Part Three: A Complete History of the Illuminati

for that. That's what everyone's saying for that unalloyed compliment.

So we have, we have. We started this episode by talking about Adam vy Shopped and the Bavarian Illuminati UM, which started out as a nerdy kid kind of trying to find a way to smuggle cool books into Bavaria that we're banned um and doing so, he created a fake religion so that rich people would feel like wizards and he could use their money to buy more books, and it ended up with him funding illegal abortions until a lightning strike exposed to society to the cops, and

then he had to flee and spend the rest of his life having the equivalent of an extended Twitter argument. This sounds so fake, This sounds like such a fake story. It is. It's both sad and funny, and I've continued my reading on this. One of the troubles here is that, like there's an actual paucity of good historical books about

the Illuminati who are not written by cranks. I picked the one of the Charles River editors are not usually my ideal source, but they do a decent job of like summarizing all of the actual facts that are known. I found another book that I have been reading through that is one of the crank books. It's called The Illuminati, The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by Jim mars Um with with two rs. And mars is absolutely a crank.

That for an idea of what a cranky is his book on secrets or in the chapters on the Illuminati, part what is Germany? And part two is Zionism. So we're going some good directions in this book that's gonna bridge, but we're gonna have to talk about today. Isn't that? Um? I want to read. There's some wild quotes in here, um, and most of them will not be most relevant until we get later on in here, but I want to read a portion of something that I cannot speak entirely

on the veracity of um. But this is a chunk of his book when he's talking about the formation of the Illuminati. In seventeen seventy nine, two years after Bishop's initiation into Freemasonry, he wrote his Wacken Hurdle, suggesting the order be renamed the Society of Bees. The bee connection again demonstrates the close ties to the Illuminati of the Illuminati to Masonry, as the beehive has long been an important Freemason symbol. Today's Masonic lodges were once referred to

as hives, and any internal disputes are called swarming. One eighteenth century Masonic ritual stated the beehive teaches us that as we are born into the world rational and intelligent beings, so what we also be industrious ones, and not stand idly by it or gazed with listless indifference on even the meanest of our fellows in a state of distress, if it is in our power to help them without

detriment to ourselves or our connections. The symbol of bees also connects to the aforementioned ancient Greek Elucinian mysteries in which honey was thought to be a divine product of the gods. So that's kind of cool. Now, yeah, I am. I'm all for beehive. I like the discussion of arguments within Masonic temples as swarming. Yeah, yeah, it's it's all. So much of this story is extremely twitter, like almost back. It's nice to know that radicals have always been more

or less the same kind of people. Nice isn't the word I would use. Yeah, it's it's reassuring. It's a thing that's that's undeniable. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So, um, we should probably get back into the story. When we had left off, we had just been talking about how the conspiracy theory about the Illuminati started up after the French Revolution and kind of merged with existing fears about Masonry in the United States to be part of this

big anti Masonic movement. You've got guys like Abigail Adams and even George Washington himself who bought into this conspiracy. And this would be this would be like one of the funny things about Jim or about I don't know whatever Mars's book is that like when he talks about American connections to the Illuminati. He just says that, like

we know that. You know, multiple members of the Founding Fathers were aware of the Illuminati, and it's like, yeah, they believe the same shit you did, Like they all added the same conspiracy buddy. Um, so far the bastards is the people who believe in the Illuminati, not the Illuminati. No, the Illuminati are not bastards. Although again, perhaps if you create a fake cult in order to do a good thing, you might wind up causing more problems than you solve.

Maybe that maybe a lesson from the Illuminati that we can take into us today. That's true. You know what, Sophie, let the initiates out of the cage. I think maybe we've been we've been going down the wrong the wrong, the wrong road. You couldn't even get that sentence out. Yeah I would. I would never tell you to let the initiates out of the cage. That's where they live now. So overtime, over time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory died out

would be the wrong word, but it kind of faded. Um. But America's public obsession with conspiracy theories never quite did, and politicians learned over the decades that' stoking these conspiracy was an easy way to get VOTs. After the Mason's popular, American conspiracy culture pivoted to obsess over the Jesuits and then the Communists, which, despite the fact that they are kind of diametrically opposed and fundamental ways, often got looped

in together as like a Jesuit Communist conspiracy. That was a whole big thing in the early half of the twentieth century. And of course every time you would have sort of a new era in American conspiracy culture, the trappings of prior manias would roll forward into each new conspiracy that enraptured the voting public. It's you know, it's syncretism.

This is a thing that umberto Echo talks about when he talks about like one of the key attributes of fascism, and I think it is kind of worth noting and a little bit beyond the scope of this episodes, but to talk about how American conspiracy culture has always been proto fascist in many ways and this is the syncretism

of it. And we've we've really seen this come to roost with Donald Trump and qwan on and sort of this is why you get a lot of liberals who are very surprised when they see these kind of people who had been sort of formerly crunchy, granola hippie types get into the hardcore right wing king On stuff and it's like that syncretism, baby, That's exactly what Echo was

talking about. This. This this also ties into like the idea of like the cultic milieu and how the shared stays were all these types of conspiracies operate, feed off each other and do and do kind of coalesce into this weird like a crypto or quasi fascist politic. Yeah. And if you if you want to, if you want to look at this as like I don't know, if you wanted to like diagram this as like a soil

or something like that, or sedimentary layers. The base of it all is the Illuminati, right, that is the er conspiracy and American political culture. Um so. Yeah. Meanwhile, the end of the eighteen hundreds in the start of the nineteen hundreds saw another surge of interest in the occult. It seems like this kind of happens once every century or so, that's been pretty consistent for the last three hundred years something like that. And over in Europe, a

pair of wizards resurrected the Illuminati. The founders were tied to the Oto and Alistair Crowley, and the Second Illuminati was never really much more than a side shows. It's primary contribution to kind of occult history in Europe was that in nineteen o two had allied itself with the

Order of the Golden Dawn. Now the Golden Dawn had also been founded on shall we say shaky his shaky grounds truth wise, by a Rosicrucian named Wentworth Little, who claimed to have come into the possession of a coded manuscript that led him to a woman named Anna Sprangel in Germany who was in touch with unknown superiors who had taught him about a secret organization behind the secret organization behind the myth of the Rosa Crucians. And you can see shades of kind of what of aishapped was

doing with the Illuminati here. I've you know, this organization has a history. It's actually much older than people know. There's this group of unknown folks in addition to me, who are actually running things. Yeah. I want to quote here from our old friend pro cult activist Massimo entrophying again because he saw again, if you're going to write it's detailed history of this ship. You're going to wind up quoting a lot of crikes and weirdos. It's mostly

going to be crips and weirdos. This is just a fact of the matter. Westcott claimed to have found Sprangle's address, to have written to her, and to have obtained the authorization of the Unknown Superiors to found an order in England placed under their authority, the Golden Dawn. In spite of the great influence it exerted on art and literature, the Golden Dawn rested on a mystification. There was no Anna Sprangele and Westcott had simply invented the whole story.

It was Alister Crowley who had been initiated into the Golden Dawn in eighteen ninety eight and had immediately engaged in trying to overthrow its leaders, who in nineteen hundred revealed the deception. Crowley is a very complicated surist, and he I think in a lot ways qualifies as a bastard um. But one of the cool things that he did was completely overthrow every magical community that he that he went into. Into your Wizard Club, he's going to

take over. He will take over your Wizard Club stop him and make you admit that you made the whole thing up. It's yes, and then have a lot of gay sex in the desert. So you know, Okay, I am certainly the least knowledge about knowledgeable about Crowley in our organization. But the thing that I always took from readings about him is that he was able to do that in all these organizations because he had He's got

some jock energy to him. Yes that like most wizards, he just kind of had that confidence to let him bully his way. Is this kind of like when punks go to like nerd conventions, We're just in charge because I actually have social skills, and we like, yeah, it's gonna this is gonna be very controversial on the subbreddit. Margaret Kiljoy just got canceled. Yeah, Crawley was really the

first punk, is what you're trying to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna take a stand and say that I absolutely no, I actually don't know that much somewhere underground and the Vault Vault of the Golden Dawn is the very first battle jacket into it. Yeah, But also, but you keep talking about this thing where it's like it seems like the cultists are the okay ones, and the conspiracy theorists

are the ones who do the Nazis shit. Yeah, I mean because these these guys, the people forming this new order of I mean the people who kind of form this new Illuminati and marry it to the golden dawn. I haven't come across any evidence that they're bastards like they were there were people who wanted to dress up and do magic like. There's nothing harmful about what they're doing here. Um, it's just it's not wildly influential. Ingle, who was one of the people who winds up in

charge of this new Illuminati, funds it. I found this interesting by writing a series of like short stories for dime novels under a shitload of different names. He kind of does an l. Ron Hubbard, but in reverse, where Like Hubbard writes all these dime novels and then creates a cult because he wants to get out of that industry, whereas Ingle funds his little cult by writing a bunch of like shitty weird fiction. I don't know if it was shitty. Actually I haven't read it. I shouldn't be

judgmental like that. It might have been good weird fiction. His Illuminati limps on into the nineteen seventies when they fall a foul of Germany's militant post war anti cult movement. There is we talk about this in the episode Sorry, yeah,

that's really funny. Yeah, well, we talked about this in the episodes titled The School That Raped Everyone, which is a dark episode about how there was an element of kind of the progressive left in post war Germany that embraced free love politics to such an extent that they justifying the molestation of children. And this is a big part of what gets the Illuminati in trouble. I have not found any evidence that they are molesting anybody, but

they are teaching sex magic. And because there are a lot of problems with other kind of people in who are broadly in the same sort of cultic milieu, you might say as the Illuminati in this period who are molesting children, they get caught up in I don't even want to call it a moral panic. A lot of people were actually harmed, but the Illuminati does not seem

to have been justifiably targeted here. They were just like adults who were doing satanic orgies, which is fine, yeah, I mean like, but like this, this complaint continues on today, how a lot of yes, a lot of like sex cults are specifically the OTO is just kind of a sex cult for its for its like older male members. This is this is this is something that is is Yeah, very very much a continuing critique, And there's nothing inherently wrong with making a sex for you and your friends.

I've been in a couple of sex cults. It's fine. Yeah, they always end great. It's what everyone says about sex calls. Some of them do, yeah, and the Illuminati doesn't end all that terribly, but it just kind of peters out after this point. The last leader of the Second Illuminati, a guy named Metzker, dies a lonely alcoholic in nineteen ninety, which is a pretty common way for things to end

for the leaders of sex colts. While Metzger's Illuminati was limping through the last arthritic stages of its life, events over in the United States were about to bring the Illuminati to a level of fame it hadn't enjoyed even in the days of Adam I Shopped. Carrie Windell Thornley was born on April seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight, in Whittier, California. Whittier is today a suburb of Los Angeles. It is back then it was kind of just like its own

little town in the middle of southern California. If you google the neighborhood that Carrie Thornley grew up in today, you'll immediately be shown a map that depicts the unincorporated community, boxed in by bold blue pins that indicate a Costco, a home depot, a savers, a Target, and a Trader Joe's. They surround East Whittier like a capitalist pentagram, almost as if her medic capitalist wizards were trying to keep some

sort of dangerous energy contained within. These are the things you think about when you spent sixteen hours writing about the Illuminati late at nights. No one fuck up those stores, or all hell will be based upon the world. Yeah, these are will crawl from underneath the Costco and start taking over the suburb. This is the Seven Seals of Neoliberalism. This is John Darnell novel, and I would read it.

Carrie was raised Mormon, and for much of the first seven years of his life his father was overseas fighting it. A little thing he might have heard of called the Second World War. Most of the context we have for his childhood comes from a letter his brother wrote decades later that I found reprinted in a zine published by Carrie's ideological children. Most of the good history on Carrie you find scattered in zines that are like thirty years old,

so it is a whole thing piecing it together. I'm going to read a quote from that letter now, though, and this is his brother talking. We were living behind my grandparents when I was born and what is now called watts on seventy seventh Street in la and our dad was in the navy stationed in Okinawa at the time. When Dad had returned from World War Two, Carrie was waiting to welcome him, dressed in a sailor's out that my mom had gotten him, and I was a newborn

in a cradle. Dad came in the door and rushed over to see me before he hugged Carrie. Carrie got so pissed that he ran out the back door and climbed up the walnut tree and refused to come down. That event, more than any other, set the tone for Carrie's relationship with me. The rest of my life is punctuated with events in which Carrie did his best to get even with me, from what I called his intellectual muggings when I was in college to writing parodies of

letters that I would send him later in life. Our father was a raging alcoholic, so by necessity Carry became like a father figure to me and Dick. So he's like a complicated guy. He's the fact that his dad is absent, I think has a big impact on him, and he feels this sense of like jealousy for his father's attention because it had been so absent, but also because his father is this violent asshole, he sort of acts to protect his younger brothers. You know, it's a

complicated thing I think he does. You know, he's obviously he's a kid, so there's sometimes he does shit out of spite to his brothers. But you get the feeling that he did the most that he could to try and fill that gap that was left by his dad being a non functional person, Like he did hit the best job I think you could have expected of a kid in that circumstance. It's a difficult way to grow up. Yeah. Carrie met Greg Hill, who was three years younger, in

high school in nineteen fifty six. The two were members of the very first generation of their nerds. They're big fucking nerds, and they were sometimes mocked by it. I think like George McFly from Back to the Future, that is exactly the kind of kids that we're talking about.

They were huge into Mad Magazine, which was kind of like that was a lot of people who wind up very radical in the sixties and seventies start by reading Mad Magazine and in the early sixties or whatever, and they were interested in radical political ideas much like the ones that had animated Adam Bishopped centuries before. They were also again big sci fi nerds, with what one biographer

describes as a fondness for crackpots. Their childhoods would have involved colorful, weirdly horny comic books and the short stories of men like Bob Heinlin, Philip K. Dick, and l Ron Hubbard. Greg and Carey were so excited by this stuff that they briefly attended meetings of a nearby uf

O cult as adolescence called understanding. Greg later recalled through our mutual general interest in wondering just what was going on out there in that gigantic world, and are many common specific interests in humanism, anti religionism, and enjoyant for enjoyment for Omar Khayam, and a curiosity for the bizarre like black magic and hypnotism, plus our common warped sense

of humor. We formed a close friendship. So that's that's who these guys are, right, Like, they're they're kind of young kids in this boring town and they get really into science fiction and fantasy, and that leads them into reading about the occult and reading all of these also kind of like mystic They're into the Sufis, they're into Zinn Buddhism, like they're not just into like kind of

golden dawns. Yeah, they're they're pretty cool. Actually, yeah, Um, I would say, I don't know how it's gonna end up, So I'm gonna hold onto them as being real cool right now. They're there. It's going to end in a couple of different ways, Margaret. Everyone involved in the movement we're talking about has a very very different ending. Um. Okay,

I could choose your adventure novel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. I do want to talk a little bit about Omar Khayam, who is a He was a guy who lived from like basically around a thousand ish to eleven hundred a d. He's a polymath, one of these guys who's like he's doing math and he's a philosopher, and he's writing poetry that's still very popular today. And he's one of the things about him that's kind of interesting and that's probably

going to be relevant. That's going to definitely be relevant to the way that Kerry Thornley uses him, because Thornley's obsessed with this guy. Is that for kind of centuries and centuries after his death, it became a tradition in a chunk of at least Islamic poetry to attribute your poems to Omar Khayam. And this started being done this like for whatever reason in the eighteen hundreds, Europeans start doing this too, and some of this is tied in

with like orientalism. I'm not a great person to discuss that, because this is a very influential figure. But one thing that's important to know is he is a real poet who also has become kind of this. I don't know if it's calling him a symbol is the right thing, but people decided to attribute poems to him that had not been written by him. There's a bunch of these throughout history, these like shared author names. They're really interesting.

It may yeah, it is, it is really interesting. Obviously Kerry Thornley is very interested in this guy, maybe in part because of that. A lot of a lot of like a cult authors also also have this. There's like Hermes Trismegistus, There's there's a lot of even um even the uh oh, I forget the forget the name, let me look it up quick. Um. Well, that's why I have a new book coming out by um Alistair Crowley, um the name under Now see, I'm doing a totally

different thing. I'm just gonna credit my next book to Stephen King and just take that money, you know, just just take that cash, baby. I mean. In terms of a cult authors who also did this, there was the the fourth Book of a Cult Philosophy by Agrippa, probably not written by the actual Agrippa, who dead for several thousand years. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's just yeah.

It's it's interesting a trend that that continues because like the types of communities that were that were writing these occult Texas groups really do get continued by the stuff that Greg Hill was actually inadvertently developing. And it's interesting, like just how similar this type of stuff is. Okay, And then one of the other of these shared names,

Luther Bliss. It is Italian collective of radicals who then lots of people write under this name that put out a book called Q that's a conspiracy book that came out before any of this, before the Q went on.

And I believe and I might have. I don't have a note in front of me, but Luther Bliss it is like some like famous like soccer player, and these like Italian radicals were just like, we're just gonna use his name, and the dude was like a live and they were and they wrote this like bestseller called Q that's a conspiracy novel. Sh It's weird. That is very funny,

and uh, you know what else is funny? Margaret Um, the stuff adder, the products and services, the ads supporting this podcast, all of which, by the way, all of our ads are are written and produced by by Omar Khayam, So you know, enjoy some of this classic celjuck capitalism poetry. It's just gonna be some math ads. I hope it's gold. I bet he had gold everyone did back then. Yeah, we're back. So Carrie Thornley and Greg Hill and a

circle of their friends, and I am leaving. There's a lot of actual people here who you can read about, who are also influential. I'm not going to go into detail about all of them. There's a reason I'm going to focus primarily on Thornley and Hill here. I'll be suggesting a book later if you want to learn more about every single person who was involved in this this

next stage of the Illuminatium. But yeah, the core of this circle seems to be Thornley and Hill, and they are some There's something kind of magnet about the two when they are together. Part of us do with the fact that Carrie is an undeniably talented public speaker, and he seems to have kind of an ability to lead people, or at least be so obsessed with something in such an endearing way that people feel the desire to follow him. One of the things that he, Carrie and Greg both

were really into was playing pranks on their classmates. And I'm going to read a segment from a biography by a guy named Adam go Rightley that talks about one of the pranks that they played on their school Chumps, Carry Gregg and other unnamed cohorts made a recording of what at first appeared to be a regular radio program, with music playing innocently from a radio positioned on the apron of the stage. In actuality, the sounds were projected

from a real to real tape machine hidden backstage. Inserted into the seemingly mundane radio program, The pranksters had implanted a series of interruptions made by a newscaster to the effect that Soviet plans were invading the US and dropping bombs. As one classmate recall, somebody had told me early on that it was a joke, but some of the students didn't know and got really scared. What made me feel bad was that one of the boys in the class

was so scared he was praying. So this is like, I kind of know where this story goes from from from this point on, and the fact that they were doing this ship as kids is hilarious. This this exact same style of prank and the kind of recklessness that they go about it gets continued on to massive proportions, like they do so much inadvertent damage by pranks of this style on a national scale very soon, and it's

so weird. You're like just watching the trade about about to crash, and you're you're seeing it go and you know what's gonna happen, and it kind of in line with that. Garrison Carrie's friends at the time, when interviewed later would note that as a kid, he had a habit of access not seem to know how to stop himself when the playing around got out of hand. Yeah.

That said, he was also intensely empathetic, and one of the stories told about him is that after his high school graduation, one of his close friends came out of the closet to him as gay. This is in nineteen fifty seven, and that friend, when interviewed, was like, Yeah, he just like embraced me, like there was never any judgment. He was completely completely accepting and fine, which is notworthy.

Some of these people are like actually really decent people unless and have had and have like pretty good politics, and we're doing kind of red stuff in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Yeah, well some of yeah, and let's let's put a pin in that one. Yeah. Thornley graduated high school in nineteen fifty seven. He attended Marine Corps Reserve boot camp that summer. This is not a thing

he had a choice in. Like a lot of people would just kind of join ahead of getting drafted in order to have amount of choice in where they went. I had a lot of relatives who are like, well, if I joined, then I get to like pick kind of what I have more agency in this process. Yeah. So he goes to boot camp, and then he gets into the University of Southern California. He spent a lot of time still at home with his friends, many of whom,

namely Greg, hadn't yet graduated. They spent the bulk of their free time at twenty four hour bowling alleys where they could buy alcohol. One night in nineteen fifty seven, Yeah, and he's buying alcohol. Greg is a couple of years younger than Carry, So Greg or Carry is often the one buying alcohol for his underage friends, which we always support here at Cool Zone. Maybe definitely didn't make my living doing that when I was a twenty one year

old street punk. No way, you would never do something like that when it was the only way to make money. One night in nineteen fifty seven, Hill and Thornley were discussing poems carry had written on Order emerging from Chaos, Hill argued that order was a construction of the human mind, only chaos was real. Now there's a couple of versions

of what comes next, and the version that mirror subjective reality. Hill, an atheist, expressed his frustration with modern organized religions for claiming the existence of an organizing principle behind the universe. The ancient Greeks, he expressed, had gotten it closest to write because they had a goddess of chaos. Her name was Airis or Discordia in Latin. Hill felt that Airis was the only deity he'd ever seen any evidence of, and he suggested it might be a good idea if

someone created a religion based around her. It's gonna go great, to go really well, it's gonna go so good. Margaret's five. I'm so excited now. While he was at college, Thornley attempted to join a fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, and what would be one of his only real brushes with the square world. He pledged, and he went through a hazing ritual called Hell Week. That year, the brothers allowed a

black student pledge. They made him go through hell Week, and then after he had gone through all of that kind of hazing shit, they laughed at him and told him that, of course, as a black guy, he was not allowed to join their fraternity. This was enough to get carried to leave and to turn him away from the concept of fraternities forever. If he ever made a secret society, it was going to be one defined by

radical acceptance. Hill and Thornley kept up their correspondence on the subject of creating some sort of like you know, they're talking about doing the same kind of shit that Vaishop is doing. They're just did They're just talking about doing it from a perspective of like this would be kind of a funny thing, um, and it's just a freak. It's a it's fine. It's just it's casually and it

is mixed with things they seriously believe. You know, Hill is you might call Hill a very early atheist activist, right, you know, pre Dawkins, pre all of that, you know that kind of guys who became really prominent in the late nineties, early two thousands. Hill is that in the late nineteen in fifties, early sixties. But also he's he's like much less insufferable than the guys that followed. I don't think he is, because he understands like the chaotic

nature of existence. Yeah yeah, And Thornley I think is sympatica with hill On a lot, But Thornley is a little more mystical, right, like, yeah, he seems to be kind of more moved by that stuff, although not to an agree that a degree that it seems to like great On hill who is kind of fundamentally a materialist value or our vision of the universe. That's at least my take on this. There's so many much that also

that's very contradictory about these guys. So if you do your own research on this, you may come to some different conclusions about some of them this than I am. It really depends on which zines you stumble into. Um And like a lot of these guys who are writing stuff about themselves wrote it contradictory on purpose to make things confusing, because because they thought it was a funny prank.

Because they thought it was a funny pranks. So all of French philosophy, I really Yeah, yeah, Thornley winds up joining the marine corps um you know, he after he does his like a little bit of time in college, he becomes active duty in the corps Um and so he spends a couple of years as a marine. And while he is a marine state side, he spends I think it's a little less than a year serving alongside a bright young man that you might have note heard of named Lee Harvey Oswald. Uh and Carrie and Lee

Harvey Oswald become pretty good friends there. They are, they are buddies. And one of the things that carry likes about Oswald is that he's a little bit of a prankster, just a just a kooky guy. That's what everybody knows about Lee Harvey Oswald. He's gonna tell a very famous joke in the not too distant future. From this point gets him a lot of attention. It's all I'll like you. Hit tweet, hit tweet. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to advertise the projectors under this one. Yeah, I'm going to read

another quote from Adam Gowrightley's book. Quote. Later, Kerry would describe Oswald as the outfit eight ball, earning this dubious distinction by openly subscribing to communist newspapers such as Prafta and cracking jokes with an exaggerated Russian accent, answering questions with da or nip and referring to his fellow Marines as comrades. It was common knowledge that Oswald was studying Russian and was fairly fluent in conversational Russian. Because of this,

he inquired the nickname Oswaldskovic. And this is no one's reporting this. You're in a war against Russia. No, it's like I'm a communist. See this is actually I wanted

to talk about this. This is a thing I think a lot of folks who, because of the fact that they are more on the left side of things and maybe don't have a lot of firsthand experience with the military, don't get so much because there's there's like a conspiracy theory going around right now, right that it has been going on for a while, but because it was Pat Tillman got brought up at the Super Bowl by those

fucks at the NFL. This was talked about recently where folks are like, oh, he was obviously murdered by his own guys because they heard him talking about how the war was bullshit and like saying like anti American stuff, and so they assassinated him. This is a conspiracy theory. That's not what happened. It's incredibly common if you talk to guys who were serving in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq for people to say, this war is bullshit, what

we're doing is stupid. I have talked to people who'd be like, yeah, half the unit thought that what we were doing over there was bullshit. It was not uncommon for people to be like, fuck this stupid war. It's like a thing that like, soldiers fuck around, and soldiers, like anyone else, often while they are participating in whatever war, express opinions that are contra to the like, and Oswald

is one of these guys. And so he does get in trouble a couple of times, but like, he's never drummed out of the Marines for making for doing jokes about being a communist. Yeah, and they're not also entirely jokes. And in fact Oswald is for at least a period of his military service, seen as a pretty good soldier.

In a later part of his life, Kerrie and another one of their comrades would claim that he Oswald and the Southern Marine were approached by someone that they believe was a representative of the CIA and given aptitude tests. Oswald and the Southern Marine were asked if they would be interested in parachuting into foreign countries and helping rebels do things like build radios. This is School of America's shit, and there were absolutely US soldiers who had this experience.

I can't confirm or deny whether or not that happened to Oswald in specific, but this is a thing that occurred, right, so it's not unlikely that some version of this happened Perian. By all accounts, he seems to be like decent at being a soldier. He was a pretty good shot. Pretty good shot. So you're saying on the record that the CIA hired him to assassinate John F. Kennedy. That is exactly what I'm saying. Okay, it actually, Margaret, hold up

because it gets a lot more conspiratorial here. So Carrie would also later and this is at a point of his life when his mental health is not so great, It would also later claim that he was targeted by the MK Ultra program during this part of his life. Now here's the thing. After his time with Oswald, he was stationed at at Sugi Air Base in Japan as a radar technician, and it is while he was stationed here that he starts having auditory hallucinations at night of

radio chatter in his head. Carrie became convinced that he was hearing actual radio traffic in his head. This is at a later portion of his life now at Sugi Air Base is host to a major was host to a major CIA base, and it was one of two foreign bases where the CIA conducted MK ultra experiments. In a rolling Stone investigation published years later, an anonymous marine who served it at Sugi around the same time as carried it an Oswald at a separate period of time,

serves at Szugi Ericabase. This guy claims it was pretty weird. I'm eighteen at the time and chasing all the horse in town, and these CIA guys are buying me drinks and paying for the horse and giving me a whole round of drinks with lots of weird drugs in them. Pretty soon all the shadows are moving around. We're in the bar. See the samurais are everywhere, and I started seeing skeletons and things. My mind just started boiling over

going about a thousand miles a minute. Now there's a distinctly higher than zero chance that either Oswald or Thornley, or quite possibly both of them were dosed as part of the MK Ultra experiments, and if doing so. By the way, this is not like trying to say some conspiracy about the Kennedy assassination here, they would if that happened to them. They are just some of hundreds and hundreds of US servicemen who were dosed by the CIA

against their will. This happened constantly to tens of thousands of people, as we've talked about in our our MK Ultra episodes. We will never know for certain because the architect of MK or Ultra burned all of the files. So just keep in your mind it is possible that the first time Kerry Thornley has LSD it's because the CIA drugs him, which convinces him that he's hearing voices

at night. We will never know. It's also there's stories from Oswald around this period that like one night he starts freaking out that there's guys shooting at him from like the woods when he's on guard duty. That some people of theorize like, oh yeah, maybe he just got fucking dosed and had a breakdown. This happens to a lot of guys. It's certainly not impossible that it happened to Oswald and Thornley as someone who's been dosed against

my will before this all tracks. Yeah, because when you tell all of those that you're on drugs, it's a completely different experience than when you know you're on drugs. Yeah, that is entirely possible, And I think I think there's actually pretty good at least one of them did, because they're both added SUGI and we know the CIA is doing this shit to service minute at SUGI. Yeah, so you know again, Oh, I guess I have to just

continue the story. Oswald and Thornley were only stationed together for a brief portion of their service, after which they probably never saw each other again, or did they? While a lot of people are going to ask that question. Mark Carrie gets sent to Manila next, where he sees such heartbreaking poverty that he becomes a Marxist Leninist. He starts reading books on Marxist political theory, and he becomes

more committed than ever to his pranks. The ultimate example of this is a fake marine that he creates under the name Omar Kayam Ravenhurst, and he does this by inserting fake records into the administrative files. He gets so far into this that he gets the military to issue

a locker and a bunk to this fake soldier. And then after he leaves, there's a big base inspection and all the inspector can't find this guy who has a bunk and who has like a locker and who is supposed to be turning out for inspection, and it causes like a big problem. But he is. He has made a fake man. Um. He's a he's a very fun

character in this part of his life. After their time Marines, Yeah, after their time in the Marines, Oswald affects the Soviet Union from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty two, So some amount of the jokes that Oswald was making about Communism were not jokes. He's like sitting around and learning Russian, being like, hey guys, yeah, I'm gonna defect to the Russians, and everyone's like, oh yeah, O Lee Harvey, Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna make a I'm gonna make a sitcom

about Lee Harvey. Oswald called O Lee Harvey just about all his mini pranks um like that one he carried out in Dallas and anyway, um, so Carrie is like, why, wow, it's weird that this guy who I was a friend with left the Marines in order to defect to the Soviet Union. That's kind of a neat story. I'm going to write a book about it. So he decides he starts work on a fictional book based around a character that is a thinly veiled Lee Harvey Oswald. This book

is out today. You can read this book that is a fictional story he wrote about his real friend Lee Harvey Oswald. And while he was starting this project his work on his first novel, he comes across a copy of another book that's going to change his life, and unfortunately it's Iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He is so blown away by miss Rand's prose that he converts from Marxism

to lazy fair capitalism overnight and basically becomes an objectivist. Now, the thing you might be starting to get from Carry right now is that he's a little bit of a seeker Ideologically. He is very prone to encountering a book and feeling that book on a almost spiritual level, and changing his life as a result of that book. This

will be a pattern for him throughout his life. Now, while he's doing this, he still has the same creative urges, and he maintains his friendship with Greg Hill, and he moves back home with his parents briefly at least, and during that period of time, he and Greg Hill launch a project that is an attempt at creating a humor magazine, which I mostly mentioned because of its title Apocalypse, a trade journal for doom profits, which is a great title. Nobody, Yeah, nobody.

I haven't found a copy of this. I would love to. I don't even know if it exists anymore. This is proto zine culture, which, by the way, these are going to be two of the guys generally credited with inventing the concept of zines. And yeah, they this particular magazine does not work very well. Um, so you know they

they they give up that project pretty early on. Life back in Whittier grated on them both, particularly the fact that the police would keep pulling them over for wandering around at night with no clear purpose, which was legal back then there were actually laws about like being out at night without a reason to be out at night. So they decided to move to a place where there were no laws about staying up all night and being weirdos.

And that place was New Orleans. And yeah, I think that's a good point to lead into an ad break. Is it an AD for New Orleans? I hope it's an ad for New Orleans. Go to New Orleans. It's a city where you can eat a shitload alligator meat, and I assume other things beignys exactly. You can stuff a bigne with gator. Yeah, I mean, I'll put gator in anything. I love gator, and I like New Orleans.

We're back. We're back from New Orleans. So they moved to New Orleans in nineteen sixty one, and Carrie continues work on his novel, which he has decided to name The Idle Warriors. After Oswald got back from the Soviet Union, he wound up moving to New Orleans too. He and Thornley are living just blocks away from each other, and Thornley would claim for the rest of his life that he was unaware of this, that they never saw each

other again. And it's worth noting that, according to Carrie's friend Becky Glazer, Carrie spent his time in New Orleans quote getting high off of everything so it's not odd that he would have been unaware. There are stories that he gets high smoking banana peals, which do not get you high, but Carrie claims like he makes blunts out of banana appeals and claims to get wasted off of them. There's going to be some stuff later in the story

that makes this makes sense. This is more what I think of New Orleans about is instead of Gator is getting high off of everything. So yeah, well that is

again so Carrie's and acclaim I didn't see Oswald. There's a decent chance of that purely because like he is spending most of his time getting wasted and hanging out with like weirdos on kind of the fringes of society, and this is what's going to wind up bringing him into contact with a number of people who later become central parts in some of the early JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

People besides Oswald, one of these guys is a friend of Carrie's named Slim brooks Now Slim may have been a navigational consultant on the Bay of Pigs Invasion. We don't actually know who this guy is. There's a couple of people that we know Carrie is hanging out with who give him names that we know our fake names because no one ever existed under those names, which is part of like what leads to these guys being part of the JFK conspiracy. Also, this is a man who's

known to make up people. This is a man who's known to make up people, although other people recall these folks um And this is an unpleasant part of Carry's history because Slim introduces him to a guy named Gary Kirstein, and some conspiracy theorist of the Kennedy assassination think that Gary Kirstein was actually Watergate burglar in CIA spymaster E Howard Hunt, because Gary Kirstein was not a real person.

Now to Carry, the man who identified himself as Gary Kirsteine claimed to have unclear ties to intelligence agencies while he regularly spouted neo Nazi propaganda. Carry later wrote, quote, one of the first things I learned about Gary was that he also hated Kennedy, but for somewhat different political reasons than mine. What a funny bit it It is

a funny bit. The bit's gonna get funnier. Quote. He expressed his dislike for Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Russians, Mexicans, and so on, with a chuckle usually, which left me with room to assume he wasn't really very serious about it. That, of course, was the assumption I preferred to make, since

I really liked Slim a lot and Gary was his friend. Now, this is where we're starting to see some of the moral downsides of being as open minded dude as Kerry was, because he's kind of willing to be like, well, this guy likes talking a lot about Nazi stuff, but maybe he's joking. I like his friends, so I'm not going

to cause a problem, which is a bad thing to do. Yeah, And Gary makes another bad decision after this point, which is he decided it kind of becomes a common thing for him when he's hanging out at bars with these guys to joke about murdering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now this may have been recorded, and it happens often enough that numerous people have experiences of carry talking about killing JFK.

He puts up posters calling for JFK to be like arrested or otherwise taken out of the presidency, which one might have seen, it's not impossible. Although, yeah, this is against JFK at this point, we're we're going to talk about that, Margaret. So there's a couple of things he has against JFK. One of them is that JFK supported the side who was fighting against the side backed by

Rhodesia in the Congo. Um. It is unclear why he was angry at He talks a lot about something called the Katanga massacre, which during the Katanga War, which is this war that happens in the Congo, there were massacres on both sides. I don't know specifically what he was talking about there. He also he's again he's an objectivist at this point, So he hates Kennedy's economic policies, right, um, but he also hates Kennedy for trying to invade Cuba. Like, wait,

there was so many steps all over the map. There's so many steps of Rhodesia that I lost the negative of the negative of the negative. Tell me where where did JFK sit on Rhodesia and where did well j JFK under him? The United States backed a side in a civil war in Congo that was opposed to the side that was backed by Rhodesia, and I don't know, Carrie never said anything pro Rhodesia. Okay, Carrie was angry that there were massacres in this war, which he blamed

on Kennedy. He was also angry at Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and for attacking Cuba. So it's it's all overs of like right wing and left wing things that are like again, he's all over the map um kind of on this stuff. But whatever reasons he had for hating Kennedy, he and his new buddies Slim and Gary the Nazi have a lot of theoretical discussions about

killing JFK. Carrie's contributions to the conversation include advocating of the use of a poison dart that would quote blow his stomach apart, as well as another scenario involving a remote control plane carrying a bomb, which is at least innovated. Yeah, gotta give Ry credit for predicting drone warfare. Yeah. Um. After Carry finished with his mock assassination plots, Kirstine added,

and next we'll get Martin Luther King. Now this is the point at which Carry started to wonder if maybe he hadn't fallen in with a bad group of people. But again, he has terrible judgment and he just kind of lets this slide. Another example of his terrible judgment comes when Gary Kirstine pays him to help research a book with the title strap In for this one, Folks, Hitler was a good guy. Now the premise of this book, please please enlighten me. It's a little different than what

you're expecting. The premise of this book is that all of the other Nazis and the Third Reich were worse than Hitler, so it's good that he was the Nazi who wound up in charge. Now, this is an insane thing to is. This is full stop idiotic, and Carrie

does not get involved in this. Carrie is like, well, this guy's a weird Nazi, but he's willing to pay me, and I am broke and kind of willing to do anything for money, Like I don't mind writing out he's writing research for this thing, right, So basically what his research for this is he's going through the library and he's reading books on guys like Gebels, and then he's writing out things that Gebel said that sound worse than things that Hitler said, like that's that's his research on

this project. So yeah, it's all it's good for good, good for you, Carrie. Um. Now, while this is going on, he is a pretty prominent member of the New Orleans fringe community. And this is again we've talked about we did in our episodes on Gabriel de Nunzio. Who's the guy. He's this Italian poet who's generally considered to be the ideological founder of fascism. He's the guy who inspired Mussolini. He takes over this city on the coast of in between kind of it's in Croatian now, but it's it's

near Italy, and it's after World War One. The city Fumes in this kind of awkward position where it's an independent city but it wants to be part of Italy, and he just goes and he takes it over. And de Nunzio's like a proto fascist, and a lot of the guys who back him in this are proto fascists, but also a lot of them are anarchists, and there are like anarcho syndicalists involved in the government of Fume, and even some Marxists, and part of what's happening here

is that, and this happens periodically. I think you could look at the Internet as sort of a digital fume, and like the late nineties, early two thousands, and we're in another New Orleans in this period is another similar situation where you've got all of these kind of fringe people, many of whom are going to be very influential in the nineteen sixties, going to be big parts of the hippies and all this stuff that happens are like hanging

out with like weirdo objectivists and Satanists and occult people and Nazis, and they're all hanging out in a lot of the same spaces because none of them fit anywhere else. And that's kind of what happens in periods of time and places. This is like, this is a pattern that repeats itself, which I'm not saying to justify on a moral level, like you should never sit down and talk to, or work with or take money from a Nazi for a job like this. That's an immoral act, full stop.

I'm saying that, like this pattern of you having all of these different radicals coming at stuff from different views. This happens repeatedly in his like the punk scene. It just like the punk scene, right then. In the punk scene, there's a lot of work putting into making as your Nazis can't hold then, right, but it took a moment. Why then, is this is why in radical space is you have to be so diligent and proactive about you know, will summarize it as punching Nazis because otherwise shit like

this happens. Right, But that culture didn't really exist at this point in that part in that area, or at least Thornly was not a part of it. Now he's also hanging out with It's not just these two weirdos. He's hanging out with a lot of musicians, a lot of like members of the local city. Like there's this kind of unique little satan As sect in New Orleans at the time, and he's friends with a lot of those guys. He's just kind of generally in the counterculture. Now.

He is also again very vociferously an opponent of JFK. And largely this comes down to I think economics, because by this point Carry considered himself a capitalist revolutionary, and so he had wished death on the President on numerous occasions for the President not sticking to kind of randy and principles of Lazai fair capitalism. I've met sep like this in the goth scene. Yeah, you know, yeah, this is not a totally unique journey. In November of nineteen

sixty three, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Carrie was working at a restaurant at the time, and when it came out that the police had arrested a former marine, he immediately and publicly said, I bet it was my friend, Lee Harvey Oswald. Now his co workers think this is peculiar. And here's an opt opset ti tip for you kids out here. If you if you believe your friend has assassinated the president, maybe keep that one to yourself. The fuck up. Yeah, you might not want to be talking

about now to the other guys at the kitchen. If there's one thing that Thornley cannot do, it he is physically incapable of shutting his mouth. Absolutely not. So it's a funny prank. It is a funny break. Like the French Revolution, the JFK assassination is a moment so horrific and inconceivable that it spawned conspiracy theories. Immediately, Carrie's co workers suspected that he was connected to it since he looks like Oswald, this is another factor in it. He

kind of resembles Lee Harvey Oswald. There's talk that they might secretly brothers. These are the beginning stories of of what's going to become a surprisingly influential conspiracy. For his part, Carrie believes that Oswald is innocent. He thinks that he was a patsy for the real killers, and he I think this is just because he was legitimately friends with the guy and he just didn't really think that he

could do it. And in fact, when Oswald gets killed, he falls into a deep depression because he's like, now, no one's ever going to find out the truth. The state has successfully murdered my friend in order to hide the fact that he was innocent of this terrible crime.

So that's where Carrie is. Immediately after the kidded the assassination, and obviously when the president is murdered, the Secret Service and the FBI, you know, get get out there, start to look in at people, start knock it on doors, and as they begin their investigations, they centered them around the radical political communities that Oswald had also spent time around. Oswald had been living in the same part of New Orleans. So one of the areas in which the Secret Service

in the FBI are looking around is New Orleans. And they start running into a lot of people who are like, you know, there's this weird guy who spent like a solid year talking about killing JFK and putting up posters and he kind of looked like Lee Harvey Oswald, and then they're like, oh yeah. And also he talked about

how he and Oswald were friends. So the FEDS become interested in carry and Carrie becomes convinced that he's being tailed by the FEDS now and if he created me convinced Harvey Oswald like what if a homoculous that's where Yeah, He's like, yeah, that's it. Yeah, Yeah, he made his own Uh, he made his own tulfa to carry us as not as far from what he winds up believing

as I wish it was the case. So but here's the thing again, you cannot emphasize how different kind of this the left is in this period of time and how differently people talk. If one thing what we know now today about like co intel pro and the infiltration of radical communities by the FBI. There are rumors about it then, but we don't like have all of the papers that we do now. It's like, well like this

like sixty three, yeah, sixty three right. So Carrie when he finds out, when he decided, when he realizes the FEDS are tailing him and here's the been looking around, he just goes to the FBI and he's like, hey, guys, I hear you're interested in me and the Kennedy killing. You want to give me a light detector test. Makes a lot of bad choices throughout his life. I mean, this lawyer might not be the worst call. This actually doesn't because, like the FBI immediately it is like, oh,

this guy's kind of a kook, right. Yeah. He also he does have like an airtight alibi for the assassination, and he Carrie frames it to them, is I want to help you track down the real killer because he wants to avenge Lee Harvey Oswald, which the FBI is probably also why the FBI is like, Okay, this guy's a little bit of a kuk. Carrie would later recall that the main question the FBI asked him was whether or not Oswald had been quote unquote a homo. I

love good, good work guys. Okay, he I know he's okay. No, I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so. Um that he that would be would be a proud moment. Again, those are not easy shots to make. You're really excited about this line of I'm just really excited to see the reddit after this. It's just gonna be people arguing that they could have hit that shot easy with a man liquor carcano. Um, it's hard, folks, it's hard. Look

not a great rifle. That's why he had to anyway. Whatever. Um, So, yeah, Carrie. For the next year or so, m Carrie, like, conspiracies start to swirl around this guy, Like the conspiracy culture in the US gets ignited again by the Kennedy assassination

in a way it really hadn't been before. And Carrie is kind of the first guy people suspect of being involved when Kennedy conspiracy theories take off the ground, and that is going to have a lot of negative long term consequences for Carrie and also everyone else in the world. But the fascinating like butterfly effect that is still continuing on today. But yeah, let's uh let's let's let's talk about that next time, and let's talk about y'all's motherfucking

plugables this time. Well, if you want a copy of me that is armed with what was the right well no, wait, I shouldn't do that. If you want a book I wrote, I wrote a book called Escape from Insul Island and you can read it in afternoon and it has people in it who are escaping from Insul Island. And if you want to hear us play a role playing game based on it, we did a live play that you can hear on the podcasts Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

It'll be one of the most recent episodes because well, I mean at the time this releases, as otherwise you might have to search for it. And I have a podcast. I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, we probably won't be covering this exact subject. And well, now, yeah, you know, Margaret, this is interesting. I actually did escape from an Insall Island once. I think I think you people in the East Coast call it Rhode Island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes,

very similar to your story. My experience on Rhode Island. Yeah, it's just made of roads. Also not a roads and in cells. Yeah, in the nineties when I did like weird website zine stuff, I definitely wrote weird things about being likewise Rhode Island, Lyne to you about everything, and it's I think it's a it's a great it's a great place to target for for like cruel jokes because like four people live there, so yeah, what are they going to do? Yeah, organize against us? Well, and it's

because I was involved. Actually, the culture that I was involved in in the nineties was like IRC Discordian stuff, So I was hanging out with like older goths who are all part of this shit. So yeah, of the ship we're about to talk about next episode, Darris. My plugs are if you want to contribute to uh, well

it's it's not it's not quite Discordian. But if if you want to feel if you want to feel like you're contributing to the work of of people in very secretive groups who are doing who are doing important work, you can donate the Atlanta Solidarity Fund um. That is the main thing I'm going to plug along with my my my four part series on Stoptop City that was just released on It could Happen Here and Uh yeah, let's uh, you know, support people in Atlanta. UM where

this story ends. By the way we are, we are. We are building to the city of Atlantic Garth. I didn't because attis which actually from underneath the ocean. UM. I have been. I have been screaming about this for years into my CBE radio. Margaret very excited to talk with you all about this. UM anyway, go to go to hell. All of you go to Hell. I love you, Go with Christ to Hell. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.