1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,000
[Music]

2
00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:10,000
Monster House Presents

3
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:13,000
[Music]

4
00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:17,000
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.

5
00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:18,000
[Music]

6
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:22,000
A giant airing creature, pod eight, one mass.

7
00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:27,000
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland,

8
00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:30,000
hit the creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.

9
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:53,000
[Music]

10
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:58,000
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.

11
00:00:58,000 --> 00:00:59,000
I'm Blake Smith.

12
00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:01,000
And I'm Karen Stolzner.

13
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:03,000
[Music]

14
00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:09,000
We're back with part two of our interview with Adam Goe rightly about Operation Mind Fuck.

15
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:13,000
As I put this together, I'm landing a little after a presidential debate

16
00:01:13,000 --> 00:01:19,000
in which the GOP candidate claimed that Haitian refugees in Ohio are eating pets.

17
00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:23,000
It's a sad indictment of the national media that the majority of that coverage

18
00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:26,000
merely says that these claims are unsubstantiated.

19
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:30,000
I'd like to believe that if you're a regular listener to this show,

20
00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:33,000
you would immediately recognize this story for what it actually is.

21
00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:37,000
A racist bit of urban legend that has been leveled against refugees in America

22
00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:41,000
at least since the 1980s, and is probably much older than that.

23
00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:45,000
But that word unsubstantiated implies that there's some point

24
00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,000
where you might be able to track it down to some root incident

25
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:50,000
that would confirm it to be true.

26
00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:52,000
But that's not how folklore works.

27
00:01:52,000 --> 00:01:54,000
That's not how urban legends work.

28
00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:58,000
But watching these stories spread and there are lots of them

29
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:00,000
isn't indicative of a few things.

30
00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:03,000
It shows that we still have a portion of our population

31
00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:06,000
that cannot abide by the idea that anybody is doing better than they are,

32
00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:10,000
and especially if they're not one of us.

33
00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:13,000
This is the basis of stories like pets being eaten by immigrants

34
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:16,000
are the infamous black welfare queen

35
00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:19,000
that Ronald Reagan conjured up in his presidential run.

36
00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:22,000
People who are themselves struggling often are very susceptible

37
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:26,000
to the idea that strangers are somehow gaming the system.

38
00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:31,000
Weaponizing envy is child's play for a politician

39
00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:34,000
as is weaponizing the other ring of newcomers.

40
00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:38,000
Now this may seem off topic, and I do try to steer away from politics.

41
00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:41,000
I have friends and family on every side of the political spectrum

42
00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:44,000
and I recognize the empathy for people who are different from us

43
00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:47,000
is not always a universal value.

44
00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:50,000
But the rumors side, the conspiracy side of all this,

45
00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:53,000
the idea that there are secret forces at play,

46
00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:56,000
steering us whether they're the deep state or foreign agents

47
00:02:56,000 --> 00:02:58,000
or people of different religious backgrounds

48
00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:00,000
or the mason's or the communists,

49
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:04,000
or alien species or subterranean reptiles.

50
00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:08,000
The list could go on and on, but sooner or later it usually lands

51
00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:10,000
on either the Jews or the Illuminati

52
00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:13,000
and sometimes those are treated interchangeably.

53
00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:17,000
Some people get so caught up in trying to ID the ROOP culprit

54
00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:21,000
that they never consider that maybe nobody's pulling the strings.

55
00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:24,000
That every outcome may have strong forces from various groups

56
00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:28,000
but that the end state is ultimately the result of stochastic forces

57
00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:31,000
outside anyone groups' controls.

58
00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:33,000
Even a single event can be confused

59
00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:36,000
with enough injections of narrative manipulation.

60
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:39,000
As I record this, we're just a few days after the anniversary

61
00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:40,000
of the 9/11 attacks.

62
00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:42,000
What was that about?

63
00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:44,000
Do you have a story about it in your head?

64
00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:46,000
What did it have to do with the war in Iraq?

65
00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:49,000
There are so many conspiracies around that one event

66
00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:52,000
that debunking them all or figuring out which are true,

67
00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:55,000
becomes a monumental and never-ending task.

68
00:03:55,000 --> 00:03:58,000
It's easier to train people to spot conspiracy theories

69
00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:01,000
by their broad form rather than through the minute,

70
00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:05,000
reputation or confirmation of the various elements.

71
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:07,000
Immigrants are not eating our pets,

72
00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:10,000
but stand by, I'm gonna make a prediction.

73
00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:13,000
Very soon, I expect someone will find a pet corpse

74
00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:15,000
and get it into the news.

75
00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:18,000
And this will not be confirmation that the rumors are true,

76
00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:22,000
but it will be confirmation that folklore is often made real

77
00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:24,000
through a process called ostention.

78
00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:26,000
That's just a fancy way of saying that sometimes ideas

79
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:28,000
get into people's heads so firmly

80
00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:30,000
that they wanna act out the legends

81
00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:33,000
or provide pseudo-evidence that the stories are real.

82
00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:36,000
Folklore's Bill Ellis wrote about this in his book,

83
00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:39,000
"Alien's Ghosts and Cults, Legends We Live."

84
00:04:39,000 --> 00:04:41,000
But so have other folklorists.

85
00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:43,000
I've argued myself that the thing that creates

86
00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:45,000
a typical monster flap, for example,

87
00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:49,000
isn't an outbreak of monsters, but an outbreak of story.

88
00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:52,000
And the story we're looking at in this two-part talk

89
00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:55,000
with Adam Gorightly is a network of deliberate injections

90
00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:57,000
of anarchic, conspiratorial narratives

91
00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:00,000
into the post-Vietnam world of the 1970s.

92
00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:03,000
Our Mary Pranksters include the Discordian movement

93
00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:06,000
created by Carrie Thorneley and Greg Hill

94
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:09,000
and the Illuminatus Trilogy written by Robert Anton Wilson

95
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:11,000
and Robert Shea.

96
00:05:11,000 --> 00:05:13,000
Their decentralized acts of creative anarchy

97
00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:15,000
were known as Operation Mind-F***.

98
00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:18,000
Here's a recording of Bob Wilson describing what he meant

99
00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:20,000
and how that spreads.

100
00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:27,000
"Aporation Mind-F*** is a form of guerrilla ontology.

101
00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:30,000
It's a group of involving many people

102
00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:35,000
and it is an attempt to galvanize the minds of many readers

103
00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:38,000
and television viewers and movie goers

104
00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:41,000
to suddenly see the world in a new way.

105
00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:45,000
And membership and operation Mind-F*** is not secret.

106
00:05:45,000 --> 00:05:49,000
It's just once you understand what operation Mind-F*** is.

107
00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:53,000
If you are a writer or a director or otherwise involved

108
00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:57,000
in the entertainment literature, the theater game,

109
00:05:57,000 --> 00:05:59,000
you just automatically become a member

110
00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:01,000
if you're sympathetic to it.

111
00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:03,000
In Operation Mind-F*** rolls merrily alone,

112
00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:06,000
and since it is no centralized conspiracy,

113
00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:10,000
nobody can ever stop it because there's nobody giving the letters.

114
00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:15,000
It's the only purely anarchist movement in the arts today.

115
00:06:15,000 --> 00:06:20,000
And it's very easy to recognize the members.

116
00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:23,000
You'll find 23s popping up in their works.

117
00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:28,000
You'll find references to the kind of the oncoming Yen revolution,

118
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:31,000
the Aquarian Conspiracy, Space Travel,

119
00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:34,000
and there's an old Tau-Dien-Praver

120
00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:37,000
who once forced it down to conspire three of them

121
00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:40,000
of fools and the fourth is a government agent.

122
00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:42,000
And I believe with modern surveillance techniques

123
00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:44,000
that's more true than ever.

124
00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:47,000
And any over-rate action against the power structure

125
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:50,000
is doomed to failure because of the techniques of control

126
00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:52,000
that have been developed.

127
00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:56,000
But the anarchistic impulses of art cannot be governed.

128
00:06:56,000 --> 00:07:02,000
And I think more and more of the culture-shapers

129
00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:05,000
are becoming part of Operation Mind-F*** in the whole world

130
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:07,000
is having its mind f***ed.

131
00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:10,000
And I'm very happy that I can play a humble part

132
00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:12,000
in this noble endeavor.

133
00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:15,000
[APPLAUSE]

134
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:18,000
Now, how an anti-authoritarian narrative

135
00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:21,000
became fodder for neo-fascism is still something

136
00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:23,000
I'm trying to get a better understanding of,

137
00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:25,000
but that is what happened.

138
00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:27,000
There are still people playing in this space

139
00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:29,000
teasing the influence of the Illuminati,

140
00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:31,000
using the icons of the eye of the pyramid

141
00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:34,000
and the apple of discordia, and generally having fun.

142
00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:37,000
And then there are those who take the algebraic idea

143
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:39,000
that if A equals B and B equals C,

144
00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:42,000
then the deep state is really the Illuminati.

145
00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:44,000
And they run with that.

146
00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:46,000
I think about this stuff a lot.

147
00:07:46,000 --> 00:07:48,000
And apparently I could just keep rambling on

148
00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:51,000
about all the ways these ideas have amused me and frightened me

149
00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:53,000
and then made the world a more interesting yet

150
00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:55,000
also a more dangerous place.

151
00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:57,000
But there's no end to it.

152
00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:00,000
So let's get back to our interview with author Adam Gorightly.

153
00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:04,000
Links to his books on these topics and many others are in our show notes.

154
00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:14,000
Monster Talk.

155
00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:16,000
A couple of years ago,

156
00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:19,000
I got into a big reading binge

157
00:08:19,000 --> 00:08:22,000
and I never read like one thing at a time.

158
00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:24,000
I tend to hop around.

159
00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:29,000
And I was hopping around between Robert Anton Wilson's cosmic trigger

160
00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:33,000
and Philip K. Dick's valus or valus.

161
00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:34,000
Yeah.

162
00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:37,000
And I think I was going through a nostic meltdown.

163
00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:40,000
These books, I had no, I didn't pick them up

164
00:08:40,000 --> 00:08:42,000
because they were related.

165
00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:45,000
But like, I mean, I swear I was losing my mind

166
00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:49,000
with how much overlap there was content-wise between these things.

167
00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:51,000
It was freaking me out.

168
00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:52,000
Yeah.

169
00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:54,000
That brings me to the aluminum and autostrilogy.

170
00:08:54,000 --> 00:08:57,000
So that's, I think that starts in what 75.

171
00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:00,000
And it's like, it's clearly, I mean, they're novels.

172
00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:02,000
They're supposed to be fictional.

173
00:09:02,000 --> 00:09:06,000
But they, I mean, if you can imagine a conspiracy,

174
00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:08,000
it's in there and linked together.

175
00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:10,000
It's crazy.

176
00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:11,000
Oh, thanks.

177
00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:12,000
Thanks for reminding me.

178
00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:14,000
So it gets back to playboys.

179
00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:16,000
So this operation,

180
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:20,000
mind-fuck this interacting between Wilson

181
00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:24,000
and Shane, Carrie Thorneley and Greg Hill,

182
00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:28,000
and about half-dozen other people sending back and forth

183
00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:33,000
their latest discoveries about the illuminati and whatever else they had to

184
00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:35,000
going on at that time.

185
00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:40,000
And then, you know, Wilson plants that letter and playboy

186
00:09:40,000 --> 00:09:42,000
about the illuminati.

187
00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:47,000
And in that role is the editor of the advisory started.

188
00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:52,000
He talked about, and they talked about this in Cosmic Trigger, too.

189
00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:57,000
I think he kind of pushed some magic button and he started getting in

190
00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:02,000
data with all these wild, even more crazy conspiracy theories and stuff

191
00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:05,000
that people were sending into the playboy advisor.

192
00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:09,000
And he would share this with Robert Chey.

193
00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:11,000
And at one point, you know, they said,

194
00:10:11,000 --> 00:10:16,000
we got to write a novel based on all this craziness about the

195
00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:22,000
illuminati and the, that, he included the recordings in the

196
00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:27,000
illuminati trilogy, the illuminati were the bad guys and the

197
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:32,000
discordians were the good guys and pulled in, you know,

198
00:10:32,000 --> 00:10:36,000
all these different crazy stories and conspiracy theories like the

199
00:10:36,000 --> 00:10:38,000
John Dillinger was still alive.

200
00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:43,000
There was another editor playboy kind of came up with that

201
00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:47,000
material and started his own discordian,

202
00:10:47,000 --> 00:10:53,000
Kabul called the John Dillinger died for your sins society.

203
00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:58,000
So that pretty involved the guy's name escapes me right now.

204
00:10:58,000 --> 00:11:03,000
But, and so all of this fed into illuminati and they're writing

205
00:11:03,000 --> 00:11:08,000
this in basically 1967,

206
00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:15,000
1968 and the idea was for this huge sprawling like a thousand

207
00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:20,000
page novel. They were based on it on at that time.

208
00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:25,000
There was the rise and fall of the third Reich was a bite book that

209
00:11:25,000 --> 00:11:30,000
came out in paperback that was like a thousand pages, a huge

210
00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:34,000
thing and they were contemplating something that size and they

211
00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:40,000
were like, "Ruth is crazy thing." I think finished it 68, 69.

212
00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:44,000
Horace Naizbeth. I got it. Yeah, sorry.

213
00:11:44,000 --> 00:11:49,000
Well, that was this discordian name, but he had another real

214
00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:54,000
name too and you can find out I have a website called the story

215
00:11:54,000 --> 00:11:58,000
discordia where I write about a lot of this stuff too and his name

216
00:11:58,000 --> 00:12:01,000
will come to me when I quit trying to think of it.

217
00:12:01,000 --> 00:12:06,000
And so they couldn't get it published initially.

218
00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:13,000
It wasn't published until 1975 finally and at that time to get

219
00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:19,000
it published, some stuff had to be removed and it was broken into a

220
00:12:19,000 --> 00:12:25,000
three-part trilogy just because to make it more digestible to

221
00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:28,000
the public, I guess. I don't know.

222
00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:33,000
But they have a combined obibis but it's a door stop.

223
00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:35,000
It's a hunker.

224
00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:41,000
And I should touch on the history of the Illuminati real briefly

225
00:12:41,000 --> 00:12:44,000
if I could and how that he sure. Sure, sure.

226
00:12:44,000 --> 00:12:47,000
So and I'm not an expert in the Illuminati.

227
00:12:47,000 --> 00:12:52,000
I just play one on the radius.

228
00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:56,000
So I might get some dates and facts wrong but is basically

229
00:12:56,000 --> 00:13:04,000
started in 1776 by this Jesuit scholar professor of Canon law

230
00:13:04,000 --> 00:13:08,000
at Ingolstadt University in Bavaria.

231
00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:10,000
I think I'm saying Ingolstadt.

232
00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:12,000
That's how they say it in the hammer films.

233
00:13:12,000 --> 00:13:14,000
I'm sure it's right.

234
00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:16,000
Last week they hang the man of Ingolstadt.

235
00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:19,000
That was Adam Wisehop and he started this.

236
00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:23,000
He was Wisehop belong to the free Masons,

237
00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:28,000
which is a secret society and he started this other secret society

238
00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:33,000
which was like Wilson describes it a secret society within a secret society

239
00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:38,000
called the Illuminati and it was as I understand it was just Wisehop

240
00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:44,000
and meet a few students, faculty members wanted to keep this secret

241
00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:51,000
because what they were discussing was kind of they were libertines basically

242
00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:54,000
and they were interested.

243
00:13:54,000 --> 00:13:59,000
And basically self determination, you know,

244
00:13:59,000 --> 00:14:09,000
man women being free to either live under a high archi of religion

245
00:14:09,000 --> 00:14:15,000
or not, you know, and they basically supported things like

246
00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:23,000
the suffrage movement and you know these type of things that

247
00:14:23,000 --> 00:14:28,000
basically were seen as heretical during that first--

248
00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:32,000
Yeah, Mike, Mike come across as anti-monarchy even.

249
00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:34,000
And any more, any more.

250
00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:36,000
There you go.

251
00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:41,000
And so they kept it on the download for obvious reasons

252
00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:46,000
and it was relatively short-lived, I think, you know,

253
00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:52,000
not long after a few years later their secret society was discovered

254
00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:59,000
and they were basically Wisehop was branded as a seditionist

255
00:14:59,000 --> 00:15:04,000
and he got the hill out of Dodge and that was kind of the hill,

256
00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:10,000
you know, got out of Fled Bavaria and that was the end of the Illuminati sort of.

257
00:15:10,000 --> 00:15:16,000
But then it got mythologized over time by conspiracy theorists,

258
00:15:16,000 --> 00:15:22,000
maybe religious zealots of religious fanatics.

259
00:15:22,000 --> 00:15:26,000
However you want to term them in over the next hundred years or so,

260
00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:34,000
there was different books written that because it started being portrayed as anti-religion

261
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:40,000
and then it kind of got conflated into their sataness.

262
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:45,000
There was a book by a lady named Nesta Webster, I think, in the 1800s

263
00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:49,000
in the early 20th century,

264
00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:55,000
another book on the Illuminati that was pushing a lot of this stuff

265
00:15:55,000 --> 00:16:00,000
by I think his name was James J. Robinson or John J. Robinson,

266
00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:07,000
whatever the case, it started evolving over the time and also other tropes

267
00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:13,000
started entering this too and by the 60s it had kind of re-emerged

268
00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:20,000
with these John Birch society aligned people and once again being conflated

269
00:16:20,000 --> 00:16:29,000
the Illuminati was basically part of the structure of these international bankers

270
00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:34,000
behind the scenes, pulling the strings, causing all these wars

271
00:16:34,000 --> 00:16:43,000
and there's some underlying, this is getting tied to anti-Semitism too.

272
00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:51,000
That's what kind of the John Birch society angle was at that time for using this

273
00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:58,000
as a propaganda tool against, they're saying the communists were basically

274
00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:05,000
pushing the civil rights movement and integration, etc., etc.,

275
00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:09,000
and see how politics entered into all this and that anyway,

276
00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:16,000
that's what Wilson and Thorneley and those guys were looking at all this stuff

277
00:17:16,000 --> 00:17:22,000
and also putting their own spin on the Illuminati and I forgot what the heck

278
00:17:22,000 --> 00:17:25,000
we were, you're going to get into...

279
00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:31,000
No worries, there's still some aspects to cover and you've talked about the 50s and 60s.

280
00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:38,000
Could we get into the 70s and could you tell us a bit about the church of the subgenius

281
00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:45,000
and tell us what that is and this is part of the counterculture or is it a

282
00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:47,000
divergent evolution?

283
00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:51,000
Oh, it was a huge part of the counterculture and I'm not, you know,

284
00:17:51,000 --> 00:18:01,000
I kind of knew about Bob Dobbs' "The Main Figure" with the subgenius society

285
00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:06,000
and they were much similar to the discordians but the discordians were kind of

286
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:15,000
behind the scenes bubbling up in the counterculture, they influenced it quite a bit.

287
00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:24,000
Basically, the church of the subgenius was a more overt bunch of pranksters

288
00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:29,000
who were involved in different public events and crazy stuff and

289
00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:36,000
that Care Thorneley actually got involved with the subgenius movement as well.

290
00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:48,000
So, I can't tell you too much about the particulars about the subgenius but if you, you know, people can...

291
00:18:48,000 --> 00:18:55,000
I'll tell you that there's a playful side to this and maybe a sinister side to this.

292
00:18:55,000 --> 00:18:57,000
And I think of the playful side.

293
00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:04,000
I first really got immersed in this stuff through Steve Jackson Games and they had a game

294
00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:09,000
called Illuminati New World Order that came in right after I got out of the Navy.

295
00:19:09,000 --> 00:19:12,000
So, that'd been like '94, '95 right in there.

296
00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:17,000
And there had been, I guess, a board game called Illuminatus or something or Illuminati.

297
00:19:17,000 --> 00:19:19,000
I never really played that one.

298
00:19:19,000 --> 00:19:24,000
But the card game, man, I loved it and it came out with a, they did a re-release of the

299
00:19:24,000 --> 00:19:31,000
Principitas Cordia and it had, it's still one of my favorite games and I have hundreds

300
00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:36,000
and hundreds of the cards. But you can play them and you basically you're an organization

301
00:19:36,000 --> 00:19:38,000
and, you know, I'll talk about this in the intro.

302
00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:43,000
But you basically build these networks and they all work against each other or for each other.

303
00:19:43,000 --> 00:19:48,000
But if there's a conspiracy that exists, it shows up on these cards.

304
00:19:48,000 --> 00:19:51,000
And that's fine.

305
00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:55,000
But I have one right in front of me.

306
00:19:55,000 --> 00:19:57,000
A bunch of bookmarks.

307
00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:01,000
I knew I had one and then I pulled it out and has Illuminati on one side.

308
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:07,000
New World Order, so they turned it around and, oh, it has gun lobby.

309
00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:10,000
There you go.

310
00:20:10,000 --> 00:20:18,000
There's like the weird, let's get the weird get organized and there's, it's just, it's a brilliant game.

311
00:20:18,000 --> 00:20:20,000
It's so much fun.

312
00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:29,000
But by the time we get to 2016, they're about, you know, this stuff is, you know, being used by QAnon.

313
00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:36,000
There's a dark side to this and I, I got approached by QAnon people asking me to sell my cards

314
00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:40,000
because they really thought there was something more than just a game there, which is crazy.

315
00:20:40,000 --> 00:20:46,000
I still, I held on to them, but my, my goodness, they were selling on eBay just like single card,

316
00:20:46,000 --> 00:20:52,000
not for, not for playing for something else. I don't really understand it exactly.

317
00:20:52,000 --> 00:20:56,000
So, wow.

318
00:20:56,000 --> 00:21:08,000
So with the Illuminati stuff, you know, Wilson and Shay once again helped promote this mythology,

319
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:18,000
even though they weren't necessarily trying to promote it in the direction which it's been used here in recent years.

320
00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:26,000
You know, the, winningly or unwittingly, they helped unleash this beast, you know, and buy.

321
00:21:26,000 --> 00:21:37,000
You know, that once again went on to influence or help create QAnon these type of things by really in the 90s.

322
00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:44,000
The Illuminati started once again, Rhett getting ramped up by different conspiracy theories.

323
00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:51,000
There was a, it was a name of guide conspiracy theorist name Fritz Springmire.

324
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:56,000
He wrote this huge book called The Bloodlines of the Illuminati.

325
00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:05,000
And it, you know, connected it once again with the banking families and all these notorious people,

326
00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:16,000
the Rothschilds that were beyond behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the New World Order and it kept evolving into,

327
00:22:16,000 --> 00:22:27,000
they were practicing mind control and they were satinists and this kind of played into a lot of the David Ike stuff, you know, of that period, Bill Cooper.

328
00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:30,000
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah.

329
00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:37,000
The book behold the pill horse featured in it, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff, but he also republished.

330
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:45,000
He sure did. Yeah. Reproduce. Right. The protocols of the elders of Zion. Right there in the, right there in the middle of it.

331
00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:54,000
Yeah. Yeah. He was always careful. I remember on a radio. He said, people don't, I'm not talking about Jewish people when it, when it says the Zion's,

332
00:22:54,000 --> 00:23:04,000
they're actually talking about the Illuminati, but you know, what does that actually mean to a lot of people?

333
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:15,000
Well, yeah, that's, that's the thing. I mean, it's the, there's this playful side and then there's this dark and sinister side and anti-Semitism always seems to be,

334
00:23:15,000 --> 00:23:23,000
I don't know what, what the deal is exactly, but like it always ends up coming back to the Jews and it, yeah, I don't, it's always happened.

335
00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:31,000
I don't know why, but it's, well, yeah, I think there's, there's reasons why. Well, yeah.

336
00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:38,000
But I have the many reasons none of them are that the Jews really rule the world just to be clear.

337
00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:41,000
Yeah, that's actually.

338
00:23:41,000 --> 00:23:48,000
It's, it's, it's used as, you know, for political propaganda, basically. Right. Yeah.

339
00:23:48,000 --> 00:24:01,000
And for me, back in like certainly the 80s, early 90s, it was all fun and games to me too, just like it was probably during the Illuminatus period,

340
00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:09,000
but his Wilson later said Operation Mind kind of came back and bit them in the ass.

341
00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:18,000
It happens. I mean, this is, I, I'm a big fan of the idea of memetics and how ideas can spread and transform.

342
00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:27,000
And it's, it's the two, it's the two things they spread and they transform and they do it without any control from the people who create those ideas.

343
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:36,000
The case in point, Richard Dawkins comes up with memes as a sort of an intellectual way of talking about things that replicate mutate.

344
00:24:36,000 --> 00:24:42,000
But what do we think about what memes now is just cat videos and cat photos, you know, is on the internet.

345
00:24:42,000 --> 00:24:49,000
So even the idea of memes themselves of, you know, mutated to the point that is really hard to recognize them anymore.

346
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:53,000
So, but I'm okay with cat memes. Well, yeah, yeah, those are fine.

347
00:24:53,000 --> 00:25:01,000
But this is such a big topic. I know, and you know, we're trying to limit our episodes to, you know, 45 minutes or so.

348
00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:13,000
I just, I want to, you've got Lee, you've done a, a, a Yomans job of taking us through sort of the highlights of this stuff, but there's so much more to read.

349
00:25:13,000 --> 00:25:22,000
Yeah, so where, where should people go from here? What, what, what, I guess which of your books would be great to get them introduced into a deep dive in this topics?

350
00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:28,000
Where should they go? Probably the prankster in the conspiracy.

351
00:25:28,000 --> 00:25:38,000
It's basically a biography of Carrie Thornley talks about, you know, the discordian days and the Jim Garrison investigation.

352
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:48,000
And so I would start there and also the book, a story of discordia has a lot of the rare discordian artifacts in it.

353
00:25:48,000 --> 00:25:56,000
It shows how the, it actually has a reproduction within that book of the first principiated discordia.

354
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:02,000
So, yeah, I would start there and I have the website called the story of discordia.

355
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:03,000
Nice.

356
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:14,000
Which, which I also, yeah, took in there, there was a period where I was part of a reading group.

357
00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:24,000
There's a website called rawilluminations.com and they were doing an illuminati reading group several years back.

358
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:43,000
So I kind of took a deep dive and roots some like extended entries where I really got into the nitty gritty of how some of the different tropes and things and names and events in illuminatis.

359
00:26:43,000 --> 00:27:07,000
Really came out of the early days of the discordian society and these different people interacting with each other, which no one would really know unless they had access to the archives that I got turned on to.

360
00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:13,000
Anyway, there's a lot of materials there at that website.

361
00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:19,000
Great. Well, yeah, thank you for recommending those books and I think there's just so much to dig into with this.

362
00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:25,000
But Adam, we've really enjoyed talking with you about this topic is just you covered so much ground.

363
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:31,000
But we've got one final question that we like to ask all of our guests and that is what's your favorite monster?

364
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:39,000
My favorite monster, I think is the cyclops from the Sinbad movie.

365
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:43,000
Oh, Harryhausen, yeah, Harryhausen, yeah.

366
00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:47,000
Nice. I just just got back from Dragoncon and I was talking to my wife.

367
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:53,000
When we were still engaged, we went to a special screening of King Kong.

368
00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:02,000
Yeah, and it was down in the cellar, you know, down at the bottom, one of the hotels, but to our surprise, it was introduced by Ray Harryhausen.

369
00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:07,000
He was sitting right behind us and he hopped up and talked about the movie and we got to talk to him for a few minutes.

370
00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:13,000
It was great. I was so delighted. I got to meet him and Ray Bradbury that year was really wonderful.

371
00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:17,000
Oh, I love Ray Bradbury. Yeah, I was so good.

372
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:27,000
Yeah, it was, if you look at it, I just kind of came to mind the way that cyclops moves is quite similar to King Kong.

373
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:31,000
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And a similar beast.

374
00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:35,000
Quite a lot. And I know he was sort of tutored by Willis O'Brien.

375
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:41,000
And I just, it was a joy to meet him and to hear him talk about his craft.

376
00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:50,000
And I know everybody loves CGI, but man, there is something so organic about classic stop motion photography.

377
00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:53,000
Yeah, unbeatable, unbeatable.

378
00:28:53,000 --> 00:29:01,000
Well, you've really, really scratched an edge. You've taken one off my bucket list by getting to talk to you a person.

379
00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:05,000
I've been following your work for a long time. I really appreciate this.

380
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:13,000
I imagine our listeners will be a little bit confounded and overwhelmed by the scope and sprawl of all this stuff.

381
00:29:13,000 --> 00:29:19,000
But my gosh, it's such an interesting thing how all these things were so interconnected and way before the internet.

382
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:25,000
I mean, you know, this stuff still exists. I'll tell you one more thing before we go.

383
00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:32,000
Like I, when my great uncle died, he was more like a grandfather to me because my grandfather passed away before I was born.

384
00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:38,000
But my great uncle was kind of a hoarder and I was going through his basement after he passed.

385
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:42,000
And I found a copy of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, which is.

386
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:50,000
Oh, yeah, yeah, that weird scary Allen book. Yeah, that's one of the Jeep John Birch Society sure is.

387
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:52,000
It's a lot of publications.

388
00:29:52,000 --> 00:30:00,000
Well, what was weird about it was it had a letter in it that was basically introducing him to the John Birch Society.

389
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:07,000
And it was co-signed or like it had all the names of these other people in town that he could like reach out to to learn more about it.

390
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:14,000
And it was like every dentist, every doctor, every prominent business person in my hometown.

391
00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:23,000
It was, it was just like a really extraordinary. It's like by the time I found it, you know, that had been 30 years since it had been sent out.

392
00:30:23,000 --> 00:30:35,000
But I mean, these guys were all now the sort of the patriarchs of the town. And it was, they had all been like immersed in this John Birch sort of conspiracy minded hyper conservatism libertarianism.

393
00:30:35,000 --> 00:30:42,000
And it was like it was so wild to run across it. I still got it over here on my bookshelf with that letter.

394
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:49,000
I think you know, I might turn it over to the historical society for the county or something at some point. It's very, it's very interesting.

395
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:51,000
Yeah, that sounds like it.

396
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:56,000
Yeah, well, thank you so much for your time and for your work.

397
00:30:56,000 --> 00:30:59,000
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, amazing.

398
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:01,000
Thanks for adding me on. It was fun.

399
00:31:01,000 --> 00:31:03,000
Monster doll.

400
00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:08,000
You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith.

401
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:10,000
And I'm Karen Stolzner.

402
00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:17,000
You just heard part two of our two part chat with Adam go rightly about Operation Mind Fuck, the discordians in the Illuminati.

403
00:31:17,000 --> 00:31:23,000
Links to Adam's books are in the show notes. I've definitely had some fun playing around with the ideas in this space.

404
00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:28,000
But watching it get weaponized for political purposes has been demoralizing.

405
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:32,000
Of course, that's true for many, many, many other ideas and movements.

406
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:37,000
At least I had a lot of fun playing the Illuminati New World Order game in the 90s,

407
00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:43,000
knowing nobody would ever really believe in a secret orbital laser platform being used by a powerful cabal.

408
00:31:43,000 --> 00:31:53,000
When I now deleted Facebook post, green question whether California's deadly campfire in 2018 was started by lasers being down from outer space.

409
00:31:53,000 --> 00:32:00,000
Laser, she says somehow connected to the Rothschilds, the Jewish European banking family, the target of some of the oldest,

410
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:07,000
laziest, most dangerous anti-Semitic tropes on the books, Jewish space lasers.

411
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:09,000
Oh, damn.

412
00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:15,000
And that's not just some hypothetical threat. Thanks to redistricting, she now represents the county adjacent to mine.

413
00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:20,000
And encompasses the city where I was born and a lot of the state where I like to go fishing and visit with family.

414
00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:26,000
Her hate-mongering nonsense used to be so absurd that it was literally on playing cards and games,

415
00:32:26,000 --> 00:32:31,000
and now I've had to watch it run wild in my community seriously believed.

416
00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:37,000
Well, anything can be weaponized, I guess. I just wish that evidence-based thinking was more valued these days.

417
00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:47,000
Will the fund days ever come back? Only when the majority of us have the discernment to recognize hate and nonsense even when it's being used as sensibly to our own benefit.

418
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:54,000
It turns out that the wobbly legs of conspiracy are often shot in the iron heels of fascism.

419
00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:58,000
Around the world, people report monsters, but are they real?

420
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:11,000
Join the detective of the impossible, Joe Nichol, as he walks you through investigations to reveal often surprising natural explanations behind some of the most famous cryptids and legendary animals ever reported.

421
00:33:11,000 --> 00:33:25,000
Using scientific skepticism, meticulous field work and historical deep dives, Joe Nichol seeks out hidden clues and real-world candidates that sometimes reveal that even the most unlikely monster stories may have a basis in reality.

422
00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:34,000
The Science of Monsters is the first book from Monster House LLC, the publisher of science shows, monster talk, and in research of.

423
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:41,000
The revised edition is now on sale and includes corrections and suggestions from you, our listeners, and now readers.

424
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:48,000
Sales of the Science of Monsters directly benefits Monster House and its podcasts, thanks to the generosity of its author.

425
00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:57,000
Pick up the revised Science of Monsters today at Amazon.com, available in paperback and Kindle editions.

426
00:33:57,000 --> 00:34:00,000
Monster talk's theme music is by Pete Steeling Monkeys.

427
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:07,000
If you found this episode interesting or informative, won't you please take a moment and give us a review on your podcasting platform.

428
00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:15,000
We'll be happy for any reviews, but our demographic suggests that iTunes reviews have the most impact on raising awareness of our existence to potential listeners.

429
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:18,000
And we thank you for your honest feedback.

430
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:28,000
[Music]

431
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:57,000
[Music]

432
00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:04,000
[Music]

433
00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:08,000
This has been a Monster House presentation.