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Hi there, I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's Chief Medical Officer, and host of the Spotlight On Series from the Health Discovered Podcast. In this special episode, we dive into plaque psoriasis, the difficulties, the misconceptions, and the treatment options available. What does it take to get patients to clear skin? Well, if you have a relatively limited case of psoriasis, for example, scalp psoriasis, and you put the Chlobetis all solution on your scalp, twice a day, in three days you see dramatic improvement in the psoriasis. Now, if you're covered with psoriasis, top of the therapy is not reasonable, with an injection once every two or three months. You have like a 50% chance of being completely clear, and probably a 90% chance of being nearly completely clear. Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeart Radio app, for wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is sponsored by Life Lock by Norton. There's no better time than the new year to resolve to protect your identity and finances. Identity thieves can take out loans in your name, take over and drain your banking and investment accounts, and more. It could be dangerously easy to become a victim of identity theft. Lock makes it easy to help protect your identity and financial future. Life Lock monitors your accounts and credit and detects potential threats to your identity that you might miss on your own. And if you do become a victim of identity theft, a US-based restoration specialist will work to fix it. No one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses, but Life Lock by Norton is the new year's resolution that's easy to keep. Join today and save up to 25% off your first year. Go to lifelock.com slash BTB. That's lifelock.com slash BTB for 25% off Life Lock by Norton today. The steak experts at Omaha Steaks are helping you spring into something delicious with their semi-annual sale. Grab all your favorites at 50% off like tender steaks, ocean fresh seafood, air-chilled chicken and more. Plus use promo code melt at OmahaStakes.com and check out for an additional $30 off your order. Wow, Sophie, I did not expect for you to take personal responsibility for the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I had always blamed it on Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, now, actually, you've, yeah, that's a lie. You have blamed it on a lot of people. I know, I know. And it's possible someone might say that I'm just blaming yet another person for the assassination of JFK. But really, what I'm trying to let people know is that Sophie can land three shots within a roughly dinner plates size target at a surprising distance. Move it. Also moving target. Moving target, too. You've got to lead that very impressive. I believe in you, Sophie. I believe in your ability to take out John Fitzgerald Kennedy if you'd had to. And that's why we've built you this time machine. If he was coming at you with his limousine and you were, you were sheltering in a book depository, I think you could have done it. Thank you. Welcome back to behind the master's. Welcome back to behind the master's. I didn't know how to introduce this one. So I decided to blame Sophie for a historical crime. Well I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast. Ostensibly about the worst people in all of history. We are getting behind some bastards because all right wing politics today is rooted in the series of conspiracy theories that we are explaining right now for you in 300 issues of history condensed into, I don't know, like five podcast episodes. Anyway, my guests to continue this glorious journey in part four are Margaret Killjoy. Hello. And Garrison Davis. Good morning or afternoon or some other time. Mm hmm. Yep. It's whatever time of day you're listening to. So folks, here we are. Let's get back into the story. For the next year or so after the Kennedy assassination, conspiracies around Carrie kind of flared and then eventually seem to subside. His friend Greg moved back to New Orleans. Greg kind of was back and forth between Whittier and New Orleans. You know, it is being young. You can't make rent for a while. You'll be back in with your parents. Then he come back. It's life. And once he comes back to the city, the two start work on their long shelf plans to create a satiric religion based on the Greek goddess of chaos, Eris. Now Gary wrote most of the first draft of a tract that would later become, this is a little bit before Zines were a thing, but it also is kind of a proto-Zine. And its title is Prinskipia Discordia or how I found the goddess and what I did to her when I found her. And this is, it's a good title. It's a good title. These guys are very funny. And this is, it is kind of framed as, it's a mix of like a religious tract. You know, it actually, what it's kind of framed as. Remember when I told you about how that illuminated, you know, member of the Illuminati got struck by lightning and found by the cops. A lot of the Prinskipia Discordia kind of has the feeling of like intercepted communications from like, yeah, this like weird underground cult. And that's intentional. They know the history that I related to you all in the first. In fact, are quite knowledgeable about the history that I related you all in the opening episodes of this series. This is a bit of a kind of framed as a religious tract and the faith that this is a tract bore is called discordianism. Now by this point, Kerry had already started reading guys like Max Stearner and he had found himself pulled out of his objectivist, Trent of his iron ran support and towards a more sort of individualist anarchism. Stearner is a guy who wrote a book called the ego and its own and I am not the person to summarize that egoism is kind of is one of the things that like that kind of anarchism is called I am not the person to summarize it to you. But the main impact it has on Kerry is that he finds himself pulled towards anarchism as opposed to this kind of and he'd always been an anti-state guy, right? That is a thing that is pretty consistent. You know, that's a thing that he believes when he considers himself a capitalist revolutionary. The main thing that Stearner does for him is he drops the capitalism, right? And is just kind of now anti-state. And he and Greg are also getting increasingly interested in the occult in this period of time. Kerry does a pass on the principia discordia and then they start mailing it off to an ever-expanding group of their friends who were mostly artists and weirdo pranksters who all like the idea of a religion centered around chaos. By the mid-1960s, American conspiracy culture had taken off to new heights thanks to the Kennedy assassination and all that shit that was going on with UFOs. Conspiracism is also taking off increasingly among the right wing too. And the conservative political establishment is starting to have its first big break away from what you might call consensus reality which is existing and accepting a plane of basic reality that is similar or if not basically identical to the ones that the liberals accept and towards a more a darker splinter reality defined by conspiracy. And the author of this switch, probably the single figure most responsible for the splintering of the reality tunnels in mainstream American politics is a guy named Robert H. Welch's Jr. We have talked about on this show he is the founder of the John Birch Society. Now again, if you want to listen to those episodes on Bob Welch that we do with the knowledge fight guys, I do recommend them. But in case you haven't heard those or you just rusty on the subject of the John Birch Society, I'm going to quote from our friend Hofstadter again who wrote the paranoid style in American politics in November of 1964. So that article that I quoted to you earlier that talked about the Illuminati and its influence on kind of conspiracism in America earlier like two episodes ago, that article was written during the period we're talking about right now in November 1964. Yeah. Yeah. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that communist influences are now almost in almost complete control of our government. Note the care and scrupulousness of that almost. He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which communist figure at every turn. They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure. They can try for the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse. They have stirred up fuss over segregation in the South. They have taken over the Supreme Court and made it one of the most important agencies of communism. Right? That's how Hofstadter described this is where and that is what if you replace communism with the Illuminati, it's the same kind of shit that people were saying after the French Revolution, right? It's the same playbook and they very much is a playbook for a guy for a lot of these people. In the early 1960s Welch came across a pair of books that had a massive influence on them. And these books were Nesta Websters, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements from 1924. An American evangelist Gerald Winrods book Adam Weischopped, A Human Devil from 1935. Okay. That is a that is a that is a bang your title. Dude, if anybody writes a book about me, Robert Evans, A Human Devil, I will be the proudest time capable of being. I had to say Tannik Scare at the last place I lived with like a local news person about one of my music videos. And so we just printed up the next ban shirt was just like, Axe wielding terrorist women anti-file anarchists sacrificing babies in the woods or whatever. That's how you do it. So both of these books, and this is going to really shock you guys, we're profoundly anti-Semitic. What? And this is kind of the start of this of a European school of thought that saw Jews and the Illuminati. And in some cases, the Freemasons as like co-authors of the French and Bolshevik revolutions together that like this is all tied together. And this is a big part. Hitler is is espousing aspects of this. He's talking to him. Hit when you if you like look at what Hitler actually said about the conspiracies he believed, he would often call it Judeo-Bolshevism. Right? Hitler's not so much into the Illuminati stuff, but the stuff Hitler believes is very much descended from a lot of this stuff. So Welch Jettison to the anti-Semitism he found in these books, some of it at least. But he kept the rest, particularly the obsession with a grand Illuminati conspiracy theory. And I'm going to quote now from the book The World of the John Birch Society. Welch's first public mention of the Illuminati, but not yet the insiders, came in his more stately mansion speech, delivered before a crowd of 1700 at the Conrad Hilton in Chicago on June 5th, 1964. He told his biographer that although he had been studying this subject for a number of years prior to this, he understood that you couldn't start putting it all out in one go because nobody would believe you. Instead, he'd endeavored to lead the Birch Society's members little by little to where they would be interested. Despite these concerns, Welch's idea of the insiders was quickly incorporated into the society's official worldview, with Birch writers like Medford Evans amusing about whether Dean Rusk was the insiders quarterback, for example. But just as often, the conspirators continued to be identified as the communists, the liberals, the establishment, the liberal establishment, or simply the conspiracy. The seeming interchangeability of the terms reflected the fact that appearances to the contrary, notwithstanding, Welch's turn to the Illuminati hadn't really changed his basic analysis. So that's interesting. Number one, Welch's kind of doing a little bit of an atom vice shop with his society, right? Where he's like, well, you can't tell everyone the whole truth at once. You have to kind of like lead them there. But he's also, he comes to believe that the, he comes to believe in these Illuminati conspiracies that they're behind, you know, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and all of these social justice movements. But he also consciously loops them in with both this blaming it on insiders, right? The Illuminati are the insiders and I mean, you might call them the deep state, you know? But he also, he identifies them in the same breath as not just the communists, but also the liberal establishment, right? All of this is the conspiracy. All of this linked together is the conspiracy. The right is going to believe him from 1964 up to today. In November of 19th, huh? Oh, it's just so based on anti-Semitism in terms of the way that like people think of anti-Semitism as like racism but confusing because applied to this group of people that's often white. But it's like, it's not. It's just this entirely different system of oppression that's based on this that I don't know. Yeah, this belief in this fucking secret rule is based on this, it's based on this belief that there is a fragment of society within your society that is different and fundamentally is trying to push all of these modernizing elements for sinister reasons, right? Of their own power, right? That is the core of anti-Semitic belief and it is focused obviously on the Jews being that that fragment. But once you start to believe that, it's not hard for you to move on to just like, well, beyond that, it's the Illuminati. Right. It's the Communists, it's the Liberals of the Sanals. All of these different, like you've accepted that there's this, that any sort of movement towards progressing society is based in a conspiracy to destroy it, right? And that's the most important step to take. And it also, it goes the other direction too. Now that you get people to believe in lizard people or whatever other Illuminati thing, you can then get them to also just become anti-Semitic. Yes, it works backwards and forwards. Again, it's very syncretic too. So you can, people who are just convinced that there's lizard people or Bigfoot or UFOs, if you loop that into like, well, the Illuminati doesn't want you to know about Bigfoot or the UFOs, right? And they're, they're keeping that, then that is also an inroad to get those people believing that the Jews are behind everything that in society. This is a pretty durable and proven thing that happens within conspiracism. Yeah. In November of 1966, roughly a year after the publication of the Prinskippy at Discordia, Bob Welch published an essay in a John Birch magazine titled The Truth in Time, in which he revealed his discovery of a master conspiracy, older than communism. The Communist movement is only a tool of the total conspiracy. As secret as the communist activities and organizations generally appear, they are part of an open book compared to the secrecy enveloping some higher degree of this diabolic force. The extrinsic evidence is strong and convincing that by the beginning of the 20th century, there had evolved an inner core of conspiratorial power, able to direct and control subversive activities, which were worldwide in their reach, incredibly cunning and ruthless in their nature, and brilliantly far-sighted and patient in their strategy. Whether or not this increasingly all-powerful hidden command was due to an unbroken continuation of Vyshoptsiluvan Illuminati, or was a distillation from the leadership of this and other groups we do not know. Some of them may never have been communists, while others were, to avoid as much dispute as possible, therefore let us call this ruling click simply the insiders. It's just people falling for the bait thinking that they're smart. Yeah, and Bob Welch is both high on his own supply, but also recognizes this is a good way to manipulate people. And it's interesting, 1964 as Welch's first mention of the Illuminati, where it's like I've got a prept aground for people. 1966 is where he comes out with his big speech talking about the Illuminati. 1965 is when for the Principia Discordia gets published. Yeah. It is. All of this is... We should say that the Principia Discordia has a decent section in it about the Illuminati. Oh, yes. I'm about to get to that. Yeah. We will be reading from it right now. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. The Principia Discordia was written for people like Greg and Kerry, because it was written by people like Greg and Kerry, right? Intelligent, well-read weirdos on the fringes of society, who are natural skeptics, but who are also drawn irresistibly towards conspiracism. It's fitting that chapter one authored by Kerry, and attributed to his pseudonym, Lord Omar Qayem Ravenhurst, was called the Epistle to the Paranoids. It is essentially a message to the counterculture of the 1960s, and at this point, as he's had his sort of break into anarchism, he's fighting himself increasingly angry that the objectives were he'd formerly kind of like found identification and the Marxists who he'd once identified with, and the anarchists who he now identified with all hated each other and were all fighting each other rather than fighting the state, right? And he, the Paranoids, that's who he's talking about, is these people on the counterculture who are all in opposition to the state, but who can't get along with each other. And this message in the Presbyteria Discordia is essentially a message to this fragmented chunk of the counterculture that he was like, you guys are fighting too much to oppose the state in a meaningful way. And I'm going to read a quote from that now. And this is again the Epistle to the Paranoids. Number one, you have locked yourselves up in cages of fear, and behold, do you now complain that you lack freedom? You have cast out your brothers for devils, and now complain ye lamenting that you've been left to fight alone. All chaos was once your kingdom, verily held ye dominion over the entire Pentecost, but today he was so afraid and dark corners, nooks and sinkholes. Oh, how the darknesses do crowd up, one against the other in ye hearts. What fear ye more than that what ye have rotten? Verily, verily I say unto you, unto you, not all the sinister ministers of the Viverian Illuminati working together in multitudes could so entwine the land with tribulation as have your baseless warnings. Are you just trying to talk to a Twitter? That's not a thing that anyone involved in radical politics today would identify with on a deep and emotional level, right? Yeah. It's well written too. I find a lot in this piece. Now the next section of the Prinskipia was an ad, and it's framed as an advertisement, as like a hoki 60 style advertisement, to join the Viverian Illuminati, which is listed as the world's oldest and most successful conspiracy. Greg and Carrie give their version of Illuminati history here, which puts the creation of the organization at around 1090 by Hassan Isaba, a medieval warlord credited with creating an order of hash-fet fueled assassins. We'll get the exact history on that a little bit. Quite a lot wrong. Obviously Hassan Isaba had nothing to do with the Illuminati, and they knew this. This was a joke for them, right? The advertisement is very tongue in cheek. It also references HP Lovecraft's creation, Yogg Sothoth, as well as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Among other things, the Prinskipia is a satire of real cults, but also a satire of American mass media. And in fact, that ad to join the Viverian Illuminati ends with these lines. If your IQ is over 150 and you have $3,125 plus handling, you might be eligible for a trial membership. If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our underground agents will contact you shortly. I dare you. Tell no one. Accidents have a strange way of happening to people who talk too much about the Viverian Illuminati. Maybe we warn you against imitations. R is this original ingenuit. Jamie, do a podcast about this. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, there's some Mensa mixed up in there, right? There's also like Coca-Cola ads kind of like, this is the original fly-up, you know? Yes, well, they're making fun of all this stuff. Speaking of advertisements, that will instruct you to bury your money and throw it away, here are our ads that go. I hope it's a gold ad. I hope I wish for each of you a gold ad at this point. There's no better time than the New Year to resolve to protect your identity and finances. Identity thieves can take out loans in your name, take over and drain your banking and investment accounts and more. It can be dangerously easy to become a victim of identity theft. Lifelock makes it easy to help protect your identity and financial future. Lifelock monitors your accounts and credit and detects potential threats to your identity that you may miss on your own. And if you do become a victim of ID theft, a US-based Restoration Specialist will work to fix it. No one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses, but Lifelock by Norton is the New Year's resolution that's easy to keep. So join today and save up to 25% off your first year. Go to lifelock.com slash news. This show was sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a process of learning more things about yourself. For example, I recently learned that reading about terrible people all the time can sometimes make you sad. And when you're sad, it helps to talk to people. If you think you might need to talk to someone, therapy is a great way to do that. It's all about deepening your self-awareness and understanding. Because sometimes you don't know what you want or why you react the way you do until you talk through things with an objective observer. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist who can take you on that journey of self-discovery from wherever you are. So if you're thinking about starting therapy, BetterHelp might be a good option for you. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. For your potential with BetterHelp, visit BetterHelp.com slash behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com slash behind. Welcome to Biggie Burger. I'll take a cheeseburger. Two door or four door. What? Sorry, I'm shopping for a new car on the road to app. Did you know that road to find discounted rebates specific to each customer? That's kind of cool. Right. So you get the car you want at the price you want. It's like getting your burger just how you like it. Get every rebate and discount available. Then save big on your next car with Roto. Download the Roto app or check out Roto.com. Roto. The easiest way to buy or sell a car right from your phone. We're back. So one thing that becomes clear going through the Prinskipia and doing, by the way, you can pronounce the Principia Discordia however you want because nobody actually knows how ancient Latin was pronounced in its entirety. We have a Cleasyastic Latin which is a bit different. So if you want to be like, I don't even pronounce it that way. You can go fuck yourself. I took three years of Latin. I'll say it however the fuck I goddamn want. Go to hell. I'd love you. Don't study Latin in high school kids. Wait, that's all wasted time. I did too. I did too. I also. Look at us. We are such a bunch of suckers. I know. I know. Absolutely. My friends are all like learning Spanish that they didn't travel with. I'm stuck there learning about how fucking kikilius and his buddy. I had a, you know, it helped me have a conversation with my nun aunt about whether or not you pronounce Latin certain ways. That's what I got out of three years of Latin. I took, you want to, we just did some episodes on Bobby Fisher and some people thought I was intending to just kind of joke about the fact that he was a nerd because I was also a nerd, which is why I brought a war hammer so much. But I took three years of Latin so that I could understand all of my war hammer books. Like that. That was, that was why I did that. Hell yeah. So there, there you go. Anyway, whatever. One thing that becomes clear going through the Prinskippia and doing all this research on the Illuminati is how knowledgeable Greg and Kerry and their other friends were about the actual history, not just of the Illuminati, but of other secret societies and conspiracies. These guys have like an academic levels understanding of this history, which is why they are able to parody it so successfully. The Prinskippia contains a number of letters in which members of the Illuminati, all of which are like, and they take, as did we didn't really get into this in those, but all of the original Illuminati people like took on pseudonyms that were like themed after ancient Greek and Roman history, like Achilles and Ajax and stuff. And all of the new Illuminati, the discordians, take on pseudonyms as well. As I said, carries is Lord Omar Kiam, Ravenhurst, Greg Hills is Maleklips the younger. And yeah, they give, you know, uh, uh, yeah. So these guys are very much consciously like aping, Adam Vyshopped. And in their conspiracy document that they put out, they each provide kind of different and often contrasting theories about the actual age and origin of the Illuminati. Usually this winds up stretching back to prehistory and they're kind of continuing Vyshopped's lie here, right? Like consciously continuing because like he would pretend it was an ancient society. They're doing this intentionally. And it also includes bits like this, which are clearly satirizing the John Birch society. Your publication is timely. So mention that in addition, and this is part of like a section of it that's framed as like intercepted letters basically, right? Your publication is timely. So mention that in addition to the old fronts like the Masons, the Rothschild Banks and the Federal Reserve system, we now have significant control of the Federal Bureau of investigation since Hoover died last year, but that is still secret. The students for a democratic society, the Communist Party USA, the American anarchist association, the junior Chamber of Commerce, the Black Lotus Society, the Republican Party, the John Dillinger Died for You Society, and the Campfire Girls. It is still useful to continue the sham of the birchers that we are seeking world domination. So do not reveal that political and economic control was generally complete several generations ago. It's so funny. It's so good. Yeah, this is a response to the John Birch society as much as it is anything else. And they're fucking with people, right? Like that's what's going on here. Okay, but wait, was there a campfire girls or do they make that up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like a girl scouts kind of. I may still exist for all I know, I'm not a campfire girls exit expert. Although soon we'll have our six part series on the campfire girls. I mean, if I don't really like it, right? I mean, if you already did the Boy Scouts. We could have done a couple more episodes on the fucking Boy Scouts. So they write this silly scene. And I know some of you who are not like is into this stuff as all three of us are probably like, why are we talking about like this weird joke that some dudes made in the mid 60s? Oh, oh boy. Trust me, it matters. So they write this weird scene. And if you know anything about kind of like pre internet erasines, you know that the thing they're going to need next is a photo copier. Now in the mid 1960s, photo copier's existed. You could get access to them, but they like owning one would have cost, you know, probably like what a car does today. It was not easy to get like to purchase one. Most people didn't have access to one unless they had access through an institution. And so if you were going to use such a machine, you either were like at a school that had one or you had maybe an employer that had one and you could kind of like get some time on it. So it just so happened that Greg Hill, when they decide they want to start making a bunch of copies of this thing they had out, Greg Hill had a friend named Lane Kaplinger and Lane worked as a secretary for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. If you've ever watched the movie JFK by Oliver Stone, Garrison is the guy played by Kevin Caster. So he would go on to write the first major Kennedy assassination conspiracy book titled on the trail of assassins, which is what Jones stones JFK was based on. This will be relevant soon. So Greg Hill and his friend sneak into Jim Garrison's office and they use the photo copier to produce several copies of the Prinskippia discordia, which they start handing out to friends who read it and find it funny. Now these people then I will say as someone who is also interested in this history, this claim is heavily disputed. Yes. We know there's at least one scene they did use Garrison's photo copier on. It's not provable that it was the Prinskippia discordia. And they also claim that the first copy of the Prinskippia was typed out using Garrison's typewriter. Yes. There's a lot of weird claims about Garrison specifically because of his involvement in JFK stuff. Well, he's going to wrote it. Oh, not just that. But yeah, no, you're right, Garrison. This may not have happened. We do know that they used, because they were writing other scenes. Yeah, pretty well known that they used his photo copier for one thing a couple of years prior to this. There have been claims since that they used it for this. And like you said, that they used his typewriter. We don't know what's true because these guys, again, part of what they're about to start doing is telling a bunch of funny lies. So that's so good. That's it. It is known that Hill and a friend got access to his photo copier at one point, right? I chose to tell people the version that I found most funny, which I thought was in line with discordian traditions. But yes, that is useful context. So they start handing this stuff out to friends. And in the way that things spread back then, these people read it, a lot of them like it. They find their own access to like memiograph machines or whatever they go to the library. They start making copies of it and handing it out to friends. And in a couple of different cities, people start to decide to start discordian chapters, which I've themed as both kind of secret societies and sets of a religion. That's like what they are consciously aping. But in reality, it has a lot more in common with like modern nerd subculture today. And to kind of go through this process, I'm going to quote now from the book KLF by an author named JMR Higgs. Slowly, Hill and Thornley recruited a few like-minded friends into their new religion. Their aim was to undermine existing belief systems by spreading confusion and disinformation with as much humor as possible. To this end, they each adopted a host of new names under which their discordian endeavors were credited. Many new discordian chapters were founded. The majority of these contained only one member and some contained none. Discordians then wrote essays and letters under these aliases, only to follow them with completely contradictory essays and letters under a different alias. So this is like becomes sort of the first act of worship of the discordian church is to write essays and letters about conspiracies and then send them out to different magazines and different publications under a variety of aliases. Now, as for the actual religion itself, we all know you actually meant aliens. I did. Which my book on the Illuminati by that one crank does talk a lot about the Anunnaki. Apparently, the Babylonians talked about them all the time. So no one's more credible than the Babylonians. The actual tenets of the discordian faith, which is again a satire of religion, are- there's a variety of things. Everybody's a pope, which is not an original thing. Initially it is actually very centralized. It's kind of one of the big like changes in the discordian faith over the years is the decision that everybody gets to be a pope. They don't have religious dogmas, they have catmas, which are like relative meta-beliefs rather than like strict beliefs in something, right? There's kind of a general prescription in the discordian church against believing too hard in anything. Like every religion, they have foods that your band kind of arbitrarily from eating. In this case, it's hot dog buns. And so there's a lot of just like hot dogs handed out at like discordian events in this period of time. And again, this is meant to be- yeah, it's meant to be- she would love this. It's a joke. It's yaks. But what you should have realized right now by the passage I read earlier where they're kind of- they're spreading all these jokes, but they're also spreading all of these different claims about the things they've done as a conspiracy. What they've done, what Hillin Thornley particularly have done, is create a series of memes, which start to spread through the underground media of the day through this kind of growing underground network of what's going to become Zine culture. Now, because this faith gets founded in 1965, right as the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories pick up steam, conspiracy theories become sort of the language that discordians choose to do their messaging in. Now, this is what brings us to Playboy magazine. The mid-delight- I know. I'm pleased Jamie Lombas worked. She did. She's deeply tied to all these conspiracy theories. She's evolving this. She doesn't explain so much. We are through the looking glass here, people. Oh my gosh. When I say Playboy today, you either think of all of Hugh Hefner's mini-sex crimes, or you think about- oh, yeah, that like website, or that magazine that used to be big and is no longer profitable and turned into like kind of a sleazy internet brand. In the 1960s, Playboy is hugely influential in the counter-culture, not just because there's pictures of attractive naked people, but because of the articles. Like there are a lot of very influential writers- I read it for the articles. This is a thing. And two of the guys who are writing it for the articles are a pair of editors for Playboy magazine named Robert Shay and Robert Anton Wilson. Oh my god. There's so many fucking Roberts. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of Roberts involved in this story, too. But yes, Bob Shay and Robert Anton Wilson are both editors for Playboy magazine. And they're both kind of in to a lot of the same stuff that Kerry and Greg are. They find the occult- they're both very much into the occult, especially Robert Anton Wilson. They are taking huge amounts of LSD. And by the way, so are Hill and Thornley by this point. And they start to notice, because Playboy publishes letters. And one of the places, the easiest places for discordians who are writing these nonsense conspiracy letters to get their shit published is Playboy. And Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shay, start to notice like, we're getting a lot of weird letters from guys. Writing about the Illuminati and the Eris and stuff. That's peculiar. So they start responding to some of these letters. Wilson, being a prankster himself, decides he's going to fuck with whoever is sending him these joke letters by publishing all of the weirdest ones. And his particular thing is in the ETSU, he likes to publish conspiracy theories, like letters that are conspiracy theories that specifically contradict each other, like incompatible theories about the Kennedy assassination and stuff like that. Because he thinks that's funnier and it is. And I'm going to quote now from a summary by a writer named James Bert. Wilson said he did not consider the Supreme Court a hoax, but guerrilla ontology. He became increasingly exasperated with the fixed views on both the right and left of politics. And he wanted people to question the information they received to stop seeing their beliefs as inherently true. Now ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies, among other things, the nature of reality, like what is true, right? Again, this is a philosophy discussion on a podcast. So we're flattening things here, but that's the basic of it, right? It is the science of like what is how to classify and explain objects and entities. Wilson and Shay, like the discordians, saw themselves as waging a necessary war against people's widely accepted definitions of reality. And they are looking out at millions of people being massacred in Vietnam at police in the street beating civil rights marchers and they are responding to what they see as all of the people perpetuating these crimes have locked themselves into what Robert Anton Wilson will later call a reality tunnel, which is this like very solidified belief about the nature of the world that is wrong, but justifies violence because the world itself will not conform to this errant belief. And so if you can't accept anything else as real, you're going to do violence on the people who insist in living in a way that does not conform to that belief you have about the world. So the thing Wilson and Shay want to do is soften people's understanding of what reality is and the hope that it will stop a lot of this horrible shit from happening, right? That's the goal, okay? Okay. This is not going to work out perfectly, but it's you understand where they're coming from, right? Yeah, I mean, I do at least. I do. I feel like sometimes we think that like, oh, we'll use sarcasm and parody and irony. I feel like people who are versed in the internet will know why this doesn't work, you know? And the spoiler is that it doesn't. Yeah. But you know what does work, Margaret? The exchange of money for items. Oh, I was going to say advertising. It has a more profound impact on human cognition than almost anyone understands. And in fact, in the future, we'll be considered to be a health hazard on the same level as cigarette smoking. But for now, it's what keeps podcasts on the air. So enjoy your information hazard, everybody. Welcome to Biggie Burger. I'll take a cheeseburger. Two door or four door. What? Sorry, I'm shopping for a new car on the road to app. Did you know that roto finds discounts and rebates specific to each customer? That's kind of cool. Right. 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So book your free consultation with the experts in lacic and visit lacic.com now. That's lacic.com. Amazing vision, amazing price. Cost of lacic compared to a daily $4.50 latte over three years. Must mention this promotion be treated in March of 2023 to qualify. A thousand offer both eyes on standard wave light price. 500 offer one eye. Cannot be combined with any other offers. See details at lacic.com. Hi there. I'm Dr. John White, Webbedease Chief Medical Officer and host of the Spotlight On series from the Health Discovered Podcast. In this special episode, we dive into plaque psoriasis, the difficulties, the misconceptions, and the treatment options available. What does it take to get patients to clear skin? Well, if you have a relatively limited case of psoriasis, for example, scalp psoriasis, and you put the Chlobetis O solution on your scalp twice a day. In three days, you see dramatic improvement in the psoriasis. If you're covered with psoriasis, top of the therapy is not reasonable. With an injection, once every two or three months, you have like a 50% chance of being completely clear and probably a 90% chance of being nearly completely clear. Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Have your kids considered the benefit of smoking Paul Mals? Paul Mals aren't just the tastiest cigarette on the market. They're the cigarette that has an extra long filter, which helps those tiny hands grasp it and smoke safely. Don't worry, I'm getting some of them already asked Chris to cut it. What? Sophie, you don't want kids to hear the good news about Paul Mals cigarettes? The cigarette crafted with tiny hands in mind? By tiny hands? I thought you were a kid. Because it's rolled in. Okay. Look, one of the tragic lessons about advertising is that sometimes people consume different products than they advertise. Yeah, fair enough. Just like I actually kind of more into silver. Well, it's like I talk about how LASIK provided me with laser eye surgery, but the reality is that I lashed a banshee to the rock in my backyard. Sophie, you just do your job. Sophie, I can't talk about how I trained a banshee to fix my eyes with the ice. Okay, whatever. Sophie, Jesus. Unfair. Anyway, discordians. So Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea start publishing all of these weirdo letters by these weirdo discordians and eventually like realize something is going on here that it's not just an increasing number of crazy people sending them conspiracy theories, but I can see them. You mean conspiracists? Yeah, exactly. And Robert Anton Wilson, when he finds this out, is like so on board. He's like, this is the best thing I've ever heard of. And he travels and he go, he meets with Kerry Thornley in 1967. And as soon as Thornley explains the game to him, Robert Anton Wilson becomes a discordian. He is immediately on board with all of this shit. Now some other stuff is happening while all of these figures are meeting. At this point in time, a book called The Second Oswald has been published, which is the first organized conspiracy theory about a second gunman on the grassy knoll. And who's care? At the same time. Through this, yes, it comes out in this book that Kerry Thornley, this weird countercultural figure, has ties to all of these people adjacent to the conspiracy in the second Oswald. And the nature of this coincidence that he's just sort of tied to all these people that this book has argued were like helping to carry out the assassination is too much for a lot of people. And a growing chunk of the conspiracy culture of the time convinces itself that Thornley was the second gunman. And some versions of the conspiracy, he's like an Oswald double, who is there to like distract from the fact that like, yeah, like there's multiple Oswald basically, right? And a lot of people, because Thornley looks like Oswald and knows him, think that he's the second Oswald, right? One of the people who decides this is what's happened. One of the people who comes to believe this about the Kennedy assassination is Jim Garrison, the DA of New Orleans. So Garrison, yeah, that's not going to work out well for anybody. Garrison, hi Garrison. This is going to be so complicated. I know all of our names except for Margaret so far have been deeply implicated in this conspiracy. So Jim Garrison starts investigating Kerry Thornley in January of 1968, right after Kerry and Bob Wilson made. And he actually subpoenas Kerry Thornley so he can ask Kerry about his relationship with Oswald. Now Thornley denies that he had been in any contact with the assassination in any, assassin in any manner since 1959. But Garrison comes to believe that Thornley is part of the conspiracy and acted as a body double for Oswald. And he also finds out that Oswald moved to New Orleans right after Thornley and that the year before the assassination they were both in Mexico City at the same time. So he charges Kerry with perjury. This is like a years long fight. Kerry has with like a perjury charge overlying about his associations with Lee Harvey Oswald. And this is a very situation. Kerry had actually been called in. A lot of people don't know this, Kerry Thornley testified to the Warren Commission in 1964 because he had published his book The Idol Warriors which was about Lee Harvey Oswald. And all he's talking about in the Warren Commission stuff is what he knew about Oswald, right? But because he says he had no more contact with him, this is a really, you can get in shitloads of trouble for lying in a congressional inquiry like this, right? Like you are not allowed to do that. So the fact that they're... And a year after he testified, he also released a book just titled Oswald. Yes. Like the same exact year that the principia was first being distributed. Well, I was just like, I can't buy that by the same, right? Because if I'm not mistaken, when he... No, no, because he becomes convinced after a while, I believe that Oswald... Oh, I'm honest. He starts believing that Oswald was innocent and then he comes to believe that Oswald did it. And he eventually comes to believe something very similar to what Jim Garrison believes. And he writes the book Oswald, kind of in the middle of all of these beliefs. Because he knows the guy. And yeah. So, Kerry starts to get very paranoid at this point. Because in the middle of creating a religion about secret societies where they claim to be the Illuminati pulling the strings, he has also become the center of the JFK assassination conspiracy theory and is now being charged with poetry. This is what we call a fucker-outed fight-out moment. Yes. Yeah. And then they hear and stuff putting up flyers asking for a president to be assassinated. If you don't want people to think you might have done it. Mm-hmm. Now, you remember back when that Nazi paid him to do research on the Hitler book? Oh, God, yes. Okay. So, the book is titled, I think, because Hitler was not a bad guy, right? Kerry becomes convinced that the guy, and again, this Nazi is not a real person. There was a person there because people saw Kerry talking to him, but the name he gives is not a real person, right? So there's a lot of that's part of why this guy gets wrapped in it. We don't know who this was. Kerry becomes convinced that that guy was a fed who paid him to do this research so there would be a bunch of writing about Hitler under the title Hitler was not a bad guy in Kerry's handwriting. And the state could put it up as a manifesto after framing him for killing JFK. What? I wouldn't put it wrong. Yeah, that's what Kerry starts to believe because he's like, no one knows who this guy is. This is such a weird thing that somebody paid me to do. Someone just wanted my name on this like Nazi thing so they could argue like I was involved in it because he also sees that what Garrison is doing is trying to like bring him into this and blame the assassination on him. So he's not, there are people in the government trying to pin the assassination. Oh, yeah. But he's also locked in this conspiratorial mindset now in part as recreation. So he kind of just starts to go crazy. Now that's right. Kerry is also at his heart a prankster. And despite the severity of the situation he is in, he cannot help himself but fuck with Jim Garrison. And I'm going to quote, I'm going to quote from the very interesting book, The prankster in the conspiracy, which is by that, that go rightly guy and is a biography of Kerry, primarily quote, sometime in 1968 during the course of the Garrison investigation, Kerry discovered that one of Garrison's aides, Alan Chapman, believed that the JFK assassination had been the work of the Bavarian Illuminati that ancient and fraternal order much ballihood by right wing conspiracy theorists such as the John Birch Society as a centuries old secret society behind communism and damn near every other socialist inspired ill than corrupting the world and poisoning our precious bodily fluids. In response to all of this Bavarian Illuminati paranoia, Kerry in the midst of Garrison's probe decided to mind fuck Garrison all the more by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he, Kerry, was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. These communicates were sent under the auspices of the discordian society. The mind fuck eventually got Kerry interested in the history of this mysterious secret society. And the more he read about the Bavarian Illuminati, the more fascinated he became. Eventually, Kerry and his fellow discordian conspirators started planting stories about the discordian societies, age old war against the Illuminati, accusing everyone under the sun of being a member of that sinister and sneaky organization, from such politicos as Nixon, LBJ Daily and William Buckley to Martian invaders and various conspiracy buffs, plus members of the discordian society itself, which made it all very confusing and extremely hilarious. So he, he starts sending fake letters claiming that he's in the agent of the Illuminati to one of Garrison's bullet aides who believes that the JFK assassination was the work of the Illuminati and is actively investigating him for his complicity in that cry. Yeah. You, you look, whatever you think of the wisdom and ethics of this, you have to respect that commitment. Yeah. No, I mean, if someone's like, that'd be like if I result, if my, if when people are like, oh, you're an evil Satanist, they'll be like, yes, I personally brought Satan back from the dead and used him to do this actual crime that happened. I am the literal Christian devil and I killed all those kids at that elementary school and whatever, whatever the one that started the satanic manek was. Yeah. I forget mountain meadows seem, no, that's the Mormon massacre. I've lost track. Yeah. You know, whatever. By the early 1970s, Kerry Hill and Robert Anton Wilson have a name for this combination prank act of political terrorism that they've sort of lapsed into committing. They start to call it Operation Mind Fuck. JMR Briggs writes, the aim of Operation Mind Fuck was to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced with some form of enlightenment. Now, it's not gonna be an optimistic. Yeah. It's, yeah. It is worth noting that the discordians are not the only anarchist weirdos thinking along these lines at the time. In 1967, another group of anarchists on the UC Berkeley campus had formed a group called the Bavarian Illuminati and had started sending out weird press releases with the goal of giving conspiratorially minded people something to get paranoid about. And the lady who found this group at Berkeley later becomes friends with Thornley and becomes a discordian and is now a right-wing crank journalist. Oh no! No! No! It's the worst thing that's happened in this episode. Oh no, don't worry. Something a lot worse is coming, Margaret. Oh no. Okay. So, we're like, but also this type of stuff is not that is not super like dissimilar to like the situation is. Yes, which we'll be chatting about them in a little bit too. I think it's useful context to give people. But yeah, Operation Mindfuck becomes a mix of deliberate paranoid incitement and anarchist political project. Some of the press releases they send out are just like conspiracy nonsense, but others are comparatively serious where they are advocating for specific political acts. They put out a big paper urging a permanent universal rent strike and their idea is that everyone should just start stop paying rent and go about their lives as normal. So there it's a mix of like here are things we actually believe and here's a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories. This mix of conspiratorial incitement and sincere attempts to push some political change was a conscious aping of a strategy that Greg Hill, who wrote under the name Malik clips the younger, had come across in a book titled The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The authors had argued that the only strategy an opponent can't predict is a random one. Hence, what became the new religions maximum we discordians must stick apart. Now, yeah, it's like what they're what they're doing is like a thing in game theory. We do actually talk about this in the chess episodes where like if you're like a random weirdo like you can sometimes beat people in these games who are much better than you because you just are not acting in a way that it can they can possibly predict, right? Yeah. I've been reading a little bit and forgive me, I know very little about go, but basically one of the things that people will say is that like a good chess computer cannot be beat by humans, right? Like when it's when it's playing it, it's like we are past the point where human beings can beat the machines and chess, but you they kind of don't have computers at go that are that reliable at beating human beings. They're good. And some of the tests that they just been less work in doing this with machines that play go, but one of the things people will notice that because there are so many more possibilities in go human players can just do crazy shit and the machine gets kind of tripped up, right? In a way that's not as possible with chess because there's less sort of options that you have in the game of chess than you do with go. Anyway, I find this interesting, not an expert on go. Another inspiration for Thornley Hill, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Chey and the other early discordions are the situationists. This is Garrison just said now these are a group of avant-garde artists and activists. They start out in France. They're basic contention. This isn't like the 50s, right? So this is in the period of time and when like Greg and Carrie are like teenagers and young adults is when the situation is less or kind of at their most influential. And the basic contention that the situation is have is that culture in the form of advertising and increasingly slick mass media is being forced upon us. The situationists believe that you should resist cultural homogeneity with a sort of artistic judo, taking the momentum of mass media and turning it back against its wielder. Situationist art projects were supposed to have no single author or creator as they valued decentralization of creation. Artists would work together under shared names and rejected the idea of the visionary author. Again, you can see how this had a big influence on what Greg and Carrie and the others are doing. The key to this thinking is the idea of the spectacle. Originally defined by Guy de Bourd as the autocratic reign of the market economy, the media is one outward expression of the form of this autocratic reign. As de Bourd wrote, rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term media and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service. Now this is all a little bit wonky so I want to turn to a paragraph by Tehrman Morgan and Laurie Purgey explaining the concept in more detail. De Bourd describes the spectacle as capitalism's instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during De Bourd's lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you ten things you need to know about X. The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For De Bourd, this constituted an unacceptable degradation of our lives. By the way, all of this stuff has a huge influence on the Wachowskis and is kind of like the basis of the Matrix movies. Which also ties in the first fact that that shit gets fucking turned around. Yeah, it sure does. Yeah. This is one of those things where I have a lot of sympathies with the situationists and I like that style of praxis. But also this thing can get turned in on itself, turned in on itself. You can never actually escape the loop. You can only try to loop it even tighter and then hopefully it will collapse in on itself. But it keeps on that thought. It keeps looping. We haven't described the loop that De Bourd sets up quite yet for people. But hold on to that thought because I want to come back to that in just a second. So De Bourd is convinced that art has failed and is essentially dead as a thing capable of carrying meaningful counter-cultural messages. And this is because the spectacle is an expert at something called recuperation. Where ideas and individuals that were initially subversive are trivialized, cleansed of their revolutionary potential and re-incorporated to mainstream capitalist society as commodities. The easiest example of this is like a Shaguavaure t-shirt. This communist revolutionary being turned into this like shirt that you buy at a head shop that's owned by a hedge fund, right? Yeah. Like a podcast about like cool revolutionaries in history that's like exactly not that corporation that's ever existed. These are all good examples Margaret. Yeah. Thank you. I've got a problem. I came up with that one off of my head. The way the situation in this suggested fighting against recuperation was called detourment, which is what Garrison was talking about a little bit ago and it is the recontextualizing of an existing work of art in order to shift its meaning towards something that inspires revolutionary feelings. Now the situation lists are also motivated by the concept of psychogiography, which is a way of describing one's surroundings in order to like influence their emotional state. It's a little bit difficult to describe some of the situation lists art over a podcast, but one thing that they would do in Paris is they would like cut up and reshuffle maps that were then given to people in order to encourage people to wander to different parts of the city that they would not otherwise have traveled to and thus build connections between them, right? This is kind of part of what they're trying to do here is trying to cut what they saw is the power that maps had over how humans thought about the geography of their cities. This is also a response to the fact that city planners like set up cities in such a way to keep certain groups of people apart, right? I mean, you can think about the way this existed, whatever city you live. This is a part like look at the way bike lanes are always set up, right? They don't go to poor neighborhoods as a general rule. They connect affluent parts of town to affluent parts of town or places where people shop. It's not 100% of the case, but that is a lot of them, right? This is a thing that the situation is still recognizing when this is one of the things in which the kind of art that they're doing is trying to fight against. And this all sounds very heady, but situation is often credited with sparking a massive series of riots in Paris in 1968, which is right within the time period we're talking about. Obviously, the situation is international, kind of falls apart eventually for the same reason most left wing movements do, but the tactics that they'd pioneered and the goal of their work gets kind of stuck in the teeth of the global left. And that's all happening kind of in the period of time before and right at the height of what, well, right at the start, at least, of what the discordians are doing. All right. Now we can talk about it, Gareth. Yeah. It's just one of those things that we've even seen, like this situation is trying to get ahead of that type of recuperation. And it's just a very hard thing to do. Like it is one of those things that eventually there are attempts to even put that recuperation and commodify that even aspect of it. It's like one of the few good jokes in Rick and Morty that I stand by is the freedom wafer selects of distilling this brain juice that gets grown during an act of rebellion and selling that back to you so you can consume and have that same feeling of rebellion. And it's this mechanism that can just keep on going into the world. And trying to break out of that is a topic of a lot of this type of political theory. But so, yeah, it's this... Oh, sorry, Margaret. Oh, just like this idea. The detournament thing used to make a lot of sense to me. I grew up in ad busters and stuff, like the late 90s early-odd. Yeah, we'll chat about them a little bit later too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like that was like I was in art school and ad busters came around and then I dropped out of art school to go travel and try and do anarchy or whatever, and these are related thoughts. and the detourment and all that was a big part of it. But I like, but seen detourment then loop so many times, I'm kind of back to just like regular direct cultural attack. Just making art. Yeah, you just fucking do the things you believe in and you say the things you believe into people and you just fucking cry. Like instead of the judo thing, you just punch them in the face, you know? I, Margaret, I hadn't thought this until just now, but it kind of occurs to me that you can argue that the situationists, part of what they're doing is similar to what ViShopt was doing way back in the day. It's this thing that like you have to hide your message one way or the other, right? That like that has to be a part of it. Yeah. Like there's, it's interesting this like, because I'm thinking about like I can remember, there's a lot of folks on the left who part of like will celebrate and I'm not saying this is wrong, but like one of the things they love about the matrix is that it is so clearly inspired by the situationists. Like down to the fact that like at the very beginning of the movie, Neo has a copy of a book called The Society of the Spectacle, right? Like that's you can see in this. I believe he has a Simulacher and Simulation, which was inspired by the writings of society of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like, is that an example of an insurgent form of art being snuck into a massive Hollywood blockbuster? Or is the matrix itself an example of the recuperation of what the situationists were doing because it's this multi-billion dollar franchise. And then even the matrix is rebellious messages get recuperated by fascism with the Red Pill. Now Elon Musk is talking about Red Pill. But one of the Chapsky sisters screams at him. But and then on, but then the fourth matrix film is about the recuperation of the first matrix film. And it's looping on itself endlessly. And this is what Operation Mindfuck is really after. It's about causing this loop to destroy people's brains and make reality incredibly malleable. And that is the goal of this sort of thing. I would argue they're not trying to destroy people's brains. And I think that because again, the story we're building to is this does all go terribly wrong. And I think an argument you could make if your pro mind fuck is that, well, the situationists were cool, but also it would have been a real bad thing if people had believed too strongly in what they were doing and come to treat these ideas of deterrentment as if it is something you should take that seriously, as like the most effective way of fighting against capitalist modernity and maybe getting people to think this way and start looking at these kind of loops of recuperation in which these things, the situationists created, created this multi-billion dollar franchise. And then maybe that causes people to take all of it a little bit less seriously and treat it more like a tool in the toolbox rather than something that should be the core of your personality. Yeah, I feel like some of the recuperation stuff, it's like people get mad because they punch someone and then they got punched back. It's like, I'm gonna do this thing that attacks capitalism. Capitalism is gonna look and be like, all right, well, what's the best thing I can do? And they might try and use that back against me. Like, of course they are. We're fighting. Like, I punched them and they punched me. Like, and this is like, yeah, it's a conflict and in a conflict, you learn from the actions of your adversaries, which is why, I do like, you have this very interesting anarchist group called Up Against the Wall Motherfathers. This is who I was thinking about doing all this, yeah. Cut the fence at Woodstock, which makes Woodstock what it is in a lot of ways. And then Woodstock winds up in Pepsi commercials. Yeah. Life, huh? And actually the situation kicked out the British situation is because they liked up against the Wall Motherfuckers. Yeah, and up against the Wall Motherfuckers had a conflict with the, this is all, sorry. We didn't need to go and hold this thing. But if you want, I have a whole episode of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers came out recently. Excellent, excellent. Well, we are going to cover all of this in more detail lately. But I wanted to talk in this by talking about the situation is because as the, the, the, the, the, the discordian church really starts to take off in the early 1970s, that's the goal that Thornley and Hill and Robert Anten Wilson and Bob Shea and all their friends kind of have is to in a very situationist manner, take the cultural weight of these conspiracy theories that the John Birch society and the right are, see is a method to power and are using still to this day as a method of power. And they are trying to, in a situationist manner, kind of like judo, turn the weight of this stuff back against itself by, as Garrison said, in some ways, kind of breaking the brains of the people who believe this by widening the field of play conspiratorial, right? Instead of it, instead of the, instead of the, the John Birch society being the only word on the Illuminati, well, let's expand what this fucker can be well beyond what they can control. And maybe the hope is that they can't manipulate people as effectively. And that maybe people even become less manipulatable. Now, spoiler, this is debatable. As to whether or not it works very well. Some people would argue that what the discordians are about to do is build a very well crafted gun and then leave it on the table in a room full of four-year-olds. But we will talk about that next week. Y'all got any pluggable stuff? Well, if you want to support people trying to use some of these same type of tactics in defense of the forest, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. One of the posters I saw around Atlanta about the Stopp Cops and stuff, it ended with a very situation-ist-esque motto, which was reality is the battlefield. And yeah, so this type of thing is continuing on today. And it's not just people making propaganda. It's also people doing stuff physically in the real world and facing the situation-ists did, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And there's people facing legal consequences for it. And if you want to support those people that are experiencing state repression, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Yes, donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. And it is good to keep in mind. This is why one of the things I would like to leave liberal type folks, and I don't mean that as a slur, but folks who are kind of more centrist in liberals, who have a lot of listeners who are of that tendency, what I would like to leave you with is the next time you hear someone on the right say something that is objectively, factually wrong and feel the desire to dunk on them, consider whether or not you're just feeding the loot, right? Because reality is the battlefield. And you may not in fact be able to damage their cause by locking into an argument with them, right? That may be a doomed tactic. In the way that we're talking about a doomed tactic, that is much more in line with the people that I tend to admire politically. There's no political side has a monopoly on doomed tactics. But I think it is worth saying that if arguing with conservatives about the nature of reality could change things, we would be in a different situation right now, and perhaps other tactics are necessary. My... Margaret Claw is for the D'arrive, my favorite of the situation is tactics, which is go for a walk and go for a walk where you don't normally go for a walk. I love the idea of that as like a way to change your scope of reality. I think that they did a really good job of that. And then also I'll plug that all of the references earlier about Jamie doing all of this and that is Jamie Loftus, who has a bunch of podcasts on this very network, including my year in Mensa and a bunch of other ones. And then I... And did Jamie do 9-11? We can't say she didn't. I actually think we probably can. She comes from the Northeast, Margaret. That's true. I mean, I don't know if that's true. I'm suspicious. She was in like the third grade. Okay. The third grade, 9-11, three times three is nine. Sophie. Also didn't too many conspiracies. Also didn't we just read that the Illuminati was controlling the Girl Scouts? They are specifically going after organizations with kids to recruit them to do these types of acts. Powerful. That at all makes sense now. Because if we've learned one lesson in this series, it's that joking about this stuff never has consequences. No consequences. I was just so proud that Gary forgot those things all in one reference. That was good. All right, everybody. Go make a conspiracy somewhere. I'll add to what Margaret said about taking a walk. Another anarchist thinker. David Graber. David Graber. Yeah, David Graber. One of the arguments he made was that when you're out walking in a city as often as possible, cross somewhere other than where you're legally supposed to cross. But look both ways. Yeah. But look, well, the way. Don't get hit by a car post. Anyway, goodbye. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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