fucking wire, right,

(21:05):
and see how many twenty threes you see on the
back of squad cars or in people's shirts and jackets.
Watch like any big show and keep an eye out
for the number twenty three, and you'll note that it
shows up more often than it seems like it should.
And is this just because Michael Jordan is a popular
basketball player? That's certainly some of it, or does a

(21:27):
lot of it have to do with the fact that
a bunch of the people who were making, particularly the
TV shows that were big in the late nineties early
two thousands, had been fans of this stuff and stuck
twenty threes into their work. Well, that's also the case.
And because of how effectively Bob does this, and how
many people pick up on this and start sticking twenty
threes into art and television and stuff, a conspiracy and

(21:49):
actual conspiracy develops over the number twenty three, that it's
somehow tied, you know, the secret society running the world,
which culminates in a two thousand and seven film starring
Jim Carrey titled twenty three. I've never even heard of
this movie. Oh yeah, it was, it was. It was
a big deal back in the day. I guess this
is like really lived under a rock. Yeah, But I mean,

(22:11):
the thing that Bob Wilson is doing is he's he's
basically taking advantage of the human brains gift for pattern recognition,
because it can kind of, for one thing, when you
get people locked into this pattern than when you reveal
things that have to do with like the number twenty three,
it feels like more of a reveal, Right, it just
kind of like works narratively. And also Bob Wilson liked

(22:32):
fucking with people, and this like had a clear impact,
but it also has kind of formed. This is the
baseline of a lot of the tactics that are used
by conspiracists today because the way that social media works,
if you can start like seeding in references to conspiracies
in a bunch of ways that go viral when people
start seeing all this shit popping up on their timeline,

(22:54):
and maybe it comes up on their timeline in a
moment that's particularly significant to them, and then they put
more weight into it. Like all of this stuff is
a lot easier to do. Bob had to draw you
in to a thousand page fiction book to like tweak
people's heads with this shit. Now you can do that
at scale using algorithms on Twitter and YouTube and shit.
And I'm saying people have it's like publicity stuff. It's like,

(23:17):
in publicity, you expect someone to not buy a product
until like the tenth time they hear it. And this
is this is true for fucking anarchists and radicals and whatever. Also, right,
like like if you're trying to sell a book or
you're trying to get people to have interest in a book,
they're not going to do anything about it the first
several times they hear it. And so it is really
interesting that it's the same strategy. Yeah, and it's it's

(23:40):
the goal of my operation. Mind fuck Bob Wilson's goal.
And these guys are all folks who are on the left.
They're all people who are also activists. Is like to
kind of Robert Guffey, who's written a book called Operation
mind Fucking. Writes about this, summarizes the goal is like
they want to break the trance that kept America at war,
blindly consuming and oblivious to its impact on the rest

(24:02):
of the world, destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks
and confusion like that was essentially the goal. But as
Guffey notes, over the ensuing decades, it was the progressive
left whose ideas wound up being mainstreamed really from all
in the family onward. It was progressive values in fictional
TV maud to Mash Murphy Brown to the West Wing,
and as that became the dominant cultural narrative, Operation mind

(24:24):
fuck became a tool of the old right. And that
is over time kind of what you see is as
a lot of the stuff, not all of it. Obviously
these guys are much more radical than the fucking West Wing.
But as some of this, like these attitudes towards um,
you know, militarism and shit, and and attitudes towards like,
you know, sexual liberation and u like that kind of stuff,

(24:48):
like radical political equality and whatnot, as those become more
mainstreamed them the it's like the toolbox loses its power
for that side. Right, but becomes a more powerful tool
of the people who are now kind of the insurgents. Yeah,
and that's kind of the point that Guffey is making.
There's degrees to which I disagree with him, but I

(25:11):
think he's kind of like broadly looking at this in
a way that's that's that's useful. Well, So we don't
why we don't a sign, like we don't hold tactic
sacred is because like tactics themselves are applicable in certain
contexts and not another context and can be used by
all kinds of people. So if there's not a moral
weight attached to a tactic, then I don't feel bad

(25:32):
if the right wing is using Operation mind fuck type stuff,
because of course they are, because if they're the underdogs,
that's what they'll use. Like, yeah, it's like I said,
it's a gun on it on the table, right, Yeah,
that's what they've done, is they've built a gun and
they set it down on a table. Um. You know,
they try they used it first, and we can. I
think it's you know, arguable, like the degree to which
it was successful or not. Um. And I do think

(25:54):
it's interesting because one of the things, like we're trying
both to talk about sort of the broader impact on
American politics and culture that the aftershocks of Operation mind
Fuck had. But the other story is the impact that
it had on like conspiracy culture itself and even like
the conception of the Illuminati. And this has a lot

(26:15):
to do with the fact that, again, Robert Wilson and
Robert Shay are both really good writers from like a
capitalist standpoint in terms of their ability to write things
that spread and can be sold, and this has led
a lot of creators to adapt their work. They're also
very influenced by HP Lovecraft, who was kind of an
early creative commons advocate in a lot of ways, like

(26:40):
they wouldn't have used those terms, but he was this
advocate of, like, yeah, people should be taking my stories
in this mythos that I've built in writing their own
stories in it. And that's also kind of the attitude
that Wilson and Shay seem to have towards a lot
of this. And so a lot of people adapt versions
of the Illuminatis trilogy. And this leads to in the
early nineteen nineties when Kerry Thornley is going on that

(27:03):
TV show to talk about how he was racing his
buddy Oswald to kill Kennedy. A little Austin based pen
and paper game company called Steve Jackson Games makes a
card game, and Steve Jackson Games makes a lot of
card games. They Munchkin is probably their biggest seller now.
But they make a game in the early nineties called
Illuminati New World Order, and it's based in part on

(27:25):
the Illuminatis trilogy and in part on just like Shit
in the News. And the nineteen ninety four edition of
this game includes a card called Terrorist Nuke and Margaret
how she described that card. That is a picture of
the World Trade Centers being blowed up, and not blowed
up from the bottom, like, no, not from the bottom,

(27:46):
from about where that plane hit it. Yeah, this card
gives plus ten power or resistance your choice to any
violent group you control with violent is capacitalized. Well, it
certainly gave plus ten empower to the American government. There's
another card. I forget what it's called, but it just
it shows the Pentagon exploding in a particular section and

(28:09):
the way that the Pinnagonics. Yeah, I mean the band
the Coup put out like them hanging out in front
of some blowed up world towers like I think that
week or some shit like it's just an idea whose
time had Am I gonna finish that sentence? No, but
certainly it was an image that many people had thought

(28:30):
of before it happened. That is, like, there's even stuff
like in the Simpsons. There is there's stuff all over
of things resembling nine to eleven that happened in like
the two decades prior. I will say none of them
quite as much as this reson. Yes, absolutely, it is
a little striking yeah. Um. Now, the almost startling pressions

(28:51):
of this card, and the fact that it came from
a card game called Illuminati New World Order led to
viral conspiracy theories that the actual Illuminated had faked the
nine to eleven attacks and used this card game as
what Alex Jones called predictive programming to seat awareness of
their crimes. The crowning moment of this particular conspiracy theory

(29:11):
came when Osama bin Laden was assassinated in twenty eleven.
The CIA gained access to his hard drive, and the
contents of this hard drive are now all publicly available.
They contain a PDF titled smoking Gun Proof that Illuminati
planned terrible events many years ago to bring down our culture.
The article that follows is an exhaustive dissection of the

(29:31):
Illuminati card game on Osama Bin Laden's hard drive. Again,
Steve Jackson's game must have made bank off of this.
They were just sitting back being like, yeah, yeah. The
other thing that happens right around this time is they're
making like a cyberpunk role playing game, which includes a
bunch of hacking shit. And because the FBI, especially in

(29:54):
the early nineties, is not very doesn't know anything about computers,
they like freak Out and aid Steve Jackson games. So like,
after this comes out, there's a massive federal raid on
this gaming company. It's all a coincidence. I mean, this
is and especially when this shit shows up on Ben
Laden's hard drive, like this is a lot of people's
chapel perilous moment, right Yeah, you're like, why how would

(30:17):
this be in his hard drive? And obviously there had drive.
There was so much shit, including like all of the
fucking Looney Tunes cartoons you could ever want um. But
if you're if a part of your brain at any
point this went like, huh, I wonder if something we're
just going on I mean you know, that's Operation mind
Fuck working as intended. Um. Now, the Illuminatus Trilogy ironically

(30:42):
made the Illuminati reel to millions of people. This is
due in part to the relevance of the books themselves.
In the late nineteen eighties, the Illuminatus Trilogy was made
into a stage play, which was so popular it launched
the careers of Bill Night and Jim Broadbent. The Queen
of England attended the opening. Um. It is a weirdly

(31:02):
influential play. UM. So uh yeah, the Queen of England
attends this play based on this ridiculous series of books. Um.
And of course Illuminati imagery. We're just we're posting this
on a day when like Elon Musk posted an Illuminati meme.
Jay Z and Beyonce have incorporated Illuminati symbolism in that
their acts, which have convinced a lot of people that

(31:25):
they are, in fact in the Illuminati. Um. In twenty fifteen,
research suggested that about half the US population believes in
at least one conspiracy theory, and one of the most
popular is the existence of the Illuminati. I suspect it's
probably over half at this point. The QC theory a
lot has happened to reality since twenty fifteen. And honestly,

(31:49):
if you stopped happen, reality stopped existing. Yeah, well, I
mean consensus reality took a big hit. We all there
were It's almost like, you know, if you want to
use society is like, uh, some fucking like worm traveling
through the soil. We hit a rock and burst into
pieces and like that's now You've got a bunch of

(32:10):
little worms that formed out of the carcass of that
big worm. And we're all tunneling in different directions and
some of us have wound up in piles of shit. Huh, yeah,
I know that maybe is better. I use it as
the like the way of understanding majority reality is like
the ice is thicker where more people are and stuff,
and like out on the edge is like where some

(32:31):
of the more fringe things happens, and there's no value
in something being fringe or not right, like much like
Operation mind Fuck. It's like there's no value fucking people's heads.
And so yeah, sometimes it just feels like we fucking
the ice flow just split in half. Yeah, and this
is um you know, obviously, like Q went on, conspiracy
theory is a rebranded Illuminati conspiracy theory. They are taking

(32:55):
the joke that these guys made about how the CIA
and the Republican Party and the Democrat Party and the
anarchists and YadA YadA, we're all, you know, part of
the conspiracy together. The actors just taking universities, the people
in the media. They even even even the current fucking
stuff with like you know, the the the elites pushing

(33:15):
gender ideology and all, like the antitrans stuff is just
is just another version of the Illuminati. Like it's all
the same shit. And if any of those people would
get my pronouns right, as if any of the people
that they think are like controlling and trying to make
everyone trans would like fucking get my pronouns right. Yeah. Well,
and it's it's interesting too because um uh, what you

(33:37):
actually kind of see here because it's not just the
Discordians that like Discordian attitudes towards the Illuminati that have
been taken up by Q and on. They're kind of
merging the Discordian depiction of the Illuminati with the John
Birch Society's depiction of the Illuminati. So like like that's
really what you've seen happen here, which is such a
strange thing, but I don't see any other way to
kind of parse out the intellectual DNA of this movement. Um. Yeah.

(34:00):
And it's interesting because at this point, for one thing,
some of the first people to recognize what was happening
with the alt right and like what was happening kind
of with all of these different social movements, these right
wing social movements that have spread through conspiracies over the
Internet were old Discordians, and a lot of these people
have kind of come to the conclusion that not only

(34:20):
did Operation mind Fuck fail in its initial noble goal,
but it had been subverted and turned into a weapon.
And I'm going to quote from Guffey here again. The
parallels between the Discordian goddess Heiress and the Egyptian frog
headed god Keck should be obvious. Both were created to
represent the spirit of chaos, disruption, and anti authoritarianism, and
many Altright memes, Keck resembles Donald Trump with a froglike face.

(34:41):
Oddly enough, depicting Trump as a half human half reptilian
hybrid is meant to be a compliment to the president.
In the nineteen nineties, conspiracy theorist David Ike grew to
fame by traveling around the world accusing various world leaders
of being shape shifting reptilians in disguise. Today, Trump supporters
clothe him in a reptilian form as a tribute they
perceive him to be a cold blooded agent of pure chaos.

(35:01):
I was literally just looking up all of the stuff
linking the peppe Keck thing to the Yeah, the entire
way that Fortune was using this like specifically influenced by
the operation mind folk stuff specifically influenced by like the
chaos magic stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's fucked up and
you're you're not gonna Obviously, the odds that Donald Trump

(35:22):
himself knows any of this are basically zero, but the
odds that there are people in his orbit who were
aware of a lot of this history are quite a
bit higher. And you're not going to find smoking guns here. Um.
But there there are some things that I've read over
the years that set like send me back to that
chap will paralless space. Um. I'm going to quote from
an article in the Guardian, and this is from way

(35:43):
back when the Cambridge Analytic a scandal broke, like if
you can remember then, So this is this is an
article about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As Wiley describes it,
he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up
creating quote Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mind fuck tool in
twenty fourteen. Steve Bannon, then executive chairman of the alt
right news network Bright Bart, was Whiley's boss, and Robert Mercer,

(36:05):
the secret US hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor, was
Cambridge Analytic as investor. And the idea they brought into
being was to bring big data and social media to
an established military methodology information operations, then turn it on
the US electorate. Now, is WHILEY using the term mind
fuck just because that's the term that is most appropriate.
Is he using it because as the kind of guy

(36:27):
who'd get this job, he's familiar with this history. Or
is he using it because it's a term that he
heard around the office, And then why were the people
using it? Like? Right? You can you can drive yourself
into some interesting areas if you read too much into
a fucking quote from a Guardian article where a guy
happens to use the word mind fuck while talking about
a psychological warfare tool. But I do that sometimes when

(36:50):
I'm reading about the Illuminati at four in the morning.
I mean, because you're in the chapel perilyss right now,
almost permanently. Yeah. So, research in twenty sixteen by You're
in Swammy, a psychology professor, suggests that conspiracy theory believers
are more likely to be suffering from stressful life situations
than nonbelievers. And what I find interesting about this is
that the toolbox built by the Discordians, merged with the

(37:12):
reach of social media, gives bad actors a way to
create stressful life situations for millions of people, which draw
them deeper into conspiracism while alienating them from their families
and thus making them more vulnerable. Right, this is a good,
big thing on qan on. A lot of people that
fall into this are not are not actually like like
they're actually doing fine. Like a lot of them are
like suburban Republican moms who like are living life pretty good,

(37:37):
but the invention of this conspiracy theory throws their life
into shambles because they now like it creates these stressful
conditions that otherwise kind of well off and privileged people
are already existing in. Yeah, and it's it's that that
is like part of you know, to the extent that
you want to throw put blame on the original Discordians.

(38:00):
Some of what makes this tool set so dangerous didn't
exist when they invented it, right, Like, all of the
stuff that has been done using kind of the basis
they established wasn't possible back in the nineteen sixties. But yeah,
it is worth noting though that, Like I just said that,
But as Garrison brought up earlier, among the first Discordians,

(38:22):
there was a pretty widespread understanding that they were at
least potentially fiddling with something dangerous. And I'm going to
quote from j. Mr Higgs here. Greg Hill was an
atheist who intended Discordianism to be a satire of religion.
He certainly did not start out taking the idea of
goddesses or spirit seriously. By the late seventies, however, he
was convinced that his Discordian adventures had stirred up something

(38:42):
that he was unable to explain. As he told his
friend Margot Adler, if you do this type of thing
well enough, it starts to work. I started out with
the idea that all gods are an illusion. By an
end I had learned that it is up to you
to decide whether gods exist. And if you take the
Goddess of Confusion seriously enough, it will send you through
his profound and valid and metaphor physical trip as taking
a god like yahweh seriously yep, yeah, I mean this

(39:06):
is this is this is funny, just uh right. Right
right before he started recording, this video came out of
Charlie Kirk talking about how he got sick because some
witches like like cursed him, and like, the first step
for magic to be effective is that you have to
believe in the magic. So the fact that Charlie Kirk
believes that witches can make him sick means that he

(39:27):
has now opened up the possibility in his brain to
get sick because of magic. So now people can do
that and he's and he will get sick because this
is how your brain works. Like this is like actual
like science stuff with the placebo effect, with the no
sebo effect. That the fact that he's decided that witches
can can cause him physical damage means that whitches can
now cause him physical damage. And because we have so

(39:50):
many listeners to this podcast, and and I think there
is a great stored potential in their mental energy. If
you have some time today when you listen to this,
everyone just think about giving Charlie Kirk Chlamydia. Let's all
just let's all just work on that together psychically, just
a little bit of a clap for old Charlie Kirk.
I think we can do it. All you have to

(40:11):
do is visualize his face getting smaller and smaller until
until he develops a series of horrible rashes. So throughout
the nineteen nineties, in particular, the tactics of the Discordians
merged with things like the Situationists and groups like Up

(40:33):
against the Wall Motherfuckers, which had all kind of existed
in the same period that the Discordians got started. One
of the things that gives the Discordians longevity is that
there are kind of follow up cults to the original cult,
the Church of the SubGenius being the most well known
that is basically rebranded Discordian. Bob Wilson is a part
of it, and this kind of keeps a lot of

(40:54):
like the stuff that they had been putting out relevant,
and as a result, they have a big influence in
the spread of a widespread left wing cultural practice called
culture jamming by anti consumerst activists in the nineteen nineties,
well and speaking of anti consumerism and and and church
at the SubGenius. One thing they put out was a
lot of fake advertising, just like and just like, just

(41:19):
like the fake ads. You're about to hear. Nothing you're
about to hear is a real product. These are fake.
The show is entirely supported by the CIA, working with
the John Birch Society. Yea, all fake products, but you
still have to listen. You still have to listen to
them or also it won't work, so yeah, yeah, it'll
break the illusion. All right, we're back. My favorite of

(41:44):
those ads was the one where JFK was talking about
his new podcast where he talks to celebrities. The Deep
Fake JFK podcast is actually pretty good. It is. It
is shocking how clear they make his voice, and it
flows very consistently. A lot of AI voices are kind
of junkie, but the deep Fake jaky voice is actually
one of the better ones that I've heard. We should

(42:04):
interview it about Kerry Thornley add a little bit in there.
Cyber is way more confusing than I was led to
believe by playing shadow when I was a kid. Well,
it's part of this is actually part of why it's confusing.
So the basic idea of culture jamming is that you
repurpose and co opt symbols and figures of established power,

(42:25):
turn them into memes, and use that to subvert capitalism.
A good example of this would be the Billboard Liberation Front,
who started hacking billboards in their terms in the nineteen seventies.
One of my favorite pieces of their work is an
AT and T billboard, which originally said AT and T
works in more places, and the BLF added like NSA headquarters.
The Billboard Liberation Front and other culture jammers influenced and

(42:47):
inspired a lot of modern activists and artists, but you
might note they seem to have made a lot less
progress in their culture jamming than late adopters on the
right wing. Since twenty fourteen, when Gamergate roared to life
in a hail of me and repurposed bits of mass media,
different once fringed chunks of the radical right have forced
their way into the mainstream, often co opting not just
the imagery of other artists like Pepe, but co opting

(43:10):
actual people to spread their message. In fact, we have
evidence that Adbusters, perhaps the premier clearing house of leftist
culture jamming up to the present day was used by
the alt right as a textbook in their twenty fifteen
two thousand and sixteen meme operations. Aaron Gallagher was one
of the very first researchers on this beat. In a
medium right up titled alt Right Culture Jamming, she cites

(43:31):
a September twenty fifteen Pole post read adbusters don't follow
the left hard propaganda, but look at the examples. Yeah. Man,
that's so frustrating. Ah, it's deeply frustrating. I feel like
the loss. I don't know, Margaret. I think the only

(43:51):
way it is through. We have to have to keep going,
just keep posting harder. We're going to do it eventually. Sure. Yeah,
it's one of two things. It's either earnestness or it's
getting things weird enough and fucking with people's heads enough
that we make everybody a furry. And then people are
too busy trying to make you know, various genital sheaths

(44:12):
for their furs suits to have a second civil war.
But see, they will be earnestly looking for genital sheaths
for their first suits. That is the strength of the
furry movement. It is an earnest thing that everyone else
views ironically. But this is this is something actually I've
been thinking about a lot that the past week, and
how these these tactics they do seem to be successful
in the ways that the right uses them. The left

(44:34):
and anarchists have seen success in these same tactics. But
this this type of like in the last previously in
our series, we talked about like a deternament versus recuperation,
and how these these two things they're kind of they're
kind of two sides of the same coin. Actually, like
they're kind of they operate, they operate the same and
they both and same thing with like culture jamming. They

(44:55):
all do contribute to this like fracturing and this opening
up of reality. But and what that does is that
it creates these brief windows of opportunity where like reality
is extremely malleable and it can be shaped by collective
groups of people. But yeah, so as these things are
useful tactics for for creating these these areas of possibility

(45:16):
and these and these and these small windows um and
one of the kind of risks of using these tactics,
and we kind of saw this with Occupied, We saw
this with a few other kind of very very culture
jamming based movements. Is that once this reality has been
fractured in a specific way, if if if we don't
win this battle, it can never be attacked in the

(45:37):
same way. Again. It's like as if you're if you're
going to use these culture jamming tactics as as a
part of a diversity of tactics to kind of effect reality,
to to open up these fractures once once they have
been once they've been attacked, and if we lose this
method of attack and this and the location of attack
is going to be so much stronger than it was
like pre the pre the fracture And it's when you're

(46:00):
fighting the borg exactly. It's it's it's one of these
things where you have to be very careful when using
these tactics because you could inadvertently, you know, make make
the attack surface actually you know, much harder in the
future if you don't actually you know, succeed at your goal. Well,
it's it's the idea that like you have to think
about some of this stuff like operation mind fuck the

(46:21):
way that like a hacker would think of a zero
day exploit. A zero day exploit is like basically a
fuck up and code that can allow you like a
method to get in and you know, access a thing
that you're not supposed to access. But the instant you
use it, the people who are responsible for defending whatever
it is you're hacking will know what you've done and
fix it. So you can use a zero day once. Right,

(46:44):
you have to be careful about when you deploy something
like that. And also, yeah, like like you have this
thing where it's like, okay, if where we perceive reality
is going from a garrison, was saying earlier, if where
we perceive reality is like kind of a a fixed point,
and you want to move that, but it's a pin
stuck in the political map. The pin is stuck in
the political map, and everyone who wants to change it

(47:04):
wants to pull the pin out of the map so
it can be moved. And the pin is now out
of the map. But the problem is that everyone now
can fight over the pin and move it, and so
really you always want to pull the pin out of
the map when you're positioned to be the one who
can move it instead of the other team. Yes, be
fast on that shit. And it's one of those things

(47:27):
obviously in terms of like determining bastardry. There's bastardry and
Carrie's personal life. When it comes to what the Discordians
were doing. I think it'd be a trap to fall
into too much recrimination here. Now we know Carry in
particular was a reckless guy. This was not not a
reckless thing to do Operation mind fuck. That said, it's
hard for me to blame an acid drenched young man

(47:49):
and his friends for thinking that their extended joke about
the John Birch Society would unleash a torrent of chaos
upon the world, although I have to say Harris at
least is surely pleased. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely, they
did exactly what they said that they were going to
try and do, and it worked. Yes, they got shocked
that it worked. Yea. It is interesting to note that,

(48:12):
whatever you want to say about their aims, the impact
of the Discordian Society on global politics and the course
of mankind far outweighs any other real secret society that
I can name. Like, objectively, they had more of an
impact on politics than the real Illuminati. They also succeeded
in forcing their names into the story of the Illuminati forever,

(48:34):
and as evidence of this, I want to read a
quote to you from a wild Ass Illuminati conspiracy book
by Jim Mars. It is critical at this point to
understand that Illuminism is an ism, not unlike national socialism nazis.
That's in parentheses communism, capitalism, and socialism. It is a
belief system that is not relegated to any one individual

(48:55):
or group in any given period of time. The beneficial
goals of the Illuminati, such as free from church dogma
and government tyranny, lived on to modern times in France, America,
and Russia. But the more sinister aspects of the order,
such as inherent secrecy, duplicity, violence, and the drive for
absolute power lived on too when unscrupulous men. Robert Anton
Wilson opined, the one safe generalization one can make is

(49:19):
that Wishop's intent to maintain secrecy has worked. No two
students of illuminology have ever agreed totally about what the
inner secret or purpose of the order actually was or is.
As Wilson wants fancifully told a radio audience, maybe the
secret of the Illuminati is that you don't know you're
remember until it's too late to get out out. That

(49:46):
that is such an interesting way to frame that though, Yeah,
is that Robert coming out as in the Illuminati to
us or is that Robert telling us that we're in
it now? Hmm? Interesting? Interesting, Wow, it's a decision for
everyone at home to make. That kind of just is
like hindsight is twenty twenty though, Like, you don't know

(50:07):
how much you're gonna affect history or like reality until
it's already happened. And even still, I don't think Robert
Aunton Wilson and the Discordian guys knew how much this
stuff would be impacted because they all died in they
all died in the early two thousands, and this stuffs
like kind of reached reached the peak of its power
from twenty sixteen to like the present. Um, And yeah,

(50:29):
that is that is a very a very concise way
to to to frame membership of the Illuminati. I would yeah,
I would love to die before I find out that
my life's work fuels all of my ideological enemies. Yeah,

(50:50):
that part's a bummer. I don't know. I think about
it a couple of ways. Um. One of them is that, like,
as I think about Robert Danton Wilson's ideas of reality
tunnels and pan agnosticism. I kind of think that one
of the healthier terms that social media has given us
is the idea of headcanon, right, which initially came out

(51:12):
of like the fan fiction universe as a way of
talking about like, well, I'm deciding this is true about
star Wars or whatever. But it's a term that gets
used more broadly by people on the Internet, and I
think maybe even if you're talking about loopy stuff when
you use it, the idea that this is canon that
is inside my head as opposed to this is my
view of reality is maybe in a subconscious way, an

(51:36):
inherently healthier way to talk about shit. No, that's so true.
I like that idea. Yeah, anyway, that's a more or
less complete history of the Illuminati. Did I love that.
The actual history of the Illuminati is like, there's this
guy he wanted to be a nerd and that fucking

(51:57):
Christians wouldn't let him, so he did some weird Christians
and looking science shit, and that lasted for a little while,
and then God struck one of them down, and now
there's fucking pyramids on the dollar bill and reality TV
Stars of the President. Yeah, it is kind of the
story of like two different groups of well meaning nerds

(52:19):
who like fucked around in order to try to make
the world a better place, but the only language they
had was lies, and so a number of problems were
created as a result. Yeah, and that's why, I mean,
that's actually why I believe. I think that like jokes
and lies and there's like some interesting and good shit

(52:41):
that can be done through all this. But I think
that's why just like people being earnestly about what they're
about feels like, yeah, much like headcannon as like a
way to inure ourselves from this kind of nonsense. And
I actually think we've been talking a lot about this,
about how the different culture weapons that the left and

(53:01):
the right use to kind of get around each other,
that these are not static battle lines, and that tactics
are adopted and altered and change over time. One of
the things that made Trump potent, and that made you know,
the alt right and the initial Trump movement potent, was
in fact a kind of honesty, or at least authenticity,

(53:22):
And I talk about that. I've talked about this a
few times over my career. I had a series of
interviews with a guy, Rick Wilson, who was an objectively
unpleasant man in a lot of ways. He was one
of the chief Republican like dirty tricks media guys. He
did a lot of really ugly attack ads in the
Obama era and then became an anti Trumper. But like

(53:43):
one of the things he will he would point out
when he was and this wasn't I was talking to
him as the election was going on and we were
kind of analyzing the Clinton campaign's ads as he was like,
these all feel like something somebody cooked up in a
Madison Avenue ad agency, because they are and Trump bads
feel like something some guy made on his computer at
three in the morning after like slamming a bunch of monsters.

(54:05):
And that's what worked about Trump. There's something authentic about
that that like enraptured people because it felt more honest
than the politicians we were used to. Um. It doesn't
mean he was a fundamentally honest man, but there was
a central honesty in his approach and like his willingness,
his unwillingness to even like pretend that he felt bad

(54:26):
for doing bad things. That was that was that was
like this authenticity that was an effective weapon in their quarrel.
And I think over the years they've gotten so up
their own there's an extent to which I think they've
gotten up their own asses about the you know, saying
the quiet part, you know, and and uh and and
kind of like wrapping their actual intents and layers of

(54:49):
subversion and all of this fakery. And I think there's
a degree to which that may have thrown people off
who would have otherwise been appealed to them. And I
think there's also kind of the period we're seeing right
now from the right is where they're they're discarding these
tactics and they're trying authenticity again in terms of like
we're just going to straight up talk about wanting to

(55:11):
erase transgender people from existence, we want to ban books,
we want to make it illegal to learn, you know,
take ap African American history, all this kind of shit,
Like the mask is kind of off, and I think
maybe they may be miscalculating, and we have some early
signs that that may be the case, the degree to
which that kind of authenticity is a selling point. And

(55:35):
so yeah, Margaret, I think there's a good chance that
you're right in terms of like what our response needs
to actually be because they're showing their faces now and
it's a pretty ugly one. So maybe this is the
time to show ours rather than you know, trying to
make our little illuminati and hide our enlightenment values from

(55:57):
the people who can't possibly understand it well enough yet.
I don't know. Yeah, And I think part of that
has to do with like, um, you know, like many
people listeners probably identifies liberals, but there's a sort of
joke that everyone hates liberals basically from all other every
other position and also possibly including the liberal position often. Yeah,

(56:18):
And I think that a lot of it has to
do with this, like having people be sort of wishy washy,
or having people yeah, not quite say what they're about,
you know, And I don't know, just being like yeah,
I often see that you actually get more people not
necessarily agreeing with you, but able to make their own
decisions about where they agree with you and where they

(56:40):
don't when you're just like, well, this is what I'm about.
What are you about? You know, instead of being like, oh, yeah, totally,
this is how I don't know? This like false. The
problem the media has too, because, by at least according
to Gallop, public trust in the media, about twenty three
percent of the American copulation thinks that journalists are basically honestum, like,

(57:05):
so people do not believe that the media is telling
them the truth. Like this New York Times idea of
like the importance of you know, honest, unbiased journalism. That
is not a thing. And it's not a thing because
no one believes you're unbiased. So the honest thing to
do is not to be like, well, we can't have
trains people reporting on trend or black people reporting on
you know, issues that affect the black community because they're biased.

(57:27):
Like no, just like have people report on shit and
be honest about what they believe. If you're a fucking
Marxist or a fucking conservative walking into you know, a
protest or a movement or whatever, X tell people what
you think about the world when you go to report
on that thing. Obviously, Like if you're reporting on like
a tornado, your ideology is not important. But I would

(57:48):
much rather know, yeah, exactly, Yeah, that we don't need
we don't need to We don't need to know that,
you like, have a Marxist to take on the economy
or whatever if your job is to report on a hurricane.
Although maybe that'll influence the way you talk about like
the but whatever how people handle it, let let I
mean don't like it. It's this, it's the fact, Like

(58:09):
the reason people don't trust the media. A big part
of it is that you can't be an unbiased journalist.
It's simply not a thing that exists in the same
way that like, the very way you see the world
and the way that it feels to you, even down
to the way things taste, is impacted by your expectations.
This is a biological reality that is undeniable. Your expectations,

(58:34):
your personal biases. Everything including like how much sleep you've
got the night before, changes the way you interact with
physical reality, as is the things you believe. So it's
actually fundamentally dishonest to pretend that you're coming at anything
from some sort of point of objectivity. And everyone knows
that at some level, which is why nobody trusts journalists. Right,

(58:55):
That's my take, and we should work to like part
of me open about her a biases is to also
kind of like no, okay, Like my weak spot is
that I want to believe that someone who calls themselves
this or that label is fundamentally good or fundamentally bad,
and so I should be aware of my own biases,
even for myself, so I can move towards objectivity. I

(59:16):
mean I have when I went into this. This is
the second version of this that I've done. The first
one was a much shorter version that we did as
part of a live show, and it was much less
complicated and towards the Discordians and delved into a lot
less of this. And you know that's part of It's
because these guys were my heroes when I was a
very young man. Yeah, and I didn't want in a

(59:38):
lot of ways to learn things like the fact that
Carrie Thornley attempted to molest a young girl like that
is an unpleasant thing to realize and have to adapt
into because that, you know, that actually does mean something
about the things that he believed. And one of the
things that it means is that you should always be

(59:59):
carefu all about how much you believe anything, right, because
belief can lead you to some very frightening areas, even
if even if that is a belief in the value
of love and and you know, physical autonomy and stuff, right,
Because that's how Carrie would describe the underpinning of the
horrible thing that he did. Um and uh, yeah, I

(01:00:20):
don't know. I think we've probably talked enough about this
kind of stuff. Sure have or you guys want to
plug anything stop doing the or have no no no. Yeah. Sophie.
By the way, when you sent me that text last night,
you know, saying saying that your your uber wouldn't pick
you up outside of the senator's house and that you

(01:00:42):
had a hot firearm, you had to discard. Um did
you ever wind up getting that uber? Well, here's how
we know your conspiracy is wrong. Would not take it uber?
I would call your ass Yeah, you're going to say,
would lift? This has all been an extent. Did add
for lift? Lift? If you're going to carry out a

(01:01:02):
political assassination, it had better be in a lift. Lift.
We do not ask questions. Seriously, need to start offering
that as something that we do here a lift. We
make sure every one of our drivers has a hidden
area in the car that you can police a hot
firearm lift. We go the extra mile shop lift anyways, Garrison,

(01:01:28):
Margaret Pluggables. If you want to look at my slightly
unhinged ramblings about chaos magic, you can follow my Twitter
account at Hungry bow Tie, as as as this is airing.
I will probably probably be in Atlanta for the Week
of Action, which is going on to defend the Force there.

(01:01:51):
So if you want to support people in Atlanta, you
can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. I would say
I have two book novella series that came out a
little while ago that called the Danielle Kane Series. The
first ones The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. The second
one is The Barrel Will Send What It May. They're
both really short and they deal with more ggicals stuff

(01:02:13):
and more stuff about how we shape reality than some
of my other writings. So maybe you'll like them if
you like this episode, and you can get them wherever
books are sold. Yeah, read those books, because I have
been using a series of fake, cutout social media accounts
in order to harass and threaten Margaret into writing a

(01:02:34):
third one. But it's not working, so help me out
people anyway. This has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the Illuminati that also is the Illuminati. So whatever
conspiracy you belief about me and my friends here on
the show, it's probably real in some way. Happy twenty

(01:02:57):
twenty three. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.