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Monster House Presents
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It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
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A giant airing creature, pod eight, one mass.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland,
hit the creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
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Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith.
And I'm Karen Stolzner.
[Music]
We're back with part two of our interview with Adam Goe rightly about Operation Mind Fuck.
As I put this together, I'm landing a little after a presidential debate
in which the GOP candidate claimed that Haitian refugees in Ohio are eating pets.
It's a sad indictment of the national media that the majority of that coverage
merely says that these claims are unsubstantiated.
I'd like to believe that if you're a regular listener to this show,
you would immediately recognize this story for what it actually is.
A racist bit of urban legend that has been leveled against refugees in America
at least since the 1980s, and is probably much older than that.
But that word unsubstantiated implies that there's some point
where you might be able to track it down to some root incident
that would confirm it to be true.
But that's not how folklore works.
That's not how urban legends work.
But watching these stories spread and there are lots of them
isn't indicative of a few things.
It shows that we still have a portion of our population
that cannot abide by the idea that anybody is doing better than they are,
and especially if they're not one of us.
This is the basis of stories like pets being eaten by immigrants
are the infamous black welfare queen
that Ronald Reagan conjured up in his presidential run.
People who are themselves struggling often are very susceptible
to the idea that strangers are somehow gaming the system.
Weaponizing envy is child's play for a politician
as is weaponizing the other ring of newcomers.
Now this may seem off topic, and I do try to steer away from politics.
I have friends and family on every side of the political spectrum
and I recognize the empathy for people who are different from us
is not always a universal value.
But the rumors side, the conspiracy side of all this,
the idea that there are secret forces at play,
steering us whether they're the deep state or foreign agents
or people of different religious backgrounds
or the mason's or the communists,
or alien species or subterranean reptiles.
The list could go on and on, but sooner or later it usually lands
on either the Jews or the Illuminati
and sometimes those are treated interchangeably.
Some people get so caught up in trying to ID the ROOP culprit
that they never consider that maybe nobody's pulling the strings.
That every outcome may have strong forces from various groups
but that the end state is ultimately the result of stochastic forces
outside anyone groups' controls.
Even a single event can be confused
with enough injections of narrative manipulation.
As I record this, we're just a few days after the anniversary
of the 9/11 attacks.
What was that about?
Do you have a story about it in your head?
What did it have to do with the war in Iraq?
There are so many conspiracies around that one event
that debunking them all or figuring out which are true,
becomes a monumental and never-ending task.
It's easier to train people to spot conspiracy theories
by their broad form rather than through the minute,
reputation or confirmation of the various elements.
Immigrants are not eating our pets,
but stand by, I'm gonna make a prediction.
Very soon, I expect someone will find a pet corpse
and get it into the news.
And this will not be confirmation that the rumors are true,
but it will be confirmation that folklore is often made real
through a process called ostention.
That's just a fancy way of saying that sometimes ideas
get into people's heads so firmly
that they wanna act out the legends
or provide pseudo-evidence that the stories are real.
Folklore's Bill Ellis wrote about this in his book,
"Alien's Ghosts and Cults, Legends We Live."
But so have other folklorists.
I've argued myself that the thing that creates
a typical monster flap, for example,
isn't an outbreak of monsters, but an outbreak of story.
And the story we're looking at in this two-part talk
with Adam Gorightly is a network of deliberate injections
of anarchic, conspiratorial narratives
into the post-Vietnam world of the 1970s.
Our Mary Pranksters include the Discordian movement
created by Carrie Thorneley and Greg Hill
and the Illuminatus Trilogy written by Robert Anton Wilson
and Robert Shea.
Their decentralized acts of creative anarchy
were known as Operation Mind-F***.
Here's a recording of Bob Wilson describing what he meant
and how that spreads.
"Aporation Mind-F*** is a form of guerrilla ontology.
It's a group of involving many people
and it is an attempt to galvanize the minds of many readers
and television viewers and movie goers
to suddenly see the world in a new way.
And membership and operation Mind-F*** is not secret.
It's just once you understand what operation Mind-F*** is.
If you are a writer or a director or otherwise involved
in the entertainment literature, the theater game,
you just automatically become a member
if you're sympathetic to it.
In Operation Mind-F*** rolls merrily alone,
and since it is no centralized conspiracy,
nobody can ever stop it because there's nobody giving the letters.
It's the only purely anarchist movement in the arts today.
And it's very easy to recognize the members.
You'll find 23s popping up in their works.
You'll find references to the kind of the oncoming Yen revolution,
the Aquarian Conspiracy, Space Travel,
and there's an old Tau-Dien-Praver
who once forced it down to conspire three of them
of fools and the fourth is a government agent.
And I believe with modern surveillance techniques
that's more true than ever.
And any over-rate action against the power structure
is doomed to failure because of the techniques of control
that have been developed.
But the anarchistic impulses of art cannot be governed.
And I think more and more of the culture-shapers
are becoming part of Operation Mind-F*** in the whole world
is having its mind f***ed.
And I'm very happy that I can play a humble part
in this noble endeavor.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, how an anti-authoritarian narrative
became fodder for neo-fascism is still something
I'm trying to get a better understanding of,
but that is what happened.
There are still people playing in this space
teasing the influence of the Illuminati,
using the icons of the eye of the pyramid
and the apple of discordia, and generally having fun.
And then there are those who take the algebraic idea
that if A equals B and B equals C,
then the deep state is really the Illuminati.
And they run with that.
I think about this stuff a lot.
And apparently I could just keep rambling on
about all the ways these ideas have amused me and frightened me
and then made the world a more interesting yet
also a more dangerous place.
But there's no end to it.
So let's get back to our interview with author Adam Gorightly.
Links to his books on these topics and many others are in our show notes.
Monster Talk.
A couple of years ago,
I got into a big reading binge
and I never read like one thing at a time.
I tend to hop around.
And I was hopping around between Robert Anton Wilson's cosmic trigger
and Philip K. Dick's valus or valus.
Yeah.
And I think I was going through a nostic meltdown.
These books, I had no, I didn't pick them up
because they were related.
But like, I mean, I swear I was losing my mind
with how much overlap there was content-wise between these things.
It was freaking me out.
Yeah.
That brings me to the aluminum and autostrilogy.
So that's, I think that starts in what 75.
And it's like, it's clearly, I mean, they're novels.
They're supposed to be fictional.
But they, I mean, if you can imagine a conspiracy,
it's in there and linked together.
It's crazy.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks for reminding me.
So it gets back to playboys.
So this operation,
mind-fuck this interacting between Wilson
and Shane, Carrie Thorneley and Greg Hill,
and about half-dozen other people sending back and forth
their latest discoveries about the illuminati and whatever else they had to
going on at that time.
And then, you know, Wilson plants that letter and playboy
about the illuminati.
And in that role is the editor of the advisory started.
He talked about, and they talked about this in Cosmic Trigger, too.
I think he kind of pushed some magic button and he started getting in
data with all these wild, even more crazy conspiracy theories and stuff
that people were sending into the playboy advisor.
And he would share this with Robert Chey.
And at one point, you know, they said,
we got to write a novel based on all this craziness about the
illuminati and the, that, he included the recordings in the
illuminati trilogy, the illuminati were the bad guys and the
discordians were the good guys and pulled in, you know,
all these different crazy stories and conspiracy theories like the
John Dillinger was still alive.
There was another editor playboy kind of came up with that
material and started his own discordian,
Kabul called the John Dillinger died for your sins society.
So that pretty involved the guy's name escapes me right now.
But, and so all of this fed into illuminati and they're writing
this in basically 1967,
1968 and the idea was for this huge sprawling like a thousand
page novel. They were based on it on at that time.
There was the rise and fall of the third Reich was a bite book that
came out in paperback that was like a thousand pages, a huge
thing and they were contemplating something that size and they
were like, "Ruth is crazy thing." I think finished it 68, 69.
Horace Naizbeth. I got it. Yeah, sorry.
Well, that was this discordian name, but he had another real
name too and you can find out I have a website called the story
discordia where I write about a lot of this stuff too and his name
will come to me when I quit trying to think of it.
And so they couldn't get it published initially.
It wasn't published until 1975 finally and at that time to get
it published, some stuff had to be removed and it was broken into a
three-part trilogy just because to make it more digestible to
the public, I guess. I don't know.
But they have a combined obibis but it's a door stop.
It's a hunker.
And I should touch on the history of the Illuminati real briefly
if I could and how that he sure. Sure, sure.
So and I'm not an expert in the Illuminati.
I just play one on the radius.
So I might get some dates and facts wrong but is basically
started in 1776 by this Jesuit scholar professor of Canon law
at Ingolstadt University in Bavaria.
I think I'm saying Ingolstadt.
That's how they say it in the hammer films.
I'm sure it's right.
Last week they hang the man of Ingolstadt.
That was Adam Wisehop and he started this.
He was Wisehop belong to the free Masons,
which is a secret society and he started this other secret society
which was like Wilson describes it a secret society within a secret society
called the Illuminati and it was as I understand it was just Wisehop
and meet a few students, faculty members wanted to keep this secret
because what they were discussing was kind of they were libertines basically
and they were interested.
And basically self determination, you know,
man women being free to either live under a high archi of religion
or not, you know, and they basically supported things like
the suffrage movement and you know these type of things that
basically were seen as heretical during that first--
Yeah, Mike, Mike come across as anti-monarchy even.
And any more, any more.
There you go.
And so they kept it on the download for obvious reasons
and it was relatively short-lived, I think, you know,
not long after a few years later their secret society was discovered
and they were basically Wisehop was branded as a seditionist
and he got the hill out of Dodge and that was kind of the hill,
you know, got out of Fled Bavaria and that was the end of the Illuminati sort of.
But then it got mythologized over time by conspiracy theorists,
maybe religious zealots of religious fanatics.
However you want to term them in over the next hundred years or so,
there was different books written that because it started being portrayed as anti-religion
and then it kind of got conflated into their sataness.
There was a book by a lady named Nesta Webster, I think, in the 1800s
in the early 20th century,
another book on the Illuminati that was pushing a lot of this stuff
by I think his name was James J. Robinson or John J. Robinson,
whatever the case, it started evolving over the time and also other tropes
started entering this too and by the 60s it had kind of re-emerged
with these John Birch society aligned people and once again being conflated
the Illuminati was basically part of the structure of these international bankers
behind the scenes, pulling the strings, causing all these wars
and there's some underlying, this is getting tied to anti-Semitism too.
That's what kind of the John Birch society angle was at that time for using this
as a propaganda tool against, they're saying the communists were basically
pushing the civil rights movement and integration, etc., etc.,
and see how politics entered into all this and that anyway,
that's what Wilson and Thorneley and those guys were looking at all this stuff
and also putting their own spin on the Illuminati and I forgot what the heck
we were, you're going to get into...
No worries, there's still some aspects to cover and you've talked about the 50s and 60s.
Could we get into the 70s and could you tell us a bit about the church of the subgenius
and tell us what that is and this is part of the counterculture or is it a
divergent evolution?
Oh, it was a huge part of the counterculture and I'm not, you know,
I kind of knew about Bob Dobbs' "The Main Figure" with the subgenius society
and they were much similar to the discordians but the discordians were kind of
behind the scenes bubbling up in the counterculture, they influenced it quite a bit.
Basically, the church of the subgenius was a more overt bunch of pranksters
who were involved in different public events and crazy stuff and
that Care Thorneley actually got involved with the subgenius movement as well.
So, I can't tell you too much about the particulars about the subgenius but if you, you know, people can...
I'll tell you that there's a playful side to this and maybe a sinister side to this.
And I think of the playful side.
I first really got immersed in this stuff through Steve Jackson Games and they had a game
called Illuminati New World Order that came in right after I got out of the Navy.
So, that'd been like '94, '95 right in there.
And there had been, I guess, a board game called Illuminatus or something or Illuminati.
I never really played that one.
But the card game, man, I loved it and it came out with a, they did a re-release of the
Principitas Cordia and it had, it's still one of my favorite games and I have hundreds
and hundreds of the cards. But you can play them and you basically you're an organization
and, you know, I'll talk about this in the intro.
But you basically build these networks and they all work against each other or for each other.
But if there's a conspiracy that exists, it shows up on these cards.
And that's fine.
But I have one right in front of me.
A bunch of bookmarks.
I knew I had one and then I pulled it out and has Illuminati on one side.
New World Order, so they turned it around and, oh, it has gun lobby.
There you go.
There's like the weird, let's get the weird get organized and there's, it's just, it's a brilliant game.
It's so much fun.
But by the time we get to 2016, they're about, you know, this stuff is, you know, being used by QAnon.
There's a dark side to this and I, I got approached by QAnon people asking me to sell my cards
because they really thought there was something more than just a game there, which is crazy.
I still, I held on to them, but my, my goodness, they were selling on eBay just like single card,
not for, not for playing for something else. I don't really understand it exactly.
So, wow.
So with the Illuminati stuff, you know, Wilson and Shay once again helped promote this mythology,
even though they weren't necessarily trying to promote it in the direction which it's been used here in recent years.
You know, the, winningly or unwittingly, they helped unleash this beast, you know, and buy.
You know, that once again went on to influence or help create QAnon these type of things by really in the 90s.
The Illuminati started once again, Rhett getting ramped up by different conspiracy theories.
There was a, it was a name of guide conspiracy theorist name Fritz Springmire.
He wrote this huge book called The Bloodlines of the Illuminati.
And it, you know, connected it once again with the banking families and all these notorious people,
the Rothschilds that were beyond behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the New World Order and it kept evolving into,
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.
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah.
The book behold the pill horse featured in it, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff, but he also republished.
He sure did. Yeah. Reproduce. Right. The protocols of the elders of Zion. Right there in the, right there in the middle of it.
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,
they're actually talking about the Illuminati, but you know, what does that actually mean to a lot of people?
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,
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.
I don't know why, but it's, well, yeah, I think there's, there's reasons why. Well, yeah.
But I have the many reasons none of them are that the Jews really rule the world just to be clear.
Yeah, that's actually.
It's, it's, it's used as, you know, for political propaganda, basically. Right. Yeah.
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,
but his Wilson later said Operation Mind kind of came back and bit them in the ass.
It happens. I mean, this is, I, I'm a big fan of the idea of memetics and how ideas can spread and transform.
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.
The case in point, Richard Dawkins comes up with memes as a sort of an intellectual way of talking about things that replicate mutate.
But what do we think about what memes now is just cat videos and cat photos, you know, is on the internet.
So even the idea of memes themselves of, you know, mutated to the point that is really hard to recognize them anymore.
So, but I'm okay with cat memes. Well, yeah, yeah, those are fine.
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.
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.
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?
Where should they go? Probably the prankster in the conspiracy.
It's basically a biography of Carrie Thornley talks about, you know, the discordian days and the Jim Garrison investigation.
And so I would start there and also the book, a story of discordia has a lot of the rare discordian artifacts in it.
It shows how the, it actually has a reproduction within that book of the first principiated discordia.
So, yeah, I would start there and I have the website called the story of discordia.
Nice.
Which, which I also, yeah, took in there, there was a period where I was part of a reading group.
There's a website called rawilluminations.com and they were doing an illuminati reading group several years back.
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.
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.
Anyway, there's a lot of materials there at that website.
Great. Well, yeah, thank you for recommending those books and I think there's just so much to dig into with this.
But Adam, we've really enjoyed talking with you about this topic is just you covered so much ground.
But we've got one final question that we like to ask all of our guests and that is what's your favorite monster?
My favorite monster, I think is the cyclops from the Sinbad movie.
Oh, Harryhausen, yeah, Harryhausen, yeah.
Nice. I just just got back from Dragoncon and I was talking to my wife.
When we were still engaged, we went to a special screening of King Kong.
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.
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.
It was great. I was so delighted. I got to meet him and Ray Bradbury that year was really wonderful.
Oh, I love Ray Bradbury. Yeah, I was so good.
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.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And a similar beast.
Quite a lot. And I know he was sort of tutored by Willis O'Brien.
And I just, it was a joy to meet him and to hear him talk about his craft.
And I know everybody loves CGI, but man, there is something so organic about classic stop motion photography.
Yeah, unbeatable, unbeatable.
Well, you've really, really scratched an edge. You've taken one off my bucket list by getting to talk to you a person.
I've been following your work for a long time. I really appreciate this.
I imagine our listeners will be a little bit confounded and overwhelmed by the scope and sprawl of all this stuff.
But my gosh, it's such an interesting thing how all these things were so interconnected and way before the internet.
I mean, you know, this stuff still exists. I'll tell you one more thing before we go.
Like I, when my great uncle died, he was more like a grandfather to me because my grandfather passed away before I was born.
But my great uncle was kind of a hoarder and I was going through his basement after he passed.
And I found a copy of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, which is.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that weird scary Allen book. Yeah, that's one of the Jeep John Birch Society sure is.
It's a lot of publications.
Well, what was weird about it was it had a letter in it that was basically introducing him to the John Birch Society.
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.
And it was like every dentist, every doctor, every prominent business person in my hometown.
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.
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.
And it was like it was so wild to run across it. I still got it over here on my bookshelf with that letter.
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.
Yeah, that sounds like it.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for your time and for your work.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, amazing.
Thanks for adding me on. It was fun.
Monster doll.
You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith.
And I'm Karen Stolzner.
You just heard part two of our two part chat with Adam go rightly about Operation Mind Fuck, the discordians in the Illuminati.
Links to Adam's books are in the show notes. I've definitely had some fun playing around with the ideas in this space.
But watching it get weaponized for political purposes has been demoralizing.
Of course, that's true for many, many, many other ideas and movements.
At least I had a lot of fun playing the Illuminati New World Order game in the 90s,
knowing nobody would ever really believe in a secret orbital laser platform being used by a powerful cabal.
When I now deleted Facebook post, green question whether California's deadly campfire in 2018 was started by lasers being down from outer space.
Laser, she says somehow connected to the Rothschilds, the Jewish European banking family, the target of some of the oldest,
laziest, most dangerous anti-Semitic tropes on the books, Jewish space lasers.
Oh, damn.
And that's not just some hypothetical threat. Thanks to redistricting, she now represents the county adjacent to mine.
And encompasses the city where I was born and a lot of the state where I like to go fishing and visit with family.
Her hate-mongering nonsense used to be so absurd that it was literally on playing cards and games,
and now I've had to watch it run wild in my community seriously believed.
Well, anything can be weaponized, I guess. I just wish that evidence-based thinking was more valued these days.
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.
It turns out that the wobbly legs of conspiracy are often shot in the iron heels of fascism.
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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.
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