Part Six: A Complete History of the Illuminati

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? 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.

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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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

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

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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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. 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 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

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 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.