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The podcast that I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is listening to because within minutes, well like an hour, of us starting to record the last two parts of our series on the Illuminati. He posted a very boomer Illuminati meme. Extremely funny. The timing was incredible. There's no other explanation but that we have influenced his mind on a deep and possibly occult level. You know, I think what's probably to blame for this is last night I ate on a huge quantity of room temperature shrimp covered in thousand island dressing and then I vomited on the hood of an old Tesla. This was my emido mancy that I was practicing and I believe it has allowed me to infect Elon's mind with a why are you like this? Why did you have to like describe the shrimp? Why? Why? Because otherwise if people don't smell the shrimp, they're not going to believe the rest of the story, Sophie. All right. I did you're going to lie to people. You need details. Gross. Anyways, Margaret Kuhl-Huy and Harrison Davis are here. I'll add that anecdote to my growing grim war of a vomit related picture. I thought you were just going to say you're adding it to the list of things that you tell your therapist about work. You know, actually, a lot of crossover between my grim war and things I tell my therapist. You know, using vomit magic one time, I was able to turn a Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner into a bunch of vomit on the Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner. But what an amazing feat of alchemy, that that that transmutation is just simply mind-blowing. I use it as a spell to be slightly less drunk. See, limitless power is available when you embrace the sacred truths of a mid-o'-mancy. Good times actually would be a pretty fun class to make in like a in like a pathfinder type setting. You could do a lot of fun with this. You just being a human fly and it's like how you attack and devour. That's kind of based actually, like, yeah, digesting your opponents as you hit them with a sword or something. Yeah. Very cool. That's what everyone is listening to this podcast here about. You know what else is cool? The Illuminati. The Illuminati was mid, but the guy that we're going to start our episode today talking about Robert Anton Wilson was pretty dope. Now we're talking mostly about Kerry Thornley in the series for good reason. Number one, I think he and Greg Hill were the, I mean, they certainly were the initial primary drivers behind Discordianism. Kerry is also, as we'll get to the guy who kind of makes the most sense to cover and detail in behind the bastards. But my entry into like being interested in the, not just like conspiracy, culture in America particularly as it existed in the 80s and 90s, but into the Discordians and to all of this stuff was through the work of a guy named Robert Anton Wilson. And Margaret, have you, have you, are you that familiar with Bob Wilson stuff? Okay. So here's where I lose all of my cred. I am very aware of the Illuminati strategy and I have not read it. Yeah. He talking about the Illuminatus trilogy, a little later, as a, as quite relevant. Yeah. He's written a lot of essays. He's, if you really want to sense for the guy, he made a documentary right before he died called Maybe Logic that is available for free on, on YouTube and whatever. It's the first thing I watched the first time I ever took hallucinogens. So he had a big impact on me and he's a legitimately a really interesting guy. Kind of, he comes out of Flatbush, Brooklyn and he grew up as a little kid and what he called like a New York's Irish Catholic ghetto. He did not have a lot of, or so he spent, he's, yeah, Garrettson Beach is the actual neighborhood that he grew up in, which is kind of like out in the middle of nowhere. So there's not a lot of money. He is, he is abused pretty profoundly by the nuns who run his school as a kid. He is like beaten and mentally like tormented by these, these nuns and he also has two bouts of polio as a little kid. But he survives. He has this guy of all the people we're talking about. Bob Wilson is the most mentally healthy and also has like the roughest life. He has a very hard life. And he, yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that is kind of a key moment in this guy's life is that the, the thing that saves his life from polio is a treatment called the sister Kenny method, which is like alternative medicine today and was kind of at the time in the thirties considered like quackery. And I'm not competent to like weigh in on this, but he credits the sister Kenny method with saving him from his polio. And the fact that like this thing that people called quack medicine is what saved him as a child is going to have a really big influence on just sort of the, the degree of weight that he gives authority. Yeah. And those I, I, I, I did not know that but that makes so much sense for the rest of his life is so much about like how much value we put into what we believe and how much what we believe kind of creates the reality around us. And that is such an interesting thing. So I'm sure I'm sure Bob Wilson later on is like talked about like the possible effect and all that kind of stuff as, as that comes up in like in like chaos magic a lot. And, and he was a member of the biggest chaos magic order. But that's just that's such an interesting story. And I was unaware that he dealt with polio. Yeah. Nor that it was, it was kind of quote unquote, curiosity using this like crank method. What's the method? I'm imagining you go into this like convent and sister, Kenny, Kenny, whatever. Kenny, yeah. Kenny just hits you with a cane. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's basically like a bunch of hot compresses and like kind of passive movement, some of which seems like it's, it's sort of similar to like massages to reduce like some of the spasms that are caused by polio. And yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. Again, I'm not like a, like an expert on any of this, but it does seem she's pretty well regarded within like physical therapy and considered to be something of a pioneer in the field. So I think it's one of those situations where he receives this treatment that people call bullshit as a kid and it helps him. And later on, she's kind of, to at least some extent vindicated. And yeah, so this is a big impact on Bob. The other thing that has a big impact on Bob is that just like three years after he, or a couple of years after his, like while he's sort of in the middle of this polio shit, the war of the worlds comes on the radio. So Orson Wells is a huge influence on this guy. As a young adult, he starts working at Playboy and he, he hooks up and gets married to a woman named Arlen. And they are both in addition to being, because we're talking about these guys kind of in their like intellectual weirdo prankster thing. He and Arlen are both also very committed physical activists. They are both involved with the black panthers. So these are not, again, these are not just people who like talk about shit. They're taking on real risk. And in fact, at one point while he's at Playboy, one of the editors there, an executive comes up to him and says that like tell some, his name has been added to the Chicago PDs Red Squad. Or sorry, they're in Chicago, not LA. And which is like a list of radicals that the authorities had under surveillance. And the Red Squad existed. We don't actually know if Bob was on it or not. And basically this guy tells Bob like it's because they think you're a gun runner for the black panthers. And Bob is like, well, no, we're just part of the free breakfast program. And basically right now, there's a non-zero chance Bob Wilson ran guns. That's not an impossibility. I'm not going to say that's a hundred percent note. Yeah. Full support, I don't know. Yeah. And he's, he also, again, for kind of to talk about like how rough this guy's life is, the several kids with Arlen, his youngest daughter when she is 15 is beaten to death in a robbery gone bad. God. And she becomes the first person, one of the very first people in the world and the first person from at least in the Bay area to have her brain put in a in cryogenic, whatever stasis. That's a thing Bob Wilson is into very early on. That is normally I have very little sympathy as a general rule for the life extension people. But I obviously can't blame a grieving father for doing something like that. Like that's a perfectly understandable series of actions, especially in the 70s. Yeah, that's different than that. I want to be an immortal mage who rules the world. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Hey, hey, hey, come on. So while Thornley and Hill kind of provided the initial impetus behind discordianism, Bob Wilson becomes one of the chief drivers and it probably is the most influential of them because he is he is still to this day probably like one of the number one voices out of the the psychedelic movement and the counter culture movement in the late 60s and 70s. Bob Wilson wrote a bit about this in the late 70s in a book he put out called cosmic triggers. It's actually a series of books. And this is him kind of describing the changes that occur in the American psyche during the time that the discordians are starting out their activism. When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche as Jules Feffer among others has noticed. Kennedy was not a universally beloved president of course. Nobody ever has been, not even Washington, but he was young or youngish, handsome, cultured brave, everybody knows the PT 109 story and Vieryle. There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the national psyche by the Dele plasabullets. Kamala died, the divine king had been sacrificed. He were caught suddenly in the middle of a phrasier, Freud reenactment of archetypal, anthropological ritual. The national psyche veered disilley towards chapel perilous. Now chapel perilous, is this a term you all are familiar with? No, I have no idea. It's a psychological term. I know you know this case because we've talked about this so much. Yes. This is like a core part of my personal psychology. Yes. In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions called chapel perilous in the trade. You come out the other side, either a stone paranoid or an agnostic. There is no third way. I came out an agnostic. And that's, I still think is one of the more useful, especially in the era of the internet. Because a big thing for, and all of the early discordians break in different ways, they all react differently to chapel perilous. And actually one thing I'll quibble with Wilson here is I think there is a third way to react to this. And we'll talk about that later. But I think Wilson's attitude is going to be, because he is a panagnostic. Panagnosticism is kind of like the ideology that guides him the rest of his life in increasing ways. And that's kind of, if you listen to like best practices from any of these like people who work for traditional journalist outfits in disinfo, like they don't phrase it in his artful or attractive way as Bob Wilson says, but that's what everybody's trying to urge people towards. Right. What is internet accessism? Not taking anything as gospel or, or perfect truth. Not getting it. It's not allowing will, what are the things Wilson would talk about as the concept of reality tunnel, right? And so when you start to believe things about the world, that kind of, that changes how you perceive the world. That changes effectively the world that you live in and if you're going to like continue to make more choices that help you board deeper into that reality tunnel, which fears you away from everybody else, right? We've got with QAnon as a huge chunk of people who have bored a reality tunnel so deep outside of kind of the consensus reality that a lot of most of their other people live in that you, they can't be reached in a lot of cases. This is what happens in those, like somebody will like murder their family or whatever or set off a bomb because they've, they've fallen so deep down this tunnel. And one of the things Wilson is, he doesn't want people to close their minds, but he, he doesn't want anyone to get like to bury themselves too deep in a tunnel that leads them, you know, that they can't get out from, right? Like that's the benefit of panagnosticism. I mean, I think another really succinct way of thinking about it is it's the same name as his documentary, maybe logic, as it like, maybe this thing is the thing. Like a big, he has these speeches where he's tried, he tries to explain why we should remove the word it is from the English vocabulary because we say this thing is this thing. You are now collapsing reality down into this succinct statement that is probably going to cause problems when you create that, like when you create that sense of equalness. So think of everything as like, maybe this is the thing or maybe this is the thing. Like it tried to, if you are using the word is a few times there. Yeah, I mean, you like the music the word because of like linguistics, but thinking, thinking of the world in that maybe framework, yeah, is a safer way to approach a lot of these things that try to like mess with your psyche. Okay, it makes for worse writing. Metaphores are generally can see us stronger than similes. So true. That's true. And Bob Wilson will be at war most of his life with the fact that he recognizes playing with this stuff can be dangerous and also it's very fun to do. But as a young man writing for playboy, he is not as, he's not quite as mature as he will later be. And so starting from the position of these beliefs and kind of the value of pan agnosticism, he decides that his goal should be to bring as many people as possible to chapel perilous, right? And so Wilson's eyes, the goal of operation mind fuck is to put stuff out here that causes as many people as possible to hit this decision point where they either become a stone paranoid or they kind of back away and gain this ability to look at things from a more objective standpoint. And a big part of like the basic goal here is in order to stop people from kind of going too far in these particular like the John Birch directions. He wants to create art that causes people to confront the fact that reality is not fixed and emerge from that experience questioning their old assumptions. That's what Wilson sees as the actual like moral good behind operation mind fuck. So Wilson and his editor, fellow editor Shay, they start sitting down with Thornley and the other discordians. And it's from these conversations that they actually come up with a name for operation mind fuck because this is just something they're doing for a couple years, right? They're sitting off these letters. They're putting out these different conspiracy theories in different magazines. But they haven't really named it yet. And I'm going to read a quote from the New Yorker about how that goes down. Through every means available Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan. The mind fuckers intended to attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the Illuminati and other hidden hands. So they planted stories about the Illuminati and the underground press. They slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal innovator and the new left newspaper Roger Spark. They cooked up a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in the playboy advisor. When a new Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting district attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing. Garrison's booster art, Kunkan of the Los Angeles free press got a note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates the telltale sign. None of them had a left nipple. What if there really is an Illuminati Wilson asked Thornley one pot fog tonight in 1968. Maybe they'll find out about us and be pissed. I doubt if there is Thornley answered. And if there by some chances, they'd probably be very happy to have wild ass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories. I really love this idea that probably at some point they like checked someone for it and then they're like, no, no, it's not a left nipple and a right nipple. It's two right nipples. It's just one of them's on the other side. Yeah, they doubled the right nipples. So obviously none of what they're doing helps this cloud of suspicion that's fallen down on Kerry that he's deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination. And by this point, JFK conspiracy theorists have become aware of the discordians and Thornley is involvement and have decided the discordians are a CIA front, which in fairness is something that just the discordians claimed to do. So this doesn't happen anywhere. Oh, boy. So like the one line I wouldn't cross in the name of this, I'm not going to fed Jack it myself. You know, they do that immediately. So Thornley becomes the constant victim of stalking by groups of men and suits. And it's like he is legitimately under investigation by the government. Some of these guys are probably feds. Some of them are probably conspiracy theorists. Also Kerry is a paranoid schizophrenic who's taking LSD and marijuana nearly every single day. So a lot's going on when his head here, right? But like part of what's going to make this so much more damaging to him is that like some of the stalking is real, which makes the stuff that's not real a lot harder for him to doubt. Yeah. He also because, you know, this is Garrison, you may not know this. People's phone numbers used to just be like listed in a book that you could pick up. So folks like who are into the conspiracy get phone books for wherever he's living. And they start like calling him and some of them will leave like cryptic messages. And these are some of these are probably discordians fucking with Kerry, right? They're like continuing the conspiracy by pretending to be a part of it to mess with his head. Some of them are just dead air. You know, they may just be people actually stalking him. And yeah, it's impossible to say entirely what's happening. But as we turn over to the 70s, Kerry increasingly finds himself acting as a stone paranoid. Now mental illness does run in his family. His younger brother Dick suffered from schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in this period, Kerry increasingly suffers from them as well. He is eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. This is not like podcast diagnosis hour with Robert Evans here. Kerry Thorneley was diagnosed. And he also starts escalating his drug use, which this is a, this is a very during that, do you know? God in the 70s. When is he born? Um, there's like what decade is he? I think like 40s. He's probably starting his 30s right now. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah, he's like 30s, 40s. I'm under the impression that's like one of the time early 30s is like one of the times that late 20s early 30s is when people often have schizophrenic, uh, breaks. And it can be, I had a, I've had this happen to a couple of friends of mine. I used to live with a young woman who was in her mid 20s, uh, had just finished college, was like going through whatever program you go to to become like a park ranger and then just kind of one day loses it, you know? And, and you know, I'm not going to give like the tales, but like it was an, it was it's, it's, it's, it can come on very suddenly. And we know one thing we do know is that both LSD and marijuana can trigger schizophrenic episodes. I'm under the impression of my brain too, but I'm not sure. I'm, I'm, I think basically any seriously mind altering drug can have the effect of because I, I've heard that like cocaine can do it too. Like it's, it's not like it's creating this in you. It's these are people who at some point would have started to experience these symptoms, it can bring it on earlier, it can make it, you know, a lot worse. It kind of, it kind of like knocks over the first domino. Yeah. But the domino would have probably fallen over eventually anyway. Yes. And with care about it to my schizophrenic friends who are still awesome. Just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously this is just like a thing he would have had to deal with. Yeah. No, totally. I don't think anyone's, I just want to make sure everyone's and I know that it's just a thing. Yeah. It's just a thing. And this is a thing he would have had to deal with either way. I will say the fact that he is basically never not tripping on acid or smoking pot does not help him manage this. Yeah. And his friends will know that like sometimes he'll come in and he'll be like fairly like calm and normal. And once he hits a joint, he won't be able to stop talking about this conspiracy to kill Kennedy and how he's wrapped up in it and the different things that he started to believe about it. And it he's kind of so aggressive about it that people, a lot of people can't spend time around him anymore because it's just like this, this thing that, you know, that when he gets into it, he's incapable of like even seeing the people around him. And and Kerry goes further and further kind of off the deep end over the next couple of years through the 70s. He convinces himself that Oswald was really set up. He starts to believe that he may have in fact been Oswald's body double or otherwise involved in the conspiracy to kill JFK and had simply forgotten about it due to CIA mind control radios implanted in his head. And one of the problems is that like he has a lot of friends like Greg Hibbler, who's Robert Anton Wilson, Robert the CIA is cutting off your microphone, Robert. Oh, no, this isn't the first time that you've mentioned that. And then your microphone starts cutting out. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that's how the CIA works. But you know how else the CIA works by planting people with LSD so they trip and they don't know it. That's one way it works. So that way it works so that they're more susceptible to advertising. Yes. I mean, Garrison in in an earlier time with less sophisticated ads they had to use LSD. Now though the quality ads on this podcast are much more mind altering than any fucking chemical that some Danish man cooked up in a lab. In 1804 vice president Aaron Burr killed his rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel making him a pariah and a fugitive desperate to return to power. Burr began to plot a daring insurrection. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times and people that shaped America and Americans. Our values, our struggles and our dreams. In our latest series a disgraced Aaron Burr conspires to break off America's western frontier and found a new independent nation with himself as emperor. When president Thomas Jefferson discovers this scheme, Burr becomes the highest ranking official in US history ever to be charged with treason. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts and you can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondry app. So instead of selling my car using the roto app on my phone, I posted an ad online. Now it's non-stop phone calls and people at my door. I'm Larry, I'm here about to sedan. Not now Larry. See, roto will buy your car or even buy you out of a lease without the hassle. Hey, I'm not a hassle. Yes, yes, Larry. 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Ah, we're back. I hope you all enjoyed the 12 hours of hallucinations that come with every behind the bastards ad break. It's really ruined a lot of people's lives but it helps us sell. It's financially lucrative for us. It helps promote good things. What this podcast is about. Good things. The good things cast. So what a boring show that would be, am I right? Here's the problem. Kerry is, I mean, he's losing his mind. He is increasingly unable to tell what's real. The government tried to, or someone tried to make him murder the president. That he may have helped murder the president. That he's being stalked by government agents. Periodically, he will go to his friends, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Shea, Greg Hill, and he'll try to talk to him about this. And they don't really notice that he's serious because the language they all communicate with is like making up conspiracy theories. So it takes them a while to realize like, oh no, Kerry's actually in some distress here. Like, there's a problem with our friend. What are the odds that he actually was involved in the assassination of JFK? He was living basically next to this guy who he claimed not to have ever seen again. I mean, for one thing, he wasn't in Dallas when it happened. For the other thing, like, Kerry Thornley was actually incapable of hiding anything ever. Okay. When he comes to believe that he killed Kennedy, he tells everybody that he killed Kennedy. And so when he doesn't believe, like, I just don't think he would ever have been capable of being part of a plot. He's not very good at, like, yeah, he's, he's, he's, we'll talk about it. So we're going to watch a little video with him later, but yeah, it's interesting. You can believe whatever you want about actually the, Kerry's, Kerry's complicity in the Kennedy assassination. I'm literally, I've never cared about most conspiracy shit. It has never occurred to me to care who shot JFK. I do not care. I mean, wow. Margaret, this is how the reality, the reality total starts here. You are already on the path. You already asked the question. Took a shuffle out of dirt out of a tunnel. Cool. I hope there's some, I hope it's like D&D when you get into the tunnels. Sometimes, sometimes. So with gold and manlicker, Carcano rifles. Yeah. So that's how I play D&D. All of Kerry's kind of mental, I don't know, collapse isn't quite the right word, but this process of him sort of falling to his mental demons occurs over the course of about a decade. And while this is going on, he remains pretty intensely involved in radical politics. He has another ideological shift from the kind of individualist anarchism that had led him to discord and is him towards a belief system that is, I mean, this is not like a huge move. Like, this is not like a huge pivot from individualist anarchism, but he comes to like describe his political ideology as supporting sex, drugs and treason. He briefly considers, yeah, that's fine. He briefly considers slipping LSD into the water supply of a city. But eventually his acid trips convince him to drop out of society and integrate himself into what he calls a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe. And this tribe is one of the 1960s mini acid cults called the Kareesta. Kerry takes over their newspaper and he writes several influential articles. And these guys are like, again, this is like an acid sex cult. It's also pretty like their publication is reasonably prominent within the radical community at this time. So Kerry's articles wind up having a market you might be surprised by the influence this has actually. But he writes an article that includes this line. Kareesta is a religion and the mood of Kareesta is one of holiness. Do not however look for profusion of rituals, dogmas, doctrines and scriptures. Kareesta is too sacred for that. It is more akin to the religions of the East and also the so called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West. So what's interesting, like that may not seem like much, but what's interesting is that that is and this article includes basically the first, probably the first recorded use of people using the word pagan to refer to both a past practice and ongoing modern religious practices that had not really happened until. Yeah. And this is I'm not the one making this claim. This is a claim made by Margot Adler, who is a Wicken Priestess and an NPR correspondent. In her book Drawing Down the Moon, she claims that Kerry's writings helped spark the actual beginning of the neo-pagan movement. And she is the one who credits him as the first person to use the word pagan to describe both past and present religions. This guy is everywhere. Yeah, he's really influential. It's wild. Because he's personally killed a president or two, I'm not sure how many. And also started, just impressive. You know what, that is my head canon now. I'm blaming the Kennedy assassin or crediting it to him. I think this secreted him away, actually, I actually don't know the conspiracy theories from JFK. Oh, so you're above a ho-tap believer. Oh, God, no, I don't think so. I've changed my mind. You should watch the, everyone should watch the movie, Bubba Ho-tap by Don Coscarelli. The premise of the film, starting Bruce Campbell, is that Elvis, like, gives his life to an Elvis impersonator and then winds up in an old folks home as an old man. And his best friend is a black man who claims to be JFK, who the CIA, like, changed his skin in order to, like, hide him to fake his death. And they have to fight a mummy. It's an incredible film. Okay, I'm back to believing it. Yep. All right. Bubba Ho-tap, an excellent piece of art. So Kerry, again, it's interesting. He is a very functional person in a lot of ways. He's deeply influential. He writes a huge amount. It's good writing as a general rule. But he's also in, like, he's also an unmedicated and increasingly kind of falling into these increasingly complex conspiratorial holes. And he'll just drop off the map for periods of time. He spends a decent chunk, particularly in the late 70s or the 80s, kind of living as a transient. But never when he doesn't want to, right? One of the things his friends will say is that, like, no matter how kind of far out he got, when he wanted to, he would find ways to make money and keep a roof over his head. So he always had this kind of degree of control over his life. It's more like he couldn't control his relationships with other people, because he starts to wrap them into these conspiracies that he's spending all of his time thinking about. Now, probably, I think the first, as far as I've read, the first of his friends to realize something is deeply wrong is Robert Anton Wilson. And Wilson would kind of very politely, when Kerry would start getting wrapped up in these claims, would be like, well, that, I don't really, you know, I understand what you're saying, and I understand that you believe that. But I want you to consider that maybe like, that's not as true as you think it is. And like, maybe there's alternative explanations for why you think somebody's following you or this or that. Kerry decides that this means that Bob is his CIA handler, and he's trying to trick him to manipulate him into, yeah, this is like a not an uncommon story, unfortunately. And variants of this kind of happen with some of his other friends. Now, so kind of the side effect of this is that, especially kind of at the end of the 70s, Kerry is increasingly like isolated. A lot of his old friends, he doesn't talk to anymore. Greg Hill kind of gets very depressed at this point in time. His wife divorces him and he starts drinking more and more. And so he kind of reduces his contact. And so Kerry does not have a lot of the moderating influences that he'd had earlier in his life. And his personal beliefs continue to evolve. And again, he's kind of gotten really into free love in this period that has sort of become the center of his political identity. And the next set of beliefs that he takes on, because he is a guy who periodically will just take on beliefs very strongly, is that the only way to create a utopia is to build a world free of sexual hangups. Now this is where things take a really dark turn. Oh no. Kerry believes all people are sexual beings, sex is fundamentally a good. It's something that should form the center of human relationships. And if all people are sexual beings and all children are people, then sex with children can't be all that bad. So one is a real like Peter Lamborn Wilson energy. Yeah. I was wondering if they were communicating at this time, because that is very, very similar types of logic and they were both probably very active in like the early pagan community. I haven't seen that they were communicating directly, but they were certainly writing in some of the same magazines and in some of the same places. And the thing Kerry convinces himself is basically he's not committed to sexual liberation if he does not try to have sex with a child. So this did not come out until 2003. More than 2002, some like that, the book came out 2003 when Grace, when Adam go rightly, who's written the book, the prankster in the conspiracy, which is the best book about Kerry. He is looking into Kerry's life. He's talking to all of his old friends and one of his old friends, she is a Kerry would claim that they dated. She claims they just worked friends who had sex one time and then she like wanted some space. This is another thing with Kerry, but this woman Grace Kaplinger, she sends Adam a letter in and this is what it says. There was an incident in Atlanta when Kerry and Kara and Craig were living across the street from me, Kara is his wife, living across the street from me and my family. He took my daughter, Maryann, when she was around seven or eight into a room at the home of a family, close friends of mine who lived around the corner. He closed the door and began trying to fondle Maryann. This was stopped by my friend, Jane, coming to the door and demanding that it be opened. She told me about it as did Maryann at the time and I know that I did not deal with this properly. Part of me was simply unable to understand the gravity, even the total reality of it, but it did happen. Fuck. I have no reason to disbelieve that. I know. It is consistent. It is one of those that I want to be really clear here because we've talked in other episodes like when we talked about the John Hinckley Jr. about mental illness and when it does and does not have an impact on someone's complicity in a crime. I don't think that has any impact on what Kara has done here. I think his decision to try to molest this girl is completely consistent with decades of how this guy functions. What I mean by that is that when Kara comes across deep poverty overseas in Southeast Asia and reads Marx, he becomes a committed Marxist. When he reads Atlas Shrugged and falls in love with objectivism, he describes himself as like a capitalist, insurgent terrorist. When he finds anarchism, he devotes himself to causing as much chaos as possible. He is the kind of person who when he finds something attractive in an ideology, jumps into it with both feet and is immediately ready to give everything for it. I think actually there's a degree to which I have more condemnation and find him more unsettling than someone who is a pedophile in the sense of someone who is attracted to children and seeks them out because we have no evidence this ever happened again. I don't think this is the result of attraction. I think this is the result of Kerry believing he is not living his ideology if he doesn't try to do this. I think a person who can do that is so much scarier than almost any other kind of person in the world. It's fucked up. No, and there's so much there about the history of... It's terrible. The history of pedophilia that runs through so many different subcultures and ideologies on all sides of the spectrum and it's like very rarely tackled head on because it's usually talked about in very bad faith. Everyone calling trans people groomers or whatever. People don't want to talk about it because it's not a fucking nice thing to talk about. It's complicated, but people need to know that, yeah, that's just like... What echo chambers can make you believe is reasonable? You know, I guess it was the kind of thing that they call reality tunnels. When you have these self-reinforcing beliefs and you get a small group of people who are like, yeah, and then this thing. It is a thing that people have a problem with and it allows you to come up with horrific conclusions such as this one. This is why Robert Anton Wilson was such an advocate of panagnosticism. He's watching Kerry. I don't think he's aware of this when it happens, but he does write the forward to the biography that this is in. He does become aware of it at some point. That was only published a few years before Wilson died. It was right around because I think he died in 2003 or 2004. Yeah, yeah. That's unsettling. It's interesting just to kind of make that point further. Go rightly also talks to one of Thorne's longtime friends or Thorne Lee's longtime friends, Lois Lacey, to try and understand why this happened. And Lacey's explanation is that Kerry really started to, like his behavior started to change for the worst, for the toxic, for the abusive. When he dropped the personal mantra that he had kept with him most of his life, which was just the word no. And I'm going to read a quote from the book here because I think this is interesting. As Luis explained, Kerry was fiercely anti-authoritarian. And prior to his bouts of paranoia, he had always stood up to whatever monolithic force stood in his way, continually saying no, whether it was to the government, Jim Garrison, or anyone else. This was Kerry's way of dealing with people who tried to tell him what to do. And this was the simple wisdom he'd imparted to Lois many years before. Just learn to say no, and people won't know how to react or what to do. And in most cases would leave you the fuck alone. At some point, Kerry apparently quit saying no. And in essence, stopped evolving, while his friends, who in many instances, had followed Kerry over the years, now began eclipsing him as they continued growing, exploring, and entertaining new ideas and forms of expression. Kerry, Lois Contents, became locked in this delusory world of conspiracies, which impeded his evolution. One time, Kerry explained his struggles to her in the following manner. It's hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking to you. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's the complicated thing to parse. It is a complicated thing to parse. And in a lot of ways, the path that he got set down, he did lay out the own stones for the path. He was encouraging himself so much of this development, and he just got lost along the way. But he was always capable of doing this, right? Because he did it as a person. It's one of those things we add. Same thing with the Kanye West stuff, same thing with whenever we talk about what's degree does your mental health or whatever diagnosis you might have, contribute to the actions that you take. Yeah. I think it's a matter of whether or not you understand the reality of what you're doing in a very basic way. For example, if Kerry had become convinced that a random person was stalking him and just shot that person, believing he was defending himself from the CIA, you're not morally culpable to that, right? That's fundamentally a decision you make because you believe you're in danger. I can't morally blame somebody for that. But the decision to rape a child is based on like a real personal sense of ideology. Yes, and the weirdly fucked up thing to do. And that matters more than for example, the consent of the child or the ability, like obviously children cannot consent, but like the, like it's the sintering of his own need to be consistent with this thing he's convinced himself is his politics. Yeah. That is like that's a bad thing to do. Well, this is depressing. You know what's not bad? Uh, gold. The products are right. That's right. This is the part that's podcasting. Buy some gold. Everybody. How are you spending your weekend with friends and family or at the car dealership? Why lease a new car the old way with Roto, lease your vehicle in three easy steps all from our app? Shop real-time inventory and see the clear cost. That means the best price personalized to you with no haggling, then complete your lease right from your phone. The best part your new car is delivered right to your door, download the Roto app today. That's R-O-D-O. Ready? Set. Roto. 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We're just having a good time, having a good time, never want to stop at all. So Gary gets divorced. He kind of loses his ability over time to function in mainstream society whatsoever. He becomes something of a wandering bum hitchhiking across the country, crashing with friends or on the street. Those who'd known him a long time learned that trying to help him inevitably brought allegations that they too were part of the CIA conspiracy. One of his brothers is his kind of middle brother, not Dick. Later writes this, which I think does a good enough job of kind of summarizing how Gary is treating people in this period. The last time I saw Gary was in the early 1980s, it was the last time our nuclear family was all together at the same time in years and it was Christmas. After the Warren Commission testimony, Gary gradually morphed from a fascinating, very charismatic, merry prankster, beaten-it kind of idiot, savant, intellectual giant into a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic. That Christmas we got together at my mom and dad's, the Nazi spy's house. Gary was intent on proving to me that he was being followed and watched and that he had thought mind-controlled devices got mind-controlled devices planted in his head. So he asked me to drive him to a local bus stop to prove his point. To put this in perspective, I had long hair. Gary had long hair, a full beard, and a bright orange sailor's hat on and was carrying a white purse. As we sat at the bus stop in this very conservative palo-sferred-as neighborhood, Gary began to point out how almost everyone who drove by was looking at us. So they were most likely spying on him and in fact some had been following him for days. That was such a shock to me to realize what a fine line it is between being an intellectual giant and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic. I never saw him again after that day. His whole story is so dark and tragic. You can see all this gets, his stuff that he was doing in school to prank his friends as a precursor to all this, how he would put up posters talking about killing the president as this thing that in the end has such a negative impact on your life but is seemingly an inconsequential joke. And then in the end, it leads to this devastating train of things that just kind of shatters your mental grasp of reality. And it's, I think, what Wilson would say is it's the result of saying yes to many times, it's the result of being too convinced. And I think part of what, and I think this is part of where you need some of his brothers words here to help make sense of it because the fact that what he says there at the end there, the difference between the thin line between being an intellectual giant which carry objectively was his influence on the culture was massive and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic. I think Kerry's conception of his own intelligence is a big part of why things go so badly for him. He thought he was smart enough that he was like catching these people. And he was fucking with them and I'm the one who has the control in the agency here, right? And I'm like, and I'm like the maybe logic side of things. It's like, people looking at me at this bus stop, that is proof that they're following me. It's using that notion of like is and as opposed to thinking like, oh, they're looking at you or maybe it's because you have long hair and you're sitting just someone else with long hair. Yeah, with a purse. And you just you just you just look like weird hippies like that. Well, see him in a little bit, but I should note here, Kerry never didn't look like a wizard. Like the whole period from the historian point on, he's got like this long beard and these, he has wizard, resting wizard face is how I would describe the way Kerry historically looks. But he did eventually find some sort of rough equilibrium. He wound up kind of making a place for himself in Atlanta's little five points neighborhood. Now at this point, that was the center of all things weird in the deep south. And it was ignored enough by authorities that it drew in traveling punk kids who wanted nothing more than to squat in old buildings and publish weird shit for other grungy leftists. What what Kerry's here are we in now? We're talking the late seventies and the eighties all through the Reagan years, basically. This is kind of what he's doing. And he finds a sketchy living situation where he's basically, I think it's like a backhouse kind of thing that it's not entirely illegal over the course of the time he's there. He fills it with exactly 13 cats. And because because space in his house is so small, he had to build what he called it cat condo out of scrapwood and trash, creating a system of tunnels, ladders and platforms on the walls for his cats. I've lived in punk houses where you have like the resident wizard where everyone's like 25. And then there's just the like 70 year old anarchist who's like, yeah, fucking. That is scary. That is scary. In this last period of his life. Yeah. And his cat condo, by the way, the health department eventually makes him tear it down. That's fucked up. Man. I know what the man have his cat condo. I know. I mostly feel sad for the 14th cat that just hangs out outside and is like, come on. You're a crazy cat. There's no more space. Come on. So without the internet, the L5P community, little five points community keeps in touch through a series of underground papers. And in the mid 70s, late 70s really mostly, Carrie has another one of his great ideas. So he starts by posting what he calls wall newspapers all around little five points. These are one page to Xerox Rants. And he puts them up in strategic locations around town, around like the punk bars and stuff that people hang out in. So folks like find these. They see them on like bathroom walls and stuff and they read them and they talk about them to their friends who are all hanging out in the same area. And gradually like Carrie starts to become known around town for these these wall newspapers that he's posting up. He starts publishing more and more of these little Xerox Rants and like arguments and like letters to the editor. People start passing them out to their friends or leaving them out at bars. This is the start of the Zine revolution. Because one of the things Carrie is doing while he's doing this in little five points, he's also part of the time living this sort of transient existence where he's like hitchhiking throughout the South, putting up these little like wall newspapers and stuff and like spreading. So sometimes people will like write notes and letters and stuff in Atlanta and he'll like print them up and then he'll travel down to, you know, Orlando and he'll put them up in places and stuff. And this is like other people start to see this and realize like, oh, this is actually a really cool way to like communicate and share information. And yeah, this is like kind of how the Zine revolution kicks off and that really starts in the 1980s. So only publications included Cocha, K-U-L-C-A-J, which focused on art, sex and religion. And this is my favorite one, The Decadent Worker, which was a gossip column of like different like like drama that in the leftist community and little five points. Oh my gosh. Yeah. This is like Twitter getting circulated. It's kind of a little five points. Okay. So when I lived in the squad scene in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, there was this Zine that had been going on for like 10 or 15 years, maybe longer. That was just the gossip of who's fucking who in the squad scene in Amsterdam. And it was like terrifying. It was terrifying to me because I like, I didn't read Dutch and it was one of the, I don't know, but just the fact that there's this Zine that gets distributed about like who is new in town, who's fucking who. It's fucking scary. Yeah. And it's one of the, I should note here just because people will get angry online otherwise. This is not one of the, this is one of those things where like, like, it's not like Kerry runs into a room full of punks and anarchists and says, I have invented the Zine. This is, this is actually a little bit more like, you know, that situation we were talking about in episode one with like the creation of, or the discovery of calculus, right? Where he is doing this and a couple other people are doing similar things and it all runs together. But since he's so influential and so skilled at getting his view of things out to people, he definitely has a massive. He's one of a handful of people who starts the, the Zine revolution. And yeah, he also lays out, he also puts together a, a wall newspaper called the cactus flower at Gazette where he lays out the basics of what's going to be his final ideology. He calls it Zine anarchism. Now here's what he wrote about his contribution to the Zine revolution. I like to think that over two and a half years of such activity, it's raised the vibes and my immediate surroundings considerably. Beyond the satisfaction of refuting a few of the lies, the intelligence community spreads to counter my claims to bring light about, light data about my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK matter and such related matters as the premeditated escalation of the Indo-China war and German breeding experiments right here in the US. There is no other profit involved. And that's really interesting, the fact that he's like my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder because he's only now realized that he had a hand in killing JFK. He also posts anarchist proposal. I mean, anarchist got two of the presents. Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm not sure. To be notably, Margaret, he may still have been an objective aspect then. Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure. Remember, they can have that one. Yeah, they can have this one, Margaret. That's the gets fine. He wanted JFK dead for Randy and reasons. It's very funny. Yeah. So we will continue to talk about Kerry Thorneley and give sort of the last stages of his life in the final part of this epic series. And we will also talk about what happens after the original discordians and how their ideas get taken and changed and turned eventually into the sundry fascist manipulation campaigns that have had such an influence on our last couple of presidential elections. And last, I don't know, dozenish public mass murders. But before we do that, Margaret Garrison. Yes. You know, it hasn't. It's been implicated in any mass murders us us as far as I know. We did a background check on you. No, you did. Well, I drove past the police department building and screamed, has Garrison committed any crimes and no one, no one called me back. That's good. That's good. And you also went and found that a Dutch scene and got someone to translate it from Dutch and found out that I had not done anything wrong. That's right. That's right. That's all the scene focuses on these days is your lack of complicity in various crimes. Yeah. I don't know. If you have any old copies of Kerry Thornley wall newspapers from little five points in the 1980s, hit us the fuck up because I want to see some of that shit. I want to read culture. Yeah. What do you guys got to plug? Well, if you want to try to find, if you have any of those weird scenes from little five points or the wall or the wall newspapers, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at Hungry Bowtie. I just speaking of Atlanta, just finished up a four part series on the StopCop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. The week of action should be either ongoing or about to happen by the time this episode airs. So yeah. Excellent. I have a podcast. I have two podcasts. I have a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying that is individual and community preparedness. And I have a podcast on this very network. And it's called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And yeah, you can listen to it every Monday and Wednesday. And I have a book called Escape from Insel Island. I have a bunch of books. But the most recent one is called Escape from Insel Island. And you can read it. It came out. You can get it wherever you steal, wherever you book. Buy it, steal it, steal, you know, just go steal something everybody. Go, go steal it. The principietta score, yeah. Yeah. Still the principietta score, yeah. From a bookstore that has the temerity to sell it. And I don't know. So be what kind of crimes are we allowed to advocate? Our listeners commit. Go go go back in time and shoot JFK. Go do it. Chris just bleep me talking right now. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Sophie. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I could be that much. I think that much thermite would take out the structural supports. But I don't know if a controlled demolition like that is going to lead to as fast as you expect. I think we'll have to check this by legal before we air this episode. Well, we'll get back to you all on that. But wow, Sophie, surprisingly intricate plan. And if any of it was bleaped out, it was actually the CIA who bleeped it out. Yeah. We don't do that. We've got this whole section. But if this section runs, but part of it's bleaped out, it means that the CIA has altered this episode as part of an influence operation. And you can't trust anything that we say in this because as good as the technology has gotten for deepfakes right now, there's no way to know if we actually said this or this is something that our CIA handlers are putting out using our voices. We may not even be alive anymore. You have no way of telling. I love that we haven't learned from the actual thing we're describing. We haven't learned from the history that we were in the process of describing. I was just going to talk, I didn't do that thing where like a TV program gets pulled live on air, but it's just like me. I mean, look, Margaret, the chief lesson of this show is that it is impossible to learn things from history. And we live that message every day. Yeah. All right. End of the story. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Excuse me. Did you know that when you used the Roto app to buy a car, Roto actually finds all the secret available rebates and discounts specific to you? So the price I see is my unique price? That's right. The lowest and best. Does Roto do this for every customer or just customers named Catherine? 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