Speaker 1: Oh, it's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is opened
Speaker 1: in a radically different way of pretty much every week,
Speaker 1: but usually one that involves me making sounds with my mouth.
Speaker 1: I don't understand how you're this successful of a podcast. Now,
Speaker 1: No one does, Garrison, nobody does. But they can't. They
Speaker 1: can't stop it. They can't, they can't stop the signal.
Speaker 1: You know. I'm like, I'm like the Rolling Stones of podcasting,
Speaker 1: the Andrew Tate of podcasting. Thank you, Margaret, thank you
Speaker 1: for that. That's what everyone's saying for that unalloyed compliment.
Speaker 1: So we have, we have. We started this episode by
Speaker 1: talking about Adam vy Shopped and the Bavarian Illuminati UM,
Speaker 1: which started out as a nerdy kid kind of trying
Speaker 1: to find a way to smuggle cool books into Bavaria
Speaker 1: that we're banned um and doing so, he created a
Speaker 1: fake religion so that rich people would feel like wizards
Speaker 1: and he could use their money to buy more books,
Speaker 1: and it ended up with him funding illegal abortions until
Speaker 1: a lightning strike exposed to society to the cops, and
Speaker 1: then he had to flee and spend the rest of
Speaker 1: his life having the equivalent of an extended Twitter argument.
Speaker 1: This sounds so fake, This sounds like such a fake story.
Speaker 1: It is. It's both sad and funny, and I've continued
Speaker 1: my reading on this. One of the troubles here is that,
Speaker 1: like there's an actual paucity of good historical books about
Speaker 1: the Illuminati who are not written by cranks. I picked
Speaker 1: the one of the Charles River editors are not usually
Speaker 1: my ideal source, but they do a decent job of
Speaker 1: like summarizing all of the actual facts that are known.
Speaker 1: I found another book that I have been reading through
Speaker 1: that is one of the crank books. It's called The Illuminati,
Speaker 1: The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by Jim mars
Speaker 1: Um with with two rs. And mars is absolutely a crank.
Speaker 1: That for an idea of what a cranky is his
Speaker 1: book on secrets or in the chapters on the Illuminati,
Speaker 1: part what is Germany? And part two is Zionism. So
Speaker 1: we're going some good directions in this book that's gonna bridge,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna have to talk about today. Isn't that? Um?
Speaker 1: I want to read. There's some wild quotes in here, um,
Speaker 1: and most of them will not be most relevant until
Speaker 1: we get later on in here, but I want to
Speaker 1: read a portion of something that I cannot speak entirely
Speaker 1: on the veracity of um. But this is a chunk
Speaker 1: of his book when he's talking about the formation of
Speaker 1: the Illuminati. In seventeen seventy nine, two years after Bishop's
Speaker 1: initiation into Freemasonry, he wrote his Wacken Hurdle, suggesting the
Speaker 1: order be renamed the Society of Bees. The bee connection
Speaker 1: again demonstrates the close ties to the Illuminati of the
Speaker 1: Illuminati to Masonry, as the beehive has long been an
Speaker 1: important Freemason symbol. Today's Masonic lodges were once referred to
Speaker 1: as hives, and any internal disputes are called swarming. One
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Masonic ritual stated the beehive teaches us that
Speaker 1: as we are born into the world rational and intelligent beings,
Speaker 1: so what we also be industrious ones, and not stand
Speaker 1: idly by it or gazed with listless indifference on even
Speaker 1: the meanest of our fellows in a state of distress,
Speaker 1: if it is in our power to help them without
Speaker 1: detriment to ourselves or our connections. The symbol of bees
Speaker 1: also connects to the aforementioned ancient Greek Elucinian mysteries in
Speaker 1: which honey was thought to be a divine product of
Speaker 1: the gods. So that's kind of cool. Now, yeah, I am.
Speaker 1: I'm all for beehive. I like the discussion of arguments
Speaker 1: within Masonic temples as swarming. Yeah, yeah, it's it's all.
Speaker 1: So much of this story is extremely twitter, like almost back.
Speaker 1: It's nice to know that radicals have always been more
Speaker 1: or less the same kind of people. Nice isn't the
Speaker 1: word I would use. Yeah, it's it's reassuring. It's a
Speaker 1: thing that's that's undeniable. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So, um,
Speaker 1: we should probably get back into the story. When we
Speaker 1: had left off, we had just been talking about how
Speaker 1: the conspiracy theory about the Illuminati started up after the
Speaker 1: French Revolution and kind of merged with existing fears about
Speaker 1: Masonry in the United States to be part of this
Speaker 1: big anti Masonic movement. You've got guys like Abigail Adams
Speaker 1: and even George Washington himself who bought into this conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And this would be this would be like one of
Speaker 1: the funny things about Jim or about I don't know
Speaker 1: whatever Mars's book is that like when he talks about
Speaker 1: American connections to the Illuminati. He just says that, like
Speaker 1: we know that. You know, multiple members of the Founding
Speaker 1: Fathers were aware of the Illuminati, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they believe the same shit you did, Like they all
Speaker 1: added the same conspiracy buddy. Um, so far the bastards
Speaker 1: is the people who believe in the Illuminati, not the Illuminati. No,
Speaker 1: the Illuminati are not bastards. Although again, perhaps if you
Speaker 1: create a fake cult in order to do a good thing,
Speaker 1: you might wind up causing more problems than you solve.
Speaker 1: Maybe that maybe a lesson from the Illuminati that we
Speaker 1: can take into us today. That's true. You know what, Sophie,
Speaker 1: let the initiates out of the cage. I think maybe
Speaker 1: we've been we've been going down the wrong the wrong,
Speaker 1: the wrong road. You couldn't even get that sentence out.
Speaker 1: Yeah I would. I would never tell you to let
Speaker 1: the initiates out of the cage. That's where they live now.
Speaker 1: So overtime, over time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory died out
Speaker 1: would be the wrong word, but it kind of faded. Um.
Speaker 1: But America's public obsession with conspiracy theories never quite did,
Speaker 1: and politicians learned over the decades that' stoking these conspiracy
Speaker 1: was an easy way to get VOTs. After the Mason's popular,
Speaker 1: American conspiracy culture pivoted to obsess over the Jesuits and
Speaker 1: then the Communists, which, despite the fact that they are
Speaker 1: kind of diametrically opposed and fundamental ways, often got looped
Speaker 1: in together as like a Jesuit Communist conspiracy. That was
Speaker 1: a whole big thing in the early half of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. And of course every time you would have
Speaker 1: sort of a new era in American conspiracy culture, the
Speaker 1: trappings of prior manias would roll forward into each new
Speaker 1: conspiracy that enraptured the voting public. It's you know, it's syncretism.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that umberto Echo talks about when
Speaker 1: he talks about like one of the key attributes of fascism,
Speaker 1: and I think it is kind of worth noting and
Speaker 1: a little bit beyond the scope of this episodes, but
Speaker 1: to talk about how American conspiracy culture has always been
Speaker 1: proto fascist in many ways and this is the syncretism
Speaker 1: of it. And we've we've really seen this come to
Speaker 1: roost with Donald Trump and qwan on and sort of
Speaker 1: this is why you get a lot of liberals who
Speaker 1: are very surprised when they see these kind of people
Speaker 1: who had been sort of formerly crunchy, granola hippie types
Speaker 1: get into the hardcore right wing king On stuff and
Speaker 1: it's like that syncretism, baby, That's exactly what Echo was
Speaker 1: talking about. This. This this also ties into like the
Speaker 1: idea of like the cultic milieu and how the shared
Speaker 1: stays were all these types of conspiracies operate, feed off
Speaker 1: each other and do and do kind of coalesce into
Speaker 1: this weird like a crypto or quasi fascist politic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you if you want to, if you want
Speaker 1: to look at this as like I don't know, if
Speaker 1: you wanted to like diagram this as like a soil
Speaker 1: or something like that, or sedimentary layers. The base of
Speaker 1: it all is the Illuminati, right, that is the er
Speaker 1: conspiracy and American political culture. Um so. Yeah. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: end of the eighteen hundreds in the start of the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds saw another surge of interest in the occult.
Speaker 1: It seems like this kind of happens once every century
Speaker 1: or so, that's been pretty consistent for the last three
Speaker 1: hundred years something like that. And over in Europe, a
Speaker 1: pair of wizards resurrected the Illuminati. The founders were tied
Speaker 1: to the Oto and Alistair Crowley, and the Second Illuminati
Speaker 1: was never really much more than a side shows. It's
Speaker 1: primary contribution to kind of occult history in Europe was
Speaker 1: that in nineteen o two had allied itself with the
Speaker 1: Order of the Golden Dawn. Now the Golden Dawn had
Speaker 1: also been founded on shall we say shaky his shaky
Speaker 1: grounds truth wise, by a Rosicrucian named Wentworth Little, who
Speaker 1: claimed to have come into the possession of a coded
Speaker 1: manuscript that led him to a woman named Anna Sprangel
Speaker 1: in Germany who was in touch with unknown superiors who
Speaker 1: had taught him about a secret organization behind the secret
Speaker 1: organization behind the myth of the Rosa Crucians. And you
Speaker 1: can see shades of kind of what of aishapped was
Speaker 1: doing with the Illuminati here. I've you know, this organization
Speaker 1: has a history. It's actually much older than people know.
Speaker 1: There's this group of unknown folks in addition to me,
Speaker 1: who are actually running things. Yeah. I want to quote
Speaker 1: here from our old friend pro cult activist Massimo entrophying
Speaker 1: again because he saw again, if you're going to write
Speaker 1: it's detailed history of this ship. You're going to wind
Speaker 1: up quoting a lot of crikes and weirdos. It's mostly
Speaker 1: going to be crips and weirdos. This is just a
Speaker 1: fact of the matter. Westcott claimed to have found Sprangle's address,
Speaker 1: to have written to her, and to have obtained the
Speaker 1: authorization of the Unknown Superiors to found an order in
Speaker 1: England placed under their authority, the Golden Dawn. In spite
Speaker 1: of the great influence it exerted on art and literature,
Speaker 1: the Golden Dawn rested on a mystification. There was no
Speaker 1: Anna Sprangele and Westcott had simply invented the whole story.
Speaker 1: It was Alister Crowley who had been initiated into the
Speaker 1: Golden Dawn in eighteen ninety eight and had immediately engaged
Speaker 1: in trying to overthrow its leaders, who in nineteen hundred
Speaker 1: revealed the deception. Crowley is a very complicated surist, and
Speaker 1: he I think in a lot ways qualifies as a
Speaker 1: bastard um. But one of the cool things that he
Speaker 1: did was completely overthrow every magical community that he that
Speaker 1: he went into. Into your Wizard Club, he's going to
Speaker 1: take over. He will take over your Wizard Club stop
Speaker 1: him and make you admit that you made the whole
Speaker 1: thing up. It's yes, and then have a lot of
Speaker 1: gay sex in the desert. So you know, Okay, I
Speaker 1: am certainly the least knowledge about knowledgeable about Crowley in
Speaker 1: our organization. But the thing that I always took from
Speaker 1: readings about him is that he was able to do
Speaker 1: that in all these organizations because he had He's got
Speaker 1: some jock energy to him. Yes that like most wizards,
Speaker 1: he just kind of had that confidence to let him
Speaker 1: bully his way. Is this kind of like when punks
Speaker 1: go to like nerd conventions, We're just in charge because
Speaker 1: I actually have social skills, and we like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: gonna this is gonna be very controversial on the subbreddit.
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy just got canceled. Yeah, Crawley was really the
Speaker 1: first punk, is what you're trying to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take a stand and say that I absolutely no,
Speaker 1: I actually don't know that much somewhere underground and the
Speaker 1: Vault Vault of the Golden Dawn is the very first
Speaker 1: battle jacket into it. Yeah, But also, but you keep
Speaker 1: talking about this thing where it's like it seems like
Speaker 1: the cultists are the okay ones, and the conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: are the ones who do the Nazis shit. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean because these these guys, the people forming this new
Speaker 1: order of I mean the people who kind of form
Speaker 1: this new Illuminati and marry it to the golden dawn.
Speaker 1: I haven't come across any evidence that they're bastards like
Speaker 1: they were there were people who wanted to dress up
Speaker 1: and do magic like. There's nothing harmful about what they're
Speaker 1: doing here. Um, it's just it's not wildly influential. Ingle,
Speaker 1: who was one of the people who winds up in
Speaker 1: charge of this new Illuminati, funds it. I found this
Speaker 1: interesting by writing a series of like short stories for
Speaker 1: dime novels under a shitload of different names. He kind
Speaker 1: of does an l. Ron Hubbard, but in reverse, where
Speaker 1: Like Hubbard writes all these dime novels and then creates
Speaker 1: a cult because he wants to get out of that industry,
Speaker 1: whereas Ingle funds his little cult by writing a bunch
Speaker 1: of like shitty weird fiction. I don't know if it
Speaker 1: was shitty. Actually I haven't read it. I shouldn't be
Speaker 1: judgmental like that. It might have been good weird fiction.
Speaker 1: His Illuminati limps on into the nineteen seventies when they
Speaker 1: fall a foul of Germany's militant post war anti cult movement.
Speaker 1: There is we talk about this in the episode Sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really funny. Yeah, well, we talked about this in
Speaker 1: the episodes titled The School That Raped Everyone, which is
Speaker 1: a dark episode about how there was an element of
Speaker 1: kind of the progressive left in post war Germany that
Speaker 1: embraced free love politics to such an extent that they
Speaker 1: justifying the molestation of children. And this is a big
Speaker 1: part of what gets the Illuminati in trouble. I have
Speaker 1: not found any evidence that they are molesting anybody, but
Speaker 1: they are teaching sex magic. And because there are a
Speaker 1: lot of problems with other kind of people in who
Speaker 1: are broadly in the same sort of cultic milieu, you
Speaker 1: might say as the Illuminati in this period who are
Speaker 1: molesting children, they get caught up in I don't even
Speaker 1: want to call it a moral panic. A lot of
Speaker 1: people were actually harmed, but the Illuminati does not seem
Speaker 1: to have been justifiably targeted here. They were just like
Speaker 1: adults who were doing satanic orgies, which is fine, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean like, but like this, this complaint continues on today,
Speaker 1: how a lot of yes, a lot of like sex
Speaker 1: cults are specifically the OTO is just kind of a
Speaker 1: sex cult for its for its like older male members.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is something that is is Yeah,
Speaker 1: very very much a continuing critique, And there's nothing inherently
Speaker 1: wrong with making a sex for you and your friends.
Speaker 1: I've been in a couple of sex cults. It's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they always end great. It's what everyone says about sex calls.
Speaker 1: Some of them do, yeah, and the Illuminati doesn't end
Speaker 1: all that terribly, but it just kind of peters out
Speaker 1: after this point. The last leader of the Second Illuminati,
Speaker 1: a guy named Metzker, dies a lonely alcoholic in nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty common way for things to end
Speaker 1: for the leaders of sex colts. While Metzger's Illuminati was
Speaker 1: limping through the last arthritic stages of its life, events
Speaker 1: over in the United States were about to bring the
Speaker 1: Illuminati to a level of fame it hadn't enjoyed even
Speaker 1: in the days of Adam I Shopped. Carrie Windell Thornley
Speaker 1: was born on April seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight, in Whittier, California.
Speaker 1: Whittier is today a suburb of Los Angeles. It is
Speaker 1: back then it was kind of just like its own
Speaker 1: little town in the middle of southern California. If you
Speaker 1: google the neighborhood that Carrie Thornley grew up in today,
Speaker 1: you'll immediately be shown a map that depicts the unincorporated community,
Speaker 1: boxed in by bold blue pins that indicate a Costco,
Speaker 1: a home depot, a savers, a Target, and a Trader Joe's.
Speaker 1: They surround East Whittier like a capitalist pentagram, almost as
Speaker 1: if her medic capitalist wizards were trying to keep some
Speaker 1: sort of dangerous energy contained within. These are the things
Speaker 1: you think about when you spent sixteen hours writing about
Speaker 1: the Illuminati late at nights. No one fuck up those stores,
Speaker 1: or all hell will be based upon the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are will crawl from underneath the Costco and start
Speaker 1: taking over the suburb. This is the Seven Seals of Neoliberalism.
Speaker 1: This is John Darnell novel, and I would read it.
Speaker 1: Carrie was raised Mormon, and for much of the first
Speaker 1: seven years of his life his father was overseas fighting it.
Speaker 1: A little thing he might have heard of called the
Speaker 1: Second World War. Most of the context we have for
Speaker 1: his childhood comes from a letter his brother wrote decades
Speaker 1: later that I found reprinted in a zine published by
Speaker 1: Carrie's ideological children. Most of the good history on Carrie
Speaker 1: you find scattered in zines that are like thirty years old,
Speaker 1: so it is a whole thing piecing it together. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read a quote from that letter now, though,
Speaker 1: and this is his brother talking. We were living behind
Speaker 1: my grandparents when I was born and what is now
Speaker 1: called watts on seventy seventh Street in la and our
Speaker 1: dad was in the navy stationed in Okinawa at the time.
Speaker 1: When Dad had returned from World War Two, Carrie was
Speaker 1: waiting to welcome him, dressed in a sailor's out that
Speaker 1: my mom had gotten him, and I was a newborn
Speaker 1: in a cradle. Dad came in the door and rushed
Speaker 1: over to see me before he hugged Carrie. Carrie got
Speaker 1: so pissed that he ran out the back door and
Speaker 1: climbed up the walnut tree and refused to come down.
Speaker 1: That event, more than any other, set the tone for
Speaker 1: Carrie's relationship with me. The rest of my life is
Speaker 1: punctuated with events in which Carrie did his best to
Speaker 1: get even with me, from what I called his intellectual
Speaker 1: muggings when I was in college to writing parodies of
Speaker 1: letters that I would send him later in life. Our
Speaker 1: father was a raging alcoholic, so by necessity Carry became
Speaker 1: like a father figure to me and Dick. So he's
Speaker 1: like a complicated guy. He's the fact that his dad
Speaker 1: is absent, I think has a big impact on him,
Speaker 1: and he feels this sense of like jealousy for his
Speaker 1: father's attention because it had been so absent, but also
Speaker 1: because his father is this violent asshole, he sort of
Speaker 1: acts to protect his younger brothers. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: complicated thing I think he does. You know, he's obviously
Speaker 1: he's a kid, so there's sometimes he does shit out
Speaker 1: of spite to his brothers. But you get the feeling
Speaker 1: that he did the most that he could to try
Speaker 1: and fill that gap that was left by his dad
Speaker 1: being a non functional person, Like he did hit the
Speaker 1: best job I think you could have expected of a
Speaker 1: kid in that circumstance. It's a difficult way to grow up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Carrie met Greg Hill, who was three years younger, in
Speaker 1: high school in nineteen fifty six. The two were members
Speaker 1: of the very first generation of their nerds. They're big
Speaker 1: fucking nerds, and they were sometimes mocked by it. I
Speaker 1: think like George McFly from Back to the Future, that
Speaker 1: is exactly the kind of kids that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: They were huge into Mad Magazine, which was kind of
Speaker 1: like that was a lot of people who wind up
Speaker 1: very radical in the sixties and seventies start by reading
Speaker 1: Mad Magazine and in the early sixties or whatever, and
Speaker 1: they were interested in radical political ideas much like the
Speaker 1: ones that had animated Adam Bishopped centuries before. They were
Speaker 1: also again big sci fi nerds, with what one biographer
Speaker 1: describes as a fondness for crackpots. Their childhoods would have
Speaker 1: involved colorful, weirdly horny comic books and the short stories
Speaker 1: of men like Bob Heinlin, Philip K. Dick, and l
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard. Greg and Carey were so excited by this
Speaker 1: stuff that they briefly attended meetings of a nearby uf
Speaker 1: O cult as adolescence called understanding. Greg later recalled through
Speaker 1: our mutual general interest in wondering just what was going
Speaker 1: on out there in that gigantic world, and are many
Speaker 1: common specific interests in humanism, anti religionism, and enjoyant for
Speaker 1: enjoyment for Omar Khayam, and a curiosity for the bizarre
Speaker 1: like black magic and hypnotism, plus our common warped sense
Speaker 1: of humor. We formed a close friendship. So that's that's
Speaker 1: who these guys are, right, Like, they're they're kind of
Speaker 1: young kids in this boring town and they get really
Speaker 1: into science fiction and fantasy, and that leads them into
Speaker 1: reading about the occult and reading all of these also
Speaker 1: kind of like mystic They're into the Sufis, they're into
Speaker 1: Zinn Buddhism, like they're not just into like kind of
Speaker 1: golden dawns. Yeah, they're they're pretty cool. Actually, yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I would say, I don't know how it's gonna end up,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna hold onto them as being real cool
Speaker 1: right now. They're there. It's going to end in a
Speaker 1: couple of different ways, Margaret. Everyone involved in the movement
Speaker 1: we're talking about has a very very different ending. Um. Okay,
Speaker 1: I could choose your adventure novel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: I do want to talk a little bit about Omar Khayam,
Speaker 1: who is a He was a guy who lived from
Speaker 1: like basically around a thousand ish to eleven hundred a d.
Speaker 1: He's a polymath, one of these guys who's like he's
Speaker 1: doing math and he's a philosopher, and he's writing poetry
Speaker 1: that's still very popular today. And he's one of the
Speaker 1: things about him that's kind of interesting and that's probably
Speaker 1: going to be relevant. That's going to definitely be relevant
Speaker 1: to the way that Kerry Thornley uses him, because Thornley's
Speaker 1: obsessed with this guy. Is that for kind of centuries
Speaker 1: and centuries after his death, it became a tradition in
Speaker 1: a chunk of at least Islamic poetry to attribute your
Speaker 1: poems to Omar Khayam. And this started being done this
Speaker 1: like for whatever reason in the eighteen hundreds, Europeans start
Speaker 1: doing this too, and some of this is tied in
Speaker 1: with like orientalism. I'm not a great person to discuss that,
Speaker 1: because this is a very influential figure. But one thing
Speaker 1: that's important to know is he is a real poet
Speaker 1: who also has become kind of this. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's calling him a symbol is the right thing,
Speaker 1: but people decided to attribute poems to him that had
Speaker 1: not been written by him. There's a bunch of these
Speaker 1: throughout history, these like shared author names. They're really interesting.
Speaker 1: It may yeah, it is, it is really interesting. Obviously
Speaker 1: Kerry Thornley is very interested in this guy, maybe in
Speaker 1: part because of that. A lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: like a cult authors also also have this. There's like
Speaker 1: Hermes Trismegistus, There's there's a lot of even um even
Speaker 1: the uh oh, I forget the forget the name, let
Speaker 1: me look it up quick. Um. Well, that's why I
Speaker 1: have a new book coming out by um Alistair Crowley,
Speaker 1: um the name under Now see, I'm doing a totally
Speaker 1: different thing. I'm just gonna credit my next book to
Speaker 1: Stephen King and just take that money, you know, just
Speaker 1: just take that cash, baby. I mean. In terms of
Speaker 1: a cult authors who also did this, there was the
Speaker 1: the fourth Book of a Cult Philosophy by Agrippa, probably
Speaker 1: not written by the actual Agrippa, who dead for several
Speaker 1: thousand years. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's just yeah.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting a trend that that continues because like
Speaker 1: the types of communities that were that were writing these
Speaker 1: occult Texas groups really do get continued by the stuff
Speaker 1: that Greg Hill was actually inadvertently developing. And it's interesting,
Speaker 1: like just how similar this type of stuff is. Okay,
Speaker 1: And then one of the other of these shared names,
Speaker 1: Luther Bliss. It is Italian collective of radicals who then
Speaker 1: lots of people write under this name that put out
Speaker 1: a book called Q that's a conspiracy book that came
Speaker 1: out before any of this, before the Q went on.
Speaker 1: And I believe and I might have. I don't have
Speaker 1: a note in front of me, but Luther Bliss it
Speaker 1: is like some like famous like soccer player, and these
Speaker 1: like Italian radicals were just like, we're just gonna use
Speaker 1: his name, and the dude was like a live and
Speaker 1: they were and they wrote this like bestseller called Q
Speaker 1: that's a conspiracy novel. Sh It's weird. That is very funny,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know what else is funny? Margaret Um,
Speaker 1: the stuff adder, the products and services, the ads supporting
Speaker 1: this podcast, all of which, by the way, all of
Speaker 1: our ads are are written and produced by by Omar Khayam,
Speaker 1: So you know, enjoy some of this classic celjuck capitalism poetry.
Speaker 1: It's just gonna be some math ads. I hope it's gold.
Speaker 1: I bet he had gold everyone did back then. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're back. So Carrie Thornley and Greg Hill and a
Speaker 1: circle of their friends, and I am leaving. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of actual people here who you can read about,
Speaker 1: who are also influential. I'm not going to go into
Speaker 1: detail about all of them. There's a reason I'm going
Speaker 1: to focus primarily on Thornley and Hill here. I'll be
Speaker 1: suggesting a book later if you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about every single person who was involved in this this
Speaker 1: next stage of the Illuminatium. But yeah, the core of
Speaker 1: this circle seems to be Thornley and Hill, and they
Speaker 1: are some There's something kind of magnet about the two
Speaker 1: when they are together. Part of us do with the
Speaker 1: fact that Carrie is an undeniably talented public speaker, and
Speaker 1: he seems to have kind of an ability to lead people,
Speaker 1: or at least be so obsessed with something in such
Speaker 1: an endearing way that people feel the desire to follow him.
Speaker 1: One of the things that he, Carrie and Greg both
Speaker 1: were really into was playing pranks on their classmates. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a segment from a biography by
Speaker 1: a guy named Adam go Rightley that talks about one
Speaker 1: of the pranks that they played on their school Chumps,
Speaker 1: Carry Gregg and other unnamed cohorts made a recording of
Speaker 1: what at first appeared to be a regular radio program,
Speaker 1: with music playing innocently from a radio positioned on the
Speaker 1: apron of the stage. In actuality, the sounds were projected
Speaker 1: from a real to real tape machine hidden backstage. Inserted
Speaker 1: into the seemingly mundane radio program, The pranksters had implanted
Speaker 1: a series of interruptions made by a newscaster to the
Speaker 1: effect that Soviet plans were invading the US and dropping bombs.
Speaker 1: As one classmate recall, somebody had told me early on
Speaker 1: that it was a joke, but some of the students
Speaker 1: didn't know and got really scared. What made me feel
Speaker 1: bad was that one of the boys in the class
Speaker 1: was so scared he was praying. So this is like,
Speaker 1: I kind of know where this story goes from from
Speaker 1: from this point on, and the fact that they were
Speaker 1: doing this ship as kids is hilarious. This this exact
Speaker 1: same style of prank and the kind of recklessness that
Speaker 1: they go about it gets continued on to massive proportions,
Speaker 1: like they do so much inadvertent damage by pranks of
Speaker 1: this style on a national scale very soon, and it's
Speaker 1: so weird. You're like just watching the trade about about
Speaker 1: to crash, and you're you're seeing it go and you
Speaker 1: know what's gonna happen, and it kind of in line
Speaker 1: with that. Garrison Carrie's friends at the time, when interviewed
Speaker 1: later would note that as a kid, he had a
Speaker 1: habit of access not seem to know how to stop
Speaker 1: himself when the playing around got out of hand. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That said, he was also intensely empathetic, and one of
Speaker 1: the stories told about him is that after his high
Speaker 1: school graduation, one of his close friends came out of
Speaker 1: the closet to him as gay. This is in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven, and that friend, when interviewed, was like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just like embraced me, like there was never any judgment.
Speaker 1: He was completely completely accepting and fine, which is notworthy.
Speaker 1: Some of these people are like actually really decent people
Speaker 1: unless and have had and have like pretty good politics,
Speaker 1: and we're doing kind of red stuff in the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties. Yeah, well some of yeah, and let's
Speaker 1: let's put a pin in that one. Yeah. Thornley graduated
Speaker 1: high school in nineteen fifty seven. He attended Marine Corps
Speaker 1: Reserve boot camp that summer. This is not a thing
Speaker 1: he had a choice in. Like a lot of people
Speaker 1: would just kind of join ahead of getting drafted in
Speaker 1: order to have amount of choice in where they went.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of relatives who are like, well,
Speaker 1: if I joined, then I get to like pick kind
Speaker 1: of what I have more agency in this process. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he goes to boot camp, and then he gets
Speaker 1: into the University of Southern California. He spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time still at home with his friends, many of whom,
Speaker 1: namely Greg, hadn't yet graduated. They spent the bulk of
Speaker 1: their free time at twenty four hour bowling alleys where
Speaker 1: they could buy alcohol. One night in nineteen fifty seven, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's buying alcohol. Greg is a couple of years
Speaker 1: younger than Carry, So Greg or Carry is often the
Speaker 1: one buying alcohol for his underage friends, which we always
Speaker 1: support here at Cool Zone. Maybe definitely didn't make my
Speaker 1: living doing that when I was a twenty one year
Speaker 1: old street punk. No way, you would never do something
Speaker 1: like that when it was the only way to make money.
Speaker 1: One night in nineteen fifty seven, Hill and Thornley were
Speaker 1: discussing poems carry had written on Order emerging from Chaos,
Speaker 1: Hill argued that order was a construction of the human mind,
Speaker 1: only chaos was real. Now there's a couple of versions
Speaker 1: of what comes next, and the version that mirror subjective reality. Hill,
Speaker 1: an atheist, expressed his frustration with modern organized religions for
Speaker 1: claiming the existence of an organizing principle behind the universe.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greeks, he expressed, had gotten it closest to
Speaker 1: write because they had a goddess of chaos. Her name
Speaker 1: was Airis or Discordia in Latin. Hill felt that Airis
Speaker 1: was the only deity he'd ever seen any evidence of,
Speaker 1: and he suggested it might be a good idea if
Speaker 1: someone created a religion based around her. It's gonna go great,
Speaker 1: to go really well, it's gonna go so good. Margaret's five.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited now. While he was at college, Thornley
Speaker 1: attempted to join a fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, and what
Speaker 1: would be one of his only real brushes with the
Speaker 1: square world. He pledged, and he went through a hazing
Speaker 1: ritual called Hell Week. That year, the brothers allowed a
Speaker 1: black student pledge. They made him go through hell Week,
Speaker 1: and then after he had gone through all of that
Speaker 1: kind of hazing shit, they laughed at him and told
Speaker 1: him that, of course, as a black guy, he was
Speaker 1: not allowed to join their fraternity. This was enough to
Speaker 1: get carried to leave and to turn him away from
Speaker 1: the concept of fraternities forever. If he ever made a
Speaker 1: secret society, it was going to be one defined by
Speaker 1: radical acceptance. Hill and Thornley kept up their correspondence on
Speaker 1: the subject of creating some sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: they're talking about doing the same kind of shit that
Speaker 1: Vaishop is doing. They're just did They're just talking about
Speaker 1: doing it from a perspective of like this would be
Speaker 1: kind of a funny thing, um, and it's just a freak.
Speaker 1: It's a it's fine. It's just it's casually and it
Speaker 1: is mixed with things they seriously believe. You know, Hill
Speaker 1: is you might call Hill a very early atheist activist, right,
Speaker 1: you know, pre Dawkins, pre all of that, you know
Speaker 1: that kind of guys who became really prominent in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, early two thousands. Hill is that in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen in fifties, early sixties. But also he's he's
Speaker 1: like much less insufferable than the guys that followed. I
Speaker 1: don't think he is, because he understands like the chaotic
Speaker 1: nature of existence. Yeah yeah, And Thornley I think is
Speaker 1: sympatica with hill On a lot, But Thornley is a
Speaker 1: little more mystical, right, like, yeah, he seems to be
Speaker 1: kind of more moved by that stuff, although not to
Speaker 1: an agree that a degree that it seems to like
Speaker 1: great On hill who is kind of fundamentally a materialist
Speaker 1: value or our vision of the universe. That's at least
Speaker 1: my take on this. There's so many much that also
Speaker 1: that's very contradictory about these guys. So if you do
Speaker 1: your own research on this, you may come to some
Speaker 1: different conclusions about some of them this than I am.
Speaker 1: It really depends on which zines you stumble into. Um
Speaker 1: And like a lot of these guys who are writing
Speaker 1: stuff about themselves wrote it contradictory on purpose to make
Speaker 1: things confusing, because because they thought it was a funny prank.
Speaker 1: Because they thought it was a funny pranks. So all
Speaker 1: of French philosophy, I really Yeah, yeah, Thornley winds up
Speaker 1: joining the marine corps um you know, he after he
Speaker 1: does his like a little bit of time in college,
Speaker 1: he becomes active duty in the corps Um and so
Speaker 1: he spends a couple of years as a marine. And
Speaker 1: while he is a marine state side, he spends I
Speaker 1: think it's a little less than a year serving alongside
Speaker 1: a bright young man that you might have note heard
Speaker 1: of named Lee Harvey Oswald. Uh and Carrie and Lee
Speaker 1: Harvey Oswald become pretty good friends there. They are, they
Speaker 1: are buddies. And one of the things that carry likes
Speaker 1: about Oswald is that he's a little bit of a prankster,
Speaker 1: just a just a kooky guy. That's what everybody knows
Speaker 1: about Lee Harvey Oswald. He's gonna tell a very famous
Speaker 1: joke in the not too distant future. From this point
Speaker 1: gets him a lot of attention. It's all I'll like you.
Speaker 1: Hit tweet, hit tweet. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to advertise
Speaker 1: the projectors under this one. Yeah, I'm going to read
Speaker 1: another quote from Adam Gowrightley's book. Quote. Later, Kerry would
Speaker 1: describe Oswald as the outfit eight ball, earning this dubious
Speaker 1: distinction by openly subscribing to communist newspapers such as Prafta
Speaker 1: and cracking jokes with an exaggerated Russian accent, answering questions
Speaker 1: with da or nip and referring to his fellow Marines
Speaker 1: as comrades. It was common knowledge that Oswald was studying
Speaker 1: Russian and was fairly fluent in conversational Russian. Because of this,
Speaker 1: he inquired the nickname Oswaldskovic. And this is no one's
Speaker 1: reporting this. You're in a war against Russia. No, it's
Speaker 1: like I'm a communist. See this is actually I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about this. This is a thing I think
Speaker 1: a lot of folks who, because of the fact that
Speaker 1: they are more on the left side of things and
Speaker 1: maybe don't have a lot of firsthand experience with the military,
Speaker 1: don't get so much because there's there's like a conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory going around right now, right that it has been
Speaker 1: going on for a while, but because it was Pat
Speaker 1: Tillman got brought up at the Super Bowl by those
Speaker 1: fucks at the NFL. This was talked about recently where
Speaker 1: folks are like, oh, he was obviously murdered by his
Speaker 1: own guys because they heard him talking about how the
Speaker 1: war was bullshit and like saying like anti American stuff,
Speaker 1: and so they assassinated him. This is a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: That's not what happened. It's incredibly common if you talk
Speaker 1: to guys who were serving in combat in Afghanistan and
Speaker 1: Iraq for people to say, this war is bullshit, what
Speaker 1: we're doing is stupid. I have talked to people who'd
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, half the unit thought that what we
Speaker 1: were doing over there was bullshit. It was not uncommon
Speaker 1: for people to be like, fuck this stupid war. It's
Speaker 1: like a thing that like, soldiers fuck around, and soldiers,
Speaker 1: like anyone else, often while they are participating in whatever war,
Speaker 1: express opinions that are contra to the like, and Oswald
Speaker 1: is one of these guys. And so he does get
Speaker 1: in trouble a couple of times, but like, he's never
Speaker 1: drummed out of the Marines for making for doing jokes
Speaker 1: about being a communist. Yeah, and they're not also entirely jokes.
Speaker 1: And in fact Oswald is for at least a period
Speaker 1: of his military service, seen as a pretty good soldier.
Speaker 1: In a later part of his life, Kerrie and another
Speaker 1: one of their comrades would claim that he Oswald and
Speaker 1: the Southern Marine were approached by someone that they believe
Speaker 1: was a representative of the CIA and given aptitude tests.
Speaker 1: Oswald and the Southern Marine were asked if they would
Speaker 1: be interested in parachuting into foreign countries and helping rebels
Speaker 1: do things like build radios. This is School of America's shit,
Speaker 1: and there were absolutely US soldiers who had this experience.
Speaker 1: I can't confirm or deny whether or not that happened
Speaker 1: to Oswald in specific, but this is a thing that occurred, right,
Speaker 1: so it's not unlikely that some version of this happened Perian.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, he seems to be like decent at
Speaker 1: being a soldier. He was a pretty good shot. Pretty
Speaker 1: good shot. So you're saying on the record that the
Speaker 1: CIA hired him to assassinate John F. Kennedy. That is
Speaker 1: exactly what I'm saying. Okay, it actually, Margaret, hold up
Speaker 1: because it gets a lot more conspiratorial here. So Carrie
Speaker 1: would also later and this is at a point of
Speaker 1: his life when his mental health is not so great,
Speaker 1: It would also later claim that he was targeted by
Speaker 1: the MK Ultra program during this part of his life.
Speaker 1: Now here's the thing. After his time with Oswald, he
Speaker 1: was stationed at at Sugi Air Base in Japan as
Speaker 1: a radar technician, and it is while he was stationed
Speaker 1: here that he starts having auditory hallucinations at night of
Speaker 1: radio chatter in his head. Carrie became convinced that he
Speaker 1: was hearing actual radio traffic in his head. This is
Speaker 1: at a later portion of his life now at Sugi
Speaker 1: Air Base is host to a major was host to
Speaker 1: a major CIA base, and it was one of two
Speaker 1: foreign bases where the CIA conducted MK ultra experiments. In
Speaker 1: a rolling Stone investigation published years later, an anonymous marine
Speaker 1: who served it at Sugi around the same time as
Speaker 1: carried it an Oswald at a separate period of time,
Speaker 1: serves at Szugi Ericabase. This guy claims it was pretty weird.
Speaker 1: I'm eighteen at the time and chasing all the horse
Speaker 1: in town, and these CIA guys are buying me drinks
Speaker 1: and paying for the horse and giving me a whole
Speaker 1: round of drinks with lots of weird drugs in them.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon all the shadows are moving around. We're in
Speaker 1: the bar. See the samurais are everywhere, and I started
Speaker 1: seeing skeletons and things. My mind just started boiling over
Speaker 1: going about a thousand miles a minute. Now there's a
Speaker 1: distinctly higher than zero chance that either Oswald or Thornley,
Speaker 1: or quite possibly both of them were dosed as part
Speaker 1: of the MK Ultra experiments, and if doing so. By
Speaker 1: the way, this is not like trying to say some
Speaker 1: conspiracy about the Kennedy assassination here, they would if that
Speaker 1: happened to them. They are just some of hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of US servicemen who were dosed by the CIA
Speaker 1: against their will. This happened constantly to tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people, as we've talked about in our our MK
Speaker 1: Ultra episodes. We will never know for certain because the
Speaker 1: architect of MK or Ultra burned all of the files.
Speaker 1: So just keep in your mind it is possible that
Speaker 1: the first time Kerry Thornley has LSD it's because the
Speaker 1: CIA drugs him, which convinces him that he's hearing voices
Speaker 1: at night. We will never know. It's also there's stories
Speaker 1: from Oswald around this period that like one night he
Speaker 1: starts freaking out that there's guys shooting at him from
Speaker 1: like the woods when he's on guard duty. That some
Speaker 1: people of theorize like, oh yeah, maybe he just got
Speaker 1: fucking dosed and had a breakdown. This happens to a
Speaker 1: lot of guys. It's certainly not impossible that it happened
Speaker 1: to Oswald and Thornley as someone who's been dosed against
Speaker 1: my will before this all tracks. Yeah, because when you
Speaker 1: tell all of those that you're on drugs, it's a
Speaker 1: completely different experience than when you know you're on drugs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is entirely possible, And I think I think there's
Speaker 1: actually pretty good at least one of them did, because
Speaker 1: they're both added SUGI and we know the CIA is
Speaker 1: doing this shit to service minute at SUGI. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you know again, Oh, I guess I have to just
Speaker 1: continue the story. Oswald and Thornley were only stationed together
Speaker 1: for a brief portion of their service, after which they
Speaker 1: probably never saw each other again, or did they? While
Speaker 1: a lot of people are going to ask that question.
Speaker 1: Mark Carrie gets sent to Manila next, where he sees
Speaker 1: such heartbreaking poverty that he becomes a Marxist Leninist. He
Speaker 1: starts reading books on Marxist political theory, and he becomes
Speaker 1: more committed than ever to his pranks. The ultimate example
Speaker 1: of this is a fake marine that he creates under
Speaker 1: the name Omar Kayam Ravenhurst, and he does this by
Speaker 1: inserting fake records into the administrative files. He gets so
Speaker 1: far into this that he gets the military to issue
Speaker 1: a locker and a bunk to this fake soldier. And
Speaker 1: then after he leaves, there's a big base inspection and
Speaker 1: all the inspector can't find this guy who has a
Speaker 1: bunk and who has like a locker and who is
Speaker 1: supposed to be turning out for inspection, and it causes
Speaker 1: like a big problem. But he is. He has made
Speaker 1: a fake man. Um. He's a he's a very fun
Speaker 1: character in this part of his life. After their time Marines, Yeah,
Speaker 1: after their time in the Marines, Oswald affects the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty two, So
Speaker 1: some amount of the jokes that Oswald was making about
Speaker 1: Communism were not jokes. He's like sitting around and learning Russian,
Speaker 1: being like, hey guys, yeah, I'm gonna defect to the Russians,
Speaker 1: and everyone's like, oh yeah, O Lee Harvey, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna make a I'm gonna make a sitcom
Speaker 1: about Lee Harvey. Oswald called O Lee Harvey just about
Speaker 1: all his mini pranks um like that one he carried
Speaker 1: out in Dallas and anyway, um, so Carrie is like, why, wow,
Speaker 1: it's weird that this guy who I was a friend
Speaker 1: with left the Marines in order to defect to the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. That's kind of a neat story. I'm going
Speaker 1: to write a book about it. So he decides he
Speaker 1: starts work on a fictional book based around a character
Speaker 1: that is a thinly veiled Lee Harvey Oswald. This book
Speaker 1: is out today. You can read this book that is
Speaker 1: a fictional story he wrote about his real friend Lee
Speaker 1: Harvey Oswald. And while he was starting this project his
Speaker 1: work on his first novel, he comes across a copy
Speaker 1: of another book that's going to change his life, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately it's Iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He is so blown
Speaker 1: away by miss Rand's prose that he converts from Marxism
Speaker 1: to lazy fair capitalism overnight and basically becomes an objectivist. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing you might be starting to get from Carry
Speaker 1: right now is that he's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: seeker Ideologically. He is very prone to encountering a book
Speaker 1: and feeling that book on a almost spiritual level, and
Speaker 1: changing his life as a result of that book. This
Speaker 1: will be a pattern for him throughout his life. Now,
Speaker 1: while he's doing this, he still has the same creative urges,
Speaker 1: and he maintains his friendship with Greg Hill, and he
Speaker 1: moves back home with his parents briefly at least, and
Speaker 1: during that period of time, he and Greg Hill launch
Speaker 1: a project that is an attempt at creating a humor magazine,
Speaker 1: which I mostly mentioned because of its title Apocalypse, a
Speaker 1: trade journal for doom profits, which is a great title. Nobody, Yeah, nobody.
Speaker 1: I haven't found a copy of this. I would love to.
Speaker 1: I don't even know if it exists anymore. This is
Speaker 1: proto zine culture, which, by the way, these are going
Speaker 1: to be two of the guys generally credited with inventing
Speaker 1: the concept of zines. And yeah, they this particular magazine
Speaker 1: does not work very well. Um, so you know they
Speaker 1: they they give up that project pretty early on. Life
Speaker 1: back in Whittier grated on them both, particularly the fact
Speaker 1: that the police would keep pulling them over for wandering
Speaker 1: around at night with no clear purpose, which was legal
Speaker 1: back then there were actually laws about like being out
Speaker 1: at night without a reason to be out at night.
Speaker 1: So they decided to move to a place where there
Speaker 1: were no laws about staying up all night and being weirdos.
Speaker 1: And that place was New Orleans. And yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's a good point to lead into an ad break.
Speaker 1: Is it an AD for New Orleans? I hope it's
Speaker 1: an ad for New Orleans. Go to New Orleans. It's
Speaker 1: a city where you can eat a shitload alligator meat,
Speaker 1: and I assume other things beignys exactly. You can stuff
Speaker 1: a bigne with gator. Yeah, I mean, I'll put gator
Speaker 1: in anything. I love gator, and I like New Orleans.
Speaker 1: We're back. We're back from New Orleans. So they moved
Speaker 1: to New Orleans in nineteen sixty one, and Carrie continues
Speaker 1: work on his novel, which he has decided to name
Speaker 1: The Idle Warriors. After Oswald got back from the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: he wound up moving to New Orleans too. He and
Speaker 1: Thornley are living just blocks away from each other, and
Speaker 1: Thornley would claim for the rest of his life that
Speaker 1: he was unaware of this, that they never saw each
Speaker 1: other again. And it's worth noting that, according to Carrie's
Speaker 1: friend Becky Glazer, Carrie spent his time in New Orleans
Speaker 1: quote getting high off of everything so it's not odd
Speaker 1: that he would have been unaware. There are stories that
Speaker 1: he gets high smoking banana peals, which do not get
Speaker 1: you high, but Carrie claims like he makes blunts out
Speaker 1: of banana appeals and claims to get wasted off of them.
Speaker 1: There's going to be some stuff later in the story
Speaker 1: that makes this makes sense. This is more what I
Speaker 1: think of New Orleans about is instead of Gator is
Speaker 1: getting high off of everything. So yeah, well that is
Speaker 1: again so Carrie's and acclaim I didn't see Oswald. There's
Speaker 1: a decent chance of that purely because like he is
Speaker 1: spending most of his time getting wasted and hanging out
Speaker 1: with like weirdos on kind of the fringes of society,
Speaker 1: and this is what's going to wind up bringing him
Speaker 1: into contact with a number of people who later become
Speaker 1: central parts in some of the early JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: People besides Oswald, one of these guys is a friend
Speaker 1: of Carrie's named Slim brooks Now Slim may have been
Speaker 1: a navigational consultant on the Bay of Pigs Invasion. We
Speaker 1: don't actually know who this guy is. There's a couple
Speaker 1: of people that we know Carrie is hanging out with
Speaker 1: who give him names that we know our fake names
Speaker 1: because no one ever existed under those names, which is
Speaker 1: part of like what leads to these guys being part
Speaker 1: of the JFK conspiracy. Also, this is a man who's
Speaker 1: known to make up people. This is a man who's
Speaker 1: known to make up people, although other people recall these
Speaker 1: folks um And this is an unpleasant part of Carry's
Speaker 1: history because Slim introduces him to a guy named Gary Kirstein,
Speaker 1: and some conspiracy theorist of the Kennedy assassination think that
Speaker 1: Gary Kirstein was actually Watergate burglar in CIA spymaster E
Speaker 1: Howard Hunt, because Gary Kirstein was not a real person.
Speaker 1: Now to Carry, the man who identified himself as Gary
Speaker 1: Kirsteine claimed to have unclear ties to intelligence agencies while
Speaker 1: he regularly spouted neo Nazi propaganda. Carry later wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: one of the first things I learned about Gary was
Speaker 1: that he also hated Kennedy, but for somewhat different political
Speaker 1: reasons than mine. What a funny bit it It is
Speaker 1: a funny bit. The bit's gonna get funnier. Quote. He
Speaker 1: expressed his dislike for Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Russians, Mexicans,
Speaker 1: and so on, with a chuckle usually, which left me
Speaker 1: with room to assume he wasn't really very serious about it. That,
Speaker 1: of course, was the assumption I preferred to make, since
Speaker 1: I really liked Slim a lot and Gary was his friend. Now,
Speaker 1: this is where we're starting to see some of the
Speaker 1: moral downsides of being as open minded dude as Kerry was,
Speaker 1: because he's kind of willing to be like, well, this
Speaker 1: guy likes talking a lot about Nazi stuff, but maybe
Speaker 1: he's joking. I like his friends, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to cause a problem, which is a bad thing to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Gary makes another bad decision after this point, which
Speaker 1: is he decided it kind of becomes a common thing
Speaker 1: for him when he's hanging out at bars with these
Speaker 1: guys to joke about murdering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now
Speaker 1: this may have been recorded, and it happens often enough
Speaker 1: that numerous people have experiences of carry talking about killing JFK.
Speaker 1: He puts up posters calling for JFK to be like
Speaker 1: arrested or otherwise taken out of the presidency, which one
Speaker 1: might have seen, it's not impossible. Although, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: against JFK at this point, we're we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about that, Margaret. So there's a couple of things he
Speaker 1: has against JFK. One of them is that JFK supported
Speaker 1: the side who was fighting against the side backed by
Speaker 1: Rhodesia in the Congo. Um. It is unclear why he
Speaker 1: was angry at He talks a lot about something called
Speaker 1: the Katanga massacre, which during the Katanga War, which is
Speaker 1: this war that happens in the Congo, there were massacres
Speaker 1: on both sides. I don't know specifically what he was
Speaker 1: talking about there. He also he's again he's an objectivist
Speaker 1: at this point, So he hates Kennedy's economic policies, right, um,
Speaker 1: but he also hates Kennedy for trying to invade Cuba. Like, wait,
Speaker 1: there was so many steps all over the map. There's
Speaker 1: so many steps of Rhodesia that I lost the negative
Speaker 1: of the negative of the negative. Tell me where where
Speaker 1: did JFK sit on Rhodesia and where did well j
Speaker 1: JFK under him? The United States backed a side in
Speaker 1: a civil war in Congo that was opposed to the
Speaker 1: side that was backed by Rhodesia, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: Carrie never said anything pro Rhodesia. Okay, Carrie was angry
Speaker 1: that there were massacres in this war, which he blamed
Speaker 1: on Kennedy. He was also angry at Kennedy for the
Speaker 1: Bay of Pigs and for attacking Cuba. So it's it's
Speaker 1: all overs of like right wing and left wing things
Speaker 1: that are like again, he's all over the map um
Speaker 1: kind of on this stuff. But whatever reasons he had
Speaker 1: for hating Kennedy, he and his new buddies Slim and
Speaker 1: Gary the Nazi have a lot of theoretical discussions about
Speaker 1: killing JFK. Carrie's contributions to the conversation include advocating of
Speaker 1: the use of a poison dart that would quote blow
Speaker 1: his stomach apart, as well as another scenario involving a
Speaker 1: remote control plane carrying a bomb, which is at least innovated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: gotta give Ry credit for predicting drone warfare. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: After Carry finished with his mock assassination plots, Kirstine added,
Speaker 1: and next we'll get Martin Luther King. Now this is
Speaker 1: the point at which Carry started to wonder if maybe
Speaker 1: he hadn't fallen in with a bad group of people.
Speaker 1: But again, he has terrible judgment and he just kind
Speaker 1: of lets this slide. Another example of his terrible judgment
Speaker 1: comes when Gary Kirstine pays him to help research a
Speaker 1: book with the title strap In for this one, Folks,
Speaker 1: Hitler was a good guy. Now the premise of this book,
Speaker 1: please please enlighten me. It's a little different than what
Speaker 1: you're expecting. The premise of this book is that all
Speaker 1: of the other Nazis and the Third Reich were worse
Speaker 1: than Hitler, so it's good that he was the Nazi
Speaker 1: who wound up in charge. Now, this is an insane
Speaker 1: thing to is. This is full stop idiotic, and Carrie
Speaker 1: does not get involved in this. Carrie is like, well,
Speaker 1: this guy's a weird Nazi, but he's willing to pay me,
Speaker 1: and I am broke and kind of willing to do
Speaker 1: anything for money, Like I don't mind writing out he's
Speaker 1: writing research for this thing, right, So basically what his
Speaker 1: research for this is he's going through the library and
Speaker 1: he's reading books on guys like Gebels, and then he's
Speaker 1: writing out things that Gebel said that sound worse than
Speaker 1: things that Hitler said, like that's that's his research on
Speaker 1: this project. So yeah, it's all it's good for good,
Speaker 1: good for you, Carrie. Um. Now, while this is going on,
Speaker 1: he is a pretty prominent member of the New Orleans
Speaker 1: fringe community. And this is again we've talked about we
Speaker 1: did in our episodes on Gabriel de Nunzio. Who's the guy.
Speaker 1: He's this Italian poet who's generally considered to be the
Speaker 1: ideological founder of fascism. He's the guy who inspired Mussolini.
Speaker 1: He takes over this city on the coast of in
Speaker 1: between kind of it's in Croatian now, but it's it's
Speaker 1: near Italy, and it's after World War One. The city
Speaker 1: Fumes in this kind of awkward position where it's an
Speaker 1: independent city but it wants to be part of Italy,
Speaker 1: and he just goes and he takes it over. And
Speaker 1: de Nunzio's like a proto fascist, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the guys who back him in this are proto fascists,
Speaker 1: but also a lot of them are anarchists, and there
Speaker 1: are like anarcho syndicalists involved in the government of Fume,
Speaker 1: and even some Marxists, and part of what's happening here
Speaker 1: is that, and this happens periodically. I think you could
Speaker 1: look at the Internet as sort of a digital fume,
Speaker 1: and like the late nineties, early two thousands, and we're
Speaker 1: in another New Orleans in this period is another similar
Speaker 1: situation where you've got all of these kind of fringe people,
Speaker 1: many of whom are going to be very influential in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, going to be big parts of the
Speaker 1: hippies and all this stuff that happens are like hanging
Speaker 1: out with like weirdo objectivists and Satanists and occult people
Speaker 1: and Nazis, and they're all hanging out in a lot
Speaker 1: of the same spaces because none of them fit anywhere else.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of what happens in periods of time
Speaker 1: and places. This is like, this is a pattern that
Speaker 1: repeats itself, which I'm not saying to justify on a
Speaker 1: moral level, like you should never sit down and talk to,
Speaker 1: or work with or take money from a Nazi for
Speaker 1: a job like this. That's an immoral act, full stop.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that, like this pattern of you having all
Speaker 1: of these different radicals coming at stuff from different views.
Speaker 1: This happens repeatedly in his like the punk scene. It
Speaker 1: just like the punk scene, right then. In the punk scene,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of work putting into making as your
Speaker 1: Nazis can't hold then, right, but it took a moment.
Speaker 1: Why then, is this is why in radical space is
Speaker 1: you have to be so diligent and proactive about you know,
Speaker 1: will summarize it as punching Nazis because otherwise shit like
Speaker 1: this happens. Right, But that culture didn't really exist at
Speaker 1: this point in that part in that area, or at
Speaker 1: least Thornly was not a part of it. Now he's
Speaker 1: also hanging out with It's not just these two weirdos.
Speaker 1: He's hanging out with a lot of musicians, a lot
Speaker 1: of like members of the local city. Like there's this
Speaker 1: kind of unique little satan As sect in New Orleans
Speaker 1: at the time, and he's friends with a lot of
Speaker 1: those guys. He's just kind of generally in the counterculture. Now.
Speaker 1: He is also again very vociferously an opponent of JFK.
Speaker 1: And largely this comes down to I think economics, because
Speaker 1: by this point Carry considered himself a capitalist revolutionary, and
Speaker 1: so he had wished death on the President on numerous
Speaker 1: occasions for the President not sticking to kind of randy
Speaker 1: and principles of Lazai fair capitalism. I've met sep like
Speaker 1: this in the goth scene. Yeah, you know, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is not a totally unique journey. In November of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Carrie was working
Speaker 1: at a restaurant at the time, and when it came
Speaker 1: out that the police had arrested a former marine, he
Speaker 1: immediately and publicly said, I bet it was my friend,
Speaker 1: Lee Harvey Oswald. Now his co workers think this is peculiar.
Speaker 1: And here's an opt opset ti tip for you kids
Speaker 1: out here. If you if you believe your friend has
Speaker 1: assassinated the president, maybe keep that one to yourself. The
Speaker 1: fuck up. Yeah, you might not want to be talking
Speaker 1: about now to the other guys at the kitchen. If
Speaker 1: there's one thing that Thornley cannot do, it he is
Speaker 1: physically incapable of shutting his mouth. Absolutely not. So it's
Speaker 1: a funny prank. It is a funny break. Like the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, the JFK assassination is a moment so horrific
Speaker 1: and inconceivable that it spawned conspiracy theories. Immediately, Carrie's co
Speaker 1: workers suspected that he was connected to it since he
Speaker 1: looks like Oswald, this is another factor in it. He
Speaker 1: kind of resembles Lee Harvey Oswald. There's talk that they
Speaker 1: might secretly brothers. These are the beginning stories of of
Speaker 1: what's going to become a surprisingly influential conspiracy. For his part,
Speaker 1: Carrie believes that Oswald is innocent. He thinks that he
Speaker 1: was a patsy for the real killers, and he I
Speaker 1: think this is just because he was legitimately friends with
Speaker 1: the guy and he just didn't really think that he
Speaker 1: could do it. And in fact, when Oswald gets killed,
Speaker 1: he falls into a deep depression because he's like, now,
Speaker 1: no one's ever going to find out the truth. The
Speaker 1: state has successfully murdered my friend in order to hide
Speaker 1: the fact that he was innocent of this terrible crime.
Speaker 1: So that's where Carrie is. Immediately after the kidded the assassination,
Speaker 1: and obviously when the president is murdered, the Secret Service
Speaker 1: and the FBI, you know, get get out there, start
Speaker 1: to look in at people, start knock it on doors,
Speaker 1: and as they begin their investigations, they centered them around
Speaker 1: the radical political communities that Oswald had also spent time around.
Speaker 1: Oswald had been living in the same part of New Orleans.
Speaker 1: So one of the areas in which the Secret Service
Speaker 1: in the FBI are looking around is New Orleans. And
Speaker 1: they start running into a lot of people who are like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's this weird guy who spent like a
Speaker 1: solid year talking about killing JFK and putting up posters
Speaker 1: and he kind of looked like Lee Harvey Oswald, and
Speaker 1: then they're like, oh yeah. And also he talked about
Speaker 1: how he and Oswald were friends. So the FEDS become
Speaker 1: interested in carry and Carrie becomes convinced that he's being
Speaker 1: tailed by the FEDS now and if he created me
Speaker 1: convinced Harvey Oswald like what if a homoculous that's where Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, that's it. Yeah, Yeah, he made his
Speaker 1: own Uh, he made his own tulfa to carry us
Speaker 1: as not as far from what he winds up believing
Speaker 1: as I wish it was the case. So but here's
Speaker 1: the thing again, you cannot emphasize how different kind of
Speaker 1: this the left is in this period of time and
Speaker 1: how differently people talk. If one thing what we know
Speaker 1: now today about like co intel pro and the infiltration
Speaker 1: of radical communities by the FBI. There are rumors about
Speaker 1: it then, but we don't like have all of the
Speaker 1: papers that we do now. It's like, well like this
Speaker 1: like sixty three, yeah, sixty three right. So Carrie when
Speaker 1: he finds out, when he decided, when he realizes the
Speaker 1: FEDS are tailing him and here's the been looking around,
Speaker 1: he just goes to the FBI and he's like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I hear you're interested in me and the Kennedy killing.
Speaker 1: You want to give me a light detector test. Makes
Speaker 1: a lot of bad choices throughout his life. I mean,
Speaker 1: this lawyer might not be the worst call. This actually
Speaker 1: doesn't because, like the FBI immediately it is like, oh,
Speaker 1: this guy's kind of a kook, right. Yeah. He also
Speaker 1: he does have like an airtight alibi for the assassination,
Speaker 1: and he Carrie frames it to them, is I want
Speaker 1: to help you track down the real killer because he
Speaker 1: wants to avenge Lee Harvey Oswald, which the FBI is
Speaker 1: probably also why the FBI is like, Okay, this guy's
Speaker 1: a little bit of a kuk. Carrie would later recall
Speaker 1: that the main question the FBI asked him was whether
Speaker 1: or not Oswald had been quote unquote a homo. I
Speaker 1: love good, good work guys. Okay, he I know he's okay. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so. Um
Speaker 1: that he that would be would be a proud moment. Again,
Speaker 1: those are not easy shots to make. You're really excited
Speaker 1: about this line of I'm just really excited to see
Speaker 1: the reddit after this. It's just gonna be people arguing
Speaker 1: that they could have hit that shot easy with a
Speaker 1: man liquor carcano. Um, it's hard, folks, it's hard. Look
Speaker 1: not a great rifle. That's why he had to anyway. Whatever. Um, So, yeah, Carrie.
Speaker 1: For the next year or so, m Carrie, like, conspiracies
Speaker 1: start to swirl around this guy, Like the conspiracy culture
Speaker 1: in the US gets ignited again by the Kennedy assassination
Speaker 1: in a way it really hadn't been before. And Carrie
Speaker 1: is kind of the first guy people suspect of being
Speaker 1: involved when Kennedy conspiracy theories take off the ground, and
Speaker 1: that is going to have a lot of negative long
Speaker 1: term consequences for Carrie and also everyone else in the world.
Speaker 1: But the fascinating like butterfly effect that is still continuing
Speaker 1: on today. But yeah, let's uh let's let's let's talk
Speaker 1: about that next time, and let's talk about y'all's motherfucking
Speaker 1: plugables this time. Well, if you want a copy of
Speaker 1: me that is armed with what was the right well no, wait,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't do that. If you want a book I wrote,
Speaker 1: I wrote a book called Escape from Insul Island and
Speaker 1: you can read it in afternoon and it has people
Speaker 1: in it who are escaping from Insul Island. And if
Speaker 1: you want to hear us play a role playing game
Speaker 1: based on it, we did a live play that you
Speaker 1: can hear on the podcasts Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
Speaker 1: It'll be one of the most recent episodes because well,
Speaker 1: I mean at the time this releases, as otherwise you
Speaker 1: might have to search for it. And I have a podcast.
Speaker 1: I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: we probably won't be covering this exact subject. And well, now, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Margaret, this is interesting. I actually did escape
Speaker 1: from an Insall Island once. I think I think you
Speaker 1: people in the East Coast call it Rhode Island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: very similar to your story. My experience on Rhode Island. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just made of roads. Also not a roads and
Speaker 1: in cells. Yeah, in the nineties when I did like
Speaker 1: weird website zine stuff, I definitely wrote weird things about
Speaker 1: being likewise Rhode Island, Lyne to you about everything, and
Speaker 1: it's I think it's a it's a great it's a
Speaker 1: great place to target for for like cruel jokes because
Speaker 1: like four people live there, so yeah, what are they
Speaker 1: going to do? Yeah, organize against us? Well, and it's
Speaker 1: because I was involved. Actually, the culture that I was
Speaker 1: involved in in the nineties was like IRC Discordian stuff,
Speaker 1: So I was hanging out with like older goths who
Speaker 1: are all part of this shit. So yeah, of the
Speaker 1: ship we're about to talk about next episode, Darris. My
Speaker 1: plugs are if you want to contribute to uh, well
Speaker 1: it's it's not it's not quite Discordian. But if if
Speaker 1: you want to feel if you want to feel like
Speaker 1: you're contributing to the work of of people in very
Speaker 1: secretive groups who are doing who are doing important work,
Speaker 1: you can donate the Atlanta Solidarity Fund um. That is
Speaker 1: the main thing I'm going to plug along with my
Speaker 1: my my four part series on Stoptop City that was
Speaker 1: just released on It could Happen Here and Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: let's uh, you know, support people in Atlanta. UM where
Speaker 1: this story ends. By the way we are, we are.
Speaker 1: We are building to the city of Atlantic Garth. I
Speaker 1: didn't because attis which actually from underneath the ocean. UM.
Speaker 1: I have been. I have been screaming about this for
Speaker 1: years into my CBE radio. Margaret very excited to talk
Speaker 1: with you all about this. UM anyway, go to go
Speaker 1: to hell. All of you go to Hell. I love you,
Speaker 1: Go with Christ to Hell. Behind the Bastards is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1: out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.