Part Four: A Complete History of the Illuminati | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

Wow Sophie I did not expect for you to take personal responsibility for the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy um I had always blamed it on Lee Harvey Oswald now now actually you yeah he's alive you have blamed it on a lot of people I know I know and it's possible someone might say that I'm just blaming yet another person for the assassination of JFK but really what I'm trying to let people know is that Sophie can land Three shots within a roughly dinner plate size Target at a surprising distance moving also moving Target moving Target

do you've got to lead that very impressive I believe in you Sophie I believe in your ability to take out John Fitzgerald Kennedy if you'd had to and that's why we've built you this time machine if he was coming at you with his limousine and you were you were Sheltering In A Book Depository I think you could have done it Thanks welcome back one so I decided I'm Sophie for a historical crime um I am Robert Evans this is a podcast ostensibly about the worst people in all of history we are getting behind some bastards

because uh all right-wing politics today is rooted in the series of conspiracy theories that we are explaining right now for you in 300-ish years of History condensed into I don't Know like five podcast episodes anyway my guests to continue this glorious journey in part four are Margaret Killjoy hello and Garrison Davis good morning or afternoon or some other time yep it's whatever time of day you're listening to so folks here we are let's get back into the story for the next year or so after the Kennedy assassination uh conspiracies around Kerry kind of flared and

then eventually seemed to subside His friend Greg moved back to New Orleans Greg kind of was back and forth between Whittier and New Orleans um you know how it is being being young you can't you know make rent for a while you move back in with your parents then you come back it's life and uh once he comes back to the city the two start work on their long-shelf plans to create a satiric religion based on the Greek goddess of chaos heiress now Gary wrote most of the first draft of a tract that Would later

become if this is a little bit before zines were a thing but it also is kind of a protozine um and its title is principia discordia or how I found the goddess and what I did to her when I found her um and this is It's a good title it's a good title these guys are very funny um and this is it is kind of framed as it's a mix of like a religious tract and You know it actually what it's kind of framed as when I remember when I told you about how that illuminated

a member of the Illuminati got struck by lightning and found by the cops a lot of the principia discordia kind of has the feeling of like intercepted Communications from like yeah this like weird underground cult and that's intentional they know the history that I related to you all in the first in fact are quite knowledgeable about the History that I related to you all in the in the opening episodes of this series um aspects of it are kind of framed as a religious tract and the faith that this is a track for is called discordianism

now by this point Kerry had already started reading guys like Max Sterner and he had found himself pulled out of his objectivist Trent of his iron Rand support and towards a more a sort of individualist anarchism Sterner is a guy who wrote a book called the ego end its Own and I am not the person to summarize uh that egoism is kind of is one of the things that like that kind of anarchism is called I am not the person to summarize it to you but the main impact it has on Carrie is that he

finds himself pulled towards anarchism um as opposed to this kind of and he'd always been an anti-state guy right that is the thing that is pretty consistent um you know and that that's a thing that he believes when he considers himself a Capitalist revolutionary the main thing that Sterner does for him is he drops the capitalism right and is just kind of now anti-state um and he and Greg are also getting increasingly interested in the occult in this period of time Carrie does a pass on the principia discordia and then they start mailing it off

to whatever expanding group of their friends who are mostly artists and weirdo pranksters who all like the idea of a religion centered Around chaos by the mid-1960s American conspiracy culture had taken off to new heights thanks to the Kennedy assassination and all that [ __ ] that was going on with UFOs conspiracism is also taking off increasingly among the right wing too and the conservative political establishment is starting to have its first Brig big break away from what you might call consensus reality which is existing and accepting a plane of basic Reality that is similar

or if not basically identical to the ones that the Liberals accept and towards a more a darker Splinter reality defined by conspiracism and the author of this switch probably the single figure most responsible for the the splintering of the reality tunnels in mainstream American politics is a guy named Robert H Welch Jr who we have talked about on the show he is the founder of the John Birch Society Um now again if you want to listen to those episodes on Bob Welch that we do with the knowledge fight guys I do recommend them but in

case you haven't heard those are you just rusty on the subject of the John Birch Society I'm going to quote from our friend hofstadter again who wrote the paranoid Style in American politics in November of 1964. so that article that I quoted to you earlier that talked about the Illuminati and its influence on kind of Conspiracism in America um earlier like two episodes ago that article was written during the period we're talking about right now November wow yeah a few years ago Welch proclaimed that communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government

note the care and scrupulousness of that almost he has offered a full-scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn they started a run On American banks in 1933 that forced their closure they can try for the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse they've stirred up fuss over segregation in the South they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it one of the most important agencies of communism right that's how hofstadter described this is

where and that is What if you replace communism with the Illuminati it's the same kind of [ __ ] that people were saying after the French Revolution right it's the same Playbook and they very much is a playbook for a guy for a lot of these people in the early 1960s Welch came across a pair of books that had a massive influence on them and these books were Nesta Webster's secret societies and subversive movements from 1924 an American evangelist Gerald winrod's uh Book Adam vicechopt a human devil from 1935. okay that is that is a

that is a banger title dude if anybody writes a book about me Robert Evans a human devil I will be the proudest I'm capable of being I had a satanic Scare at the last place I lived like a local news person about one of my music videos and so we just printed up the next band shirt was just all of the like ax wielding terrorist women anti-family America sacrificing Babies in the woods or whatever that's how you do it so both of these books and this is going to really shock you guys we're profoundly anti-semitic

um and this is kind of the start of this of a European school of thought that saw Jews and the Illuminati and in some cases the Freemasons as like co-authors of the French and Bolshevik revolutions together that like this is all tied together and this is a big part Hitler Is is spousing aspects of this he's taught you to hit when if you like look at what Hitler actually said about the conspiracies he believed he would often call it judeo-bolshevism right um Hitler's not so much into the Illuminati stuff but the stuff Hitler believes is

very much descended from a lot of this stuff um so Welch jettisoned the anti-Semitism he found in these books some of it at least but he kept the rest particularly The obsession with a grand Illuminati conspiracy theory and I'm going to quote now from the book The World of the John Birch Society Welch's first public mention of the Illuminati but not yet the Insiders came in his more stately Mansion speech delivered before a crowd of 1700 at the Conrad Hilton in Chicago on June 5th 1964. he told his biographer that although he had been studying

this subject for a number of years prior to This he understood that you couldn't start putting it all out in one go because nobody would believe you instead he'd endeavored to lead the Birch society's members little by little to where they would be interested despite these concerns Welch's idea of the insiders was quickly incorporated into the society's official worldview with Birch writers like Medford Evans amusing about whether Dean Rusk was The Insider's quarterback for example but Just as often the conspirators continue to be identified as the Communists the Liberals The Establishment the liberal establishment or

simply the conspiracy the seeming interchangeability of the terms reflected the fact that appearances to the contrary notwithstanding Welch's turn to the Illuminati hadn't really changed his basic analysis so that's interesting number one Welch is kind of doing a little bit of an atom Vice shop with his Society right where he's like well you can't tell everyone the whole truth at once you have to kind of like lead them there but he's also he comes to believe that the he comes to believe in these Illuminati conspiracies that they're behind you know the French Revolution of the

Bolshevik Revolution and all of these social justice movements but he also consciously Loops them in with both this blaming it on insiders right the Illuminati are the Insiders and I mean you might call them the Deep State you know but he also he identifies them in the same breath as not just the Communists but also the liberal establishment right all of this is the conspiracy all of this linked together is the conspiracy the right is going to believe in from 1964 up to today in November of 19 huh oh it's just it's so based on

anti-Semitism in terms of the way that like people think of Anti-Semitism as like racism but confusing because applied to this group of people that's often white but it's like it's not it's just this entirely different system of Oppression that's based on this it's based on this belief that there is a fragment of society within your society that is different and fundamentally is trying to push all of these modernizing elements for sinister reasons right of their own power right That is the core of anti-Semitic belief and it is focused obviously on the Jews being that that

fragment but once you start to believe that it's not hard for you to move on to just like well beyond that it's the Illuminati right it's the Communists it's the Liberals establishment all of these different like you've accepted that there's this that that any sort of movement towards a progressing Society is based in a conspiracy to destroy it right and That's the most important step to take and it also it goes the other direction too now that you get people to believe in lizard people or whatever other Illuminati thing you can then get them to

also just become anti somatic backwards and forwards again it's very syncretic too so you can people who are just convinced that there's lizard people or Bigfoot or UFOs if you Loop that into like well the Illuminati doesn't want you to know about Bigfoot Or the UFOs right and they're they're keeping that then that is also an inroad to get those people believing that the Jews are behind everything bad in society this is a pretty durable and proven thing that happens within conspiracism yeah in November of 1966 roughly a year after the publication of the principia

discordia Bob Welch published an essay in a John Birch magazine titled the truth in time in which he revealed his Discovery of a master conspiracy older than communism the communist movement is only a tool of the total conspiracy as secret as the Communist activities and organizations generally appear they are part of an open book compared to the secrecy enveloping some higher degree of this diabolic Force the extrinsic evidence is strong and convincing that by the beginning of the 20th century there had evolved an inner core of conspiratorial power able to direct and Control subversive activities

which were worldwide in their reach incredibly cunning and ruthless in their nature and brilliantly farsighted and patient in their strategy whether or not this increasingly all-powerful hidden command was due to an unbroken continuation of vaishop's Illuminati or was a distillation from the leadership of this in other groups we do not know some of them may never have been Communists While others were to avoid as much Dispute as possible therefore let us call this ruling click simply the Insiders it's just it's just people falling for the bait thinking that they're smart it's yeah and Bob Welsh

is both high on his own Supply but also recognizes this is a good way to manipulate people um and it's interesting 1964 is Welch's first mention of the Illuminati whereas like I've got to prep the ground for People 1966 is where he comes out with his big speech talking about the Illuminati 1965 is when for the principia discordia gets published um yeah it is all of this we should say that the principia discordia has a decent section in it uh about the Illuminati I'm about to get to that yeah we will be reading from it

right now yeah yeah the recipient discordia was written for people like Greg and Carrie because it Was written by people like Greg and Carrie right intelligent well-read weirdos on the fringes of society who are natural Skeptics but who are also drawn irresistibly towards conspiracism it's fitting that chapter 1 authored by Carrie and attributed to his pseudonym Lord Omar kaim ravenhurst was called the the epistle to the paranoids it is essentially a message to the counterculture of the 1960s and at this point as he's had his sort of break into Anarchism he's finding himself increasingly angry

that the objectivists where he'd formally kind of like uh found identification and the marxists who he'd once identified with and the anarchists who he now identified with all hated each other and were all fighting each other rather than fighting the state right and he the the paranoids that's who he's talking about is these people on The Counter Culture who are all in opposition to the state but who Can't get along with each other and this message in the principia discordia is essentially a message to this fragmented chunk of the counterculture that he was like you

guys are fighting too much to oppose the state in a meaningful way and I'm going to read a quote from that now and this is again the epistle to the paranoids number one you have locked yourselves up in cages of fear and behold do you now complain that ye lack Freedom you have cast out your brothers For devils and now complain ye lamenting that you've been left to fight alone all chaos was once your kingdom verily held ye dominion over the entire pintiverse but today he was sore afraid in dark Corners nooks and sinkholes oh

how the darknesses do crowd up one against the other in the hearts What Fear ye more than that what ye hath rotten verily verily I say unto you unto you not all the Sinister Ministers of the Bavarian Illuminati working together in Multitudes could so entwine the land with tribulation as have your baseless warnings yeah that's not a thing that anyone involved in radical politics today would identify lit with on a deep and emotional level right yeah yeah it's well written too he is he is he's I I I find a lot in this piece um

now the next step section of the principia was an ad Um and it's framed as an advertisement as like a hokey 60s style advertisement to join the Bavarian Illuminati which is listed as the world's oldest and most successful conspiracy Greg and Carrie give their version of Illuminati history here which puts the creation of the organization at around 1090 by Hassan is Sabah a medieval warlord credited with creating an order of hash bet fueled assassins people get the history the exact history on that a Little bit quite a lot wrong obviously Hassan asaba had nothing to

do with the Illuminati and they knew this this was a joke for them right the advertisement is very tongue-in-cheek it also references HP lovecraft's creation yogg sauthoff as well as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs um among other things the principia is a satire of real Cults but also a satire of American mass media and in fact that ad to join the Bavarian Illuminati ends with these lines if your IQ is over 150 And you have 3125 plus handling you might be eligible for a trial membership if you think you will if you call if

you think you qualify put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard one of our Underground agents will contact you shortly I dare you tell no one accidents have a strange way of happening to people who talk too much about the Bavarian Illuminati maybe may we warn you against imitations ours is original And genuine didn't Jamie do a podcast about this yeah yeah exactly also like Coca-Cola ads kind of like this is the original flavor you know yes yes they're making fun of all this stuff speaking of advertisements that will instruct

you to bury your money and throw it away here here are our ads that God I hope it's a gold ad I hope I wish for each of you a gold ad at this point [Music] We're back um so one thing that becomes clear going through the principia and and doing and by the way you can pronounce the principia discordia however you want because nobody actually knows how ancient Latin was pronounced in its entirety we have ecclesiastic Latin which is a bit different so if you want to be like I don't even pronounce it that

way you can go [ __ ] yourself I took three years of Latin I'll say it however The [ __ ] I goddamn want um go to hell I'd love you uh don't study Latin in high school kids look at us we are such a bunch of suckers I know I know absolutely my friends are all like learning Spanish that they didn't travel with and I'm stuck there learning about how [ __ ] kaikilius and his yeah buddy I had a you know it helped me have a conversation with my nun aunt about whether or

not you pronounce Latin certain ways that's What I got out of three years a lot I took you wanna we just did some episodes on uh on Bobby Fischer and some people thought I I I I I was intending to just kind of joke about the fact that he was a nerd because I was also a nerd which is why I brought up Warhammer so much but I took three years of Latin so that I could understand all of my Warhammer books like that that was that was why I did that hell yeah so there

there you go anyway whatever One thing that becomes clear going through the principia and doing all this research on the Illuminati is how knowledgeable Greg and Carrie and their other friends were about the actual history not just of the Illuminati but of other secret societies and conspiracies these guys have like an academic levels understanding of this history which is why they are able to parody it so successfully the recipient contains a number of letters in which Members of the Illuminati all of which are like and they take as did we didn't really get into this

in those but all of the original illuminati people like took on uh pseudonyms that were like themed after ancient Greek and Roman history like Achilles and Ajax and stuff um and all of the the new Illuminati the discordians take on pseudonyms as well as I said um carries is uh Lord Omar khayam ravenhurst um Greg Hills is malaclips the the Younger um and yeah they give you know uh uh yeah so these guys are are very much consciously like aping Adam if I shopped and in their conspiracy document that they put out they each provide

kind of different and often contrasting theories about the actual age and origin of the Illuminati um usually this winds up stretching back to pre-history and and they're kind of continuing why shops lie here right like Consciously continuing because like he would pretend it was an ancient Society they're doing this intentionally and it also includes bits like this which are clearly satirizing the John Birch Society your publication is timely so mention that in addition and this is part of like a section of it that's framed as like intercepted letters basically right your publication is timely so

mention that in addition to the old fronts like The Masons the Rothschild Banks and the Federal Reserve System we now have significant control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since Hoover died last year but that is still secret the students from a Democratic Society the Communist Party USA the American Anarchist Association the junior Chamber of Commerce the Black Lotus Society the Republicans party the John Dillinger died for you society and the campfire girls it is still useful to continue the Sham of the birchers that we are seeking world domination so do not reveal that political

and economic control was generally complete several Generations ago it's so funny it's so good yeah this is a response to the John Birch Society as much as it is anything else and they're [ __ ] with people right like that's what's going on here okay was there a campfire girls or do they make that up yeah yeah that was like a girl scouts kind of thing oh okay that that It may still exist for all I know um I'm not a campfire girl's exit expert although soon we'll have our six part series on the campfire

girls um you already did the Boy Scouts so we we could have done a couple more episodes on the [ __ ] Boy Scouts yeah um so they write this silly Zine and I know some of you who are not like is into this stuff as all three of us are are probably like why are we talking About like this weird joke that some dudes made in the mid 60s oh boy trust me it matters so they write this week they write this weird scene and if you know anything about kind of like pre-internet erazines

you know that the thing they're gonna need next is a photocopier now in the mid-1960s photocopiers existed you could get access to them but they like owning one would have cost uh you know probably like what a car does today it was not Easy to get like to purchase one most people didn't have access to one unless they had access through an institution um and so if you were going to use such a machine you either were like at a school that had one or you had maybe an employer that had one and you could

kind of like get some time on it um so it just so happened that Greg Hill when they decide they want to start making a bunch of copies of this thing they had out Greg Hill had a friend Named Lane Caplinger and Lane worked as a secretary for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison if you've ever watched the movie JFK by Oliver Stone Garrison is the guy played by Kevin Costner so he would go on to write the first major Kennedy assassination conspiracy book titled on the trail of Assassins which is what Joe Stone's JFK

was based on this will be relevant soon so Garrison's office and they use the Photocopier to produce several copies of the principia discordia which they start handing out to friends who read it and find it funny these people then I will say as someone who's also a uh interested in this history this this claim is heavily disputed yes we know there's one at least one scene they did use Garrison's photocopier on it's not provable that it was the principia discordia and they also claim that the first copy of the principia was Typed out using Garrison's

typewriter um there's there's a lot of weird claims about Garrison specifically because JFK stuff well he's the one I wrote it oh oh not not just that um but uh yeah no you're right Garrison this may not have happened we do know that they used because they were writing other scenes it's pretty well known that they used his photocopier for one thing a couple of years prior to this there Have been claims since that they used it for this and like you said that they used his typewriter we don't know what's true because these guys

again part of what they're about to start doing is telling a bunch of funny lies so that's so good that said it is known that hill and a friend got access to his photocopier at one point right I I chose to tell people the version that I found most funny which I thought was in line with discordian Traditions but yes that Is good that is useful context so they start handing this stuff out to friends and in the way that things spread back then these people read it a lot of them like it they find

their own access to like mimeograph machines or whatever they go to the library they start making copies of it and handing it out to friends and in a couple of different cities people start to decide to start gordian chapters which are themed as both kind of secret societies and sets Of a religion um that's like what they are consciously aping but in reality it has a lot more in common with like modern nerd subculture today um and to kind of go through this process I'm going to quote now from the book klf by an author

named jmr Higgs slowly Hillen Thornley recruited a few like-minded friends into their new religion their aim was to undermine existing belief systems by spreading Confusion and disinformation with as much humor as possible to this end they each adopted a host of new new names under which their discordian Endeavors were credited many new discordian chapters were founded the majority of these contained only one member and some contained none discordians then wrote essays and letters under these aliases only to follow them with completely contradictory essays and letters under a different alias So this is like becomes sort

of the first act of worship of the discordian church is to like write essays and letters about conspiracies and then send them out to different magazines and different Publications under a variety of alien aliases now as for the actual religion itself we all know you actually meant aliens I did um which uh you know my book on the Illuminati by uh that one crank does Talk a lot about the Annunaki um they are apparently the Babylonians talked about them all the time so you know no one's more credible than the Babylonians um but the actual

tenets of the discordian faith which is again a satire of religion um are you know there's a variety of things everybody's a pope which is not an original thing initially it is actually very centralized it's kind of One of the big like changes in the discordian faith over the years is the decision that everybody gets to be a pope um they don't have religious dogmas they have katmas um which are like relative meta beliefs rather than like strict beliefs in something right there's kind of a general prescription in the discordian church against believing too hard

in anything Um like every religion they have foods that your band kind of arbitrarily from eating in this case it's hot dog buns and so there's a lot of just like hot dogs handed out at like discordian events in this period of time and again yeah it's meant to be she would love this it's it's it's a joke it's yucks um but what you should have realized right now by the passage I read earlier where they're kind of they're spreading all these jokes but they're also Spreading all of these different claims about the things they've

done as a conspiracy what they've done what hill and Thornley particularly have done is create a series of memes which start to spread through the underground media of the day through this kind of growing underground network of what what's going to become Zine culture now because this faith gets founded in 1965 right as the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories pick up steam conspiracy Theories become sort of the language that discordians choose to do their messaging in now this is what brings us to Playboy magazine a place Jamie Loftus worked she did she's deeply tied to all

these Jamie is involved in this she knows so much we are through the Looking Glass here people now gosh when I say Playboy today you either think of all of Hugh Hefner's many sex crimes um or you think About um oh yeah that like website or that state magazine that used to be big and is no longer profitable and turned into like kind of a sleazy Internet Brand in the 1960s Playboy is hugely influential in the counterculture not just because there's there's pictures of attractive naked people but because they're like of the Articles like there

are a lot of very influential writers I read it for the Articles Sorry this is a thing and two of the guys who are writing it for the articles are a pair of editors for Playboy magazine named Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson oh my gosh there's so many [ __ ] robbers yeah yeah there's a lot of Robert's involved in this story too but yes Bob Shea and Robert Anton Wilson are both editors for Playboy magazine and they're both kinda in to a lot of the same stuff that Carrie and and Greg are they

they find cons the occult They're both in very much into the occult especially Robert Anton Wilson they are taking huge amounts of LSD and by the way so are Hill and Thornley by this point um and you know they they start to notice because Playboy publishes letters and one of the places the easiest places for discordians who are writing these nonsense conspiracy letters to get their [ __ ] published is Playboy and Robert Anton Wilson Robert Shea start to notice Like we're getting a lot of weird letters from guys writing about the Illuminati and and

heiress and stuff that's peculiar so they start responding to some of these letters Wilson being a prankster himself decides he's going to [ __ ] with whoever is sending him these joke Letters by publishing all of the weirdest ones and his his particular thing is an ENT issue he likes to publish conspiracy theories letter like letters that are Conspiracy theories that specifically contradict each other like incompatible theories about the Kennedy assassination and stuff like that yeah um because he thinks that's funnier and it is and I'm going to quote now from a summary by a

writer named James Burt Wilson said he did not consider this a prank or a hoax but Guerrilla ontology he became increasingly exasperated with the fixed views on both the right and left of politics and he wanted people to Question the information they received to stop seeing their beliefs is inherently true ontology is a branch of branch of philosophy that studies among other things the nature of reality like what is true right again this is a philosophy discussion on a podcast so we're flattening things here but that's the basic of it right it is the science

of like what is how to classify and explain objects and entities Wilson and Shea Like the discordians saw themselves as waging a necessary war against people's widely accepted definitions of reality and they are looking out at millions of people being massacred in Vietnam at police in the street beating civil rights Marchers and they are they are responding to what they see as all of the people perpetuating these crimes have locked themselves into what Robert Downton Anton Wilson will later call a reality tunnel which is this like very Solidified belief about the nature of the world

that is wrong but justifies violence because the world itself will not conform to this errant belief and so if you can't accept anything else is real you're going to do violence on the people who insist in living in a way that does not conform to that belief you have about the world so the thing Wilson and Shea want to do is soften people's understanding of what reality is and the hope that it will stop a lot of this Horrible [ __ ] from happening right that's the goal okay okay um this is this is not

gonna work out perfectly but it's it's you understand where they're coming from right yeah I mean I do at least I I do I feel like sometimes we think that like oh we'll use sarcasm and parody and irony I feel like people who are versed in the internet will know why this doesn't work you know and and the spoiler is that it Doesn't yeah but it's work mark uh the exchange of money for items oh I was going to say advertising oh uh it has it has a more profound impact on human cognition um than

almost anyone understands and in fact in the future we'll be considered to be a health hazard on the same level as cigarette smoking but for now it's what keeps podcasts on the air enjoy your information Hazard everybody [Music] ah we're back and have your kids considered the benefit of smoking Pall Malls Pall Malls aren't just the tastiest cigarette on the market they're the cigarette that has an extra long filter which helps those tiny hands and smoke safely Sophie you don't want kids to hear the good news about Pall Mall cigarettes the cigarette crafted with tiny

hands in mind buy tiny hands I thought you were Because it's rolled okay I'm I'm hurt look you know one of the tragic lessons about advertising is that sometimes people consume different products than they advertise yeah fair enough just like I actually kind of more into silver well it's like you know I talk about how Lasik provided me with laser eye surgery but the reality is that I lashed a Banshee uh to the the the I have to walk in my backyard do your job what Sophie I can't talk about how I trained a Banshee

To fix my eyes no with the ice the the the okay whatever Sophie Jesus unfair anyway discordians so Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea start publishing all of these weirdo Letters by these weirdo discordians and eventually like realize something is going on here that it's not just an increasing number of crazy people sending them conspiracy theories conspiracists yeah exactly and Robert Anton Wilson When he finds this out is like so on board he's like this is the best thing I've ever heard of and he he travels and he go he meets with Carrie Thornley in

1967. and as soon as Thornley explains the game to him Robert Antoine Wilson becomes a discordy and he is immediately on board with all of this [ __ ] now some other stuff is happening while all of these figures are meeting at this point in time a book called the second Oswald has been published which is the First organized conspiracy theory about a second gunman on the grassy knoll and at the same time through this yes it comes out in this book that Carrie Thornley this weird countercultural figure has ties to all of these people

adjacent to the conspiracy in the second Oswald and the nature of this coincidence that he's just sort of tied to all these people that this book has argued were like helping to carry out the assassination is too much for a lot Of people and a growing chunk of the conspiracy culture of the time convinces itself that Thornley was the second Gun Man and some versions of the conspiracy he's like an Oswald double who is there to like distract from the fact that like yeah like there's multiple laws Waltz basically right and a lot of people

because Thornley looks like Oswald and knows him think that he's the second Oswald right one of the people who decides this is what's Happened one of the people who comes to believe this about the Kennedy assassination is Jim Garrison the D.A of New Orleans oh so Garrett yeah that's not gonna work [Music] Harrison this is so complicated you know I know all of our names except for Margaret so fall a bit far have been deeply implicated in this conspiracy so Jim Garrison starts investigating Carrie Thornley in January of 1968 right After Carrie and Bob Wilson

meet and he actually subpoenas Carrie Thornley so he can ask Carrie about his relationship with Oswald now thornly denies that he had been in any contact with the assassination in any assassin in any manner since 1959 but Garrison comes to believe that Thornley is part of the conspiracy and acted as a body double for Oswald and he also finds out that Oswald moved to New Orleans right after Thornley and that the year before the Assassination they were both in Mexico City at the same time so he charges Carrie with perjury this is like a years-long

fight Carrie has with like a purge recharge over lying about his associations with Lee Harvey Oswald and this is a very situation Carrie had actually been called in a lot of people don't know this Carrie Thornley testified for the war to the Warren Commission in 1964 because he had published his book The Idol Warriors which was about Lee Harvey Oswald and all he's talking about in the word commission stuff is what he knew about Oswald right but because he says he had no more contact with him this is a really you can get in shitloads

of trouble for lying in a congressional inquiry like this right um like you are not allowed to do that so the fact that and a year after he he testified uh he also released a book just titled Oswald yes like the same Exact year that the principia was first um was first being distributed I assume right because if I'm not mistaken when he no no because he becomes convinced after a while I believe that Oswald he starts believing that Oswald was innocent and then he comes to believe that Oswald did it and he eventually comes

to believe something very similar to what Jim Garrison believes but he writes the book Oswald kind of in the middle of all of these beliefs okay Um because he knows the guy and yeah um so Carrie starts to get very paranoid at this point because in the middle of creating a religion about secret societies where they claim to be the Illuminati pulling the strings he has also become the center of the JFK assassination conspiracy theory and is now being charged with perjury so this is this is what we call a [ __ ] around and

find out moment yeah yeah one of the things and stuff putting up Flyers Asking for a president to be assassinated if you don't want people to think you might have done it now you remember back when that Nazi paid him to do research on the Hitler book oh God yes okay so the book is titled I think it's like Hitler was not a bad guy right yeah Carrie becomes convinced that the guy and again this Nazi is not a real person like there was a person there because people saw Carrie talking to him but the

Name he gives is not a real person right so there's a lot of that that's part of why this guy gets wrapped we don't know who this was Carrie becomes convinced that that guy was a Fed who paid him to do this research so there would be a bunch of writing about Hitler under the title Hitler was not a bad guy in Kerry's handwriting and the state could put it up as a Manifesto after framing him for killing JFK what I would have been awesome Yeah that's that's what Carrie starts to believe because he's like

no one knows who this guy is this is such a weird thing that somebody paid me to do someone just wanted my name on this like Nazi thing so they could argue like I was involved in it because he also sees that what Garrison is doing is trying to like bring him into this and blame the assassination on him so he's not there are people in the government trying to pin the assassination yeah But he's also he's also locked in this conspiratorial mindset now in part as Recreation so he kind of just starts to go

crazy now yeah that tracks Carrie is also at his heart a prankster and despite the severity of the situation he is in he cannot help himself but [ __ ] with Jim Garrison and I'm going to quote I'm going to quote from the very interesting book the prankster in the conspiracy which is by that that go rightly guy and is a biography of Carrie Primarily quote sometime in 1968 during the course of a Garrison investigation Carrie discovered that one of Garrison's aides Alan Chapman believed that the JFK assassination had been the work of the Bavarian

Illuminati that ancient and Fraternal Order much balihood by right-wing conspiracy theorists such as the John Birch Society as a centuries-old secret society behind communism and damn near every other socialist inspired ill then corrupting The world and poisoning our precious bodily fluids in response to all of this Bavarian Illuminati paranoia Carrie in the midst of Garrison's probe decided to mind [ __ ] Garrison all the more by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he Carrie was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati these communiques were sent under the auspices of the discordian society the mind [ __

] eventually got Carrie interested in the history of this mysterious secret Society and the more he read about the Bavarian Illuminati the more fascinated he became eventually Carrie and his fellow discordian conspirators started planting stories about the discordian society's age-old war against the Illuminati accusing everyone Under the Sun of being a member of that Sinister and sneaky organization from such politicos as Nixon LBJ Daley and William Buckley to Martian Invaders and various conspiracy Buffs Plus members of the Discordian society itself which made it all very confusing and extremely hilarious so he he starts sending fake

letters claiming that he's in the agent of the Illuminati to one of Garrison's aides who believes that the JFK assassination was the work of the Illuminati and is actively investigating him for his complicity in that cry you you look whatever you think of the wisdom and ethics of this you have to respect that commitment yeah no I mean If someone's like that'd be like if I resolve if my if when people were like oh you're an evil Satanist I'd be like yes I personally brought Satan back from the dead and used him to do this

actual crime that happened I am the literal Christian devil and I killed all those kids at that elementary school and whatever whatever the one that started the satanic manic was yeah um I forget Mountain Meadows seem no no that's the Mormon Massacre I've lost Track yeah you know whatever by the early 1970s Carrie Hill and Robert Anton Wilson have a name for this combination prank active political terrorism that they've sort of lapsed into committing they start to call it operation mind [ __ ] jmr Briggs writes the aim of operation mind [ __ ] was

to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced with some form of enlightenment Now that may have been optimistic yeah yeah it is worth noting that the discordians are not the only Anarchist weirdos thinking along these lines at the time in 1967 another group of anarchists on the UC Berkeley campus had formed a group called The Bavarian Illuminati and had started sending out weird press releases with the goal of giving conspiratorially minded people something they get paranoid about and the the lady Who founds

this group at Berkeley later becomes friends with Thornley and becomes a discordian and is now a right-wing crank journalist no no this is the worst thing that's happened in this episode yeah yeah uh oh I know don't don't worry something a lot worse is coming Margaret oh no okay so this is really but also this type of stuff is not that he's not stupid he's not super like dissimilar to like the situation is yes which we will be Chatting about them in a little bit too which I think is useful context to give people but

yeah operation mind [ __ ] becomes a mix of deliberate paranoid incitement and Anarchist political project some of the press some of the press releases they send out are just like conspiracy nonsense but others are comparatively serious where they are advocating for specific political acts they put out a big paper urging a permanent Universal Rent strike and Their idea is that everyone should just start stop paying rent and go about their lives as normal so there is this mix of like here are things we actually believe and here's a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories this

mix of conspiratorial incitement and sincere attempts to push some political change was a conscious aping of a strategy that Greg Hill who wrote Under the name malaclips the younger had come across in a book titled the theory of games and Economic behavior the authors had argued that the only strategy an opponent can't predict is a random one hence what became the new religion's Maxim we discordians must stick apart now yeah it's it's like what they're what they're doing is like a thing in Game Theory we do actually talk about this in the chess episodes where

like if you're like a a random weirdo like you can sometimes beat people in these games who Are much better than you because you just are not acting in a way that it can they can possibly predict right yeah um there are arguments that I've been reading a little bit and forgive me I know very little about go but basically one of the things that people will say is that like the a good chess computer cannot be beat by humans right like when it's when it's playing it it's like we are past the point where

human beings can beat the machines in chess Um but you they kind of don't have computers at go that are that reliable at beating human beings they're good um and some of this has to do there's just been less work in doing this with machines that play go but one of the things people will notice that because there are so many more possibilities in go human players can just do crazy [ __ ] and the Machine gets kind of tripped up right in a way that's not as possible with chess because there's less sort of

Options that you have in the game of chest than you do with go um anyway I find this interesting not an expert on go another inspiration for Thorn Lee Hill Robert Anton Wilson Robert Shea and the other early discordians are the situationists is Garrison just said now these are a group of avant-garde artists and activists they start out in France their basic contention this isn't like the 50s right so this is in the period Of time and when like Greg and Carrie are like teenagers and young adults is when the situation and this are kind

of at their most um influential and the basic contention that the situationists have is that culture in the form of advertising and increasingly slick mass media is being forced upon us the situationists believe that you should resist cultural homogeneity with a sort of artistic Judo taking the momentum of mass media and Turning it back against its wielder situationist art projects were supposed to have no single author or Creator as they value decentralization of creation artists would work together under shared names and rejected the idea of the Visionary auteur again you can see how this had

a big influence on what Greg and Carrie and the others are doing key to this thinking is the idea of the spectacle of originally defined by guidoboard as the autocratic reign of The market economy the media is one outward expression of the form of this autocratic reign as deboard wrote rather than talk of the spectacle people often prefer to use the term media and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument a kind of Public Service now this is all a little bit wonky so I want to turn to a paragraph by tiermann Morgan

and Laurie pershie explaining the concept in more detail de board describes the spectacle as Capitalism's instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses the spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during the board's lifetime it can be found on every screen that you look at it is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser it is the listicle telling you 10 things you need to know about X the spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while Encouraging us to focus on appearances for deborde

this constituted an unacceptable degradation of Our Lives and by the way all of this stuff has a huge influence on the wachowskis and is kind of like the basis of the Matrix movie which also ties in the first fact that that [ __ ] gets [ __ ] turned around yes it sure does yeah you it's this is one of those things where I have a lot of sympathies with this with the Situationists and I I like that style of Praxis but also this thing can get turned in on itself turned in on itself like

yeah you can never actually escape the loop you can only try to Loop it even Tighter and then hopefully it will collapse in on itself but yeah it will keep on to that thought because we have subscribed we haven't described the loop that the board sets up quite yet for people but but hold on to that thought because I do Want to I want to come back to that in just a second so debord is convinced that art has failed and is essentially dead as a thing capable of carrying meaningful counter-cultural messages and this is

because the spectacle is an expert at something called recuperation where ideas and individuals that were initially subversive are trivialized cleanse of cleansed of their revolutionary potential and reincorporated to mainstream capitalist Societies Commodities the easiest example of this is like a Che Guevara t-shirt right this communist revolutionary being turned into this like shirt that you buy at a head shop that's owned by a hedge fund right yeah or like a podcast about like cool revolutionaries in history that's like exactly Corporation it's ever existed these are all good examples Margaret thank you no problem The way the

situation is suggested fighting against recuperation was called determent which is what Garrison was talking about a little bit ago and it is the recontextualizing of an existing work of art in order to shift its meaning towards something that inspires revolutionary feelings now the situationalists are also motivated by the concept of psychogeography which is a way of describing one's surroundings uh in order to like influence their Emotional state it's a little bit difficult to describe some of the situationalists art over a podcast but one thing that they would do in Paris is they would like cut

up and reshuffle maps that were then given to people in order to encourage people to wander to different parts of the city that they would not otherwise have traveled to and thus build connections between them right um this is kind of part of what they're Trying to do here is trying to cut their what they saw is the power that Maps had over how humans thought about the geography of their cities this is also a response to the fact that city planners like set up cities in such a way to keep certain groups of people

apart right I mean you can think about the way this existed whatever City you live this is a part like look at the way bike lanes are always set up right they don't go to poor neighborhoods as a general rule They connect affluent parts of town to affluent parts of town or places where people shop it's not a hundred percent of the case but that is a lot of them right this is a thing that the situation is still recognizing and this is one of the things in which that the the kind of art that

they're doing is trying to to fight against um this all sounds very heavy but situationist art is often credited with sparking a massive series of riots in Paris in 1968 which is right within the time period we're talking about obviously the situationist international kind of falls apart eventually for the same reason most left-wing movements do but the tactics that they'd pioneered and the goal of their work gets kind of stuck in the teeth of the global left and that's all happening kind of in the period of time before and right at the height of what

well right at the start at least of What the discordians are doing um all right now now we can talk about it Garris yeah I mean it's just it's just one of those it's just one of those things that because we've even seen like this situation has tried to get ahead of that type of recuperation and it's just a very hard thing to do like it's it's it is it is one of those things that eventually there there are attempts to Even to even put that recuperation and commodify that even aspect of it it's like

the one of the few good jokes in Rick and Morty that I that I I stand by is the is the um uh is the freedom wafer selects of of like distilling this brain juice that is that is that is that that gets um like grown during an active rebellion and selling that back to you so you can consume and have that same feeling of rebellion and it's yeah it's it's it's this it's this mechanism that Can just keep on going into itself and getting trying to break out of that is I mean a topic

of a lot of this type of political Theory but so yeah it's this um oh sorry Margaret oh just like this idea that the the detornment thing used to make a lot of sense to me I grew up in ad Busters and stuff like the late 90s really awesome we'll chat about them a little bit later too yeah yeah like that was like I was in art school and AD Busters came around and then I dropped out of art school to go travel and try and do Anarchy or whatever and these are related thoughts yeah

and the detornment and all that was a big part of it but I like but seemed tournament then Loop so many times I'm kind of back to just like regular direct cultural attack just making art yeah you just [ __ ] do the things you believe in and you say the things you believe into people and you just [ __ ] all right like instead of The Judo thing you just punch him in the face you know I Margaret I hadn't thought this until just now but it kind of occurs to me that you can

argue that the situationists part of what they're doing is similar to what Vice shopt was doing way back in the day it's this thing that like you have to hide your message one way or the other right that like that has to be a part of yeah um like there there's it's interesting this like because I'm thinking about Like I can remember there's a lot of folks on the left who part of like will celebrate and I'm not saying this is wrong but like one of the things they love about the Matrix is that it

is so clearly inspired by the situation it's like down to the fact that like at the very beginning of the movie Neo has a copy of a book called The Society the spectacle right like that I I believe he has a semi locker and simulation which oh sorry sorry it's right which was it Which was inspired by the writings yes Society yeah yeah yeah yeah um and so it's like is that an example of an Insurgent form of art being snuck into a massive Hollywood Blockbuster or is the move is the Matrix itself an example

of the recuperation of what the situationists were doing because it's this multi-billion dollar franchise and then even and then even the Matrix is uh rebellious messages get recuperated by fascism with with Elon Musk is talking About red screams at him but but and then on but then the fourth Matrix film is about the recuperation of the first Matrix and it's looping on itself endlessly and this is this is what operation mindfuck is really after it's about causing this Loop to destroy people's brains and make reality incredibly malleable and that is that is the goal of

this sort of thing I argue they're not trying to destroy people's brains and I think that because Again the story we're building to is this does all go terribly wrong but I think an argument you could make if you're pro-mind [ __ ] is that well the situations were cool but also it would have been a real bad thing if people had believed too strongly in what they were doing and and and and come to like treat these ideas of determent as if it is something you should take that seriously as like the most effective

way of fighting against capitalist modernity Um and maybe getting people to think this way and start looking at these kind of Loops of recuperation in which these things the situationalists created created this multi-billion dollar franchise and then that maybe that causes people to take all of it a little bit less seriously and treat it more like a tool in the toolbox rather than something that should be the core of your personality yeah and I also feel like some of the recuperation stuff it's Like people getting mad because they punch someone and then they punch they

got punched back it's like right I'm gonna do this thing that attacks capitalism capitalism is going to look and be like all right well what's the best thing I can do and they might try and use that back against me like of course they are we're fighting like I punch them and they punch me like and this is like yeah it's a it's a conflict and in a conflict Um you learn from the actions of your adversary which is why do you like you have this you have this very interesting uh Anarchist group called up

against the wall this is who I was thinking about doing all this yeah Woodstock which makes Woodstock what it is in a lot of ways and then Woodstock winds up in Pepsi commercials yeah um life and actually the situation has kicked out the British situationists because they liked up against the wall [ __ ] yeah anyway up against all [ __ ] had a conflict with the this is all sorry wait wait it's up against the wall [ __ ] came out recently excellent excellent well we are going to cover all of this in more

detail lately but I wanted to talk in this by talking about the situation is because as as the the discordian church really starts to take off in the early 1970s that's the Goal that Thornley and Hill and Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea and all their friends kind of have is to in a very situationist manner take the cultural weight of these conspiracy theories that the John Birch Society and the right are C is a method to power and are using still to this day as a method of power and they are trying to in

a situationist manner kind of like Judo turn the weight of this stuff back against itself by as Garrison said in some ways kind of Breaking the brains of the people who believe this by widening the field of play conspiratorially right instead of it instead of the instead of the uh the John Birch Society being the only word on the Illuminati well let's expand what this [ __ ] can be well beyond what they can control and maybe the hope is that they can't manipulate people as effectively and that maybe people even become less manipulatable now

spoiler this is debatable as to whether or not It works very well some people would argue that what the discordians are about to do is build a very well-crafted gun and then leave it on the table in a room full of four-year-olds but yeah we will talk about that next week y'all got any pluggables to plug well if you want to uh support people trying to use some of these same type of tactics uh in defense of the forest you can donate to the to the Atlanta solidarity fund oh one of the one of the

Posters I saw around Atlanta about about the stop cop City stuff it it uh ended with a very situationist-esque motto which was reality is the battlefield and yeah so this type of thing is is continuing on today and it's it's it's it's not just people making propaganda it's also people like doing stuff physically in the real world and facing the situationists did you know yeah absolutely and and there's people facing Legal consequences for it um and if you want to support those people that are that are experiencing State repression you can donate to the Atlanta

solidarity fund yes donate to the Atlanta solidarity fund and uh it is it is good to keep in mind this is why one of the things I would like to leave liberal type folks and I don't mean that as like a slur but like folks who are kind of like more Centrist and liberals who we have a lot of listeners Who are of that that tendency what I would like to leave you with is the next time you hear someone on the right say something that is objectively factually wrong and feel the desire to dunk

on them consider whether or not you're just feeding the loop right because reality is the battlefield and you may not in fact be able to damage their cause by locking into an argument with them right yeah that that that that may be a doomed Tactic um in the way that we're talking about a doomed tactic that is is much more in line with the people that I tend to admire politically there's no political side has a monopoly on doomed tactics but I think it is worth saying that if arguing with conservatives about the nature of

reality could change things we would be in a different situation right now and perhaps other tactics are necessary My Margaret is for the derive my favorite of the situationist uh tactics which is go for a walk and go for a walk or you don't normally go for a walk um I I love the idea of that as like a way to change your scope of reality I think that they did a really good job of that and then also a plug that all of the references earlier about Jamie doing all of this and that is

Jamie Loftus who has a bunch of podcasts on this very Network including my year in Mensa um and a bunch of other ones and then I and did Jamie do 911 we can't say she didn't I actually think that we probably can okay she she comes from the Northeast Margaret that's true I I don't know if that's true I'm suspicious she was in like the third grade Okay the third grade nine eleven three times three is nine Sophie also did too many too many conspiracies also Like didn't didn't we like just read that that um

the Illuminati was controlling the Girl Scouts like they are specifically going after they are organizations with kids to recruit them to do these types of Acts powerful that it all makes sense now because if we've learned one lesson in this series it's that joking about this stuff never has consequences no consequences was just so proud that Garrison got Those things all in one reference that's good that was good [Laughter] that was good go um go make a conspiracy somewhere you know what I'll add I'll add to what Margaret said about taking a walk another Anarchist

thinker uh uh uh uh David Graber David Graber yeah David grabert one of the arguments he made was that when you're out walking in a city as often as possible cross somewhere Other than where you're legally supposed to cross but look both ways yeah but look both ways don't get hit by a car folks anyway goodbye behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone media for more from Cool Zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts