Speaker 1: What's Elon my moskks? This is Behind the Bastards, the
Speaker 1: podcast that I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is listening to,
Speaker 1: because within minutes, well like an hour of us starting
Speaker 1: to record the last two parts of our series on
Speaker 1: the Illuminati, he posted a very boomer Illuminati meme um
Speaker 1: extremely funny. The timing was incredible. There's no other explanation
Speaker 1: but that we have influenced his mind on a deep
Speaker 1: and possibly a cult level. M You know, I think
Speaker 1: what's probably to blame for this is last night I
Speaker 1: ate on a huge quantity of room temperature shrimp covered
Speaker 1: in thousand island dressing, and then I vomited on the
Speaker 1: hood of an old tesla. This was this was my
Speaker 1: emdomancy that I was that I was practicing, and I
Speaker 1: believe it has allowed me to infect Elon's mind with
Speaker 1: a why are you like this? Why did you? Why
Speaker 1: did you have to like describe the shrimp? Why? Why?
Speaker 1: Because otherwise if people don't smell the shrimp, they're not
Speaker 1: going to believe the rest of the story. Sophie, Alright,
Speaker 1: I didn't lie at people. You need details gross anyways
Speaker 1: are here. Oh I'll add that anecdote to my growing
Speaker 1: grimoire of a vomit related I thought you were going
Speaker 1: to say, you're adding it to the list of things
Speaker 1: that you tell your therapist about work. But you know,
Speaker 1: actually a lot of crossover between my grimoire and things
Speaker 1: I tell my therapist, you know, using vomit magic, one
Speaker 1: time I was able to turn a Ukrainian couple's wedding
Speaker 1: dinner into a bunch of vomit on a Ukrainian couple.
Speaker 1: What what an amazing feet of alchemy that that that
Speaker 1: transmutation is just simply mind blowing. I use it as
Speaker 1: a spell to be slightly less drunk. See, limitless power
Speaker 1: is available when you embrace the sacred truths of a midamancy. Um,
Speaker 1: good times actually would be a pretty fun class to
Speaker 1: make in like a in like a Pathfinder type setting. Um,
Speaker 1: you could do a lot of fun with this. You'd
Speaker 1: just be the human fly and that's like how you
Speaker 1: attack and devour. That that's kind of based actually, like yeah,
Speaker 1: digesting your opponents as you hit them with a sword
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, very cool is listening to this podcast
Speaker 1: to hear about You know what else is cool? The Illuminati.
Speaker 1: The Illuminati was mid but the guy that we're going
Speaker 1: to start our episode today talking about Robert Anton Wilson
Speaker 1: was pretty dope. Now we're talking mostly about Kerry Thornley
Speaker 1: in this series for good reason. Number One, I think
Speaker 1: he and Greg Hill were the I mean, they certainly
Speaker 1: were the initial primary drivers behind Discordianism. M Carrie is also,
Speaker 1: as we'll get to, the guy who kind of makes
Speaker 1: the most sense to cover in detailment behind the bastards.
Speaker 1: But my entry into like being interested in in the
Speaker 1: not just like conspiracy culture in America, particularly as it
Speaker 1: existed in the eighties and nineties, but into the Discordians,
Speaker 1: into all of this stuff was through the work of
Speaker 1: a guy named Robert Anton Wilson and Margaret are you
Speaker 1: are you that familiar with Bob Wilson stuff? Okay, so
Speaker 1: here's where I lose all of my credit. I am
Speaker 1: very aware of the Illuminatus trilogy, and I have not
Speaker 1: read it. Yeah, we'll be talking about the Illuminatus Trilogy
Speaker 1: a little later. Essays quite relevant. Yeah, he's written a
Speaker 1: lot of essays. He's if you really want a sense
Speaker 1: for the guy, he made a documentary right before he
Speaker 1: died called Maybe Logic that is available for free on
Speaker 1: YouTube and whatever. It's the first thing I watched the
Speaker 1: first time I ever took hallucinogens. So he had a
Speaker 1: big impact on me. And he's a legitimately a really
Speaker 1: interesting guy kind of He comes out of Flat Brooklyn
Speaker 1: and he grew up as a little kid and what
Speaker 1: he called like a New York's Irish Catholic ghetto. Um,
Speaker 1: he did not have a lot of our so he
Speaker 1: spent He's yeah. Garrettson Beach is the actual neighborhood that
Speaker 1: he grew up in, which is kind of like out
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, so there's not a lot
Speaker 1: of money. He is abused pretty profoundly by the nuns
Speaker 1: who run his school. As a kid, he is like
Speaker 1: beaten and mentally like tormented by these these nuns. And
Speaker 1: he also has two bouts of polio as a little
Speaker 1: kid that he survives. He has. This guy, of all
Speaker 1: the people were talking about, Bob Wilson is the most
Speaker 1: mentally healthy and also has like the roughest life. He
Speaker 1: has a very hard life. Um, and uh, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: One of the things that is kind of a key
Speaker 1: moment in this guy's life is that the thing that
Speaker 1: saves his life from polio is a treatment called the
Speaker 1: Sister Kenney method, which is like alternative medicine today and
Speaker 1: was kind of at the time in the thirties considered
Speaker 1: like quackery. Um. And I'm not competent to like weigh
Speaker 1: in on this, but he credits the Sister Kenny method
Speaker 1: with saving him from his polio and the fact that
Speaker 1: like this thing that people called quack medicine is what
Speaker 1: saved him as a child is going to have a
Speaker 1: really big influence on just sort of the the degree
Speaker 1: of weight that he gives authority. I did not know that,
Speaker 1: but that makes so much sense for the rest of
Speaker 1: his life. Is so much about like how much value
Speaker 1: we put into what we believe, and how much what
Speaker 1: we believe kind of creates the reality around us. And
Speaker 1: that is such an interesting things like I'm sure, I'm
Speaker 1: sure Bob Wilson that later on is like talking about
Speaker 1: like the placebo effect and all that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: as as that comes up like in like chaos magic
Speaker 1: a lot um and and he was a member of
Speaker 1: the biggest chaos magic order. But that's just that's such
Speaker 1: an interesting story. And I was unaware that he dealt
Speaker 1: with polio that it was it was kind of quote
Speaker 1: using this like a crank method. What's the methods I'm
Speaker 1: imagining you go into this like convent and sister Kearny,
Speaker 1: Kearny whatever. Kenny. Yeah, Kenny just hits you with a cane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's it's basically like a bunch of
Speaker 1: hot compresses and like kind of passive movement, some of
Speaker 1: which seems like it's it's sort of similar to like
Speaker 1: massages um to reduce like some of the spasms that
Speaker 1: are caused by polio um and yeah, it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's interesting. Again, I'm not like a uh like an
Speaker 1: expert on any of this, but it does seem She's
Speaker 1: pretty well regarded within like physical therapy and consider to
Speaker 1: be something of a pioneer in the field. So I
Speaker 1: think it's one of those situations where he receives this
Speaker 1: treatment that people call bullshit as a kid and it
Speaker 1: helps him, and later on she's kind of to at
Speaker 1: least some extent vindicated um and yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: a big impact on Bob. The other than that has
Speaker 1: a big impact on Bob is that just like three
Speaker 1: years after he or a couple of years after his
Speaker 1: like while he's sort of in the middle of this
Speaker 1: polio shit, the War of the Worlds comes on the
Speaker 1: radio and so Orson Wells is a huge influence on
Speaker 1: this guy. As a young adult, he starts working at Playboy,
Speaker 1: and he hooks up and gets married to a woman
Speaker 1: named Arlen, and they are both in addition to being
Speaker 1: because we're talking about these guys kind of in their
Speaker 1: like intellectual weirdo prankster thing, he and Arlen are both
Speaker 1: also very committed physical activists. They are both involved with
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers. So these are not again, these are
Speaker 1: not just people who like talk about shit like they're
Speaker 1: taking on real risk. And in fact, at one point
Speaker 1: while he's at Playboy, one of the editors there, an
Speaker 1: executive comes up to him and says that, like tells
Speaker 1: him his name has been added to the Chicago PDS
Speaker 1: Red Squad or sorry, they're in Chicago, not LA and
Speaker 1: which is like a list of radicals that the authorities
Speaker 1: had under surveillance, and the Red Squad existed, we don't
Speaker 1: actually know if Bob was on it or not. And
Speaker 1: basically this guy tells Bob like, it's because they think
Speaker 1: you're a gun runner for the Black Panthers, and Bob
Speaker 1: is like, well, no, we're just part of the free
Speaker 1: breakfast program. Especially right now, there's a non zero chance
Speaker 1: Bob Wilson ran guns. That's not an impossibility. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna say that's one hundred percent, no full support. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's he also again for kind of to talk
Speaker 1: about like how rough this guy's life is. He has
Speaker 1: several kids with Arlen. His youngest daughter, when she is fifteen,
Speaker 1: is beaten to death in a robbery gone back, and
Speaker 1: she becomes the first person, one of the very first
Speaker 1: people in the world and the first person from at
Speaker 1: least in the Bay Area to have her brain put
Speaker 1: in a in cryogenic whatever stasis. That's the thing Bob
Speaker 1: Wilson is into very early on. That is normally I
Speaker 1: have very little sympathy as a general rule for the
Speaker 1: life extension people, but I obviously can't blame a grieving
Speaker 1: father for doing something like that, Like that's a perfectly
Speaker 1: understandable series of actions, especially in the seventies. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: different than that. I want to be an immortal major.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, Yeah exactly. Hey, hey, come on, So, while
Speaker 1: Thornley and Hill kind of provided the initial impetus behind Discordianism.
Speaker 1: Bob Wilson becomes one of the chief drivers, and he
Speaker 1: probably is the most influential of them because he is
Speaker 1: he is still to this day probably like one of
Speaker 1: the number one voices out of the psychedelic movement and
Speaker 1: the counterculture movement in the late sixties and seventies. Bob
Speaker 1: Wilson wrote a bit about this in the late seventies
Speaker 1: in a book he put out called Cosmic Trigger. It's
Speaker 1: actually a series of books, and this is him kind
Speaker 1: of describing the changes that occur in the American psyche
Speaker 1: during the time that the Discordians are starting out their activism.
Speaker 1: When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and
Speaker 1: or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche. As
Speaker 1: Jules Feffer, among others, has noticed, Kennedy was not a
Speaker 1: universally beloved president, of course, nobody ever has been, not
Speaker 1: even Washington. But he was young or youngish, handsome, cultured, brave.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows the pt one on nine story and via Rile.
Speaker 1: There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the
Speaker 1: national psyche by the Daily Plaza Bullets, Camelot died, the
Speaker 1: divine king had been sacrificed. We were caught suddenly in
Speaker 1: the middle of a Fraser Freud reenactment of archetypal anthropological ritual.
Speaker 1: The national psyche veered dizzily towards chapel perillus. Now, chapel
Speaker 1: perillus is a term y'ell are familiar with. No, I
Speaker 1: have no idea. It's a psychological term. I know, you
Speaker 1: know the scars we've talked about this body. This is
Speaker 1: a core part of my personal psychology. Yes. In researching
Speaker 1: occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions
Speaker 1: called chapel perillus. In the trade, you come out the
Speaker 1: other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic. There
Speaker 1: is no third way. I came out an agnostic, and
Speaker 1: that's I still think is one of the more useful,
Speaker 1: especially in the era of the Internet. UM, because a
Speaker 1: big thing for and all of the early Discordians break
Speaker 1: in different ways. They all react differently to chapel perilous.
Speaker 1: And actually, one thing I'll quibbo with Wilson here is
Speaker 1: I think there is a third way to react to this,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about that later. Um. But I think
Speaker 1: Wilson's attitude is going to be because he is he
Speaker 1: is a pan agnostic. Pan Agnosticism is kind of like
Speaker 1: the ideology that guides him the rest of his life
Speaker 1: in increasing ways. Um. And that's kind of if you
Speaker 1: listen to like best practices from any of these like
Speaker 1: people who work for traditional journalist outfits in disinfo, Like
Speaker 1: they don't phrase it in as artful or attractive a
Speaker 1: way as Bob Wilson says. But that's what everybody's trying
Speaker 1: to urge people towards, right, not taking anything as gospel
Speaker 1: or perfect truth, not getting it's not allowing one of
Speaker 1: the things Wilson would talk about as the concept of
Speaker 1: a reality tunnel. Right. And so when you start to
Speaker 1: believe things about the world that kind of that changes
Speaker 1: how you perceive the world. It changes effectively the world
Speaker 1: that you live in. And you're going to like continue
Speaker 1: to make more choices that help you bore deeper into
Speaker 1: that reality tunnel which fears you away from everybody else. Right,
Speaker 1: We've got with qan On is a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: people who have bored a reality tunnel so deep outside
Speaker 1: of kind of the consensus reality that a lot of
Speaker 1: most of the other people live in that they can't
Speaker 1: be reached. In a lot of cases, this is what
Speaker 1: happens in those like somebody will like murder their family
Speaker 1: or whatever, or set off a bomb because they've they've
Speaker 1: fallen so deep down this tunnel. And one of the
Speaker 1: things Wilson is he doesn't want people to close their minds,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't want anyone to get like to bury
Speaker 1: themselves too deep in a tunnel that leads them, you know,
Speaker 1: that they can't get out from right Like that was
Speaker 1: kind of the benefit of pan agnosticism. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think another release instinct way is thinking about it is
Speaker 1: it's the same name as his documentary maybe logic, as
Speaker 1: in like maybe this thing is the thing, like a
Speaker 1: big He has these speeches where he's tried he tries
Speaker 1: to explain why we should remove the word is from
Speaker 1: the English vocabulary because we say this thing is this thing.
Speaker 1: You are now collapsing reality down into this succinct statement
Speaker 1: that is probably going to cause problems when you create
Speaker 1: that like um, when when you create that sense of
Speaker 1: equalness um. So think of everything as like maybe this
Speaker 1: is the thing, or maybe this is the thing like
Speaker 1: it try to if you are a few times there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you like using the word because because of
Speaker 1: like linguistics, but thinking thinking of the world in that
Speaker 1: maybe framework, yeah, is just a it's a safer way
Speaker 1: to approach a lot of these things that try to
Speaker 1: like mess with your psyche. Okay, it makes for worse writing.
Speaker 1: Metaphors or general can seen as stronger than similes. So true,
Speaker 1: that's true, And Bob Wilson will be at war most
Speaker 1: of his life with the fact that he recognizes playing
Speaker 1: with this stuff can be dangerous and also it's very
Speaker 1: fun to do. But as a young man writing for Playboy,
Speaker 1: he is not He's not quite as mature as he
Speaker 1: will later be. And so, starting from the position of
Speaker 1: these beliefs in kind of the value of pan agnosticism,
Speaker 1: he decides that his goal should be to bring as
Speaker 1: many people as possible to chapel perilous right. That is,
Speaker 1: in Wilson's eyes, the goal of Operation mind Fuck is
Speaker 1: to put stuff out here that causes as many people
Speaker 1: as possible to hit this decision point where they either
Speaker 1: become a stone paranoid or they kind of back away
Speaker 1: and gain this ability to look at things from a
Speaker 1: more objective standpoint, and a big part of like the
Speaker 1: basic goal here is in order to stop people from
Speaker 1: kind of going too far in these particularly the John
Speaker 1: Birch directions. He wants to create art that causes people
Speaker 1: to confront the fact that reality is not fixed and
Speaker 1: emerge from that experience questioning their old assumptions. You know,
Speaker 1: That's what Wilson sees as the actual like moral good
Speaker 1: behind Operation mind fuck. So Wilson and his editor fellow
Speaker 1: editors Shay, they start sitting down with Thornley and the
Speaker 1: other Discordians, and it's from these conversations that they actually
Speaker 1: come up with a name for Operation Mindful, because this
Speaker 1: is just something they're doing for a couple of years, right,
Speaker 1: They're sending off these letters, they're putting out these different
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories in different magazines, but they haven't really named
Speaker 1: it yet. And I'm I'm gonna read a quote from
Speaker 1: The New Yorker about how that goes down through every
Speaker 1: means available. Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan,
Speaker 1: the mind Fuckers intended to attribute all national calamities, assassinations,
Speaker 1: or conspiracies to the Illuminati and other hidden hands. So
Speaker 1: they planted stories about the Illuminati and the underground press.
Speaker 1: They slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal Innovator
Speaker 1: and the new left newspaper Roger Spark. They cooked up
Speaker 1: a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in
Speaker 1: the Playboy Advisor. When a New Orleans jury refused to
Speaker 1: convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting District
Speaker 1: Attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison's booster
Speaker 1: Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press got a
Speaker 1: note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates. The
Speaker 1: telltale sign none of them had a left nipple. What
Speaker 1: if there really is an Illuminati, Wilson asked Thornley one
Speaker 1: pot fogged night in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe they'll find
Speaker 1: out about us and be pissed. I doubt if there is,
Speaker 1: Thornley answered, And if they're, by some chances, they'd probably
Speaker 1: be very happy to have wild ass fools like us
Speaker 1: covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories. I really
Speaker 1: love this idea that probably at some point they like
Speaker 1: checked someone for it and then they're like, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not a left nipple and a right nipple. It's
Speaker 1: two right nipples, just one of thems on the other side. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they doubled the right nipples. So obviously none of what
Speaker 1: they're doing helps this cloud of suspicion that's fallen down
Speaker 1: on Carrie that he's deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 1: And by this point JFK conspiracy theorists have become aware
Speaker 1: of the Discordians and thornley Is involvement and have decided
Speaker 1: the Discordians are a CIA front, which, in fairness is
Speaker 1: something to the Discordians claimed too. So this doesn't nowhere.
Speaker 1: Um oh boy, So I'm not gonna fed jacket myself,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean they do that immediately. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So Thornley becomes the constant victim of stalking by groups
Speaker 1: of men in suits, and it's like he is legitimately
Speaker 1: under investigation by the government. Some of these guys are
Speaker 1: probably FEDS, some of them are probably conspiracy theorists also
Speaker 1: carry as a paranoid schizophrenic who's taking LSD and marijuana
Speaker 1: nearly every single day. So a lot's going on win
Speaker 1: his head here, right, But like part of what's going
Speaker 1: to make this so much more damaging to him is that,
Speaker 1: like some of the stalking is real, which makes the
Speaker 1: stuff that's not real a lot harder for him him
Speaker 1: to doubt. He also, because you know this is Garrison,
Speaker 1: you may not know this. People's phone numbers used to
Speaker 1: just be like listed in a book that you can
Speaker 1: pick up. So folks like who are into the conspiracy
Speaker 1: get phone books for wherever he's living, and they start
Speaker 1: like calling him, and some of them will leave like
Speaker 1: cryptic messages, and these are some of these are probably
Speaker 1: discordiants fucking with Carrie right where they're like continuing the
Speaker 1: conspiracy by pretending to be a part of it to
Speaker 1: mess with his head. Some of them are just dead air.
Speaker 1: You know, they may just be people actually stalking him.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's it's it's impossible to say entirely what's happening.
Speaker 1: But as we turn over to the seventies, Carrie increasingly
Speaker 1: finds himself acting as a stone paranoid. Now, mental illness
Speaker 1: does run in his family. His younger brother Dick suffered
Speaker 1: from schizophrenic auditory hallucinations, and in this period Carrie increasingly
Speaker 1: suffers from them as well. He is eventually diagnosed as
Speaker 1: a paranoid schizophrenic. This is not like podcast Diagnosis Hour
Speaker 1: with Robert Evans. Here Carrie Thornley was diagnosed and he
Speaker 1: also starts escalating his drug use, which this is a
Speaker 1: this is a seed during that do you know God
Speaker 1: in the seventies, when is he born? Um, there's like,
Speaker 1: what decade is he? I think like forties, He's probably
Speaker 1: he's starting his thirties right now, if I'm not mistaken, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like thirties, forties. I'm under the impression that's like
Speaker 1: one of the time early thirties is like one of
Speaker 1: the times that late twenties, early thirties is when people
Speaker 1: often have schizophrenic breaks. And it can be I had
Speaker 1: a I've had. This happened to a couple of friends
Speaker 1: of mine. I used to live with a young woman
Speaker 1: who was in her mid twenties, had just finished college.
Speaker 1: Was like going through whatever program you go to to
Speaker 1: become like a park ranger and then just kind of
Speaker 1: one day loses it, you know, and yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna give like the tails, but like it was, it's
Speaker 1: it's it can come on very suddenly. And we know
Speaker 1: one thing we do know is that both LSD and
Speaker 1: marijuana can trigger schizophrenic episodes the martial too, But I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I'm I'm I think basically any seriously mind
Speaker 1: altering drug can have the effective because I've heard that,
Speaker 1: like cocaine can do it too. Like it's and it's
Speaker 1: not like it's creating this in you. It's these are
Speaker 1: people who at some point would have started to experience
Speaker 1: these symptoms, but it can bring it on earlier. It
Speaker 1: can make it, you know, a lot worse. It kind
Speaker 1: of it kind of like knocks over the first domino. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the domino would have probably fallen over eventually anyway. Yes,
Speaker 1: and with car right out to my schizophrenic friends who
Speaker 1: are still awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean obviously this
Speaker 1: is just like a thing he would have had to
Speaker 1: deal with either way. Totally. I don't think anyway. I
Speaker 1: just want to make sure everyone and I knows that
Speaker 1: it's just a yeah, yeah, you know, it's just a thing,
Speaker 1: and this is a thing he would have had to
Speaker 1: deal with either way. I will say the fact that
Speaker 1: he is basically never not tripping on acid or smoking
Speaker 1: pot does not help him manage this. Yeah, and his
Speaker 1: friends will note that, like sometimes he'll come in and
Speaker 1: he'll be like fairly like calm and normal, and once
Speaker 1: he hits a joint, he won't be able to stop
Speaker 1: talking about this conspiracy to kill Kennedy and how he's
Speaker 1: wrapped up in it and the different things that he
Speaker 1: started to believe about it. And he's kind of so
Speaker 1: aggressive about it that people, a lot of people can't
Speaker 1: spend time around him anymore because it's just like this
Speaker 1: this thing that when he gets into it, he's incapable
Speaker 1: of like even seeing the people around him. And Carrie
Speaker 1: goes further and further, kind of off the deep end.
Speaker 1: Over the next couple of years, through the seventies, he
Speaker 1: convinces himself that Oswald was really set up. He starts
Speaker 1: to believe that he may have in fact been Oswald's
Speaker 1: body double or otherwise involved in the conspiracy to kill
Speaker 1: JFK and had simply forgotten about it due to CIA
Speaker 1: mind control radios implanted in his head. And one of
Speaker 1: the problems is that, like he has a lot of
Speaker 1: friends like Greg Robert Danton Wilson, the CIA is cutting
Speaker 1: off your microphone, Robbers, Oh no, this isn't the first
Speaker 1: time that you've mentioned that. And then your microphone starts
Speaker 1: cutting out. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that's how the CIA works.
Speaker 1: But you know how else the CIA works by planting
Speaker 1: people with that let's do so they trip and they
Speaker 1: don't know it. That's one way it works. It works
Speaker 1: so that they're more susceptible to advertising. Yes, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean Garrison in an earlier time, with less sophisticated ads,
Speaker 1: they had to use LSD. Now though, the quality ads
Speaker 1: on this podcast are much more mind altering than any
Speaker 1: fucking chemical that's some Danish man cooked up in a lab. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back. I hope you all enjoyed the twelve hours
Speaker 1: of hallucinations that come with every behind the Bastard's ad break. Um,
Speaker 1: it's really ruined a lot of people's lives, but it
Speaker 1: helps us. You know, it'stantially lucrative for us. I mean
Speaker 1: exactly helps promote good got nothing, okay, yeah, it helps
Speaker 1: promote good things. What this podcast is about, good thing,
Speaker 1: the Good Things cast. So what a boring show that
Speaker 1: would be him? A right here. Yeah, here's the problem
Speaker 1: Carrie is. I mean, he's losing his mind. He is
Speaker 1: increasingly unable to tell what's real. He's increasingly convinced that
Speaker 1: that the government tried to have or someone tried to
Speaker 1: make him murder the president, that he may have helped
Speaker 1: murder the president, that he's being stalked by government agents.
Speaker 1: And periodically he will go to his friends Robert Anton Wilson,
Speaker 1: Bob Shay, Greg Hill, and he'll try to talk to
Speaker 1: him about this, and they don't really notice that he's
Speaker 1: serious because the language they all communicate with is like
Speaker 1: making up conspiracy theories. So it takes them a while
Speaker 1: to realize, like, oh, no, Carrie's actually in some distress here,
Speaker 1: Like there's a there's a problem with our friend. What
Speaker 1: are the odds that he actually was involved in the
Speaker 1: assassination of JFK. He was living basically next to this
Speaker 1: guy who he claimed not to have ever seen again.
Speaker 1: I mean, for one thing, that he wasn't in Dallas
Speaker 1: when it happened, But for the other thing, like Carrie
Speaker 1: Thornley was actually incapable of like hiding anything every um.
Speaker 1: I like, when he comes to believe that he killed Kennedy,
Speaker 1: he tells everybody that he killed Kennedy. And so when
Speaker 1: he doesn't believe, like, I just don't think he would
Speaker 1: ever have been capable of being part of a plot. Um,
Speaker 1: he's not very good at Like, yeah, he's, he's he's. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about it, like, Okay, there's a We're gonna
Speaker 1: watch a little video with him later. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's interesting. You can believe whatever you want about. Actually,
Speaker 1: the carries carries complicity in the Kennedy assassination. Literally, I've
Speaker 1: never cared about most conspiracy shit. It has never occurred
Speaker 1: to me to care who shot JFK. I do not care. M.
Speaker 1: I mean, wow, uh, Margaret, this is how the reality
Speaker 1: the reality tunnel st arts. You're you are already on
Speaker 1: the path. You you you already asked the question took
Speaker 1: a shovel load of dirt out of a tunnel? M cool.
Speaker 1: I hope there's some I hope. It's like D and
Speaker 1: D when you get into the tunnels. Sometimes sometimes with
Speaker 1: gold and manliquer carcano rifles. Yeah, so that's how I
Speaker 1: play D and D. All of Carrie's kind of mental Um,
Speaker 1: I don't collapse isn't quite the right word. But the
Speaker 1: this this process of him sort of falling to his
Speaker 1: mental demons occurs over the course of about a decade
Speaker 1: and while this is going on, he remains pretty intensely
Speaker 1: involved in radical politics. Um, he has another ideological shift
Speaker 1: from the kind of individualist anarchism that had led him
Speaker 1: to Discordianism towards a belief system that is, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is not like a huge movement like this is
Speaker 1: not like a huge pivot from individualist anarchism. But he
Speaker 1: comes to like describe his political ideology as supporting second
Speaker 1: drugs and treason. He briefly considers, yeah, that's fine. He
Speaker 1: briefly considers slipping LSD into the water supply of a city.
Speaker 1: But eventually his acid trips convince him to drop out
Speaker 1: of society and integrate himself into what he calls a
Speaker 1: sexually swinging psychedelic tribe. And this tribe is one of
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties mini acid cults called the Carrista. Carrie
Speaker 1: takes over their newspaper and he writes several influential articles.
Speaker 1: And these guys are like, again, this is like an
Speaker 1: acid sex cult. It's also pretty like their Their publication
Speaker 1: is reasonably prominent within the radical community at this time.
Speaker 1: So Carrie's articles wind up having Margaret. You might be
Speaker 1: surprised by the influence this has actually, but he writes
Speaker 1: an article that includes this line, Carrista is a religion
Speaker 1: and the mood of Carrista is one of holiness. Do not, however,
Speaker 1: look for profusion of rituals, Dogma's doctrines and scriptures. Carrista
Speaker 1: is too sacred for that. It is more akin to
Speaker 1: the religions of the East and also the so called
Speaker 1: pagan religions of the pre Christian West. So what's interesting
Speaker 1: Like that may not seem like much, but what's interesting
Speaker 1: is that that is and in this article includes basically
Speaker 1: the first, probably the first recorded use of people using
Speaker 1: the word pagan to refer to both a past practice
Speaker 1: and ongoing modern religious practices that had not interesting happened
Speaker 1: until yeah, and this is I'm not the one making
Speaker 1: this claim. This is a claim made by Margot Adler,
Speaker 1: who is a Wiccaned priestess and an NPR correspondent. In
Speaker 1: her book Drawing Down the Moon, she claims that Carry's
Speaker 1: writings helped spark the actual beginning of the neo pagan movement,
Speaker 1: and she is the one who credits him as the
Speaker 1: first person to use the word pagan to describe both
Speaker 1: past and present religions. This guy is everywhere. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: really influential. It's it's wild because he's so president or too.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how many and also started. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's just impressive. You know what that is my head cannon.
Speaker 1: Now I'm blaming the Kennedy assassin or crediting it to him. Um,
Speaker 1: I think they secreted him away. Actually, I actually don't
Speaker 1: know the conspiracy theories. Friend JFK. Oh, so you're you're
Speaker 1: you're a Bubba Ho Tep believer? Oh god, no, I
Speaker 1: don't think so, I've changed. You should watch everyone should
Speaker 1: watch the movie Bubba Ho Tep by Don Coscarelli. The
Speaker 1: premise of the film, starring Bruce Campbell, is that Elvis
Speaker 1: like gives his life to an Elvis impersonatorum and then
Speaker 1: winds up in an old folks home as an old man,
Speaker 1: and his best friend is a black man who claims
Speaker 1: to be JFK who the CIA like changed his skin
Speaker 1: in order to like hide him to fake his death,
Speaker 1: and they have they have to fight a mummy. It's
Speaker 1: an incredible film. Okay, I've got I'm back to believing it. YEA,
Speaker 1: all right, Bubba Ho Tep excellent piece of art. Yea,
Speaker 1: um so Carrie Again, It's interesting. He is a very
Speaker 1: functional person in a lot of ways. He's deeply influential.
Speaker 1: He writes it huge amount. It's good writing as a
Speaker 1: general rule, but he's also in like he's also an
Speaker 1: unmedicated and increasingly kind of falling into these increasingly complex
Speaker 1: conspiratorial holes, and he'll just drop off the map for
Speaker 1: periods of time. He spends a decent chunk, particularly in
Speaker 1: the late seventies early eighties, kind of living as a transient,
Speaker 1: but but never when he doesn't want to write. One
Speaker 1: of the things his friends will say is that like,
Speaker 1: no matter how kind of far out he got, when
Speaker 1: he wanted to, he would find ways to make money
Speaker 1: and keep a roof over his head. So he was
Speaker 1: he always had this kind of degree of control over
Speaker 1: his life. It's more like he couldn't control his relationships
Speaker 1: with other people because he starts to wrap them into
Speaker 1: these conspiracies that he's spending all of his time thinking about. Now.
Speaker 1: Probably I think the first, as far as I've read,
Speaker 1: the first of his friends to realize something as deeply
Speaker 1: wrong is Robert Anton Wilson. And Wilson, you know, would
Speaker 1: kind of very politely when Carrie would start getting wrapped
Speaker 1: up in these claims, would be like, well that I
Speaker 1: don't really you know. I I understand what you're saying,
Speaker 1: and I understand that you believe that, but I want
Speaker 1: you to consider that maybe that's not as true as
Speaker 1: you think it is, and like, maybe there's alternative explanations
Speaker 1: for why you think somebody's following you or this or that.
Speaker 1: Carrie decides that this means that Bob is his CIA
Speaker 1: handler and he's trying to trick him, to manipulate him
Speaker 1: into Yeah, this is like a not an uncommon story, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: and variants of this kind of happened with some of
Speaker 1: his other friends now. So kind of the side effect
Speaker 1: of this is that, especially kind of at the end
Speaker 1: of the seventies, Carrie is increasingly like isolated. A lot
Speaker 1: of his old friends he doesn't talk to anymore. Greg
Speaker 1: Hill kind of gets very depressed at this point in time.
Speaker 1: His wife divorces him and he starts drinking more and more,
Speaker 1: and so he kind of reduces his contact and so
Speaker 1: Carrie does not have a lot of the moderating influences
Speaker 1: that he'd had earlier in his life and his personal
Speaker 1: beliefs continue to evolve, and again he's kind of gotten
Speaker 1: really into free love in this period that has sort
Speaker 1: of become the center of his political identity. And the
Speaker 1: next set of beliefs that he that he takes on,
Speaker 1: because he is a guy who periodically will just take
Speaker 1: on beliefs very strongly, is that the only way to
Speaker 1: create a utopia is to build a world free of
Speaker 1: sexual hang ups. Now, this is where things take a
Speaker 1: really dark turn. Carrie believes all people are sexual beings.
Speaker 1: Sex is fundamentally a good. It's something that should form
Speaker 1: the center of human relationships. And if all people are
Speaker 1: sexual beings and all children are people, then sex with
Speaker 1: children can't be all that bad. So one of them
Speaker 1: real by Heater Lamborne Wilson Energy. Yeah. I was wondering
Speaker 1: if they were communicating at this time, because that is
Speaker 1: very very similar types of logic, and they were both
Speaker 1: probably very very active, and like the early pagan community.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that they were communicating directly, but they
Speaker 1: were certainly writing in some of the same magazines and
Speaker 1: in some of the same places. And the thing Carrie
Speaker 1: convinces himself is basically he's not committed to sexual liberation
Speaker 1: if he does not try to have sex with a child.
Speaker 1: So this did not come out until two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: more than two thousand and two, something like that. The
Speaker 1: book came out two thousand and three when Grace when
Speaker 1: Adam go Rightley's who's written the book The Pranks during
Speaker 1: the Conspiracy, which is the best book about Carrie, he
Speaker 1: is looking into Carrie's life. He's talking to of all
Speaker 1: of his old friends, and one of his old friends
Speaker 1: she is a Carrie would claim that they dated. She
Speaker 1: claims they just worked friends who had sex one time
Speaker 1: and then she wanted some space. Yeah, this is another
Speaker 1: thing with Carrie. But this woman, Grace Kaplinger, she sends
Speaker 1: Adam a letter and this is what it says. There
Speaker 1: was an incident in Atlanta when Carrie and Kara and
Speaker 1: Craig were living across the street from me. Kara's his
Speaker 1: his wife, living across the street from me and my family.
Speaker 1: He took my daughter Marian, when she was around seven
Speaker 1: or eight, into a room at the home of a
Speaker 1: family close friends of mine who lived around the corner.
Speaker 1: He closed the door and began trying to fondle Marian.
Speaker 1: This was stopped by my friend Jane coming to the
Speaker 1: door and demanding that it be opened. She told me
Speaker 1: about it, as did Marian at the time, and I
Speaker 1: know that I did not deal with this properly. Part
Speaker 1: of me was simply unable to understand the gravity, even
Speaker 1: the total reality of it. But it did happen, fuck,
Speaker 1: and I have no reason to disbelieve that it's one
Speaker 1: of those I want to be really clear here because
Speaker 1: we've talked in other episodes, like when we talked about
Speaker 1: them John Hinckley Junior, about you know, mental illness and
Speaker 1: when it does and does not, like have an impact
Speaker 1: on someone's complicity in a crime. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that has any impact on what Carry has done here.
Speaker 1: I think his decision to try to molest this girl
Speaker 1: is completely consistent with decade of how this guy functions.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is that when Carrie
Speaker 1: comes across deep poverty overseas in Southeast Asia and reads Marx,
Speaker 1: he becomes a committed Marxist. When he reads Atlas Shrugged
Speaker 1: and falls in love with objectivism, he describes himself as
Speaker 1: like a capitalist insurgent terrorist. When he finds anarchism, he
Speaker 1: devotes himself to causing as much chaos as possible. He
Speaker 1: is the kind of person who, when he finds something
Speaker 1: attractive in an ideology, jumps into it with both feet
Speaker 1: and is immediately ready to give everything for it. And
Speaker 1: I think, actually, I there's a degree to which I
Speaker 1: have more condemnation and find him more unsettling than someone
Speaker 1: who is a pedophile in the sense of someone who
Speaker 1: is attracted to children and seeks them out, Because we
Speaker 1: have no evidence this ever happened again, And I don't
Speaker 1: think this is the result of attraction. I think this
Speaker 1: is the result of Carrie believing he is not living
Speaker 1: his ideology if he doesn't try to do this. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: and I think a person who can do that is
Speaker 1: so much scarier than almost any other kind of person
Speaker 1: in the world. Yeah, it's fucked up now. And there's
Speaker 1: so much there about the history of its terrible the
Speaker 1: history of pedophilia that runs through so many different subcultures
Speaker 1: and ideologies on all sides of the spectrum. And it's
Speaker 1: like very rarely tackled head on because it's usually talked
Speaker 1: about in very bad faith, you know, like everyone calling
Speaker 1: trans people groomers or whatever, right, or people don't want
Speaker 1: to talk about it because it's not a fucking nice
Speaker 1: thing to talk about, and it's it's complicated, but we
Speaker 1: people need to know that. Yeah, that's just like what
Speaker 1: echo chambers can make you believe is reasonable, you know.
Speaker 1: I guess the kind of thing that they probably would
Speaker 1: call reality tunnels, right like, yeah, like when you're like
Speaker 1: you have these like self reinforcing beliefs and you get
Speaker 1: a small group of people who are like yeah, and
Speaker 1: then this thing and then this thing, you know, and
Speaker 1: it is a thing that like people have a problem
Speaker 1: with and it allows you to come up with horrific
Speaker 1: conclusions such as this one. And this is why Robert
Speaker 1: Anton Wilson was such an advocate of pan agnosticism, right,
Speaker 1: it's part he's he's watching Carrie. I don't think he's
Speaker 1: aware of this one. It happens, but he does write
Speaker 1: the forward to the biography that this is in. It
Speaker 1: doesn't become aware of it at some point because that
Speaker 1: was only published a few years before Wilson died. It
Speaker 1: was right rat because I think he died in two
Speaker 1: thousand three or four. Yeah, yeah, but um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is um, I mean, that's unsettling and it's interesting
Speaker 1: just to kind of make that point further go Rightly
Speaker 1: also talks to one of Thorny's longtime friends, or Thornley's
Speaker 1: longtime friends, Lewis Lois Lacy, to try and understand why
Speaker 1: this happened, and Lacy's explanation is that Carrie really started
Speaker 1: to like his behavior started to change for the worse,
Speaker 1: for the toxic, for the abusive, when he dropped the
Speaker 1: personal mantra that he had kept with him most of
Speaker 1: his life, which was just the word no. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to read a quote from the book here because
Speaker 1: I think this is interesting. As Louise explained, Carrie was
Speaker 1: fiercely anti authoritarian, and prior to his bouts of paranoia,
Speaker 1: he had always stood up to whatever monolithic force stood
Speaker 1: in his way, continually saying no, whether it was to
Speaker 1: the government, Jim Garrison, or anyone else. This was Carrie's
Speaker 1: way of dealing with people who tried to tell him
Speaker 1: what to do. And this was the simple wisdom he'd
Speaker 1: imparted to Lois many years before. Just learned to say no,
Speaker 1: and people won't know how to react or what to do,
Speaker 1: and in most cases would leave you the fuck alone.
Speaker 1: At some point, Carrie apparently quit saying no, and in essence,
Speaker 1: stopped evolving, while his friends, who in many instances had
Speaker 1: followed Carrie over the years, now began eclipsing him. As
Speaker 1: they continued growing, exploring, and entertaining new ideas and forms
Speaker 1: of expression, Carrie Lois contends, became locked in this delusory
Speaker 1: world of conspiracies, which impeded his evolution. One time, Carry
Speaker 1: explained his struggles to her in the following manner, It's
Speaker 1: hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking
Speaker 1: to you. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's a that's the complicated
Speaker 1: thing to parse. It is a complicated thing because in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, like the path that he got
Speaker 1: set down, he did lay he did lay out the
Speaker 1: own stones for the path, like he was encouraging himself
Speaker 1: along so much of this development and then he just
Speaker 1: got lost along the way. Um. But but also he
Speaker 1: was also just like he was always capable of doing
Speaker 1: this right because he did it as a person. So
Speaker 1: it's it's it's one of those things where had it.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing with the same thing with like
Speaker 1: the Kanye West stuff, same thing with whenever we talk
Speaker 1: about like what degree does does like your mental health
Speaker 1: or or you know, whatever diagnosis you might have like
Speaker 1: contribute to the actions that you take. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think it's a matter of whether or not you understand
Speaker 1: the like the reality of what you're doing in a
Speaker 1: very like basic way. Like, for example, if Carrie had
Speaker 1: become convinced that a random person was stalking him and
Speaker 1: just shot that person, believing he was defending himself from
Speaker 1: the CIA, You're not morally like culpable to that, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's fundamentally a decision you make because you're you believe
Speaker 1: you're in danger. Yeah, and like I can't morally blame
Speaker 1: somebody for that, but yeah, like the decision to rape
Speaker 1: a child is based on like reinforcing your own personal
Speaker 1: sense of ideology. Yeah's just the weirdly fucked up thing
Speaker 1: to do that, and that that matters more than, for example,
Speaker 1: the consent of the child or you know, the like
Speaker 1: the ability like obviously children cannot consent, but like the like,
Speaker 1: it's the centering of his own need to be consistent
Speaker 1: with this thing he's convinced himself as his politics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is like that's a bad thing to do. Well,
Speaker 1: this is depressing. You know what's not bad? Gold past,
Speaker 1: buy some gold. Ah, we're back. We're just having a
Speaker 1: good time, having a good time. Never want to stop
Speaker 1: at all. So Karrie gets divorced. Um he kind of
Speaker 1: loses his ability over time to function in mainstream society whatsoever.
Speaker 1: He becomes something of a wandering bum, hitchhiking across the country,
Speaker 1: crashing with friends or on the street. Those who'd known
Speaker 1: him a long time learned that trying to help him
Speaker 1: inevitably brought allegations that they too were part of the
Speaker 1: CIA conspiracy. One of his brothers is his kind of
Speaker 1: middle brother, not not. Dick later writes this, which I
Speaker 1: think does a good enough job of kind of summarizing
Speaker 1: how Carrie is treating people in this period. The last
Speaker 1: time I saw Carrie was in the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: It was the last time our nuclear family was all
Speaker 1: together at the same time in years, and it was Christmas.
Speaker 1: After the Warren Commission testimony. Carrie gradually morphed from a fascinating,
Speaker 1: very charismatic Mary prankster beaten at kind of idiot, savant
Speaker 1: intellectual giant into a full blown paranoid schizophrenic. That Christmas,
Speaker 1: we got together at my mom and Dad's the Nazi
Speaker 1: spy's house. Carrie was intent on proving to me that
Speaker 1: he was being followed and watched, and that he had
Speaker 1: thought mind control devices, got mind control devices planted in
Speaker 1: his head. So he asked me to drive him to
Speaker 1: a local bus stop to prove his point. To put
Speaker 1: this in perspective, I had long hair. Carrie had long hair,
Speaker 1: a full beard, and a bright orange sailor's hat on,
Speaker 1: and was carrying a white purse. As we sat at
Speaker 1: the bus stop in this very conservative palos fared as neighborhood,
Speaker 1: Carrie began to point out how almost everyone who drove
Speaker 1: by was looking at us, so they were most likely
Speaker 1: spying on him, and in fact, some had been following
Speaker 1: him for days. That was such a shock to me
Speaker 1: to realize what a fine line it is between being
Speaker 1: an intellectual giant and a very smart, paranoid schizophrenic. I
Speaker 1: never saw him again after that day. Oh that his
Speaker 1: whole story is so dark and tragic. Um. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like but you can see, like all all this gets
Speaker 1: like you know, there's there's the his stuff that he
Speaker 1: was doing in school to prank his friends as like
Speaker 1: a pregurs for all this, how he would put up
Speaker 1: posters talking about killing the president as like this this
Speaker 1: thing that in the end has such a negative impact
Speaker 1: on your life, but is seemingly an inconsequential joke, and
Speaker 1: then in the end it leads to this devastating train
Speaker 1: of things that just kind of shatters your mental grasp
Speaker 1: of reality. And it's yeah, I think one like what
Speaker 1: Wilson would say as it's the result of saying yes
Speaker 1: too many times. Right, it's the result of being too convinced.
Speaker 1: And I think part of what and I think this
Speaker 1: is part of where you need some kind of some
Speaker 1: of his brothers um words here to help make sense
Speaker 1: of it, because the fact that what he says, they're
Speaker 1: at the end there the difference between the thin line
Speaker 1: between being an intellectual giant, which Carrie objectively was, his
Speaker 1: influence on the culture was massive, and a very smart,
Speaker 1: paranoid schizophrenic. I think carries conception of his own intelligence
Speaker 1: is a big part of why yeah, yeah, go so
Speaker 1: badly for him. Right, he thought he was smart enough
Speaker 1: that he was like he was like catching these people yum,
Speaker 1: and its fucking with them. And I'm the one, like
Speaker 1: I'm the one who has like the control and the
Speaker 1: agency here, right, and I think and I'm like, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, the maybe logic side of things, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, people looking at me at this bus stop,
Speaker 1: that is proof that they're following me. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's using that that that notion of like is and
Speaker 1: as opposed to thinking like, oh, they're looking at you,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's because you have long hair and you're
Speaker 1: sitting to someone else's long hair with you just you know,
Speaker 1: you just look like weird hippies, like like, we'll see
Speaker 1: him in a little bit. But I should note here
Speaker 1: Carrie never didn't look like a wizard, like the whole
Speaker 1: period from the Discorian point on. He's got like this
Speaker 1: long beard and these he has wizard rest in wizard
Speaker 1: face is how I would describe the way carry authorically looked.
Speaker 1: He did eventually find some sort of rough equilibrium. He
Speaker 1: wound up kind of making a place for himself in
Speaker 1: Atlanta's little Five Points neighborhood. Now, at this point that
Speaker 1: was the center of all things weird in the Deep South,
Speaker 1: and it was ignored enough by authorities that it drew
Speaker 1: in traveling punk kids who wanted nothing more than to
Speaker 1: squat in old buildings and published weird shit for other
Speaker 1: grungy leftists. What Carrie Sarah are we in now? We're
Speaker 1: talking the late seventies, in the eighties, all through the
Speaker 1: Reagan years. Basically, this is kind of what he's doing.
Speaker 1: And he finds a sketchy living situation where he's basically
Speaker 1: I think it's like a backhouse kind of thing that
Speaker 1: it's not entirely legal. Over the course of the time
Speaker 1: he's there, he fills it with exact thirteen cats. Um.
Speaker 1: And because because space in his house is so small,
Speaker 1: he had to build what he called a cat condo
Speaker 1: out of scrapwood and trash, creating a system of tunnels, ladders,
Speaker 1: and platforms on the walls for his cat. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've lived in punk houses where you have like the
Speaker 1: resident wizard, where everyone's like twenty five, and then there's
Speaker 1: just the like seventy year old anarchist who's like fucking
Speaker 1: you know that's in this last period of his life. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and his his cat condo. By the way, the health
Speaker 1: department eventually makes him tart tap that man. I know,
Speaker 1: let the man have his cat condown. You know, I
Speaker 1: mostly feel sad for the fourteenth cat that just hangs
Speaker 1: out out of side and is like, come on, you're
Speaker 1: a crazy cat wizard. Let more space. Come on. So,
Speaker 1: without the Internet, the L five P community, a Little
Speaker 1: five Points community keeps in touch through a series of
Speaker 1: underground papers, and in the mid seventies, late seventies really
Speaker 1: mostly Carrie has another one of his great ideas. So
Speaker 1: he starts by posting what he calls wall newspapers all
Speaker 1: around Little five Points. These are one paged xerox rants,
Speaker 1: and he puts them up in strategic locations around town
Speaker 1: around like the punk bars and stuff that people hang
Speaker 1: out in. So folks like find these, they see them
Speaker 1: in like bathroom walls and stuff, and they read them
Speaker 1: and they talk about them to their friends who are
Speaker 1: all hanging out in the same area. And gradually, like
Speaker 1: Carrie starts to become known around town for these wall
Speaker 1: newspapers that he's posting up, and he starts publishing more
Speaker 1: and more of these little xerox rants and like arguments
Speaker 1: and like letters to the editor. People start passing them
Speaker 1: out to their friends or leaving them out at bars.
Speaker 1: This is the start of the Zene Revolution because one
Speaker 1: of the things Carrie is doing while he's doing this
Speaker 1: in Little Five Points. He's also part of the time
Speaker 1: living the sort of transient existence where he's like hitchhiking
Speaker 1: throughout the South, putting up these little like wall newspapers
Speaker 1: and stuff and like spreading. So some times people will
Speaker 1: like write notes and letters and stuff in Atlanta and
Speaker 1: he'll like print them up, and then he'll travel down
Speaker 1: to you know, Orlando, and he'll put them up in
Speaker 1: places and stuff. And and this is like other people
Speaker 1: start to see this and realize like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: actually a really cool way to like communicate and share information. Um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, this is like kind of how the zine
Speaker 1: revolution kicks off, and that really starts. In the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: Thornley publications included Colcha u Kulccha, which focused on art, sex,
Speaker 1: and religion and and this is my favorite one, The
Speaker 1: Decadent Worker, which was a gossip column of like different
Speaker 1: like like drama that in the leftist community. And Little
Speaker 1: five Points. Oh yeah, this is just like this like
Speaker 1: Twitter getting circulated. Twitter, guys. So when I lived in
Speaker 1: the squad scene in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, um, there
Speaker 1: was this zine that had been going on for like
Speaker 1: ten or teen years maybe longer. That was just the
Speaker 1: gossip of who's fucking who in the squat scene in Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: and it was like terrifying. It was terrifying to me
Speaker 1: because I, like I didn't read Dutch and it was
Speaker 1: one of the I don't know, but just the fact
Speaker 1: that there's this zine that I guess distributed about like
Speaker 1: who is new in town, Who's fucking who? It's fucking scary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's one of I should note here just
Speaker 1: because people will get angry online. Otherwise. This is not
Speaker 1: one of these This is one of those things where
Speaker 1: like like, it's not like Carrie runs into a room
Speaker 1: full of punks and anarchists and says, I have invented
Speaker 1: the zine. This is This is actually a little bit
Speaker 1: more like, uh, you know that situation. We're talking about
Speaker 1: an episode one with like the creation of or the
Speaker 1: discovery of calculus, right where he is doing this and
Speaker 1: a couple other people are doing similar things and it
Speaker 1: all runs together. But he is since he's so influential
Speaker 1: and so skilled at getting his view of things out
Speaker 1: to people, he definitely has a massive He's one of
Speaker 1: a handful of people who starts the Zine Revolution, and yeah,
Speaker 1: he also lays out he also puts together a wall
Speaker 1: newspaper called the Cactus Flowery Gazette, where he lays out
Speaker 1: the basics of what's going to be his final ideology.
Speaker 1: He calls it zin anarchism. Now here's what he wrote
Speaker 1: about his contribution to the Zine Revolution. I like to
Speaker 1: think that over two and a half years of such activity,
Speaker 1: it's raised the vibes in my immediate surroundings considerably beyond
Speaker 1: the satisfaction of a feuding a few of the lies
Speaker 1: the intelligence community spreads to counter my claims to bring
Speaker 1: light about light data about my belatedly discovered involvement in
Speaker 1: the JFK murder and such related matters as the premeditated
Speaker 1: escalation of the Indochina War and German breeding experiments right
Speaker 1: here in the US. There is no other profit involved.
Speaker 1: And that's really interesting, the fact that he's like my
Speaker 1: belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder because he's only
Speaker 1: now realized that he had a hand in killing JFK.
Speaker 1: He also posts advocate anarchist two of the presidents. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right. Yeah, Actually, I'm not sure invatably market.
Speaker 1: He may still have been an objectivist back then. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Remember they can have that one, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can. He wanted JFK dead for Randy in reasons.
Speaker 1: Oh it's very funny. Um yeah, so um we will.
Speaker 1: We will continue to talk about Kerry Thornley and give
Speaker 1: sort of the last stages of his life in in
Speaker 1: the final part of this epic series, and we will
Speaker 1: also talk about what happens after the original Discordians and
Speaker 1: how their ideas get taken and changed and turned eventually
Speaker 1: into the sundry fascist manipulation campaigns that have had such
Speaker 1: an influence on our last couple of presidential elections and
Speaker 1: last I don't know dozen ish public mass murders. Um.
Speaker 1: But before we do that, Margaret Garrison, Yes, you know what.
Speaker 1: It hasn't it's been implicated in any mass murders US
Speaker 1: US as far as I know. We did. We did
Speaker 1: a background check on youth of you. Well, I drove
Speaker 1: past the police department building and screamed, has Garrison committed
Speaker 1: any crimes? And no one, no one called me back.
Speaker 1: That's good, that's good. And you also went and found
Speaker 1: that Dutch zine and got someone to translate it from
Speaker 1: Dutch and found out that I had not done anything wrong.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. That's all the Zene focuses on
Speaker 1: these days is your lack of complicity in various crimes. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I know. If you have any old copies of Kerry
Speaker 1: Thornley Wall newspapers from Little Five Points in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: hit us the fuck up, because I want to I
Speaker 1: want to see some of that shit. I want to
Speaker 1: read kulcha um. Yeah, what do you guys got to plug? Well,
Speaker 1: if if you want to try to find if you
Speaker 1: have any of those weird zines from from Little five
Speaker 1: Points or the Walls or the Wall newspapers, can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter and Instagram at Hungry Bowtie. I just
Speaker 1: speaking of Atlanta. Just finished up a four part series
Speaker 1: on the toptop city movement in Atlanta, Georgia. The Week
Speaker 1: of Action should be either ongoing or about to happen
Speaker 1: by the time this episode airs, so yeah, excellent. I
Speaker 1: have a podcast. I have two podcasts. I have a
Speaker 1: podcast called Live Like the World is Dying that is
Speaker 1: individual and community preparedness, and I have a podcast on
Speaker 1: this very network and it's called Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool stuff And yeah, you can listen to it every
Speaker 1: Monday and Wednesday. And I have a book called Escape
Speaker 1: from Insul Island. I have a bunch of books, but
Speaker 1: the most recent one is called Escape from Insul Island
Speaker 1: and you can read it. It came out. You can
Speaker 1: get it wherever you steal, but wherever you books buy it,
Speaker 1: steal it. Steal you know, just go steal something everybody stidia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: steal the Principia discordia um from a bookstore that has
Speaker 1: the temerity to sell it um. And uh, I don't know, Sophy,
Speaker 1: what what kind of crimes are we allowed to advocate
Speaker 1: our listeners commit go go, go back in time and
Speaker 1: shoot JFK, go do it? Chris, just bleep me talking
Speaker 1: right now? Yeah, wow, Sophie, I mean, yeah, I that much.
Speaker 1: I think that much thermite would take out the structural supports.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if a controlled demolition like that
Speaker 1: is going to lead to as fast a collapse as
Speaker 1: you expect. I think we'll have to I think we'll
Speaker 1: have to check this by legal before we air this.
Speaker 1: Are this episode Well, well, well we'll get back to
Speaker 1: you all on that. But wow, Sophie surprisingly intricate player,
Speaker 1: and if any of that was bleeped out, it was
Speaker 1: actually the CIA who bleeped it out. Yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: do that. We'll just cut this whole section. But if
Speaker 1: this section runs but part of it's bleeped out, it
Speaker 1: means that the CIA has altered this episode as part
Speaker 1: of an influence operation. And you can't trust anything that
Speaker 1: we say in this because as good as the technology
Speaker 1: has gotten for deep fakes right now, there's no way
Speaker 1: to know if we actually said this, or this is
Speaker 1: something that our CIA handlers are putting out using our voices.
Speaker 1: We may not even be alive anymore. You have no
Speaker 1: way of telling I love that we haven't learned from
Speaker 1: the actual thing we're describing. We haven't learned from the
Speaker 1: history that we are in the process of describing. I
Speaker 1: was just gonna talk to do that thing where like
Speaker 1: a TV program gets pulled live on it. It's just like,
Speaker 1: I mean, look, Margaret, but the chief lesson of this
Speaker 1: show is that it is impossible to learn things from history.
Speaker 1: Can we live that message every day? Yeah? All right?
Speaker 1: Scording by Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media at our website,
Speaker 1: coolszonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.