Part Three: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Robert sits down with Garrison and Margaret to talk about Kerry Thornley, who would go on to help resurrect the Illuminati.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, it's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is opened
in a radically different way of pretty much every week,
but usually one that involves me making sounds with my mouth.
I don't understand how you're this successful of a podcast. Now,
No one does, Garrison, nobody does. But they can't. They

(00:25):
can't stop it. They can't, they can't stop the signal.
You know. I'm like, I'm like the Rolling Stones of podcasting,
the Andrew Tate of podcasting. Thank you, Margaret, thank you
for that. That's what everyone's saying for that unalloyed compliment.
So we have, we have. We started this episode by

(00:45):
talking about Adam vy Shopped and the Bavarian Illuminati UM,
which started out as a nerdy kid kind of trying
to find a way to smuggle cool books into Bavaria
that we're banned um and doing so, he created a
fake religion so that rich people would feel like wizards
and he could use their money to buy more books,

(01:08):
and it ended up with him funding illegal abortions until
a lightning strike exposed to society to the cops, and
then he had to flee and spend the rest of
his life having the equivalent of an extended Twitter argument.
This sounds so fake, This sounds like such a fake story.
It is. It's both sad and funny, and I've continued

(01:28):
my reading on this. One of the troubles here is that,
like there's an actual paucity of good historical books about
the Illuminati who are not written by cranks. I picked
the one of the Charles River editors are not usually
my ideal source, but they do a decent job of
like summarizing all of the actual facts that are known.

(01:51):
I found another book that I have been reading through
that is one of the crank books. It's called The Illuminati,
The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by Jim mars
Um with with two rs. And mars is absolutely a crank.
That for an idea of what a cranky is his
book on secrets or in the chapters on the Illuminati,

(02:12):
part what is Germany? And part two is Zionism. So
we're going some good directions in this book that's gonna bridge,
but we're gonna have to talk about today. Isn't that? Um?
I want to read. There's some wild quotes in here, um,
and most of them will not be most relevant until

(02:33):
we get later on in here, but I want to
read a portion of something that I cannot speak entirely
on the veracity of um. But this is a chunk
of his book when he's talking about the formation of
the Illuminati. In seventeen seventy nine, two years after Bishop's
initiation into Freemasonry, he wrote his Wacken Hurdle, suggesting the

(02:53):
order be renamed the Society of Bees. The bee connection
again demonstrates the close ties to the Illuminati of the
Illuminati to Masonry, as the beehive has long been an
important Freemason symbol. Today's Masonic lodges were once referred to
as hives, and any internal disputes are called swarming. One
eighteenth century Masonic ritual stated the beehive teaches us that
as we are born into the world rational and intelligent beings,

(03:16):
so what we also be industrious ones, and not stand
idly by it or gazed with listless indifference on even
the meanest of our fellows in a state of distress,
if it is in our power to help them without
detriment to ourselves or our connections. The symbol of bees
also connects to the aforementioned ancient Greek Elucinian mysteries in
which honey was thought to be a divine product of
the gods. So that's kind of cool. Now, yeah, I am.

(03:41):
I'm all for beehive. I like the discussion of arguments
within Masonic temples as swarming. Yeah, yeah, it's it's all.
So much of this story is extremely twitter, like almost back.
It's nice to know that radicals have always been more
or less the same kind of people. Nice isn't the

(04:03):
word I would use. Yeah, it's it's reassuring. It's a
thing that's that's undeniable. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So, um,
we should probably get back into the story. When we
had left off, we had just been talking about how
the conspiracy theory about the Illuminati started up after the

(04:25):
French Revolution and kind of merged with existing fears about
Masonry in the United States to be part of this
big anti Masonic movement. You've got guys like Abigail Adams
and even George Washington himself who bought into this conspiracy.
And this would be this would be like one of
the funny things about Jim or about I don't know
whatever Mars's book is that like when he talks about

(04:48):
American connections to the Illuminati. He just says that, like
we know that. You know, multiple members of the Founding
Fathers were aware of the Illuminati, and it's like, yeah,
they believe the same shit you did, Like they all
added the same conspiracy buddy. Um, so far the bastards
is the people who believe in the Illuminati, not the Illuminati. No,
the Illuminati are not bastards. Although again, perhaps if you

(05:11):
create a fake cult in order to do a good thing,
you might wind up causing more problems than you solve.
Maybe that maybe a lesson from the Illuminati that we
can take into us today. That's true. You know what, Sophie,
let the initiates out of the cage. I think maybe
we've been we've been going down the wrong the wrong,
the wrong road. You couldn't even get that sentence out.

(05:35):
Yeah I would. I would never tell you to let
the initiates out of the cage. That's where they live now.
So overtime, over time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory died out
would be the wrong word, but it kind of faded. Um.
But America's public obsession with conspiracy theories never quite did,

(05:56):
and politicians learned over the decades that' stoking these conspiracy
was an easy way to get VOTs. After the Mason's popular,
American conspiracy culture pivoted to obsess over the Jesuits and
then the Communists, which, despite the fact that they are
kind of diametrically opposed and fundamental ways, often got looped

(06:16):
in together as like a Jesuit Communist conspiracy. That was
a whole big thing in the early half of the
twentieth century. And of course every time you would have
sort of a new era in American conspiracy culture, the
trappings of prior manias would roll forward into each new
conspiracy that enraptured the voting public. It's you know, it's syncretism.
This is a thing that umberto Echo talks about when

(06:39):
he talks about like one of the key attributes of fascism,
and I think it is kind of worth noting and
a little bit beyond the scope of this episodes, but
to talk about how American conspiracy culture has always been
proto fascist in many ways and this is the syncretism
of it. And we've we've really seen this come to
roost with Donald Trump and qwan on and sort of

(06:59):
this is why you get a lot of liberals who
are very surprised when they see these kind of people
who had been sort of formerly crunchy, granola hippie types
get into the hardcore right wing king On stuff and
it's like that syncretism, baby, That's exactly what Echo was
talking about. This. This this also ties into like the
idea of like the cultic milieu and how the shared

(07:20):
stays were all these types of conspiracies operate, feed off
each other and do and do kind of coalesce into
this weird like a crypto or quasi fascist politic. Yeah.
And if you if you want to, if you want
to look at this as like I don't know, if
you wanted to like diagram this as like a soil
or something like that, or sedimentary layers. The base of

(07:43):
it all is the Illuminati, right, that is the er
conspiracy and American political culture. Um so. Yeah. Meanwhile, the
end of the eighteen hundreds in the start of the
nineteen hundreds saw another surge of interest in the occult.
It seems like this kind of happens once every century
or so, that's been pretty consistent for the last three
hundred years something like that. And over in Europe, a

(08:05):
pair of wizards resurrected the Illuminati. The founders were tied
to the Oto and Alistair Crowley, and the Second Illuminati
was never really much more than a side shows. It's
primary contribution to kind of occult history in Europe was
that in nineteen o two had allied itself with the
Order of the Golden Dawn. Now the Golden Dawn had

(08:28):
also been founded on shall we say shaky his shaky
grounds truth wise, by a Rosicrucian named Wentworth Little, who
claimed to have come into the possession of a coded
manuscript that led him to a woman named Anna Sprangel
in Germany who was in touch with unknown superiors who
had taught him about a secret organization behind the secret

(08:49):
organization behind the myth of the Rosa Crucians. And you
can see shades of kind of what of aishapped was
doing with the Illuminati here. I've you know, this organization
has a history. It's actually much older than people know.
There's this group of unknown folks in addition to me,
who are actually running things. Yeah. I want to quote
here from our old friend pro cult activist Massimo entrophying

(09:12):
again because he saw again, if you're going to write
it's detailed history of this ship. You're going to wind
up quoting a lot of crikes and weirdos. It's mostly
going to be crips and weirdos. This is just a
fact of the matter. Westcott claimed to have found Sprangle's address,
to have written to her, and to have obtained the
authorization of the Unknown Superiors to found an order in
England placed under their authority, the Golden Dawn. In spite

(09:35):
of the great influence it exerted on art and literature,
the Golden Dawn rested on a mystification. There was no
Anna Sprangele and Westcott had simply invented the whole story.
It was Alister Crowley who had been initiated into the
Golden Dawn in eighteen ninety eight and had immediately engaged
in trying to overthrow its leaders, who in nineteen hundred
revealed the deception. Crowley is a very complicated surist, and

(09:58):
he I think in a lot ways qualifies as a
bastard um. But one of the cool things that he
did was completely overthrow every magical community that he that
he went into. Into your Wizard Club, he's going to
take over. He will take over your Wizard Club stop
him and make you admit that you made the whole

(10:21):
thing up. It's yes, and then have a lot of
gay sex in the desert. So you know, Okay, I
am certainly the least knowledge about knowledgeable about Crowley in
our organization. But the thing that I always took from
readings about him is that he was able to do
that in all these organizations because he had He's got
some jock energy to him. Yes that like most wizards,

(10:44):
he just kind of had that confidence to let him
bully his way. Is this kind of like when punks
go to like nerd conventions, We're just in charge because
I actually have social skills, and we like, yeah, it's
gonna this is gonna be very controversial on the subbreddit.
Margaret Kiljoy just got canceled. Yeah, Crawley was really the

(11:10):
first punk, is what you're trying to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm gonna take a stand and say that I absolutely no,
I actually don't know that much somewhere underground and the
Vault Vault of the Golden Dawn is the very first
battle jacket into it. Yeah, But also, but you keep
talking about this thing where it's like it seems like

(11:32):
the cultists are the okay ones, and the conspiracy theorists
are the ones who do the Nazis shit. Yeah, I
mean because these these guys, the people forming this new
order of I mean the people who kind of form
this new Illuminati and marry it to the golden dawn.
I haven't come across any evidence that they're bastards like
they were there were people who wanted to dress up
and do magic like. There's nothing harmful about what they're

(11:54):
doing here. Um, it's just it's not wildly influential. Ingle,
who was one of the people who winds up in
charge of this new Illuminati, funds it. I found this
interesting by writing a series of like short stories for
dime novels under a shitload of different names. He kind
of does an l. Ron Hubbard, but in reverse, where
Like Hubbard writes all these dime novels and then creates

(12:17):
a cult because he wants to get out of that industry,
whereas Ingle funds his little cult by writing a bunch
of like shitty weird fiction. I don't know if it
was shitty. Actually I haven't read it. I shouldn't be
judgmental like that. It might have been good weird fiction.
His Illuminati limps on into the nineteen seventies when they
fall a foul of Germany's militant post war anti cult movement.

(12:38):
There is we talk about this in the episode Sorry, yeah,
that's really funny. Yeah, well, we talked about this in
the episodes titled The School That Raped Everyone, which is
a dark episode about how there was an element of
kind of the progressive left in post war Germany that
embraced free love politics to such an extent that they

(13:00):
justifying the molestation of children. And this is a big
part of what gets the Illuminati in trouble. I have
not found any evidence that they are molesting anybody, but
they are teaching sex magic. And because there are a
lot of problems with other kind of people in who
are broadly in the same sort of cultic milieu, you
might say as the Illuminati in this period who are

(13:21):
molesting children, they get caught up in I don't even
want to call it a moral panic. A lot of
people were actually harmed, but the Illuminati does not seem
to have been justifiably targeted here. They were just like
adults who were doing satanic orgies, which is fine, yeah,
I mean like, but like this, this complaint continues on today,
how a lot of yes, a lot of like sex

(13:42):
cults are specifically the OTO is just kind of a
sex cult for its for its like older male members.
This is this is this is something that is is Yeah,
very very much a continuing critique, And there's nothing inherently
wrong with making a sex for you and your friends.
I've been in a couple of sex cults. It's fine. Yeah,

(14:04):
they always end great. It's what everyone says about sex calls.
Some of them do, yeah, and the Illuminati doesn't end
all that terribly, but it just kind of peters out
after this point. The last leader of the Second Illuminati,
a guy named Metzker, dies a lonely alcoholic in nineteen ninety,
which is a pretty common way for things to end

(14:25):
for the leaders of sex colts. While Metzger's Illuminati was
limping through the last arthritic stages of its life, events
over in the United States were about to bring the
Illuminati to a level of fame it hadn't enjoyed even
in the days of Adam I Shopped. Carrie Windell Thornley
was born on April seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight, in Whittier, California.

(14:46):
Whittier is today a suburb of Los Angeles. It is
back then it was kind of just like its own
little town in the middle of southern California. If you
google the neighborhood that Carrie Thornley grew up in today,
you'll immediately be shown a map that depicts the unincorporated community,
boxed in by bold blue pins that indicate a Costco,

(15:07):
a home depot, a savers, a Target, and a Trader Joe's.
They surround East Whittier like a capitalist pentagram, almost as
if her medic capitalist wizards were trying to keep some
sort of dangerous energy contained within. These are the things
you think about when you spent sixteen hours writing about
the Illuminati late at nights. No one fuck up those stores,

(15:31):
or all hell will be based upon the world. Yeah,
these are will crawl from underneath the Costco and start
taking over the suburb. This is the Seven Seals of Neoliberalism.
This is John Darnell novel, and I would read it.
Carrie was raised Mormon, and for much of the first

(15:52):
seven years of his life his father was overseas fighting it.
A little thing he might have heard of called the
Second World War. Most of the context we have for
his childhood comes from a letter his brother wrote decades
later that I found reprinted in a zine published by
Carrie's ideological children. Most of the good history on Carrie
you find scattered in zines that are like thirty years old,

(16:12):
so it is a whole thing piecing it together. I'm
going to read a quote from that letter now, though,
and this is his brother talking. We were living behind
my grandparents when I was born and what is now
called watts on seventy seventh Street in la and our
dad was in the navy stationed in Okinawa at the time.
When Dad had returned from World War Two, Carrie was
waiting to welcome him, dressed in a sailor's out that

(16:33):
my mom had gotten him, and I was a newborn
in a cradle. Dad came in the door and rushed
over to see me before he hugged Carrie. Carrie got
so pissed that he ran out the back door and
climbed up the walnut tree and refused to come down.
That event, more than any other, set the tone for
Carrie's relationship with me. The rest of my life is
punctuated with events in which Carrie did his best to
get even with me, from what I called his intellectual
muggings when I was in college to writing parodies of

(16:55):
letters that I would send him later in life. Our
father was a raging alcoholic, so by necessity Carry became
like a father figure to me and Dick. So he's
like a complicated guy. He's the fact that his dad
is absent, I think has a big impact on him,
and he feels this sense of like jealousy for his
father's attention because it had been so absent, but also

(17:17):
because his father is this violent asshole, he sort of
acts to protect his younger brothers. You know, it's a
complicated thing I think he does. You know, he's obviously
he's a kid, so there's sometimes he does shit out
of spite to his brothers. But you get the feeling
that he did the most that he could to try
and fill that gap that was left by his dad
being a non functional person, Like he did hit the

(17:40):
best job I think you could have expected of a
kid in that circumstance. It's a difficult way to grow up. Yeah.
Carrie met Greg Hill, who was three years younger, in
high school in nineteen fifty six. The two were members
of the very first generation of their nerds. They're big
fucking nerds, and they were sometimes mocked by it. I
think like George McFly from Back to the Future, that

(18:00):
is exactly the kind of kids that we're talking about.
They were huge into Mad Magazine, which was kind of
like that was a lot of people who wind up
very radical in the sixties and seventies start by reading
Mad Magazine and in the early sixties or whatever, and
they were interested in radical political ideas much like the

(18:21):
ones that had animated Adam Bishopped centuries before. They were
also again big sci fi nerds, with what one biographer
describes as a fondness for crackpots. Their childhoods would have
involved colorful, weirdly horny comic books and the short stories
of men like Bob Heinlin, Philip K. Dick, and l
Ron Hubbard. Greg and Carey were so excited by this

(18:41):
stuff that they briefly attended meetings of a nearby uf
O cult as adolescence called understanding. Greg later recalled through
our mutual general interest in wondering just what was going
on out there in that gigantic world, and are many
common specific interests in humanism, anti religionism, and enjoyant for
enjoyment for Omar Khayam, and a curiosity for the bizarre

(19:02):
like black magic and hypnotism, plus our common warped sense
of humor. We formed a close friendship. So that's that's
who these guys are, right, Like, they're they're kind of
young kids in this boring town and they get really
into science fiction and fantasy, and that leads them into
reading about the occult and reading all of these also
kind of like mystic They're into the Sufis, they're into

(19:24):
Zinn Buddhism, like they're not just into like kind of
golden dawns. Yeah, they're they're pretty cool. Actually, yeah, Um,
I would say, I don't know how it's gonna end up,
So I'm gonna hold onto them as being real cool
right now. They're there. It's going to end in a
couple of different ways, Margaret. Everyone involved in the movement
we're talking about has a very very different ending. Um. Okay,

(19:47):
I could choose your adventure novel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um.
I do want to talk a little bit about Omar Khayam,
who is a He was a guy who lived from
like basically around a thousand ish to eleven hundred a d.
He's a polymath, one of these guys who's like he's
doing math and he's a philosopher, and he's writing poetry

(20:09):
that's still very popular today. And he's one of the
things about him that's kind of interesting and that's probably
going to be relevant. That's going to definitely be relevant
to the way that Kerry Thornley uses him, because Thornley's
obsessed with this guy. Is that for kind of centuries
and centuries after his death, it became a tradition in
a chunk of at least Islamic poetry to attribute your

(20:32):
poems to Omar Khayam. And this started being done this
like for whatever reason in the eighteen hundreds, Europeans start
doing this too, and some of this is tied in
with like orientalism. I'm not a great person to discuss that,
because this is a very influential figure. But one thing
that's important to know is he is a real poet
who also has become kind of this. I don't know

(20:53):
if it's calling him a symbol is the right thing,
but people decided to attribute poems to him that had
not been written by him. There's a bunch of these
throughout history, these like shared author names. They're really interesting.
It may yeah, it is, it is really interesting. Obviously
Kerry Thornley is very interested in this guy, maybe in
part because of that. A lot of a lot of
like a cult authors also also have this. There's like

(21:15):
Hermes Trismegistus, There's there's a lot of even um even
the uh oh, I forget the forget the name, let
me look it up quick. Um. Well, that's why I
have a new book coming out by um Alistair Crowley,
um the name under Now see, I'm doing a totally
different thing. I'm just gonna credit my next book to

(21:37):
Stephen King and just take that money, you know, just
just take that cash, baby. I mean. In terms of
a cult authors who also did this, there was the
the fourth Book of a Cult Philosophy by Agrippa, probably
not written by the actual Agrippa, who dead for several
thousand years. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's just yeah.

(21:58):
It's it's interesting a trend that that continues because like
the types of communities that were that were writing these
occult Texas groups really do get continued by the stuff
that Greg Hill was actually inadvertently developing. And it's interesting,
like just how similar this type of stuff is. Okay,
And then one of the other of these shared names,

(22:19):
Luther Bliss. It is Italian collective of radicals who then
lots of people write under this name that put out
a book called Q that's a conspiracy book that came
out before any of this, before the Q went on.
And I believe and I might have. I don't have
a note in front of me, but Luther Bliss it
is like some like famous like soccer player, and these

(22:40):
like Italian radicals were just like, we're just gonna use
his name, and the dude was like a live and
they were and they wrote this like bestseller called Q
that's a conspiracy novel. Sh It's weird. That is very funny,
and uh, you know what else is funny? Margaret Um,
the stuff adder, the products and services, the ads supporting

(23:02):
this podcast, all of which, by the way, all of
our ads are are written and produced by by Omar Khayam,
So you know, enjoy some of this classic celjuck capitalism poetry.
It's just gonna be some math ads. I hope it's gold.
I bet he had gold everyone did back then. Yeah,

(23:27):
we're back. So Carrie Thornley and Greg Hill and a
circle of their friends, and I am leaving. There's a
lot of actual people here who you can read about,
who are also influential. I'm not going to go into
detail about all of them. There's a reason I'm going
to focus primarily on Thornley and Hill here. I'll be
suggesting a book later if you want to learn more
about every single person who was involved in this this

(23:50):
next stage of the Illuminatium. But yeah, the core of
this circle seems to be Thornley and Hill, and they
are some There's something kind of magnet about the two
when they are together. Part of us do with the
fact that Carrie is an undeniably talented public speaker, and
he seems to have kind of an ability to lead people,

(24:10):
or at least be so obsessed with something in such
an endearing way that people feel the desire to follow him.
One of the things that he, Carrie and Greg both
were really into was playing pranks on their classmates. And
I'm going to read a segment from a biography by
a guy named Adam go Rightley that talks about one
of the pranks that they played on their school Chumps,

(24:33):
Carry Gregg and other unnamed cohorts made a recording of
what at first appeared to be a regular radio program,
with music playing innocently from a radio positioned on the
apron of the stage. In actuality, the sounds were projected
from a real to real tape machine hidden backstage. Inserted
into the seemingly mundane radio program, The pranksters had implanted
a series of interruptions made by a newscaster to the

(24:55):
effect that Soviet plans were invading the US and dropping bombs.
As one classmate recall, somebody had told me early on
that it was a joke, but some of the students
didn't know and got really scared. What made me feel
bad was that one of the boys in the class
was so scared he was praying. So this is like,
I kind of know where this story goes from from

(25:18):
from this point on, and the fact that they were
doing this ship as kids is hilarious. This this exact
same style of prank and the kind of recklessness that
they go about it gets continued on to massive proportions,
like they do so much inadvertent damage by pranks of

(25:38):
this style on a national scale very soon, and it's
so weird. You're like just watching the trade about about
to crash, and you're you're seeing it go and you
know what's gonna happen, and it kind of in line
with that. Garrison Carrie's friends at the time, when interviewed
later would note that as a kid, he had a
habit of access not seem to know how to stop

(26:01):
himself when the playing around got out of hand. Yeah.
That said, he was also intensely empathetic, and one of
the stories told about him is that after his high
school graduation, one of his close friends came out of
the closet to him as gay. This is in nineteen
fifty seven, and that friend, when interviewed, was like, Yeah,
he just like embraced me, like there was never any judgment.

(26:22):
He was completely completely accepting and fine, which is notworthy.
Some of these people are like actually really decent people
unless and have had and have like pretty good politics,
and we're doing kind of red stuff in the nineteen
fifties and sixties. Yeah, well some of yeah, and let's

(26:43):
let's put a pin in that one. Yeah. Thornley graduated
high school in nineteen fifty seven. He attended Marine Corps
Reserve boot camp that summer. This is not a thing
he had a choice in. Like a lot of people
would just kind of join ahead of getting drafted in
order to have amount of choice in where they went.
I had a lot of relatives who are like, well,
if I joined, then I get to like pick kind

(27:06):
of what I have more agency in this process. Yeah.
So he goes to boot camp, and then he gets
into the University of Southern California. He spent a lot
of time still at home with his friends, many of whom,
namely Greg, hadn't yet graduated. They spent the bulk of
their free time at twenty four hour bowling alleys where
they could buy alcohol. One night in nineteen fifty seven, Yeah,

(27:27):
and he's buying alcohol. Greg is a couple of years
younger than Carry, So Greg or Carry is often the
one buying alcohol for his underage friends, which we always
support here at Cool Zone. Maybe definitely didn't make my
living doing that when I was a twenty one year
old street punk. No way, you would never do something

(27:48):
like that when it was the only way to make money.
One night in nineteen fifty seven, Hill and Thornley were
discussing poems carry had written on Order emerging from Chaos,
Hill argued that order was a construction of the human mind,
only chaos was real. Now there's a couple of versions
of what comes next, and the version that mirror subjective reality. Hill,

(28:11):
an atheist, expressed his frustration with modern organized religions for
claiming the existence of an organizing principle behind the universe.
The ancient Greeks, he expressed, had gotten it closest to
write because they had a goddess of chaos. Her name
was Airis or Discordia in Latin. Hill felt that Airis
was the only deity he'd ever seen any evidence of,

(28:32):
and he suggested it might be a good idea if
someone created a religion based around her. It's gonna go great,
to go really well, it's gonna go so good. Margaret's five.
I'm so excited now. While he was at college, Thornley
attempted to join a fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, and what
would be one of his only real brushes with the

(28:53):
square world. He pledged, and he went through a hazing
ritual called Hell Week. That year, the brothers allowed a
black student pledge. They made him go through hell Week,
and then after he had gone through all of that
kind of hazing shit, they laughed at him and told
him that, of course, as a black guy, he was
not allowed to join their fraternity. This was enough to
get carried to leave and to turn him away from

(29:13):
the concept of fraternities forever. If he ever made a
secret society, it was going to be one defined by
radical acceptance. Hill and Thornley kept up their correspondence on
the subject of creating some sort of like you know,
they're talking about doing the same kind of shit that
Vaishop is doing. They're just did They're just talking about
doing it from a perspective of like this would be

(29:35):
kind of a funny thing, um, and it's just a freak.
It's a it's fine. It's just it's casually and it
is mixed with things they seriously believe. You know, Hill
is you might call Hill a very early atheist activist, right,
you know, pre Dawkins, pre all of that, you know
that kind of guys who became really prominent in the

(29:56):
late nineties, early two thousands. Hill is that in the
late nineteen in fifties, early sixties. But also he's he's
like much less insufferable than the guys that followed. I
don't think he is, because he understands like the chaotic
nature of existence. Yeah yeah, And Thornley I think is
sympatica with hill On a lot, But Thornley is a

(30:18):
little more mystical, right, like, yeah, he seems to be
kind of more moved by that stuff, although not to
an agree that a degree that it seems to like
great On hill who is kind of fundamentally a materialist
value or our vision of the universe. That's at least
my take on this. There's so many much that also
that's very contradictory about these guys. So if you do
your own research on this, you may come to some

(30:40):
different conclusions about some of them this than I am.
It really depends on which zines you stumble into. Um
And like a lot of these guys who are writing
stuff about themselves wrote it contradictory on purpose to make
things confusing, because because they thought it was a funny prank.
Because they thought it was a funny pranks. So all
of French philosophy, I really Yeah, yeah, Thornley winds up

(31:03):
joining the marine corps um you know, he after he
does his like a little bit of time in college,
he becomes active duty in the corps Um and so
he spends a couple of years as a marine. And
while he is a marine state side, he spends I
think it's a little less than a year serving alongside
a bright young man that you might have note heard
of named Lee Harvey Oswald. Uh and Carrie and Lee

(31:26):
Harvey Oswald become pretty good friends there. They are, they
are buddies. And one of the things that carry likes
about Oswald is that he's a little bit of a prankster,
just a just a kooky guy. That's what everybody knows
about Lee Harvey Oswald. He's gonna tell a very famous

(31:46):
joke in the not too distant future. From this point
gets him a lot of attention. It's all I'll like you.
Hit tweet, hit tweet. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to advertise
the projectors under this one. Yeah, I'm going to read
another quote from Adam Gowrightley's book. Quote. Later, Kerry would

(32:06):
describe Oswald as the outfit eight ball, earning this dubious
distinction by openly subscribing to communist newspapers such as Prafta
and cracking jokes with an exaggerated Russian accent, answering questions
with da or nip and referring to his fellow Marines
as comrades. It was common knowledge that Oswald was studying
Russian and was fairly fluent in conversational Russian. Because of this,

(32:28):
he inquired the nickname Oswaldskovic. And this is no one's
reporting this. You're in a war against Russia. No, it's
like I'm a communist. See this is actually I wanted
to talk about this. This is a thing I think
a lot of folks who, because of the fact that
they are more on the left side of things and

(32:48):
maybe don't have a lot of firsthand experience with the military,
don't get so much because there's there's like a conspiracy
theory going around right now, right that it has been
going on for a while, but because it was Pat
Tillman got brought up at the Super Bowl by those
fucks at the NFL. This was talked about recently where
folks are like, oh, he was obviously murdered by his

(33:09):
own guys because they heard him talking about how the
war was bullshit and like saying like anti American stuff,
and so they assassinated him. This is a conspiracy theory.
That's not what happened. It's incredibly common if you talk
to guys who were serving in combat in Afghanistan and
Iraq for people to say, this war is bullshit, what
we're doing is stupid. I have talked to people who'd

(33:32):
be like, yeah, half the unit thought that what we
were doing over there was bullshit. It was not uncommon
for people to be like, fuck this stupid war. It's
like a thing that like, soldiers fuck around, and soldiers,
like anyone else, often while they are participating in whatever war,
express opinions that are contra to the like, and Oswald

(33:54):
is one of these guys. And so he does get
in trouble a couple of times, but like, he's never
drummed out of the Marines for making for doing jokes
about being a communist. Yeah, and they're not also entirely jokes.
And in fact Oswald is for at least a period
of his military service, seen as a pretty good soldier.

(34:14):
In a later part of his life, Kerrie and another
one of their comrades would claim that he Oswald and
the Southern Marine were approached by someone that they believe
was a representative of the CIA and given aptitude tests.
Oswald and the Southern Marine were asked if they would
be interested in parachuting into foreign countries and helping rebels
do things like build radios. This is School of America's shit,

(34:36):
and there were absolutely US soldiers who had this experience.
I can't confirm or deny whether or not that happened
to Oswald in specific, but this is a thing that occurred, right,
so it's not unlikely that some version of this happened Perian.
By all accounts, he seems to be like decent at
being a soldier. He was a pretty good shot. Pretty

(34:59):
good shot. So you're saying on the record that the
CIA hired him to assassinate John F. Kennedy. That is
exactly what I'm saying. Okay, it actually, Margaret, hold up
because it gets a lot more conspiratorial here. So Carrie
would also later and this is at a point of

(35:19):
his life when his mental health is not so great,
It would also later claim that he was targeted by
the MK Ultra program during this part of his life.
Now here's the thing. After his time with Oswald, he
was stationed at at Sugi Air Base in Japan as
a radar technician, and it is while he was stationed
here that he starts having auditory hallucinations at night of

(35:41):
radio chatter in his head. Carrie became convinced that he
was hearing actual radio traffic in his head. This is
at a later portion of his life now at Sugi
Air Base is host to a major was host to
a major CIA base, and it was one of two
foreign bases where the CIA conducted MK ultra experiments. In
a rolling Stone investigation published years later, an anonymous marine

(36:03):
who served it at Sugi around the same time as
carried it an Oswald at a separate period of time,
serves at Szugi Ericabase. This guy claims it was pretty weird.
I'm eighteen at the time and chasing all the horse
in town, and these CIA guys are buying me drinks
and paying for the horse and giving me a whole
round of drinks with lots of weird drugs in them.
Pretty soon all the shadows are moving around. We're in

(36:25):
the bar. See the samurais are everywhere, and I started
seeing skeletons and things. My mind just started boiling over
going about a thousand miles a minute. Now there's a
distinctly higher than zero chance that either Oswald or Thornley,
or quite possibly both of them were dosed as part
of the MK Ultra experiments, and if doing so. By
the way, this is not like trying to say some

(36:47):
conspiracy about the Kennedy assassination here, they would if that
happened to them. They are just some of hundreds and
hundreds of US servicemen who were dosed by the CIA
against their will. This happened constantly to tens of thousands
of people, as we've talked about in our our MK
Ultra episodes. We will never know for certain because the
architect of MK or Ultra burned all of the files.

(37:08):
So just keep in your mind it is possible that
the first time Kerry Thornley has LSD it's because the
CIA drugs him, which convinces him that he's hearing voices
at night. We will never know. It's also there's stories
from Oswald around this period that like one night he
starts freaking out that there's guys shooting at him from
like the woods when he's on guard duty. That some

(37:30):
people of theorize like, oh yeah, maybe he just got
fucking dosed and had a breakdown. This happens to a
lot of guys. It's certainly not impossible that it happened
to Oswald and Thornley as someone who's been dosed against
my will before this all tracks. Yeah, because when you
tell all of those that you're on drugs, it's a

(37:51):
completely different experience than when you know you're on drugs. Yeah,
that is entirely possible, And I think I think there's
actually pretty good at least one of them did, because
they're both added SUGI and we know the CIA is
doing this shit to service minute at SUGI. Yeah, so
you know again, Oh, I guess I have to just

(38:12):
continue the story. Oswald and Thornley were only stationed together
for a brief portion of their service, after which they
probably never saw each other again, or did they? While
a lot of people are going to ask that question.
Mark Carrie gets sent to Manila next, where he sees
such heartbreaking poverty that he becomes a Marxist Leninist. He

(38:33):
starts reading books on Marxist political theory, and he becomes
more committed than ever to his pranks. The ultimate example
of this is a fake marine that he creates under
the name Omar Kayam Ravenhurst, and he does this by
inserting fake records into the administrative files. He gets so
far into this that he gets the military to issue
a locker and a bunk to this fake soldier. And

(38:55):
then after he leaves, there's a big base inspection and
all the inspector can't find this guy who has a
bunk and who has like a locker and who is
supposed to be turning out for inspection, and it causes
like a big problem. But he is. He has made
a fake man. Um. He's a he's a very fun

(39:17):
character in this part of his life. After their time Marines, Yeah,
after their time in the Marines, Oswald affects the Soviet
Union from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty two, So
some amount of the jokes that Oswald was making about
Communism were not jokes. He's like sitting around and learning Russian,

(39:37):
being like, hey guys, yeah, I'm gonna defect to the Russians,
and everyone's like, oh yeah, O Lee Harvey, Yeah, I'm
gonna I'm gonna make a I'm gonna make a sitcom
about Lee Harvey. Oswald called O Lee Harvey just about
all his mini pranks um like that one he carried
out in Dallas and anyway, um, so Carrie is like, why, wow,

(40:00):
it's weird that this guy who I was a friend
with left the Marines in order to defect to the
Soviet Union. That's kind of a neat story. I'm going
to write a book about it. So he decides he
starts work on a fictional book based around a character
that is a thinly veiled Lee Harvey Oswald. This book
is out today. You can read this book that is

(40:22):
a fictional story he wrote about his real friend Lee
Harvey Oswald. And while he was starting this project his
work on his first novel, he comes across a copy
of another book that's going to change his life, and
unfortunately it's Iron Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He is so blown
away by miss Rand's prose that he converts from Marxism

(40:44):
to lazy fair capitalism overnight and basically becomes an objectivist. Now,
the thing you might be starting to get from Carry
right now is that he's a little bit of a
seeker Ideologically. He is very prone to encountering a book
and feeling that book on a almost spiritual level, and
changing his life as a result of that book. This

(41:07):
will be a pattern for him throughout his life. Now,
while he's doing this, he still has the same creative urges,
and he maintains his friendship with Greg Hill, and he
moves back home with his parents briefly at least, and
during that period of time, he and Greg Hill launch
a project that is an attempt at creating a humor magazine,
which I mostly mentioned because of its title Apocalypse, a

(41:29):
trade journal for doom profits, which is a great title. Nobody, Yeah, nobody.
I haven't found a copy of this. I would love to.
I don't even know if it exists anymore. This is
proto zine culture, which, by the way, these are going
to be two of the guys generally credited with inventing
the concept of zines. And yeah, they this particular magazine

(41:54):
does not work very well. Um, so you know they
they they give up that project pretty early on. Life
back in Whittier grated on them both, particularly the fact
that the police would keep pulling them over for wandering
around at night with no clear purpose, which was legal
back then there were actually laws about like being out
at night without a reason to be out at night.

(42:17):
So they decided to move to a place where there
were no laws about staying up all night and being weirdos.
And that place was New Orleans. And yeah, I think
that's a good point to lead into an ad break.
Is it an AD for New Orleans? I hope it's
an ad for New Orleans. Go to New Orleans. It's

(42:37):
a city where you can eat a shitload alligator meat,
and I assume other things beignys exactly. You can stuff
a bigne with gator. Yeah, I mean, I'll put gator
in anything. I love gator, and I like New Orleans.

(43:01):
We're back. We're back from New Orleans. So they moved
to New Orleans in nineteen sixty one, and Carrie continues
work on his novel, which he has decided to name
The Idle Warriors. After Oswald got back from the Soviet Union,
he wound up moving to New Orleans too. He and
Thornley are living just blocks away from each other, and
Thornley would claim for the rest of his life that

(43:22):
he was unaware of this, that they never saw each
other again. And it's worth noting that, according to Carrie's
friend Becky Glazer, Carrie spent his time in New Orleans
quote getting high off of everything so it's not odd
that he would have been unaware. There are stories that
he gets high smoking banana peals, which do not get
you high, but Carrie claims like he makes blunts out

(43:44):
of banana appeals and claims to get wasted off of them.
There's going to be some stuff later in the story
that makes this makes sense. This is more what I
think of New Orleans about is instead of Gator is
getting high off of everything. So yeah, well that is
again so Carrie's and acclaim I didn't see Oswald. There's
a decent chance of that purely because like he is

(44:05):
spending most of his time getting wasted and hanging out
with like weirdos on kind of the fringes of society,
and this is what's going to wind up bringing him
into contact with a number of people who later become
central parts in some of the early JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
People besides Oswald, one of these guys is a friend

(44:29):
of Carrie's named Slim brooks Now Slim may have been
a navigational consultant on the Bay of Pigs Invasion. We
don't actually know who this guy is. There's a couple
of people that we know Carrie is hanging out with
who give him names that we know our fake names
because no one ever existed under those names, which is
part of like what leads to these guys being part

(44:50):
of the JFK conspiracy. Also, this is a man who's
known to make up people. This is a man who's
known to make up people, although other people recall these
folks um And this is an unpleasant part of Carry's
history because Slim introduces him to a guy named Gary Kirstein,
and some conspiracy theorist of the Kennedy assassination think that

(45:12):
Gary Kirstein was actually Watergate burglar in CIA spymaster E
Howard Hunt, because Gary Kirstein was not a real person.
Now to Carry, the man who identified himself as Gary
Kirsteine claimed to have unclear ties to intelligence agencies while
he regularly spouted neo Nazi propaganda. Carry later wrote, quote,

(45:34):
one of the first things I learned about Gary was
that he also hated Kennedy, but for somewhat different political
reasons than mine. What a funny bit it It is
a funny bit. The bit's gonna get funnier. Quote. He
expressed his dislike for Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Russians, Mexicans,

(45:56):
and so on, with a chuckle usually, which left me
with room to assume he wasn't really very serious about it. That,
of course, was the assumption I preferred to make, since
I really liked Slim a lot and Gary was his friend. Now,
this is where we're starting to see some of the
moral downsides of being as open minded dude as Kerry was,
because he's kind of willing to be like, well, this

(46:17):
guy likes talking a lot about Nazi stuff, but maybe
he's joking. I like his friends, so I'm not going
to cause a problem, which is a bad thing to do. Yeah,
And Gary makes another bad decision after this point, which
is he decided it kind of becomes a common thing
for him when he's hanging out at bars with these
guys to joke about murdering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now

(46:41):
this may have been recorded, and it happens often enough
that numerous people have experiences of carry talking about killing JFK.
He puts up posters calling for JFK to be like
arrested or otherwise taken out of the presidency, which one
might have seen, it's not impossible. Although, yeah, this is

(47:03):
against JFK at this point, we're we're going to talk
about that, Margaret. So there's a couple of things he
has against JFK. One of them is that JFK supported
the side who was fighting against the side backed by
Rhodesia in the Congo. Um. It is unclear why he

(47:23):
was angry at He talks a lot about something called
the Katanga massacre, which during the Katanga War, which is
this war that happens in the Congo, there were massacres
on both sides. I don't know specifically what he was
talking about there. He also he's again he's an objectivist
at this point, So he hates Kennedy's economic policies, right, um,
but he also hates Kennedy for trying to invade Cuba. Like, wait,

(47:46):
there was so many steps all over the map. There's
so many steps of Rhodesia that I lost the negative
of the negative of the negative. Tell me where where
did JFK sit on Rhodesia and where did well j
JFK under him? The United States backed a side in
a civil war in Congo that was opposed to the
side that was backed by Rhodesia, and I don't know,

(48:09):
Carrie never said anything pro Rhodesia. Okay, Carrie was angry
that there were massacres in this war, which he blamed
on Kennedy. He was also angry at Kennedy for the
Bay of Pigs and for attacking Cuba. So it's it's
all overs of like right wing and left wing things
that are like again, he's all over the map um

(48:29):
kind of on this stuff. But whatever reasons he had
for hating Kennedy, he and his new buddies Slim and
Gary the Nazi have a lot of theoretical discussions about
killing JFK. Carrie's contributions to the conversation include advocating of
the use of a poison dart that would quote blow

(48:49):
his stomach apart, as well as another scenario involving a
remote control plane carrying a bomb, which is at least innovated. Yeah,
gotta give Ry credit for predicting drone warfare. Yeah. Um.
After Carry finished with his mock assassination plots, Kirstine added,
and next we'll get Martin Luther King. Now this is

(49:12):
the point at which Carry started to wonder if maybe
he hadn't fallen in with a bad group of people.
But again, he has terrible judgment and he just kind
of lets this slide. Another example of his terrible judgment
comes when Gary Kirstine pays him to help research a
book with the title strap In for this one, Folks,
Hitler was a good guy. Now the premise of this book,

(49:40):
please please enlighten me. It's a little different than what
you're expecting. The premise of this book is that all
of the other Nazis and the Third Reich were worse
than Hitler, so it's good that he was the Nazi
who wound up in charge. Now, this is an insane
thing to is. This is full stop idiotic, and Carrie

(50:04):
does not get involved in this. Carrie is like, well,
this guy's a weird Nazi, but he's willing to pay me,
and I am broke and kind of willing to do
anything for money, Like I don't mind writing out he's
writing research for this thing, right, So basically what his
research for this is he's going through the library and
he's reading books on guys like Gebels, and then he's
writing out things that Gebel said that sound worse than

(50:25):
things that Hitler said, like that's that's his research on
this project. So yeah, it's all it's good for good,
good for you, Carrie. Um. Now, while this is going on,
he is a pretty prominent member of the New Orleans
fringe community. And this is again we've talked about we
did in our episodes on Gabriel de Nunzio. Who's the guy.

(50:47):
He's this Italian poet who's generally considered to be the
ideological founder of fascism. He's the guy who inspired Mussolini.
He takes over this city on the coast of in
between kind of it's in Croatian now, but it's it's
near Italy, and it's after World War One. The city
Fumes in this kind of awkward position where it's an
independent city but it wants to be part of Italy,

(51:07):
and he just goes and he takes it over. And
de Nunzio's like a proto fascist, and a lot of
the guys who back him in this are proto fascists,
but also a lot of them are anarchists, and there
are like anarcho syndicalists involved in the government of Fume,
and even some Marxists, and part of what's happening here
is that, and this happens periodically. I think you could

(51:27):
look at the Internet as sort of a digital fume,
and like the late nineties, early two thousands, and we're
in another New Orleans in this period is another similar
situation where you've got all of these kind of fringe people,
many of whom are going to be very influential in
the nineteen sixties, going to be big parts of the
hippies and all this stuff that happens are like hanging

(51:48):
out with like weirdo objectivists and Satanists and occult people
and Nazis, and they're all hanging out in a lot
of the same spaces because none of them fit anywhere else.
And that's kind of what happens in periods of time
and places. This is like, this is a pattern that
repeats itself, which I'm not saying to justify on a

(52:10):
moral level, like you should never sit down and talk to,
or work with or take money from a Nazi for
a job like this. That's an immoral act, full stop.
I'm saying that, like this pattern of you having all
of these different radicals coming at stuff from different views.
This happens repeatedly in his like the punk scene. It
just like the punk scene, right then. In the punk scene,
there's a lot of work putting into making as your

(52:32):
Nazis can't hold then, right, but it took a moment.
Why then, is this is why in radical space is
you have to be so diligent and proactive about you know,
will summarize it as punching Nazis because otherwise shit like
this happens. Right, But that culture didn't really exist at

(52:53):
this point in that part in that area, or at
least Thornly was not a part of it. Now he's
also hanging out with It's not just these two weirdos.
He's hanging out with a lot of musicians, a lot
of like members of the local city. Like there's this
kind of unique little satan As sect in New Orleans
at the time, and he's friends with a lot of
those guys. He's just kind of generally in the counterculture. Now.

(53:14):
He is also again very vociferously an opponent of JFK.
And largely this comes down to I think economics, because
by this point Carry considered himself a capitalist revolutionary, and
so he had wished death on the President on numerous
occasions for the President not sticking to kind of randy

(53:36):
and principles of Lazai fair capitalism. I've met sep like
this in the goth scene. Yeah, you know, yeah, this
is not a totally unique journey. In November of nineteen
sixty three, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Carrie was working
at a restaurant at the time, and when it came

(53:56):
out that the police had arrested a former marine, he
immediately and publicly said, I bet it was my friend,
Lee Harvey Oswald. Now his co workers think this is peculiar.
And here's an opt opset ti tip for you kids
out here. If you if you believe your friend has
assassinated the president, maybe keep that one to yourself. The

(54:18):
fuck up. Yeah, you might not want to be talking
about now to the other guys at the kitchen. If
there's one thing that Thornley cannot do, it he is
physically incapable of shutting his mouth. Absolutely not. So it's
a funny prank. It is a funny break. Like the

(54:40):
French Revolution, the JFK assassination is a moment so horrific
and inconceivable that it spawned conspiracy theories. Immediately, Carrie's co
workers suspected that he was connected to it since he
looks like Oswald, this is another factor in it. He
kind of resembles Lee Harvey Oswald. There's talk that they
might secretly brothers. These are the beginning stories of of

(55:04):
what's going to become a surprisingly influential conspiracy. For his part,
Carrie believes that Oswald is innocent. He thinks that he
was a patsy for the real killers, and he I
think this is just because he was legitimately friends with
the guy and he just didn't really think that he
could do it. And in fact, when Oswald gets killed,

(55:25):
he falls into a deep depression because he's like, now,
no one's ever going to find out the truth. The
state has successfully murdered my friend in order to hide
the fact that he was innocent of this terrible crime.
So that's where Carrie is. Immediately after the kidded the assassination,
and obviously when the president is murdered, the Secret Service

(55:49):
and the FBI, you know, get get out there, start
to look in at people, start knock it on doors,
and as they begin their investigations, they centered them around
the radical political communities that Oswald had also spent time around.
Oswald had been living in the same part of New Orleans.
So one of the areas in which the Secret Service

(56:10):
in the FBI are looking around is New Orleans. And
they start running into a lot of people who are like,
you know, there's this weird guy who spent like a
solid year talking about killing JFK and putting up posters
and he kind of looked like Lee Harvey Oswald, and
then they're like, oh yeah. And also he talked about
how he and Oswald were friends. So the FEDS become
interested in carry and Carrie becomes convinced that he's being

(56:33):
tailed by the FEDS now and if he created me
convinced Harvey Oswald like what if a homoculous that's where Yeah,
He's like, yeah, that's it. Yeah, Yeah, he made his
own Uh, he made his own tulfa to carry us
as not as far from what he winds up believing

(56:53):
as I wish it was the case. So but here's
the thing again, you cannot emphasize how different kind of
this the left is in this period of time and
how differently people talk. If one thing what we know
now today about like co intel pro and the infiltration
of radical communities by the FBI. There are rumors about

(57:15):
it then, but we don't like have all of the
papers that we do now. It's like, well like this
like sixty three, yeah, sixty three right. So Carrie when
he finds out, when he decided, when he realizes the
FEDS are tailing him and here's the been looking around,
he just goes to the FBI and he's like, hey, guys,
I hear you're interested in me and the Kennedy killing.

(57:35):
You want to give me a light detector test. Makes
a lot of bad choices throughout his life. I mean,
this lawyer might not be the worst call. This actually
doesn't because, like the FBI immediately it is like, oh,
this guy's kind of a kook, right. Yeah. He also
he does have like an airtight alibi for the assassination,

(57:57):
and he Carrie frames it to them, is I want
to help you track down the real killer because he
wants to avenge Lee Harvey Oswald, which the FBI is
probably also why the FBI is like, Okay, this guy's
a little bit of a kuk. Carrie would later recall
that the main question the FBI asked him was whether
or not Oswald had been quote unquote a homo. I

(58:18):
love good, good work guys. Okay, he I know he's okay. No,
I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so. Um
that he that would be would be a proud moment. Again,
those are not easy shots to make. You're really excited

(58:45):
about this line of I'm just really excited to see
the reddit after this. It's just gonna be people arguing
that they could have hit that shot easy with a
man liquor carcano. Um, it's hard, folks, it's hard. Look
not a great rifle. That's why he had to anyway. Whatever. Um, So, yeah, Carrie.

(59:05):
For the next year or so, m Carrie, like, conspiracies
start to swirl around this guy, Like the conspiracy culture
in the US gets ignited again by the Kennedy assassination
in a way it really hadn't been before. And Carrie
is kind of the first guy people suspect of being
involved when Kennedy conspiracy theories take off the ground, and

(59:29):
that is going to have a lot of negative long
term consequences for Carrie and also everyone else in the world.
But the fascinating like butterfly effect that is still continuing
on today. But yeah, let's uh let's let's let's talk
about that next time, and let's talk about y'all's motherfucking
plugables this time. Well, if you want a copy of

(59:56):
me that is armed with what was the right well no, wait,
I shouldn't do that. If you want a book I wrote,
I wrote a book called Escape from Insul Island and
you can read it in afternoon and it has people
in it who are escaping from Insul Island. And if
you want to hear us play a role playing game

(01:00:16):
based on it, we did a live play that you
can hear on the podcasts Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
It'll be one of the most recent episodes because well,
I mean at the time this releases, as otherwise you
might have to search for it. And I have a podcast.
I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
we probably won't be covering this exact subject. And well, now, yeah,

(01:00:41):
you know, Margaret, this is interesting. I actually did escape
from an Insall Island once. I think I think you
people in the East Coast call it Rhode Island. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes,
very similar to your story. My experience on Rhode Island. Yeah,
it's just made of roads. Also not a roads and
in cells. Yeah, in the nineties when I did like

(01:01:04):
weird website zine stuff, I definitely wrote weird things about
being likewise Rhode Island, Lyne to you about everything, and
it's I think it's a it's a great it's a
great place to target for for like cruel jokes because
like four people live there, so yeah, what are they
going to do? Yeah, organize against us? Well, and it's
because I was involved. Actually, the culture that I was

(01:01:25):
involved in in the nineties was like IRC Discordian stuff,
So I was hanging out with like older goths who
are all part of this shit. So yeah, of the
ship we're about to talk about next episode, Darris. My
plugs are if you want to contribute to uh, well
it's it's not it's not quite Discordian. But if if

(01:01:46):
you want to feel if you want to feel like
you're contributing to the work of of people in very
secretive groups who are doing who are doing important work,
you can donate the Atlanta Solidarity Fund um. That is
the main thing I'm going to plug along with my
my my four part series on Stoptop City that was
just released on It could Happen Here and Uh yeah,

(01:02:08):
let's uh, you know, support people in Atlanta. UM where
this story ends. By the way we are, we are.
We are building to the city of Atlantic Garth. I
didn't because attis which actually from underneath the ocean. UM.

(01:02:28):
I have been. I have been screaming about this for
years into my CBE radio. Margaret very excited to talk
with you all about this. UM anyway, go to go
to hell. All of you go to Hell. I love you,
Go with Christ to Hell. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,

(01:02:51):
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.