Part Four: A Complete History of the Illuminati

plate shy sized target at a surprising distance. Move it also moving target, moving target too. You got to lead that very impressive. I believe in you, Sophie. I believe in your ability to take out John Fitzgerald Kennedy if you'd had to, And that's why we've built you this time machine. If he was coming at you with his limousine and you were you were sheltering in a book depository, I think you could have done it. Thank come back

to behind the bastards too powerful. I didn't know how to introduce this one, so I decided to blame Sophie for a historical crime. I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast ostensibly about the worst people in all of history. We are getting behind some bastards because all right wing politics today is rooted in the series of conspiracy theories that we are explaining right now for you in three hundred iss years of history condensed into I don't know,

like five podcast episodes. Anyway, My guests to continue this glorious journey in part four are Margaret Killjoy Hello, and Garrison Davis. Good morning or afternoon or is some other time m yep, it's whatever time of day you're listening to. So folks, here we are. Let's get back into the story for the next year or so. After the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, he's around. Carrie kind of flared and then eventually seemed to subside. His friend Greg moved back to

New Orleans. Greg kind of was back and forth between Whittier and New Orleans. You know, it is being young. You can't, you know, make rent for a while, you move back in with your parents, then you come back. It's life and h Once he comes back to the city, the two start work on their long shelved plans to create a satiric religion based on the Greek goddess of

chaos eires. Now, Gary wrote most of the first draft of a tract that would later become This is a little bit before zenes were a thing, but it also is kind of a proto zine. And its title is prince Skipia Discordia or How I Found the Goddess and what I did to her when I found her, And this is it's a good title. It's a good title.

These guys are very funny, and this is it is kind of framed as it's a mix of like a religious tract and you know it actually what it's kind of framed as when I remember when I told you about how that illuminated member of the Illuminati got struck by lightning and found by the cops. A lot of the Principia Discordia kind of has the feeling of like intercepted communications from like yeah, this like weird, underground cold,

and that's intentional. They know the history that I related to you all in the first In fact, are quite knowledgeable about the history that I related to you all in the opening episodes of this series. Aspects of it are kind of framed as a religious tract, and the faith that this is attract for is called Discordianism. Now by this point, Kerry had already started reading guys like Max Sterner, and he had found himself pulled out of his objectivist trend, of his iron Rand support, and towards

a more a sort of individualist anarchism. Sterner is a guy who wrote a book called The Ego and Its Own And I am not the person to summarize that Egoism is kind of is one of the things that like that of anarchism is called. I am not the person to summarize it to you. But the main impact that has on carry is that he finds himself pulled towards anarchism as opposed to this kind of And he'd

always been an anti state guy, right. That is a thing that is pretty consistent, you know, And that's a thing that he believes when he considers himself a capitalist revolutionary. The main thing that Stirner does for him is he drops the capitalism right and is just kind of now anti state. And he and Greg are also getting increasingly

interested in the occult. In this period of time, Carrie does a pass on the Principia Discordia and then they start mailing it off to an ever expanding group of their friends, who are mostly artists and weirdo pranksters who all like the idea of a religion centered around chaos. By the mid nineteen sixties, American conspiracy culture had taken off to new heights thanks to the Kennedy assassination and all that shit that was going on with UFOs. Conspiracism

is also taking off increasingly among the right wing. Too. Conservative political establishment is starting to have its first big, big break away from what you might call consensus reality, which is existing and accepting a plane of basic reality that is similar or if not basically identical to the ones that the liberals accept, and towards a more darker

splinter reality defined by conspiracism. And the author of this switch, probably the single figure most responsible for the splintering of the reality tunnels in mainstream American politics is a guy named Robert H. Welch Junior, who we have talked about on this show. He is the founder of the John Birch Society. Now again, if you want to listen to those episodes on Bob Welch that we do with the

Knowledge Fight guys, I do recommend them. But in case you haven't heard those, Are you just rusty on the subject of the John Birch Society. I'm going to quote from our friend Hofstadder again, who wrote the Paranoid Style in American Politics in November of nineteen sixty four. So that article that I quoted to you earlier talked about the Illuminati and its influence on kind of conspiracism in

America earlier like two episodes ago. That article was written during the period we're talking about right now, November fo Yeah, a few years ago Welsh proclaimed that communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government. Note the care and scrupulousness of that almost. He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which communists figure at every turn. They started a run on American

banks in nineteen thirty three that forced their closure. They contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse. They've stirred up fuss over segregation in the South. They have taken over the Supreme Court and made it one of the most important agencies

of communism. Right, That's how Hopstater described This is where and that is if you replace communism with the illuminati, it's the same kind of shit that people were saying after the French Revolution, right, It's the same playbook, and it very much is a playbook for a guy, for a lot of these people. In the early nineteen sixties, Welch came across a pair of books that had a

massive influence on him. In these books were Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements from nineteen twenty four and American evangelist Gerald win Rod's book Adam Weisshopped a Human Devil from nineteen thirty five. That is a that is a banger title. If anybody writes a book about me, Robert Evans a human Devil, I will be the proudest

I'm capable of being. I had a satanic scare at the last place I lived, like a local newsperson about one of my music videos, and so we just printed up the next band shirt was just all of the like, axe wielding terrorist women, anti phi anarchists, sacrificing babies in the woods or whatever. That's how you can do it. So both of these books, and this is going to

really shock you, guys, were profoundly anti Semitic. And this is kind of the start of this of a European school of thought that saw Jews and the Illuminati and in some cases the Freemasons as like co authors of the French and Bolshevik Bolshevik revolutions together that like, this is all tied together, and this is a big part Hitler is spousing aspects of this he's taught. En if you like, look at what Hitler actually said about the

conspiracies he believed. He would often call it Judeo Bolshevism, Right, Hitler's not so much into the illuminatis stuff. But the stuff Hitler believes is very much descended from a lot of this stuff. So Welch jettison to the anti Semitism he found in these books, some of it at least, but he kept the rest, particularly the obsession with a grand Illuminati conspiracy theory. And I'm going to quote now from the book The World of the John Birch Society.

Welch's first public mention of the Illuminati, but not yet the Insiders, came in his more stately mansion speech, delivered before a crowd of seventeen hundred at the Conrad Hilton in Chicago on June fifth, nineteen sixty four. He told his biographer that although he had been studying this subject for a number of years prior to this, he understood that you couldn't start putting it all out in one

go because nobody would believe you. Instead, he'd endeavored to lead the Birch Society's members little by little to where they would be interested. Despite these concerns, Welch's idea of the insiders was quickly incorporated into the society's official worldview, with Birch writers like Medford Evans amusing about whether Dean Rusk was the insider's quarterback, for example. But just as often, the conspirators continue to be identified as the communists, the liberals,

the establishment, the liberal establishment, or simply the conspiracy. The seeming interchangeability of the terms reflected the fact that appearances to the contrary, notwithstanding Welch's turn to the illuminati, hadn't really changed his basic analysis. So that's interesting. Number one. Welch is kind of doing a little bit of an atom by shop with his society right where he's like, well, you can't tell everyone the whole truth at once. You

have to kind of like lead them there. But he's also he comes to believe that, he comes to believe in these Illuminati conspiracies, that they're behind the French Revolution, of the Bolshevik Revolution and all of these social justice movements. But he also consciously loops them in with both this blaming it on insiders, right, the illuminati or the insiders, and you might call them the deep state, you know, but he also he identifies them in the same breath

as not just the communists but also the liberal establishment. Right, all of this is the conspiracy. All of this linked together is the conspiracy the right is going to believe in from nineteen sixty four up to today in November nineteen huh Oh. It's just it's so based on anti semitism in terms of the way that like people think of anti semitism is like racism, but confusing because applied

to this group of people that's often white. But it's like, it's not, it's just this entirely different system of oppression that's based on this. I don't know, but yeah, this this belief in this fucking secret rules based on this, It's based on this belief that there is a fragment of society within your society that is different and fundamentally is trying to push all of these modernizing elements for sinister reasons right of their own power. Right. That is

the core of anti Semitic belief. And it is focused obviously on the Jews being that fragment. But once you start to believe that, it's not hard for you to move on to just like, well, beyond that, it's the Illuminati, right, it's the communist it's the liberals, establishment, all of these different like you've accepted that there's this that any sort of movement towards a progressing society is based in a conspiracy to destroy it, right, And that's the most important

step to take. And it also it goes the other direction too. Now that you get people to believe in lizard people or whatever other Illuminati thing, you can then get them to also just become anti Semitic. Yes, it

works backwards and forwards. Again, it's very syncretic too, So you can people who are just convinced that there's lizard people or Bigfoot or UFOs if you loop that into like, well, the Illuminati doesn't want you to know about Bigfoot or the UFOs, right, And they're keeping that, then that is also an inroad to get those people believing that the Jews are behind everything bad in society. This is a

pretty durable, improven thing that happens within conspiracism. Yeah. In November of nineteen sixty six, roughly a year after the publication of The Prince Skipia Discordia, Bob Welch published an essay in a John Birch magazine titled The Truth in Time, in which he revealed his discovery of a master conspiracy older than communism. The communist movement is only a tool

of the total conspiracy. As secret as the communist activities and organizations generally appear, they are part of an open book compared to the secrecy enveloping some higher degree of

this diabolic force. The extrinsic evidence is strong and convincing that by the beginning of the twentieth century there had evolved an inner core of conspiratorial power able to direct and control subversive activities which were worldwide in their reach, incredibly cunning and ruthless in their nature, and brilliantly far

sighted and patient and their strategy. Whether or not this increasingly all powerful hidden command was due to an unbroken continuation of vaishops alun Illuminati, or was a distillation from the leadership of this in other groups We do not know. Some of them may never have been Communists, while others were to avoid as much dispute as possible. Therefore, let us call this ruling click simply the insiders. It's it's just people fallen for the bait, thinking that they're smart.

It's yeah, and Bob Welsh is both high on his own supply but also recognizes this is a good way to manipulate people, and it's interesting. Nineteen sixty four is Welsh's first meet mention of the Illuminati, whereas like, I've got to prep the ground for people. Nineteen sixty six is where he comes out with his big speech talking about the Illuminati. Nineteen sixty five is when the Principia

Discordia gets published. It is all of this. We should say that the Principia Discordia has a decent section in it about the Yes, I'm about to get to that. Yeah, we will be reading from it right now. Yeah. Yeah. The Principient Discordia was written for people like Greg and Carey. Because it was written by people like Greg and carry right, intelligent, well read weirdos on the fringes of society who are natural skeptics, but who are also drawn irresistibly towards conspiracism.

It's fitting that chapter one, authored by Carry and attributed to his pseudonym Lord Omar khay M Ravenhurst, was called the Epistle to the Paranoids. It is essentially a message to the counterculture of the nineteen sixties. And at this point, as he's had his sort of break into anarchism, he's finding himself increasingly angry that the objectivists where he'd formerly kind of like found identification, and the Marxists who he'd once identified with, and the anarchists who he now identified

with all hated each other. And we're all fighting each other rather than fighting the state, right, and he the paranoids, that's who he's talking about, is these people on account your culture who are all in opposition to the state, but who can't get along with each other. And this message in the Prince Scipia Discordia is essentially a message to this fragmented chunk of the counterculture that he was like, you guys are fighting too much to oppose the state.

In a meaningful way. And I'm going to read a quote from that now, And this is again the Epistle to the Paranoids. Number one, Ye have locked yourselves up in cages of fear, And behold, do you now complain that ye lack freedom? Ye have cast out your brothers for devils, And now complain ye lamenting that ye've been left to fight alone all chaos? Was once your kingdom verily held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse. But today

ye was sore, afraid, and dark corners, nooks and sinkholes. Oh, how the darknesses do crowd up one against the other in ye hearts? What fear ye more than that? What ye hath rotten? Verily? Verily? I say into you, unto you, not all the sinister ministers of the Bavarian Illuminati, working together in multitudes, could so entwine the lad and with tribulation as have your baseless warnings. Are you just trying? Yeah, that's not a thing that anyone involved in radical politics

today would identify it with on a deep and emotional level. Right, Yeah, Yeah, it's well written too, he is He's I find a lot in this piece. Um. Now, the next section of the Prince Skipia was an ad um and it's framed as an advertisement as like a hokey sixties style advertisement to join the Bavarian Illuminati, which is listed as the

world's oldest and most successful conspiracy. Greg and Carry give their version of Illuminati history here, which puts the creation of the organization at around ten ninety by Hassan is Saba, a medieval warlord credited with creating an order of hashbet fueled assassins. People get the history, the exact history on that a little bit, quite a lot wrong. Obviously, Hassan as Sava had nothing to do with the Illuminati, and they knew this. This was a joke for them right.

The advertisement is very tongue in cheek. It also references HP Lovecraft's creation Yog south Off, as well as so Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, among other things. The Princekipia is a satire of real cults, but also a satire of American mass media, and in fact, that ad

to join the Bavarian Illuminati ends with these lines. If your right Q is over one fifty and you have three thousand, one hundred and twenty five dollars plus handling, you might be eligible for a trial membership if you think you will quit if you qual If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our underground agents will contact you shortly. I dare you tell no one. Accidents have a strange way of happening to people who

talk too much about the Bavarian Illuminati. Maybe may we warn you against imitations? Ours is original and genuite you do a podcast about this? Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, there's there's some mensa mixed up in there. Right. There's also like Coca Cola ads kind of like this is the original flay you know, yes, yes, they're making fun of all this stuff. Speaking of advertisements that will instruct you to bury your money and throw it away. Here our

ads that God, I hope it's a gold ad. I hope I wish for each of you a gold ad. At this point we're back. Um, so one thing that becomes clear going through the prince Skipia and and doing and by the way, you can pronounce the Principia discordia however you want, because nobody actually knows how ancient Latin was pronounced in its entirety we have ecclesiastic Latin, which is a bit different. So if you want to be like I don't you're gonna pronounce it that way, you

can go fuck yourself. I took three years of Latin, I'll say it. However the fuck I goddamn want um go to hell. I'd love you don't study Latin and high school kids. That's what I did time I did. Look at us. We are such a bunch of suckers. I know, I know absolutely. My friends are all like learning Spanish that they didn't travel with, and I'm stuck

there learning about how fucking caycillous and is. Yeah, buddy, I had a you know, it helped me up a conversation with my nun aunt about whether or not you pronounced Latin certain ways. That's what I got out of three years A lot I took. You want to We just did some episodes on on Bobby Fisher, and some people thought I was intending to just kind of joke about the fact that he was a nerd because I was also a nerd, which is why I brought up

Warhammer so much. But I took three years of Latin so that I could understand all of my Warhammer books like that was that was why I did that. Hell yeah, so there there you go. Anyway, whatever, one thing that comes clear going through the Principia and doing all this research on the Illuminati is how knowledgeable Greg and Carrie and their other friends were about the actual history not just of the Illuminati, but of other secret societies and conspiracies.

These guys have like an academic levels understanding of this history, which is why they are able to parody it so successfully.

The Principia contains a number of letters in which members of the Illuminati, all of which are like and they take as did we didn't really get into this in those but all of the original Illuminati people like took on uh pseudonyms that were like themed after ancient Greek and Roman history like Achilles and Ajax and stuff, and all of the new Illuminati, the Discordians take on pseudonyms

as well. As I said, Um Carries is Lord Omar Khayam Ravenhurst, Greg Hills is Malaclipse the younger m and yeah they give you know, uh yeah, so these guys are are are very much anciously like aping Adam yeshopped and in their conspiracy document that they put out. They each provide kind of different and often contrasting theories about the actual age and origin of the Illuminati. Usually this winds up stretching back to prehistory and they're kind of continuing,

why shops lie here? Right, like consciously continuing because like he would pretend it was an ancient society. They're doing this intentionally, and it also includes bits like this which are clearly satirizing the John Birch Society. Your publication is timely so mentioned that an addition, and this is part

of a section of it that's framed as intercepted letters. Basically, right, your publication is timely so mentioned that in addition to the old fronts like the Masons, the Rothschild Banks, and the Federal Reserve System, we now have significant control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since Hoover died last year,

but that is still secret. The Students from a Democratic Society, the Communist Party USA, the American Anarchist Association, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Black Lotus Society, Eddie, the Republicans Party, the John Dillinger Died for You Society, and the Campfire Girls. It is still useful to continue the sham of the Birchers that we are seeking world domination, so do not reveal that political and economic control was generally complete several

generations ago. It's so funny, it's so good. Yeah, this is a response to the John Birch society as much as it is anything else. And they're fucking with people, right, Like, that's what's going on here. Okay, but the right is there a Campfire Girls or do they make that up? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that was like a Girl Scouts kind of that that I may still exist for all I know. I'm not a Campfire Girls exit expert, although soon we'll have our

six part series on the camp Fire Girls. You already did the Boy Scouts, so we could have done a couple more episodes on the fucking boy Scouts. Yeah. Um. So they write this silly zine, and I know some of you who are not like is into this stuff as all three of us are, are probably like, why are we talking about like this weird joke that's dudes made in the mid sixties. Oh boy, trust me, it matters.

So they write this week, they write this weird zine and if you know anything about kind of like pre internet erazines, you know that the thing they're going to need next is a photocopier. Now, in the mid nineteen sixties, photo copiers existed. You could get access to them, but they, like owning one would have cost you know, probably like what a car does today. It was not easy to get, like to purchase one. Most people didn't have access to

one unless they had access through an institution. And so if you were going to use such a machine, you either were like at a school that had one, or you had maybe an employer that had one and you could kind of like get some time on it. So it just so happened that Greg Hill when they decided they want to start making a bunch of copies of this thing they had out. Greg Hill had a friend named Lane Kaplinger, and Lane worked as a secretary for

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. If you've ever watched the movie JFK by Oliver Stone, Garrison is the guy played by Kevin Costner. So he would go on to write the first major Kennedy assassination conspiracy book titled On the Trail of Assassins, which is what Stones JFK was

based on. This will be relevant soon, so Greg Hill and his friend sneak into Jim Garrison's office and they use the photocopier to produce several copies of the Prince Sipia Discordia, which they start handing out to friends who read it and find it funny. These people, then, I will say, as someone who's also interested in this history, this claim is heavily disputed. Yes, we know there's at least one zne they did use Garrison's photocopier on it's

not provable that it was the Prince Scipia Discordia. And they also claimed that the first copy of the Principia was typed out using Garrison's typewriter. Yes, there's there's a lot of weird claims about Garrison's specific because others later in the JFK stuff, Well he's going to wrote it, Oh not just that, um but uh yeah, no, you're right, Garrison, this may not have happened. We do know that they

used because they were writing other zcenes. It's pretty well known that they used his photocopier for one thing a couple of years prior to this. There have been claimed since that they used it for this, And like you said that they used as typewriter. We don't know what's true because these guys, again, part of what they're about to start doing is telling a bunch of funny lies,

so so good. That's a It is known that Hill and a friend got access to his photocopier at one point, right, I chose to tell people the version that I found most funny, which I thought was in line with Discordian traditions. But yes, that is good, that is useful context. So they start handing the stuff out to friends, and in the way that things spread back then, these people read it. A lot of them like it. They find their own access to like mimiograph machines or where they go to

the library. They start making copies of it and handing it out to friends, and in a couple of different cities people start to decide to start Discordian chapters, which I themed us both kind of secret societies and sects of a religion that's like what they are consciously aping, but in reality it has a lot more in common

with like modern nerds subculture today. And to kind of go through this process, I'm going to quote now from the book kal Left by an author named J. Mr. Higgs slowly, Hill and Thornley recruited a few like minded friends into their new religion. Their aim was to undermine existing belief systems by spreading confusion and disinformation with as much humor as possible. To this end, they each adopted a host of new names under which their Discordian endeavors

were credited. Many new Discordian chapters were founded. The majority of these contained only one member, and some contained none. Discordians then wrote essays and letters under these aliases, only to follow them with completely contradictory essays and letters under

a different alias. So this is like becomes sort of the first act of worship of the Discordian Church is to like write essays and letters about conspiracies and then send them out to different magazines and different publications under a variety of alien aliases. Now, as for the actual religion itself, we all know you've actually meant aliens Mmm, I did? Which you know my book on the Illuminati, by that one Crank does talk a lot about the Anonochi.

They are. Apparently the Babylonians talked about them all the time, So you know, no one's more credible than the Babylonians. But the actual tenets of the Discordian Faith, which is again a satire of religion. Are you know, there's a variety of things. Everybody's a pope, which is not an original thing initially. It is actually very centralized. It's kind of one of the big changes in the Discordian Faith over the years is the decision that everybody gets to

be a pope. They don't have religious dogmas. They have katmas, which are like relative meta beliefs rather than like strict beliefs in something right, there's kind of a general prescription in the Discordian Church against believing too hard in anything. Like every religion, they have foods that your band kind of arbitrarily from eating. In this case, it's hot dog buns, and so there's a lot of just like hot dogs handed out at like Discordian events in this period of time.

And again this is meant to Yeah, it's meant to be. She would love this. It's it's it's a joke. It's yucks. But what you should have realized right now by the passage I read earlier where they're kind of they're spreading all these jokes, but they're also spreading all of these different claims about the things they've done as a conspiracy.

What they've done, what Hill and Thornley particularly have done, is create a series of memes which start to spread through the underground media of the day, through this kind of growing underground network of what's going to become zene culture. Now, because this faith gets founded in nineteen sixty five, right as the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories pick up steam, conspiracy theories becomes sort of the language that discordions choose to

do their messaging in. Now, this is what brings us to Playboy magazine, the mid Delatement, a place Jamie Locke has worked. She did, She's deeply tied all these Jamie has involved in this so much. We are through the looking glass here. People. When I say Playboy today, you either think of all of Hugh Hefner's mini sex crimes or you think about, um, oh yeah, that like website or that magazine that used to be big and is no longer profitable and turned into like kind of a

sleazy internet brand in the nineteen sixties. Playboy is hugely influential in the counterculture, not just because there's there's pictures of attractive naked people but because they're like of the articles, like they're there are a lot of very influential writers the articles. This is a thing, and two of the guys who are writing it for the articles are a pair of editors for Playboy magazine named Robert Shay and Robert Anton Wilsons. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of Roberts

involved in this story too. But yes, Bob Shay and Robert Anton Wilson are both editors for Playboy magazine, and they're both kinda into a lot of the same stuff that Carry and Greg are. They they find the occult. They're both very much into the occult, especially Robert Anton Wilson.

They are taking huge amounts of LSD. And by the way, so are Hill and Thornley by this point, um, And you know, they start to notice because Playboy publishes letters, and one of the places, the easiest places for Discordians who are writing these nonsense conspiracy letters to get their shit published is Playboy. And Robert Anton Wilson Robert Shay start to notice, like, we're getting a lot of weird letters from guys writing about the Illuminati and Arris and

stuff that's peculiar. So they start responding to some of these letters, Wilson, being a prankster himself, decides he's going to fuck with whoever is sending him these joke letters by publishing all of the weirdest ones and his particular thing, as in the EG issue, he likes to publish conspiracy theories letters letters that are conspiracy theories that specifically contradict each other, like incompatible theories about the Kennedy assassination and

stuff like that, because he thinks that's funnier, and it is. And I'm going to quote now from a summary by a writer named James Burt. Wilson said he did not consider this a prank or a hoax, but guerrilla ontology. He became increasingly exasperated with the fixed views on both the right and left of politics, and he wanted people to question the information they received, to stop seeing their

beliefs as inherently true. Onology is a branch of branch of philosophy that studies, among other things, the nature of reality, like what is true? Right again, this is a philosophy discussion on a podcast, So we're flattening things here, but that's the basic of it, right. It is the science of like what is how to classify and explain objects and entities. Wilson and Shay, like the Discordians, saw themselves as waging a necessary war against people's widely accepted definitions

of reality. And they are looking out at millions of people being massacred in Vietnam, at police in the street beating civil rights marchers, and they are responding to what they see as all of the people perpetuating these crimes have locked themselves into what Robert Anton Wilson will later call a reality tunnel, which is this like very solidified belief about the nature of the world that is wrong but justifies violence because the world itself will not form

to this errant belief. And so if you can't accept anything else as real, you're going to do violence on the people who insist in living in a way that does not conform to that belief you have about the world. So the thing Wilson and Shay want to do is soften people's understanding of what reality is and the hope that it will stop a lot of this horrible shit

from happening. Right, that's the goal. Okay, Okay, this is this is not going to work out perfectly, but it's it's you understand where they're coming from, right, Yeah, I mean I do, at least I do. I feel like sometimes we think that like, oh, well, use sarcasm and parody and irony. I feel like people who are versed in the internet, well know why this doesn't work, you know, and and the spoiler is that it doesn't. Yeah, but you know what does work, Margaret, the exchange of money

for items. Oh, I was going to say, advertising, Oh, it has. It has a more profound impact on human cognition than almost anyone understand hands and in fact, in the future will be considered to be a health hazard on the same level as cigarette smoking. But for now, it's what keeps podcasts on the air. So enjoy your information hazard everybody, We're back, and have your kids considered the benefit of smoking pall malls. Pall malls aren't just

the tastiest cigarette on the market. They're the cigarette that has an extra long filter which helps those tiny hands grasp and smokes safely. Sophie, you don't want kids to hear the good news about pall mall cigarettes. The cigarette crafted with tiny hands in mind, by tiny hands. Okay, I'm I'm hurt. Look you know, one of the tragic lessons about advertising is that sometimes people consume different products than they advertise. Yeah, fair enough, Just like I actually

kind of more into silver. Hmm. Well, it's like, you know, I talk about how Lasik provided me with laser eye surgery, but the reality is that I lashed a banshee uh to the rock in my backyard. Sophie, I can't talk about how I trained a banshee to fix my eyes with the ice the okay, whatever, Sophie, Jesus unfair anyway, Discordians.

So Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shay start publishing all of these weirdo letters by these weirdo Discordians, and eventually like realize something is going on here, that it's not just an increasing number of crazy people sending them conspiracy theories. Yeah exactly. And Robert Anton Wilson, when he finds this out, is like so on board. He's like, this is the best thing I've ever heard of. And he travels and

he go. He meets with Kerrie Thornley in nineteen sixties seven, and as soon as Thornley explains the game to him, Robert Anton Wilson becomes a Discordian and he is immediately on board with all of this shit. Now, some other stuff is happening while all of these figures are meeting. At this point in time, a book called The Second Oswald has been published, which is the first organized conspiracy

theory about a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll. And at the same time, through this yes, it comes out in this book that Carrie Thornley, this weird countercultural figure, has ties to all of these people adjacent to the conspiracy in the Second Oswald and the nature of this coincidence that he's just sort of tied to all these people that this book has argued, we're like helping to carry out the assassination is too much for a lot of people, and a growing chunk of the conspiracy culture

of the time convinces itself that Thornley was the second gun man, and some versions of the conspiracy he's like an Oswald double who is there to distract from the fact that like, yeah, like the multiple Oswald basically right, And a lot of people because Thornley looks like Oswald and knows him, think that he's the second Oswald. Right. One of the people who decides this is what's happened.

One of the people who comes to believe this about the Kennedy assassination is Jim Garrison, the DA of New Orleans. So Garrett, Yeah, that's not going to work. That's not going to work out well for anybody. Garrison. Garrison, Hi, Garrison, he started, you know, I know all of our names except for Margaret, so fallen a bit far. I've been

deeply implicated in this conspiracy. So Jim Garrison starts investigating Kerry Thornley in January of nineteen sixty eight, right after Carrie and Bob Wilson meat, and he actually subpoenas Kerry Thornley so he can ask Carrie about his relationship with Oswald. Now, Thornley denies that he had been in any contact with the assassination in any assassin, in any manner since nineteen fifty nine. But Garrison comes to believe that Thornley is part of the conspiracy and acted as a body double

for Oswald. And he also finds out that Oswald moved to New Orleans right after Thornley, and that the year before the assassination, they were both in Mexico City at the same time. So he charges Carrie with perjury. This is like a year's long fight Carrie has with like a perjury charge over lying about his associations with Lee Harvey Oswald. And this is a very situation Carrie had actually been called in a lot of people don't know this.

Carrie Thornley testified to the Warren Commission in nineteen sixty four because he had published his book The Idol Warriors, which was about Lee Harvey Oswald. And all he's talking about on the Warren Commission stuff is what he knew about Oswald, right, But because he says he had no more contact with him, this is a really you can get in shitloads of trouble for lying in a congressional inquiry like this, right, Like you are not allowed to

do that. So the fact that they're a year after he testified, he also released a book just titled Oswald Yes, like the same exact year that the Principia was first was first being distributed. Because if I'm not mistaken when he no, no, because he becomes convinced after a while, I believe that Oswald. He starts believing that Oswald was innocent, and then he comes to believe that Oswald did it, and he eventually comes to believe something very similar to

what Jim Garrison believes. But he writes the book Oswald kind of in the middle of all of these beliefs because he knows the guy and yeah. Um, So Carrie starts to get very paranoid at this point because in the middle of creating a religion about secret societies where they claim to be the Illuminati pulling the strings, he has also become the center of the JFK assassination conspiracy

theory and is now being charged with perjury. So this is what we call yes, yeah, yeah, one of the years of putting up flyers asking for a president to be assassinated if you don't want people to think you might have done it. Hmm. Now you remember back when that Nazi paid him to do research on the Hitler book? Oh god, yes, okay, so the book is title I think it's like Hitler was not a bad guy, right.

Carrie becomes convinced that the guy and again this Nazi is not a real person, Like there was a person there because people saw carry talking to him, but the name he gives is not a real person, right, So there's a lot of that that's part of why this

guy gets wrapped. We don't know who this was. Carrie becomes convinced that that guy was a fed who paid him to do this research, so there would be a bunch of writing about Hitler under the title Hitler was not a bad guy in Carrie's handwriting, and the state could put it up as a manifesto after framing him for killing Jfki. Yeah, that's that's what Carry starts to bleak because he's like, no one knows who this guy is. This is such a weird thing that somebody paid me

to do. Someone just wanted my name on this, like Nazi things, so they could argue like I was involved in it. Because he also sees that what Garrison is doing is trying to bring him into this and blame the assassination on him, So he's not there are people in the government trying to pin the assassination. Yeah. Yeah, but he's also he's also locked in this conspiratorial mindset now in part as recreation, so he kind of just

starts to go crazy. Now, yeah, that tracks. Carrie is also at his heart a prankster, and despite the severity of the situation he is in, he cannot help himself, but fuck with Jim Garrison. And I'm going to quote. I'm going to quote from the very interesting book The Prankster in the Conspiracy, which is by that that go Rightly Guy, and is a biography of Carry, primarily quote.

Sometime in nineteen sixty eight, during the course of the Garrison investigation, Carrie discovered that one of Garrison's aids, Alan Chapman, belief that the jfk assassination had been the work of the Bavarian Illuminati, that ancient in fraternal order, much ballyhooed by right wing conspiracy theorists such as the John Birch Society as a centuries old secret society behind communism and damn near every other socialist inspired ill then corrupting the

world and poisoning our precious bodily fluids. In response to all of this Bavarian Illuminati paranoia, Carry, in the midst of Garrison's probe, decided to mind fuck Garrison all the more by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he Carry was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. These communicates were sent under the auspices of the Discordian Society. The mind fuck eventually got Carrie interested in the history of this mysterious secret society, and the more he read about the

Bavarian Illuminati, the more fascinated he became. Eventually, Kerry and his fellow Discordian conspirators started planting stories about the Discordian Societies age Old War against the Illuminati, accusing everyone under the sun of being a member of that sinister and sneaky organization, from such politicos as X and LBJ. Daily and William Buckley to Martian invaders and various conspiracy buffs, plus members of the Discordian Society itself, which made it

all very confusing and extremely hilarious. So he starts sending fake letters claiming that he's in the agent of the Illuminati to one of Garrison's aids, who believes that the jfk assassination was the work of the Illuminati and is actively investigating him for his complicity in that crime. Yeah. You, look, whatever you think of the wisdom and ethics of this,

you have to respect that commitment. Yeah. No, I mean, if someone's like that'd be like if I resolve if if when people are like, oh, you're an evil Satanist, I'd be like, yes, I personally brought Satan back from the dead and used him to do this actual crime that happened. I am the literal Christian devil, and I killed all those kids at that elementary school and whatever whatever.

The one that started the Satanic mannock was Yeah, I forget Mountain Mountain Meadows seem No, that's the Mormon massacre. I've lost track, you know whatever. By the early nineteen seventies, Carrie Hill and Robert Anton Wilson have a name for this combination prank act of political terrorism that they've sort of lapsed into committing. They start to call it Operation

mind Fuck. Jmr. Briggs writes the aim of Operation mind Fuck was to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced with some form of enlightenment. Now that may have been optimistic, yeah, yeah. It is worth noting that the Discordians are not the only anarchist weirdos thinking

along these lines at the time. In nineteen sixty seven, another group of anarchists on the UC Berkeley campus had formed a group called the Bavarian Illuminati and had started sending out weird press releases with the gold of giving conspiratorially minded people something to get paranoid about. And the lady who founds this group at Berkeley later becomes friends with Thornley and becomes a Discordian and is now a right wing crank journalist. This is the worst thing that's

happened in this episode. Yeah, oh no, don't don't worry. Something a lot worse is coming, Margaret. Oh no, okay, so this is like but also this type of stuff is not that he's not superly good, disissimilar to like the situationists, Yes, which we will. We'll be chatting about them in a little bit too, which I think is useful context to give people. But yeah, Operation mind Fuck becomes a mix of deliberate paranoid incitement an anarchist political project.

Some of the press, some of the press releases they send out are just like conspiracy nonsense, but others are comparatively serious where they are advocating for specific political acts. They put out a big paper urging a permanent universal rent strike, and their idea is that everyone should just start stop paying rent and go about their lives as normal. So there, it's this mix of like, here things we actually believe, and here's a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories.

This mix of conspiratorial incitement and sincere attempts to push some political change was a conscious aping of a strategy that Greg Hill, who wrote under the name mal Eclipse the Younger, had come across in a book titled The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The authors had argued that the only strategy an opponent can't predict is a random one. Hence what became the New Religion's maxim, we

Discordians must stick apart. Now, Yeah, it's like what they're what they're doing is like a thing in game theory. We do actually talk about this in the Chess episodes, where like, if you're like a random weirdo, like you can sometimes beat people in these games who are much better than you because you just are not acting in

a way that it can they can possibly predict. Right, Yeah, there are arguments that I've been reading a little bit, and forgive me, I know very little about go, but basically one of the things that people will say is that like a good chess computer cannot be beat by humans, right like when it's when it's playing it It's like we are past the point where human beings can beat the machines and chessum. But you they kind of don't have computers at go that are that reliable at beating

human beings. They're they're good, um, And some of this has to do there's just been less work in doing this with machines that play Go. But one of the things people will notice that because there are so many more possibilities and Go, human players can just do crazy shit and the machine gets kind of tripped up right in a way that's not as possible with chess, because there's less sort of options that you have in them of chess than you do with Go. Um. Anyway, I

find this interesting. Not an expert on Go. Another inspiration for Thornley Hill, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shay, and the other early Discordians are the situationists. As Garrison just said, now, these are a group of avant guard artists and activists.

They start out in France. Their basic contention this isn't like the fifties, right, So this is in the period of time and when like Greg and Carry are like teenagers and young adults, is when the situations are kind of at their most influential, and the basic contention that the situations have is that culture, in the form of advertising and increasingly slick mass media, is being forced upon us.

The situationists believe that you should resist cultural homogeneity with a sort of artistic judo, taking the momentum of mass media and turning it back against its wielder. Situationist art projects were supposed to have no single author or creator, as they value decentralization of creation. Artists would work together under shared names and rejected the idea of the visionary out tour. Again you can see how this had a big influence on what would Greg and Carry and the

others are doing. Key to this thinking is the idea of the spectacle, originally defined by guide Aboard as the autocratic rain of the market economy. The media is one outward expression of the form of this autocratic rain. As a Board wrote, rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term media, and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of

public service. Now this is all a little bit wonky, so I want to turn to a paragraph by Tierman Morgan and Laurie Pergey explaining the concept in more detail. Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism's instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord's lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop up

ads that appear in your browser. It is the listical telling you ten things you need to know about X. The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable degradation of our lives. And by the way, all of this stuff has a huge influence on the Wachowskis and is kind of like the basis of the Matrix movie, which ausies in verse black that

that ship gets fucking turned around. Yeah, sure it does. Yeah. This is one of those things where I have a lot of sympathies with this, with the situationists, and I like that style of practis. But also this thing can get turned in on itself, turned in on itself, like can you can never actually escape the loop? You can only try to loop it even tighter and then hopefully it will collapse in on itself. But yeah, it will keep because we keeps described. We haven't described the loop

that Deboard sets up quite yet for people. But but hold on to that thought because I do want to. I want to come back to that in just a second. So Debord is convinced that art has failed and is essentially dead as a thing capable of carrying meaningful countercultural messages. And this is because the spectacle is an expert at something called recuperation, where ideas and individuals that were initially subversive are trivialized, cleansed of their revolutionary potential, and reincorporated

to mainstream capitalist society as commodities. The easiest example of this is like a shape Guivara T shirt, Right, this communist revolutionary being turned into this like shirt that you buy at a head shop that's owned by a hedge fund. Right, Yeah, Like a podcast about like cool revolutionaries in history that's like exactly the corporation that's ever existed. These are all

good examples, Margaret, thank you. From Kimberll Valanov's Out in My Head, the way the situation is suggested fighting against recuperation was called determment, which is what Garrison was talking about a little bit ago, and it is the recontextualizing of an existing work of art in order to shift

its meaning towards something that inspires revolutionary feelings. Now, the situationalists are also motivated by the concept of psychogeography, which is a way of describing one's surroundings in order to

like influence their emotional state. It's a little bit difficult to describe some of the situationalists art over a podcast, but one thing that they would do in Paris is they would like cut up and reshuffle maps that were then given to people in order to encourage people to under two different parts of the city that they would not otherwise have traveled to and thus build connections between them. Right.

This is kind of part of what they're trying to do here, is trying to cut their What they saw is the power that maps had over how humans thought about the geography of their cities. This is also a response to the fact that city planners like set up cities in such a way to keep certain groups of people apart. Right, I mean, you can think about the way this existed whatever city you live. This is a part like look at the way bike lanes are always set up, right. They don't go to poor neighborhoods as

a general rule. They connect affluent parts of town to affluent parts of town or places where people shop. It's not one hundred percent of the case, but that is a lot of them, right. This is a thing that the situation is still recognizing when this is one of the things in which that the kind of art that they're doing is trying to fight against. This all sounds very heavy, but situationist art is often credited with sparking a massive series of riots in Paris in nineteen sixty eight,

which is right within the time period we're talking about. Obviously, the situation ationist international kind of falls apart eventually for the same reason most left wing movements do. But the tactics that they'd pioneered and the goal of their work gets kind of stuck in the teeth of the global left. And that's all happening kind of in the period of time before and right at the height of what well, right, the start at least of what the Discordians are doing.

Um all, right, now, now we can talk about it Garrison. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's just one of those It's just one of those things that because we've even seen like this situation, has tried to get ahead of that type of recuperation and it's just a very hard thing to do. Like it's it's, it's it is. It is one of those things that eventually there there are attempts to even to even put that recuperation and commodify that

even aspect of it. It's like one of the few good jokes in Rick and Morty that I that I stand by is the is the is the freedom wafer selects of of like distilling this brain juice that is that is that is that that gets them like grown during an act of rebellion and selling that back to you so you can consume and have that same feeling

of rebellion. And it's yeah, it's it's it's this. It's this mechanism that can just keep on going into itself and getting trying to break out if that is I mean a topic of a lot of this type of political theory. But so yeah, it's this um oh sorry, Margaret, Oh, just like this idea that the de tournament thing used to make a lot of sense to me. I grew up in Adbusters and stuff like the late nineties early

We'll chat about them a little bit later. Yeah, yeah, like that was like I was in art school and Adbusters came around, and then I dropped out of art school to go travel and try and do anarchy or whatever, And these are related thoughts. Yeah, and the de Tournament and all that was a big part of it. But I like but seemed tornment then loop so many times I'm kind of back to just like regular direct cultural

attack just making art. Yeah, you just fucking do the things you believe in, and you say the things you believe into people, and you just fucking try like instead of the Judo thing, you just punch him in the face, you know, I Margaret, I hadn't thought this until just now, but it kind of occurs to me that you can argue that the situationists part of what they're doing is similar to what VII Shopped was doing way back in

the day. It's this thing that like you have to hide your message one way or the other, right that

like that has to be a part of it. Like there's it's interesting this like because I'm thinking about like I can remember there's a lot of folks on the left who part of like will celebrate And I'm not saying this is wrong, but like one of the things they love about The Matrix is that it is so clearly inspired by the situation is like down to the path fact that like, at the very beginning of the movie, Neo has a copy of a book called The Society

the Spectacle, right, like that's believe, I believe he has a semi laker and Stimulation which oh sorry, sorry, it's it's right, which was which was inspired by the writings of Society of the Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah um. And so it's like, is that an example of an insurgent form of art being snuck into a massive Hollywood blockbuster

or is the move? Is the Matrix itself an example of the recuperation of what the situationists were doing, because it's this multi billion dollar franchise, And then even and then even the Matrix is rebellious messages get recuperated by fascism with with the res is talking about red pills, but sister screams at him, but but and then on but then the fourth Matrix film is about the recuperation of the first of Matrin and it's it's looping on

itself endlessly, and this is this is what operation mind fuck is really after. It's about causing this loop to destroy people's brains and make reality incredibly malleable, and that is that that is the goal of this sort of thing. I would argue, they're not trying to destroy people's brains. And I think that because again, the story we're building

too is this does all go terribly wrong. But I think an argument you could make if your pro mind fuck is that, well, the situationalists were cool, but also it would have been a real bad thing if people had believed too strongly in what they were doing and and come to like treat these ideas of determment as if it is something you should take that seriously, as like the most effective way of fighting against capitalist modernity, and maybe getting people to think this way and start

looking at these kind of loops of recuperation in which these things the situationalist created created this multibillion dollar franchise, and then that maybe that causes people to take all of it a little bit less seriously and treat it more like a tool in the toolbox rather than something that should be the core of your personality. Yeah, and as I feel like some of the recuperation stuff, it's like people get mad because they punched someone and then

they got punched back. It's like, right, I'm going to do this thing that attacks capitalism. Capitalism is going to look and be like, all right, well, what's the best thing I can do? And they might try and use that back against me, like of course they are. We're we're fighting, Like I punched them and they punched me, Like this is like, yeah, it's a it's a conflict.

And in a conflict, um, you learn from the actions of your adversary, which is why idea like you have this, you have this very interesting uh anarchist group called Up against the Wall. This is who I was thinking about trying all this. Yeah. Yeah, cut the fence at woodstock, which makes woodstock what it is in a lot of ways, and then woodstock winds up in pepsi commercial Yeah. Um life and actually the situation it's kicked out the British

situationists because they liked Up against the Wall motherfuckers. Yeah, anyway, Up against the Wall motherfuckers had a conflict with the This is all sorry, we didn't need to go And what if you want, I have a whole episode of

A That's Up against the Wall Motherfuckers came out recently. Excellent, excellent. Well, we are going to cover all of this in more detail lately, but I wanted to talk in this by talking about the situationists, because as the Discordian Church really starts to take off in the early nineteen seventies, that's the goal that Thornley and Hill and Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shay and all their friends kind of have as to in a very situationist manner, take the cultural

weight of these conspiracy theories that the John Birch Society and the Right Our Sea as a method to power and are using still to this day as a method of power. And they are trying to, in a situationist manner, kind of like Judo, turn the weight of this stuff back against itself by, as Garrison said, in some ways kind of breaking the brains of the people who believe this, by widening the field of play conspiratorially right, instead of instead of the instead of the John Birch Society being

the only word on the illuminati. Well, let's expand what this fucker can be well beyond what they can control, and maybe the hope is that they can't manipulate people as effectively and that maybe people even become less manipulatable. Now spoiler, this is debatable as to whether or not it works very well. Some people would argue that what the Discordians are about to do is build a very well crafted gun and then leave it on the table in a room full of four year olds. But we

will talk about that next week. Y'all got any plugables to plug? Well? If you want to support people trying to use some of these same type of tactics in defense of the forest, you can donate to the to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund of the One of the posters I saw around Atlanta about about the topcop City stuff. It it ended with a very situationist esque motto, which

was reality the battlefield. And yeah, so this type of thing is is continuing on today, and it's it's it's it's not just people making propaganda, it's also people like doing stuff physically in the real world and face the situationists, did you know? Yeah? Absolutely, And and there's people facing legal consequences for it, and if you want to support this people that are that are experiencing state repression, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Yes, donate to

the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. And it is it is good to keep in mind. This is why one of the things I would like to leave liberal type folks, and I don't mean that as like a slur, but like folks who are kind of like more centrist in liberals who we have a lot of listeners who are of

that tendency. What I would like to leave you with is the next time you hear someone on the right say something that is objectively factually wrong and feel the desire to dunk on them, consider whether or not you're just feeding the loop, right, because reality is the battle field and you may not in fact be able to damage their cause by locking into an argument with them, right that that that may be a doomed tactic in the way that we're talking about, a doomed tactic that

is much more in line with the people that I tend to admire Politically. There's no political side has a monopoly on doomed tactics, but I think it is worth saying that if arguing with conservatives about the nature of reality could change things. We would be in a different situation right now, and perhaps other tactics are necessary. My Margaret is for the derieve my favorite of the situationist tactics, which is gopher a walk and go for a walk

where you don't normally go for a walk. I love the idea of that as like a way to change your scope of reality. I think that they did a really good job of that. And then also a plug that all of the references earlier about Jamie doing all of this, and that is Jamie Loftus, who has a bunch of podcasts on this very network, including My Year in Mensa UM and a bunch of other ones. And then I and did Jamie do nine to eleven? We can't say she didn't. I actually think that we probably can. Okay,

she comes from the northeast, Margaret, that's true. I mean I don't know if that's true. Suspicious true, suspicious grade? Okay, the third grade? Nine to eleven three times three is nine. Sophie also did too many too many conspiracy also, like didn't didn't we like just read that that um the Illuminati was controlling the girl Scouts like they're specifically going after they are organizations with kids to recruit them to

do these types of acts. Powerful that it all makes sense now, because if we've learned one lesson in this series, it's that joking about this stuff never has consequences. Cos I was just so proud that got those things all in one reference. That's good. That was good. All right, everybody go, um go make a conspiracy somewhere. You know what I'll add. I'll add to what Margaret said about taking a walk another anarchist thinker, uh uh graver or

David David grab Yeah, David Graber. One of the arguments he made was that when you're out walking in a city, as often as possible, cross somewhere other than where you're legally supposed to cross. But look both ways. Yeah, but look both ways. Don't get hit by a car post anyway. Goodbye Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

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