Episode 1449 - The United States of Conspiracy w/ Robert Guffey
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck Nicks?
Marc:What the fuck Patriots?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:It keeps going.
Marc:We keep going.
Marc:We keep doing it.
Marc:It is always exciting.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:That's true for me.
Marc:It has to be.
Marc:Every time I'm out here talking to somebody, I really don't know what the fuck is going to happen.
Marc:And I'm ready for things to unfold.
Marc:Happy 4th of July.
Marc:Is that what I'm here to say?
Marc:Is that what we're doing today?
Marc:Tomorrow is the 4th of July.
Marc:And I guess I have to give my regular warning, which is mind your fingers.
Marc:Don't lose any fingers.
Marc:Keep the fingers on the hand.
Marc:Don't don't light it and throw it as a grown up.
Marc:You know, when you're my age or maybe a little younger and you have these strange recollections of chaotic firecracking when you're a kid, it's not the same, man.
Marc:Just keep your digits, can you?
Marc:And don't burn the meat.
Marc:Don't burn the fucking meat.
Marc:Watch the grill.
Marc:Watch for grease fires.
Marc:If grease is dripping in, the flames are high, and you got dogs on there, you got burgers on there, you got ribs or whatever the hell it is that you're cooking, get them off.
Marc:They'll be a charred mess.
Marc:It's delicate stuff, man.
Marc:If you're smoking, manage that temperature, okay?
Marc:Just stay on it all day long.
Marc:Don't get too shit-faced.
Marc:Don't make a scene.
Marc:Don't yell at your kids.
Marc:Don't set fire to anything.
Marc:Don't cry.
Marc:You know, more likely than not, if we're reflecting on the state of our union or the idea of America, I would imagine for those of you who are of right mind, are of tolerant mind, are of empathetic mind, are of progressive nature, things seem pretty grim.
Marc:And I'm not going to tell you they're not, but you're not listening to me for that anyways.
Marc:Things are pretty grim.
Marc:Doesn't mean you can't have some meat.
Marc:Doesn't mean you can't blow some shit up safely.
Marc:Doesn't mean you can't have fun with your kids in a way that involves lighters and matches and sparkly things and things that make noises.
Marc:Doesn't mean you can't enjoy friends and whatnot.
Marc:But I gather optimism might be tricky because...
Marc:We are living in the age right now.
Marc:Obviously, I don't want to do the end times thing, but I looked up the word radicalize.
Marc:Radicalize, cause someone to adopt radical positions on political or social issues.
Marc:Radicalization, that's what's happening.
Marc:Our neighbors, our parents, people we used to know, radicalization is happening.
Marc:And it's a very specific type of,
Marc:of radicalization.
Marc:It is sort of foundationally Christian in a lot of ways, and it is foundationally on purpose, and it is coming from all sides to those who are sensitive to it.
Marc:The brain's not that strong.
Marc:If you don't have a particularly stable sense of self or you're dealing with massive amounts of unrecovered or undealt with trauma that kind of churns and burns inside of you, you're either of the ilk that will burn yourself down or want to see the world burn.
Marc:I believe that most of what is happening politically today on a personal level for many people is deep trauma stuff.
Marc:But I'm no psychiatrist.
Marc:But it might just be, you know, fuck it, basic intolerance, basic bigotry.
Marc:I mean, the fact that these people are hammering down on the most fragile minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Jews aren't as fragile.
Marc:But I mean, the ratio, the percentage rate, if you look at it, the numbers of people who are not those types of people is massive.
Marc:to the small proportion of people who believed that this country would provide them at least the basic decency and tolerance to let them exist how they want to exist without hurting other people.
Marc:The problem with radicalization, happy Fourth of July, by the way, is that, you know, how close are we to othering becoming murderous?
Marc:I mean, when you sit there and rant and rave in your red hat about rainbow flags and grooming and taking books out of schools and not teaching the honest history of this country, I mean, how far away are these people from any capacity for empathy or empathizing with the people that they are putting into these categories?
Yeah.
Marc:in the name of Christ, in the name of America, in the name of just basic fear of the different.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know when we cross that threshold, but happy 4th of July.
Marc:Enjoy the meet.
Marc:But this all transitions into my guest, to be honest with you.
Marc:The guy that I talked to, I don't know where his book came from.
Marc:It came to me somewhere.
Marc:It must have came to my P.O.
Marc:box.
Marc:This happens sometimes.
Marc:The book is called Operation Mindfuck, QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump.
Marc:It's by a guy named Robert Guffey.
Marc:He's a lecturer at Cal State Long Beach, and he's written for the Believer Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Marc:And I got this book.
Marc:And look, man, I've got a soft spot.
Marc:for the nature of conspiracy and the power it has.
Marc:Now, radicalization requires the sort of constant drumbeat and psychological pummeling that comes from your phone, the networks you choose, the people you talk to, your podcast, your radio shows that, you know, if you exist in a bubble...
Marc:And look, I guess there are many people that live in a bubble, but like, I don't know what bubble I'm specifically in.
Marc:I don't really adhere to one.
Marc:But if you choose a reality, see, I can see their reality.
Marc:I can see the radicalized reality and I can I know who they are and I know what they're up to.
Marc:I don't have a caring empathy for them, but I get it.
Marc:But I don't know if you can characterize most of us in the same way, other than being decent people who are tolerant.
Marc:I mean, if you... This righteous intolerance is no good.
Marc:Democracy cannot exist without the lubricant of tolerance.
Marc:So...
Marc:When I saw this book, I'm like, well, has somebody put this together?
Marc:Now, the backstory for me is, you know, I was susceptible and I believed in conspiracy theories at a different point in my life.
Marc:I wrote about it fairly extensively in my book, Jerusalem Syndrome.
Marc:I had sort of pushed my brain out past the point where it could manage critical thinking or adhere to practical reality.
Marc:And I locked on to a few things
Marc:many of which have been folded in to the QAnon conspiracy, you know, primarily stuff within the halls of power, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the One World Government, a lot of this stuff that is used as they're basically anti-Semitic in relation to what they see as a Jewish run media, Jewish run world, a Jewish run global cabal or government.
Marc:But these many of these conspiracies outside of those
Marc:ones that kind of revolve around Jews and eating people, have been around for a long time, and there's many strands of them.
Marc:I'll read you a bit of what I wrote about it.
Marc:I do go off on this conspiracy rant within the book when I was out of my mind.
Marc:I was coming off of a psychotic state that was induced from
Marc:I think mild borderline personality disorder in my in my youth and through my teens and through my early 20s into cocaine addiction, which kind of blew my brain open into a psychotic state.
Marc:And I was grabbing at straws, both mystical and and sort of earthbound.
Marc:And in retrospect, or looking at it in my book, Jerusalem Syndrome, I'll quote myself.
Marc:The thing about conspiracy literature is that it's perfect for stupid people who want to seem smart and ground their hatred in something completely mystical and confusing.
Marc:And it's good for smart people who are too lazy to do their homework.
Marc:People can't argue with it without possibly implicating themselves.
Marc:Facts play only a minor role in any conspiracy theory.
Marc:The proximity of one series of facts to an event that might connect those facts to another series of facts is what it's really about.
Marc:The object of the game is to connect the desperate facts in any way possible to get the outcome of we're fucked.
Marc:Events can be broad, shady, real unreal, preferably convoluted and hard to deconstruct in any one way.
Marc:This leaves them open to endless possible interpretations.
Marc:An event can be broken down in many ways as long as it serves as a doorway to the facts that you want to connect.
Marc:An event can revolve around a person involved, a color, a time, a government, a number, a date, a code, a logo, a distant relative, a passing moment at a point in time other than the time of the event, a bullet, an institution, forces of nature that are suspect in their timing, a sexual encounter, a coworker, or basically anything that will enable you to construct your own arcane projectile riff that you can ride to your version of the truth.
Marc:That's really a matter of style.
Marc:Unquote me.
Marc:Yes, I can't believe like I sometimes read the stuff I wrote and I'm like, did I write that?
Marc:But nonetheless, all those things are true.
Marc:But once it's put into the hands of propagandists and people with an agenda, that's what causes radicalization, the hammering.
Marc:It's the hammering.
Marc:So now this conversation with Robert Guffey.
Marc:We kind of bounce around a lot because I have, you know, I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm a conspiracy nerd, but because I was involved in it, there are many books that were sort of around that time.
Marc:There's a small community of people back in the day, kind of like the morbid fascination crew that was looking at all the weird videotapes.
Marc:There were certain like faces of death, Bud Dwyer suicide tapes, and it was sort of kind of ran alongside of this kind of, you know, hipster conspiracy nerd thing.
Marc:But these are historians.
Marc:I would say that Robert Guffey is sort of a conspiracy historian.
Marc:And some of the books we mentioned or that I mentioned that changed my life and the way I saw the world.
Marc:And to this day, I am grateful for them.
Marc:Apocalypse Culture, edited by Adam Parfrey.
Marc:It's a collection of sort of renegade and truly transgressive essays and pieces of writing that probably could not be published today.
Marc:And in this volume...
Marc:There is, in the Apocalypse Culture Volume 1, there's an essay by a guy named James Shelby Downard that is called King Kill Slash 33 Degrees, Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Marc:Now, this thing...
Marc:is a spectacular bit of poetry and beautiful kind of psychosis and sign reading.
Marc:And then there's an introduction to it by this guy named Michael A. Hoffman, the second who's still around, called The Alchemical Conspiracy and the Death of the West.
Marc:These are sign readers.
Marc:Now, Downard,
Marc:I don't believe is with us.
Marc:I believe Michael A. Hoffman is still with us.
Marc:And these are guys looking for the signs and symbols and through lines and bits and pieces of ephemera to sort of show the grand face of the devil.
Marc:All of this has been sort of assimilated into the broader Christian fascist mindfuck, which is QAnon.
Marc:But what...
Marc:And there are other books mentioned, you know, The Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Hoffman.
Marc:But some of these are not well intended.
Marc:Some of these are coming from the other side.
Marc:Some of these are propaganda.
Marc:There's books by Alex Constantine that we talk about.
Marc:There's a book called The Unseen Hand and The New World Order by Epperson.
Marc:You know, it was part of the John Birch crew, I believe.
Marc:And that's where I first got hip to it was I went to some sort of seminar at a hotel when I was lost and young.
Marc:And it was all these sort of like, look at the dollar bill, the eye in the pyramid, the Illuminati, all of it.
Marc:And I kind of as a character of Mark Maron, I talk about it in my book.
Marc:But it is fascinating because to be aware of them to the degree that someone like Robert Guffey is and to really sort of take on QAnon as something other than a phenomenon.
Marc:And to break it down and to look where it comes from and what its intentions are.
Marc:This goes back a long time.
Marc:And there's all kinds of different strands of military psyops and there's military personnel who are involved in promoting this thing, who have either are either brain fucked themselves, but more likely are on board with the big win of fascism in America.
Marc:So this is what the conversation is today.
Marc:And I guess it's.
Marc:It's it's is it is it prescient?
Marc:Maybe it's prescient, but I think it might be appropriate for this particular Fourth of July.
Marc:You know, you be the judge, but, you know, try to follow along.
Marc:And if it makes you curious, you know, read the book, because this stuff did not come out of nowhere.
Marc:I think that more than anything else.
Marc:you know, that's something we can take away from this.
Marc:Hey, for those of you who are in LA, I'm at Dynasty Typewriter on July 11th, 18th, and 25th.
Marc:Those are all Tuesdays, and I'm back at Largo on Thursday, July 27th.
Marc:And just announced, I'll be at Helium in Portland, Oregon on October 20th through the 22nd.
Marc:I've got dates coming up in Salt Lake City as well that are on the website.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com for tickets, both
Marc:Salt Lake City and Vegas at the Wise Guys Clubs working out the new hour.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So basically what I'm admitting to you here in so many words is that I lost my mind.
Marc:And I think some of you know that.
Marc:But I truly lost my mind for a few years.
Marc:And it was a long time coming.
Marc:And I'm just starting really at this age to put together a lot of the things that, you know, happened in my past that I did in my past and that I thought in my past.
Marc:It's almost you get to a certain age where you.
Marc:almost see yourself as a separate person because you've had many lives and whatever progress you've made or however you you've changed.
Marc:Some of it has to do with age.
Marc:Some of it has to do with cognitive decision-making, repeating habits to change.
Marc:Some of it has to do with a deeper understanding of,
Marc:But sometimes there's parts of you that don't change at all and it can be a little disconcerting.
Marc:I'm kind of, I've been spiraling a bit lately about my age, about my relevance, about whatever it is that I'm trying to do on stage anymore, if and when and where and how and all that stuff.
Marc:But I think it's part of my life, but also emotionally, relationship-wise, you know, what am I?
Marc:How did I, you know, why am I?
Marc:That kind of stuff.
Marc:But ultimately in terms of saving my mind,
Marc:which I document in Jerusalem Syndrome, the book, is that somebody had to bring me down to earth.
Marc:Somebody had to connect me, reconnect me with reality.
Marc:These broad strokes, this othering, now it's all under the flag of Christian fascism and this idea of making America great.
Marc:This is a full press, folks,
Marc:by the right, by the unashamed fascists.
Marc:It's a full press and it's absorbing people every day, breaking their brains, making them intolerant.
Marc:And the othering will become murderous and has in some cases with psychotic people.
Marc:But that is a harbinger of things to come depending on the organization in place.
Marc:uh, in terms of the government.
Marc:So look again, not trying to be sad, happy 4th of July, watch your fingers, but this kind of investigation into conspiracy thinking, it's worthwhile because it may tell you something about yourself and it may inform you more about what we're up against as critical thinking people and actual free thinkers.
Marc:Uh,
Marc:But it also will give it a context historically, this conversation and also Robert's book, Operation Mindfuck, QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump.
Marc:And, you know, you can get that.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know.
Marc:Look for it.
Marc:You can get it on Amazon.
Marc:Let's talk to Robert now.
Yeah.
Marc:The reason I wanted to talk to you is to, you know, contextualize and, you know, get some perspective on really the evolution of the conspiracy theory organism.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:I had a couple of experiences.
Marc:First was getting this apocalypse culture book and reading the James Shelby downward.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:King kill 33 degree.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Which is probably really in terms of literature, the best conspiracy theory I've ever read.
Guest:Yeah, I would say that if you were to do a sort of Norton anthology of important nonfiction works of the latter half of the 20th century, you would have to include James Shelby Downer's King Kill 33rd Degree.
Guest:Nonfiction works.
Guest:Well, it purports to be nonfiction.
Guest:So maybe, you know, at CSULB, I teach a creative writing class called Creative Nonfiction.
Marc:So that would be your book, Operation Mindfuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In a way, it is creative nonfiction.
Marc:Well, it has to be.
Marc:I mean, you know, who are the sort of beacons for creative nonfiction?
Marc:Would that be, you know, people like Hunter and— Sure.
Guest:The New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, absolutely merging—
Guest:A personal narrative with facts, with reportage.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when I read that, you know, I was sort of because I think oddly, it wasn't really a drug thing, though.
Marc:I can't I don't I don't know if I can mark the period specifically.
Marc:Yeah, it might have been because I had cocaine psychosis in the late 80s, like 87.
Marc:And it took me a while to shake that.
Marc:And I was out here, and I was very involved with an evolving conspiracy of my own making revolving around Hollywood and some buildings.
Marc:So I had the genetic makeup to – I had the emotional makeup to sort of believe.
Guest:Well, Downard talks about the whole concept of mystical toponomy.
Guest:Is this what you're talking about, the buildings?
Guest:Like connecting – Well, yeah.
Marc:Like all of it.
Marc:I mean it seems like in this book, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, the Hoffman book, I mean he's making a case for that.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That it's intentional.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Right?
Marc:So –
Marc:Which in your book, you kind of dance around whether or not QAnon and its momentum was guided or just sort of happened with the energy behind it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, at this point, I do think it was guided.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's what you kind of dump in the last third of the book.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like the indicator being the ex-military guy who was way ahead of the curve.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Paul Valle.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, like, getting back to where I want to go at first in discussing QAnon in particular is that I'm—
Marc:I've always been curious about – like in my book, Jerusalem Syndrome, my memoir, I wrote about being consumed by conspiracies in Washington, D.C.
Marc:and talking to my buddy who worked for, I believe, Clinton at that point.
Marc:Like literally in the White House and me going on about –
Marc:You know, the structure of the mall, the obolesque, you know, the pentagram and the pentagon, you know, the way, you know, just speculating on random information I've got from conspiracists and just telling my friend in a sort of a feverish way, you know, can't you see it, man?
Marc:And I remember he saved my life because he said, look, you know, I hear you, but people here just aren't that organized.
Yeah.
Marc:And it really, it dismantled it enough for me to have a relatively healthy life.
Guest:I recently, I was teaching a class and I had a student.
Guest:He didn't know, he had no idea.
Guest:He didn't realize that I myself am a 32nd degree Scottish Rite Freemason.
Guest:So he didn't know that.
Guest:So he was telling me, I saw a picture, a photo that he had on his folder of him and his two buddies and they were dressed in tuxedos.
Guest:And I go, what's that photo from?
Guest:Is that like prom night or something?
Guest:He was like, oh, no, no.
Guest:Uh, and he told me that he spends a lot of time on the internet and it was clear from his writing before that he was like really into conspiracy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he goes, me and my buddies, we decided that we were going to try to infiltrate a Masonic lodge.
Guest:So we figured out when the night was that they were going to get together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We, we rented these tuxedos and we went to the lodge to try to kind of just like slip in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As if that's possible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said he got there and there was just one woman there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she said, oh, they're not meeting tonight.
Guest:They haven't met since the beginning of COVID.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everything's on Zoom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so they're like, oh.
Guest:And then she, I guess she was sympathetic or something.
Guest:She was like...
Guest:well, here's the code.
Guest:If you want to just jump on Zoom and see what they're doing, because it's just an open meeting.
Guest:And they were like, oh, okay.
Guest:So they went home, and they hop on Zoom to see what's going on.
Guest:And the guy goes, he goes, it blew my mind, man.
Guest:He goes, they were talking about setting up some sort of, like...
Guest:picnic and like a chili cookout.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and me and my buddies decide that must be code for like, like pizza gay, like pizza's code for pedophilia.
Guest:Like maybe it's code for something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, yeah, maybe.
Guest:And in my mind I was thinking, I know that's just a fucking chili cookout.
Guest:Like I, I, I know these guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So post-QAnon, you can take something as mundane as a chili cookout and transform it into something sinister.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But even before QAnon, if you were in the world of this type of information, which in my recollection in the early 90s, that was sort of the heyday for sort of morbid hipsters.
Marc:You know, kind of gravitating to, you know, faces of death videos, videos of, you know, Bud Dwyer blowing his brains out.
Marc:And then Paranoia Magazine, right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Was around in those circles.
Marc:I think this must have been around the time that I picked up this stuff.
Marc:Apocalypse Culture was around that time.
Guest:In fact, I think I bought my copy of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare from Newspeak, which is Joan D'Arc's bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island.
Guest:She ran Paranoia.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Oh, she ran Paranoia.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:She ran Paranoia.
Guest:I dedicate the book to her because she bought my first article back in 1996 for Paranoia, issue number 12.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:Now, wait.
Marc:So let me ask you then.
Marc:Because, look, I read the Illuminatis trilogy at some point during this, and I think because my brain was what it was, which I think was some mixture of mild borderline personality disorder and kind of the remnants of psychosis, you know, I was reading Robert Anton Wilson saying like, oh, he's kind of making this kind of lighthearted and fun to disguise the reality of the situation.
Yeah.
Marc:So but but ultimately, I think what I need to know and I think what maybe my listeners are interested in or what I'm trying to figure out for myself is that something that Adam Curtis brought up in one of his documentaries.
Marc:I'm not sure which one it was and something that you bring up.
Marc:And that's known stuff is that the origin of the Freemason conspiracy or the Illuminati.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:was really a prankster intention, right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:So the Illuminati, which holds great sway over the minds of aggravated, spiritually lost morons, was originally...
Marc:A joke.
Guest:Well, okay.
Guest:We kind of have to parse it out here because that's what you're here for.
Guest:It's a little convoluted in the sense there wasn't an Illuminati.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, 1776.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:University of Bavaria.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Washington in the apron.
Marc:Was it Adam Weishaupt?
Marc:Was it George Washington?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So Adam Weishaupt actually did begin the Secret Society of the Illuminati.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As a means of bypassing the power of...
Guest:organized religion the roman catholic church you know these were scientists and artists who wanted to just do what they wanted to do and so you had to create a secret society in order to do that in that structured uh right so you you had to have a way to meet so you could just discuss some guy's poem if that's what it is right exactly yeah yeah okay uh and and the the secret society was um
Guest:By the way, I've always found it interesting that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Victor, where he creates the monster, is the same university, University of Bavaria.
Guest:That's where he goes in Germany to create the monster.
Guest:And Mary Shelley has the date as 17 blank blank, so we don't know what year.
Guest:So it's like he could have been hanging around Adam Weishaupt when he was creating his... Now Weishaupt, the creator of the Illuminati, was he just a libertine?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I think that that's a good way to describe it.
Guest:A free thinker.
Guest:And the society itself is short-lived.
Guest:It only exists for a few years.
Guest:And it's not until... I talk about in the book about this kind of hijacking, the pendulum going back and forth between right and left.
Guest:particularly in the 50s and early 60s, the John Birch Society, particularly in Orange County, very powerful.
Guest:And they are the ones who, like, bring back the whole Illuminati conspiracy theory, which had kind of faded, you know.
Marc:But where did that start?
Marc:I mean, if you're telling me it was a short-lived sort of secret society of artists...
Marc:and free thinkers that had to find a way to communicate and meet under the church and whatever was going on in Bavaria at the time.
Marc:When does it get resurrected the first time as some conspiracy, far-reaching conspiracy in the culture of the world?
Oh.
Guest:I think it was a very convenient, you know, scarecrow whipping boy to similar to Freemasons, the Knights Templar.
Marc:So this goes back.
Marc:So the demonization goes back to the 1700s.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that's where you get, you know, Ben Franklin, George Washington being associated with the Illuminati and the Freemasons.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now, of course, some of the founding fathers were indeed Freemasons or deists, which is why I always find it amusing when you hear- Jefferson was famously a deist.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So when people say the roots of United States of America is purely Christian- Yeah, no way.
Guest:It's not exactly true.
Guest:Some of them were deists.
Marc:And deists is sort of a more spiritual-
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Also appreciators of science.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Science and nature.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I think, in fact, it was Jefferson who said, commenting on the Bible, he said, we should just shit can the whole thing, but keep everything that Jesus said in the New Testament, keep that shit can the rest of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Didn't use those exact words.
Marc:And at the time, like, you know, Ben Franklin in conspiracy lore was this, you know, party animal who was a member of the
Marc:the Hellfire Club in England, correct?
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:Which was a notoriously debauched bunch of Freemasons.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So if the Illuminati thing starts in 1700, which is a short-lived kind of meeting place for freethinkers and poets and artists and people with big ideas, where does the Freemason thing start?
Right.
Guest:Well, according to traditional mainstream history, Freemastery begins roughly in the 1700s.
Guest:But it's already been established now.
Guest:We've seen actual written evidence of Freemasons meeting as early as the early 1600s.
Guest:In fact, I wrote a paper when I was an undergraduate.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Analyzing the Masonic symbolism in Macbeth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the teacher gave me an F.
Guest:Uh, and I, I, I met with her and I said, I said, uh, I think there's a disparity here.
Guest:I was expecting an A and, uh, this is an F. And she said, well, you know, mainstream history says Freemason didn't begin until 1717.
Guest:That's, you know, a hundred years after Macbeth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was written.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, yes, but it did exist in oral form before that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I finally managed to persuade her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got it switched to an A. Wow.
Guest:But oddly enough, since then, because that was 1994.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Since then, actual written documentation has occurred that shows that Freemasons actually did meet in as early as the 1600s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It existed before that even earlier.
Marc:Well, now that we've sort of parsed why the Illuminati was created as a secret society, what was the intention of Freemasonry?
Guest:Very similar.
Guest:Very similar in the sense of the entire purpose of it was to create a kind of universalist philosophy of trying to counteract the power of the Roman Catholic Church and say, listen, it doesn't matter what God you believe in.
Guest:In order to be a Freemason, you have to believe in some sort of higher power.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But it doesn't matter...
Guest:we're all just going to put it on the same rubric, the great architect of the universe.
Guest:This gets rid of these sectarian warfare and just try to nail down the fact that, listen, at the end of the day, this is a metaphor.
Guest:I mean, Joseph Campbell once said that all these wars are fought over metaphors.
Guest:It was during one of his interviews with Bill Moyer.
Guest:And Bill Moyer said, so you mean all these people, they're killing each other over a metaphor?
Guest:And Joseph Campbell said, yeah.
Guest:That's essentially the case.
Guest:Well, that's the tribal mind, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So one of the purposes of Freemasonry was to cut down on that effect, break down the barriers between these sects, different religions.
Guest:Let's just put it all under one umbrella.
Guest:And also...
Guest:To break down on the entire class system because you might have someone in the lodge who is like, you know, the janitor Yeah, he might be the master of the lodge But the guy who's the mayor of the town might be you know beneath him, right?
Guest:You know suck it up
Guest:Well, right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Until he pays his dues.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Gets his levels.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, like, you know, when I first joined my Blue Lodge, which was in Torrance, it's just a weird coincidence that the master of the lodge at the time was a guy who worked in facilities management on campus at CSU Long Beach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I used to see him driving around in a little white car, you know, to fix the air conditioning and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I met him in the lodge, and he was the master.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, oh, cool.
Guest:You know, I recognize you.
Marc:So this was a fraternal organization designed, I guess, you know, what is the—I mean, if it was initially about insulating themselves from the Catholic Church, which was very powerful in both of these situations.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And dictated, you know, in a violent way how one behaves in culture and—
Marc:Right?
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So now, why the need?
Marc:I don't know about the Illuminati necessarily, but why the need for ritual in Freemasonry?
Marc:Is it just to make it more special?
Guest:Well, there's a lot of symbolism that's encoded in the ritual.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:But for what reason?
Right.
Guest:A lot of it, there's a great book called Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science by Robert Lomas, who is a Freemason.
Guest:And he kind of goes into this in extreme detail that a lot of this was encoded information about breakthroughs in science, in geometry, in architecture, and sort of encoding it in a way where if suddenly someone burst in and...
Guest:Said, we want the plan.
Guest:Tortured everyone for the secrets.
Guest:They wouldn't even understand it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and these things have passed through, through decades, through hundreds of years.
Guest:To the extent that I know, for example, at the Blue Lodge level, which is, when I say Blue Lodge, that's the first three degrees for second and third degree.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you want to go past that, you either join the Scottish Rite or the York Rite, and that's 4th through 32nd.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:The 33rd is an honorary degree.
Guest:It's not something that you can request.
Guest:It's something that's... Sure, man.
Marc:I've read papers on how Neil Armstrong...
Marc:Did a Masonic ritual on the moon.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you know, you got to plant the flag.
Marc:You know, we did it thanks to the science that was coded before.
Guest:And since you've read Apocalypse Culture, you'll know that Jack Parsons helped create the rocket fuel that got us to the moon.
Marc:Yeah, but that guy, you know, that's a Freemason Crowleyite crossover.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, so, you know, his sense of ritual was not limited to the Freemasons.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You get all these branches, you know, I mean, there's, for example, there's, um, lodges that are considered to be clandestine lodges even today, uh, though, you know,
Guest:For example, co-masonry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Co-masonry is a form of Freemasonry where women can join.
Guest:It started in France.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Of course it did.
Guest:Of course it did.
Guest:Progressive French.
Guest:And they're based in Colorado, but there's branches of co-masonry here.
Guest:I mean, I've known people who are members who are co-masons.
Marc:But in your experience, though, like, you know, in talking about the presence that Freemasonry and the Illuminati hold in the fevered conspiratorial mind and their understanding or belief in global control is not what's talked about at your lodge.
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Marc:Before I forget, now, was Weishaupt a Jew?
No.
Guest:That's a good question.
Guest:I actually don't know the answer to that.
Guest:Well, where did the Jews come in?
Guest:In the 1700s?
Guest:As you'll see, having read Michael Hoffman's Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, it's interesting, Hoffman, you know, who is a Holocaust denier, you know.
Guest:Nonetheless, he's also a student of the occult.
Guest:That's why I find it interesting because he's really obsessed with the occult.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he's opposed to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, so you get kind of sometimes you get accurate information, you know, filtered through his kind of fractured mindset.
Marc:I mean, I think that's a through line of your book.
Marc:Is that how do you sort it?
Marc:Because it needs the factual information to actually get traction in reality.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Any disinformation campaign has to have a core of truth to it.
Guest:Otherwise, it's not going to be believable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So what are you saying about the Jews?
Guest:So the Kabbalah has always played a major role, particularly in the Scottish Rite.
Guest:Albert Pike, who started the Scottish Rite, he was very much into Kabbalah.
Guest:So a lot of that stuff is pulled into Morals and Dogma, which is like the main book that- And the Scottish Rite's the big one.
Guest:That's the big Freemason Lodge.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's fourth through 32nd degree is the Scottish Rite.
Guest:And Albert Pike wrote all the degrees pretty much from the fourth- And how do you climb?
Guest:Well, first you have to apply.
Guest:Once you've gone through the third degree at the Blue Lodge level, you have to apply.
Guest:And you can either go into the York Rite or the Scottish Rite.
Guest:The York Rite is more...
Guest:It's more Christian-based.
Guest:I didn't join the York Rite.
Guest:You can join both.
Guest:You can do both.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:I feel like we're doing outreach for the Freemasons.
Marc:So, listen, people, if you're interested, become one of the global owners of the Jew-run government, global government.
Guest:It's funny because I have run into people.
Guest:I had a girlfriend...
Guest:who lived in Riverside back around 2005.
Guest:And she had these two friends.
Guest:They were twins named Angel and Bambi, which blew my mind that that was the real, that was the actual name.
Guest:And they were both really into conspiracy theories.
Guest:So then when she introduced me as, you know, oh, he's a Freemason, they kind of got a little weird about it.
Guest:And when I was around them, we would have these conversations like we're having right now.
Guest:And it all seemed very,
Guest:But then when I would leave, my girlfriend would say, yeah, they told me I should break up with you because, you know, you're going to pull me into some kind of sadistic scenario.
Guest:But then when I was with them, they would act completely friendly around me.
Guest:But one night I was there.
Guest:Keep your enemies closer.
Guest:Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
Guest:That's what it was.
Guest:I remember the one named Angel took me to the Mission Inn in Riverside and was pointing out,
Guest:the encoded Illuminati symbols in the mural in the Mission Inn.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:None of which I recognized, but I kind of like was nodding and agreeing.
Marc:Was she looking for validation?
Guest:I think she was looking for validation, yeah.
Guest:And she had a boyfriend who was also her drug dealer.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And she was...
Guest:urging him to ask me a question one night.
Guest:And finally she was like, just ask him, just ask him.
Guest:And the guy was like, oh, I was just wondering, like, how do you join the Freemasons?
Guest:Like, you have to be invited in, right?
Guest:Like, you'd have to invite me in.
Guest:Or I have to have a relative.
Guest:And I go, no.
Guest:I go, you can just...
Guest:You can just go.
Guest:In fact, there's actually a rule that you're not supposed to recruit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You're not supposed to go out and tell someone you should join.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It has to be someone's, like, voluntary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You have to be willing to do it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so you just go and you ask for the application.
Guest:You pay the application fee.
Guest:And then they'll send people, if you're married, they'll send people out to talk to your wife and say...
Guest:Is she okay with this?
Guest:If she's not okay, they'll just drop it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is she going to mind you wearing the hats and saying the things?
Guest:Are you going to be disturbed by this?
Guest:If she says, yeah, I'm disturbed, then they'll just drop it.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:Or they might go and talk to people you know or look into your background.
Marc:Do you have a criminal background?
Marc:We don't want any troublemakers in the masons.
Marc:Yes, absolutely.
Marc:Unless you're Jack the Ripper.
Guest:Well, you know, it's funny.
Guest:The Blue Lodge, they asked me to write an essay for their website that was like the top 20 recommended books on Freemasonry.
Guest:And so from my perspective, I thought it was important to include some anti-Masonic books because that's part of it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's the yin-yang.
Guest:If you want to understand how people perceive Freemasonry, you should include these.
Guest:So I included Jack the Ripper, The Final Solution by Stephen Knight.
Guest:And some other, one was a book called The Deadly Deception, which is by like a Christian evangelical who had been a Freemason and left.
Guest:And I thought it was important to include these things.
Guest:And the guy called me and he said, why did you include these things?
Guest:anti-Masonic text in the list.
Guest:I go, well, it's really an important part of it.
Guest:And a lot of the guys at the Lodge were not aware of the perception.
Guest:They weren't aware.
Guest:Most of them are older.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How are they going to keep up?
Marc:The guys with the AOL accounts.
Marc:How are they going to know about Paranoia magazine?
Guest:Even before that.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Because at one point they were having... What, they didn't know any Birchers?
Guest:No, they did have experience.
Guest:I remember being told stories about going on.
Guest:This one guy told me he went on a camping trip, and he had the Masonic bumper sticker.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And these Southern Baptists had left all these, like, Jack T. Chick.
Guest:The Curse of Baphomet pamphlets on the windshield.
Marc:They make those down on York Boulevard over here.
Marc:I think, I don't know if he's still, like, they used to publish them down there.
Marc:The Jack T. Chick they re-hear?
Yeah.
Marc:Well, there was a place down in York that had all the tracks, you know, the comics, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I don't know where he's from originally.
Guest:I think he is based in California.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think it was down on York.
Marc:It was at least one of the places.
Marc:Jack T. Chick, of course, I think he's passed away by this point.
Marc:but they're still producing new.
Marc:Of course, they're great.
Marc:You used to, when I was a kid, you'd find them on the street and shit.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And you'd be like, what is this?
Marc:And it would just be these weird little moral comic books, and they were the greatest, because some of them were dirty.
Guest:Steve Bissett, who's a comic book artist, he worked with Alan Moore on Swamp Thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I know that guy.
Guest:Great.
Guest:Bissette points out that Jack Cheech Chick is the most successful underground cartoonist who ever lived.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:More so than Robert Crumb.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:Because it was everybody had access to this.
Guest:I mean, I would find them on bus benches.
Guest:Yeah, and they were perverse.
Guest:They were great.
Guest:There was, like, demon fucking.
Guest:There was all kinds of people.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And you can tell there's different art styles.
Guest:There's the ones that Jack T. Chick drew.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then he had an assistant who did a lot of—had a more realistic style.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But they're all fascinating.
Guest:And they're kind of strange, almost like outsider artwork.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But several of them are anti-Masonic, the Curse of Baphomet—
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's a classic anti-Mormon one, which has my favorite Jack T. Chick panel of all time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You see two Mormons from the back.
Guest:They're knocking at the door.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You see a woman and she's looking through the curtains.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Out at the Mormons.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the thought balloon reads, gasp, the Mormons, exclamation point.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So... Also, like, you know, in popular culture, when was the last time you watched The Man Who Would Be King?
Marc:I mean, that's a Freemason movie.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:And it's a great one.
Guest:Well, I suspect Houston was a Freemason.
Guest:Had to be.
Guest:Because you also see that symbolism in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:If you remember at the beginning where the guy asks him for, you know, can you give me a handout?
Guest:And then Humphrey Bogart, you know, says, you know, take a walk or whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That happens three times.
Guest:And each time he...
Guest:Um, there's a, I think the guy's wearing a Masonic ring and then he even uses a Masonic phrase.
Marc:Oh, was that, but wasn't that played by Houston?
Marc:Wasn't the guy in the white suit?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes, you're right.
Guest:I haven't seen it in so many years, but yes, there's Masonic symbolism in treasure, the Sierra Madre and in the man who would be killed.
Marc:Okay, so that's interesting because in a contemporary application of what it means to be a Mason and engaging in the symbolism, it gives you a sense of connectivity with history that can go back as far as unknown tribes in the lost world like the man who would be king.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But certainly Egyptian mythology is incorporated into the symbolism, right?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:So then you sort of get this way of kind of writing history.
Marc:And if you have a creative bent and want to use the narrative for story, you know, that is that is an interesting way to present coded material with a secret nod to a historical brotherhood.
Guest:Kipling was clearly drawing upon—there was a school of Freemasonry called the Anthropological School.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And these were Freemasons who were really obsessed with going around various areas of the world and finding, like, prehistorical evidence of Freemasonry.
Guest:Well, that's the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Guest:That's Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Guest:There's a lot of Masonic symbolism.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And Spielberg has a huge Masonic library.
Guest:Does he?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And—
Guest:And so you might say if Michael Hoffman was listening to this.
Guest:Is he alive?
Guest:He's alive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He lives in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
Guest:Of course he does.
Guest:I have actually corresponded with him.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Was he live in a bunker up there with some several generations of wrong minded white people?
Guest:I think that that's a safe guess.
Marc:What was your correspondence with him?
Guest:This was back in 2000.
Guest:And I had ordered away for a pamphlet that he published called Masonic Assassination.
Guest:And there were three chapters.
Guest:The first chapter was about how the Masons had killed Joseph Smith.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The other one was about how they had killed.
Guest:Battling secret societies.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, the Mormons grow out of the Freemasons.
Guest:Joseph Smith had been a Mason.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Where do you think you get golden plates?
Marc:I mean, you got to make up a symbol, man.
Marc:You got it.
Marc:It's all hinging on the metaphor, like Joe Campbell said.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I mean, and the people who manufacture the best metaphor have the longer lasting religion.
Marc:Right now with QAnon, it's who can manufacture the best flags and T-shirts and hats.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Man, when I see them out in the world with their flags, I'm like, holy shit, someone is doing some design work.
Guest:Do you know?
Guest:Well, absolutely.
Guest:I saw Jordan Klupper, you know, the Daily Show, right?
Guest:He was there January 6th.
Guest:Then about six months later, he was doing his first Trump rally after all that.
Guest:And at one point, he said, I saw something I thought I'd never see before.
Guest:And then he goes, there's queues everywhere.
Guest:I thought it was fascinating that he was surprised.
Guest:Because I wasn't surprised.
Guest:I knew that January 6th wasn't going to end that thing.
Marc:Of course, it was going to solidify it.
Marc:Yeah, go ahead.
Guest:There's a recent poll that said 30% of Americans are sympathetic to QAnon.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:Yeah, well, that's nice.
Marc:God forbid it be the Jew.
Guest:Oh, Michael Hoffman.
Guest:I sent him... Oh, yeah, and then the third chapter was about assassinating Edgar Allan Poe, the Masons that killed Poe, because he had written The Cask of Amontillado.
Guest:And there's a brief sequence in there...
Guest:That has like a kind of jab against the Freemasons.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he thought that the Masons read that and they killed him three years later.
Guest:And so I wrote.
Marc:It's so amazing what you can do with history if you're creative.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:And that's the whole, you know, I wrote something in Jerusalem syndrome, my book, where I said conspiracy theories are good for stupid people who want to feel smart and smart people who don't want to do their homework.
Yeah.
Guest:That's pretty good.
Guest:That's a pretty good aphorism.
Guest:Michael, particularly if you're – obviously every time you read something and you're looking at it through one perspective, you're always going to see that same thing.
Marc:But also like the – we can talk about this in a second as soon as I ask this other question.
Marc:But it's also about having closure that speaks to your fears and also that supports –
Marc:Your your your vague point of view about, you know, what is real and what isn't.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also what what is keeping you down?
Marc:It seems that, you know, with the Illuminati with the oh, we didn't I'd like to before we get go there here about about Christians is is the protocols of the elders of Zion.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Now, I never read what you said in your book that it was it could have initially been a satire.
Guest:Yes, it's generally regarded that it was originally a piece of fiction that had absolutely nothing to do with Nazis, with the Jews.
Marc:But this is the seat of what they hang the entire Jew-run global government on.
Guest:Yes, it was a play.
Guest:It was a satirical play.
Marc:In reaction to what?
Marc:The church again?
Guest:Yes, it was a completely different context.
Guest:They just pulled out one word and then replaced it with the G. Who?
Guest:Who is they?
Guest:The Nazis, the propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
Marc:Oh, so that's where that came from.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They changed it.
Guest:They altered it on purpose.
Marc:So that was actually really in terms of what we're talking about, the most modern adaptation and use of conspiracy as propaganda that was taken from fiction that might have been sort of anti-establishment art.
Guest:Yes, that's why.
Guest:Yes, absolutely.
Guest:That's another example of the hijacking, flipping phenomenon I talk about in the book.
Guest:On January 6th, I remember as I was watching everything unfold, I wrote my notebook.
Guest:It suddenly struck me, oh, QAnon equals Joseph Goebbels' propaganda arm.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are like the SS in the brown shirts.
Marc:Except they don't dress as well.
Yeah.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:They need a better design.
Marc:Well, I do a joke in my special is that we're just waiting for the stupids to choose a uniform.
Marc:So someone got to get a designer involved.
Marc:Apparently, they're too busy working on cue flags and hats.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:Yeah, they need someone.
Guest:They need like a Lenny Riefenstall or someone to come in.
Marc:Let's not push too hard.
Marc:Bannon kind of presented himself as the Lenny Riefenstall, but it turns out he's just a hack.
Marc:God forbid anybody with a real creative vision gets hold of these guys, we're in trouble.
Marc:But from what you're saying, well, let's get back to the Jews, is that outside of historically the Jews being marginalized because of the...
Marc:they were required in medieval society to do things Christians weren't legally allowed to do, like lend money and whatnot.
Marc:So those stereotypes were built, you know, like the Rothschild arm of the Jew-run world conspiracy comes out of the banking family establishing themselves during medieval times as moneylenders because Christians weren't allowed to.
Marc:Correct.
Marc:Right.
Marc:OK, absolutely.
Marc:So that's that part of the anti-Semitic trope.
Marc:The other part was kind of exploded by Goebbels, taking the elders of Zion and reframing it as as as proof that Jews need to be leveled, killed.
Guest:There's the – and also – and this is not well known.
Guest:During the Holocaust, Freemasons were wiped out as well.
Guest:They would shut down the Masonic lodges early on and they viewed them as being Jew-infected secret societies and they needed to be wiped out.
Guest:Were they?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Were they Jew-infected secret societies?
Guest:Well, I mean, I assume there might have been overlap.
Guest:I mean, there might have been some Jews in the free places.
Marc:But I think that like in order for Nazism or fascism in general to work, and it's sort of like, you know, the only hope that we have is that we're a federalized system.
Marc:I mean, it seems like, you know, that there's going to be, it's going to be a big undertaking to completely usurp the American government all across the board.
Marc:I would think.
Guest:Well, that's why it's what's concerning is when you see so many members of the military and law enforcement.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Well, that's that's really got me spooked and crazy, but not just into QAnon, but into, you know, shameless white nationalism and fascism.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I know that this is the origin myth of American new American fascism.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they're retrieving things that had, you know, the satanic panic and anti-Masonic.
Marc:Well, yeah, it incorporates all that.
Marc:But real quick, before we get to, I'm just trying to lay a nice firm bedrock here.
Marc:So the Freemasons were actually victimized during Nazi Germany because fascism can't exist with alternative secret societies.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yes, a rival.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But in Nazism, because they were so thorough and there seemed to be some very inspired geniuses in there around this stuff, you know, the Jews got to go, the Catholics got to go, Freemasons got to go, and we have to reinterpret Christianity to serve our end.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Have you seen the in Jacksonville, Florida, just recently, there is this white supremacist group has been going around creating nine foot tall holograms that they project under the sides of buildings that are swastikas wrapped around Christian cross.
Marc:This is the problem.
Marc:Christian fascism is the problem.
Marc:And it is this American version of it.
Marc:Like, you know, coming up through the second time I came in contact with the one world government.
Marc:You know, it was around the Bush administration and there was talk about it.
Marc:But like all the stuff that really runs the world, you know, is not hiding.
Marc:You know, people were hung up on the trilateral commission.
Marc:They were hung up on, you know, this one world government thing.
Marc:But that's all that was by design.
Marc:That is a thing.
Marc:But it's got nothing to do with Jewish bankers, you know, aside from in a business sense.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, it is the sort of end game of capitalism.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So the G6, that's where your conspiracy is, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, John Ronson, who did, you know, the men who stare at goats.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I've interviewed that guy.
Marc:I like that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did this whole documentary called, what was it?
Guest:The Masters of the World.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, the Bohemian Grove thing?
Guest:Bohemian Grove, right.
Guest:He was the one who asked Alex Jones to.
Guest:Clowns.
Guest:By the way, did you know he first asked David Icke to do it?
Guest:And David Icke refused.
Guest:He said, he goes, that's where they shapeshift into reptilians.
Marc:And I don't want to see that.
Marc:So David Icke, that's the one thing people don't realize.
Marc:These guys believe this shit.
Marc:On some level, they have to believe they are grifters.
Marc:I think Alex Jones, he doesn't know anymore from his own bullshit.
Marc:But they're grifters.
Marc:You know, there's a hustle to it.
Marc:He was really a vitamin salesman is really what he was.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And whether he believes all that stuff or not, he sort of have to after a certain point.
Marc:So Ike believed it.
Guest:Yeah, it's just like I suspect that L. Ron Hubbard, when he started Scientology, probably knew that all this was fiction.
Marc:Well, of course.
Marc:I mean, he was the greatest grifter of all, and he was like locked in with – not unlike Manson, who went a different direction and fortunately didn't become powerful as anything other than a bad witch who fueled murderers and whose prosecution helped end the 60s at the hands of the conservatives, right?
Marc:So –
Marc:But what you get with Hubbard is a very calculating dude who was building a spiritual system by wandering around the Los Angeles countryside and writing sci-fi novels and hanging out with Crowleyites, right?
Marc:And Parsons.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:You're getting back to that.
Guest:Parsons, the rocket scientist, and his wife.
Guest:Yes, Marjorie Cameron.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:There's the story that the science fiction writer, Harnell Ellison.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I quote him at one point in the book.
Guest:He talked about being at the backyard barbecue in New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Hubbard's there.
Guest:And Hubbard was among the people they looked up to because he was the reigning king of pulp fiction.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Hubbard said, I'm tired of making a penny a word.
Guest:I think I want to start a religion.
Guest:And everyone at the party was, huh, Ron.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they didn't know he was absolutely completely serious about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the interesting thing about that, it was because he wanted to make more money.
Guest:He wanted to make more money, yeah, and he figured out how to do it, so he created— Creating the metaphors, dude.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:I always wondered if that's why he felt the desire to make Xenu, because in order to be a religion, you need to have some sort of deity.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:You need to have a creation myth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so he decided to create a creation myth to make it an actual church so it could be income tax-free and all of that.
Guest:And so at some point, I think he began to believe his own bullshit.
Marc:Well, I think that comes with the inflation of ego.
Marc:I mean, like I don't know that it happens like one day you believe it.
Marc:I think that the feelings of power –
Marc:you know, change your perception of things.
Marc:Why not believe it?
Guest:If you've surrounded yourself with people who are treating you like a God, then why would you not, you know, maybe I am, you know, in fact, I live in- That's the man who would be king.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And, and, uh, uh, I live in Long Beach and that's where Hubbard used to, um, there's a guy named Ben Corden who was a member of Scientology.
Guest:He wrote a book called Errol and Hubbard, Mad Man or Messiah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Ben Corden was living in Long Beach at one point when he wrote the book.
Guest:And it was in Long Beach where Hubbard would come in in disguise because he was wanted for tax evasion both in the United States and in England.
Guest:So he was on his yacht, Excalibur, going back and forth between the two.
Guest:But sometimes he would wear a wig and a hat and come into the port of Long Beach and hang out there.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Go to the pipe.
Guest:Hang out.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But it's fascinating to think of this guy.
Guest:Basically, I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman once where someone asked Neil Gaiman, if you weren't a writer, what would you be?
Guest:What would be your ideal career if you were not a writer?
Guest:And Neil Gaiman said, I think it would be lovely if people came to me and said...
Guest:I want a religion just tailored for me.
Guest:And this is what I want in it, the various philosophies.
Guest:And maybe the creation myth would have this sort of point to it, but I don't know how to do that because I'm not a writer.
Guest:So Neil Gaiman said that his job would be to create the creation myth to suit what you wanted and make the philosophy fit with the creation myth.
Guest:And people could just come to him and ask for these things.
Guest:And I thought, what a lovely idea.
Guest:That's sort of like a positive version of what people like Hubbard and these other people do.
Guest:They create like negative creation.
Marc:Well, they have to be up against something.
Guest:They have to create an enemy and they also have to embed the myth with all – everything is going to come back to worship me.
Guest:I'm the solution.
Guest:I mean that's the thing with QAnon.
Guest:It always comes back to, well, Trump is the solution.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And –
Marc:And the modern form... So Freemasons always been a stickler for Christians.
Marc:And the Illuminati in its current sort of manifestation as a conspiracy theory was popularized in the late 60s by those two sort of anarchist hippies, right?
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:So that's the first... What's their names?
Guest:Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Cary Thornley.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:Well, Anton Wilson did the book, but I thought that was after the fact.
Marc:Didn't it start with those other two guys?
Guest:Greg Hill and Cary Thornley were the...
Guest:who knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was friends with... Cary Thornley was friends with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Guest:Before he killed it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He wrote a book about Oswald before Oswald had anything to do with the J.K.
Guest:assassination.
Guest:It's called The Idle Warriors.
Guest:It's a novel about his time in the Marines, Cary Thornley's time in the Marines.
Guest:And there's a character that's based on Oswald.
Guest:And the whole manuscript was written before the assassination.
Guest:And then...
Guest:Cary Thornley is a nexus point of strangeness because then later on he works for Jim Garrison.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Jim Garrison, when he realized that Cary Thornley used to know Lee Harvey Oswald, thought that Cary Thornley was part of some conspiracy against him.
Marc:Oh, the guy who was building the big conspiracy.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And then later Cary Thornley thought that he was some sort of...
Guest:Mind controlled.
Marc:Oh, that he was, uh, he was a pawn.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so they create the discordia, uh, the principia discordia, which is this kind of like pre sub genius, you know, fake, fake religion, you know, satirical religion.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And Robert Anton Wilson, who was.
Marc:That was the time of like this was the not left, not right sort of, you know, mid to eight sixties anarchist version of taking down the system.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:Chaos.
Guest:Anti-establishment chaos magic.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And they see the Birchers getting all this traction, accusing, you know, fluoride in the water as a mind control.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Communist mind control.
Guest:And they bring back the Illuminati and they say all these, you know, liberals are members of the Illuminati.
Marc:So that was the Birchers.
Marc:That's the Birchers, right?
Marc:They did it.
Marc:So they're the ones that, they're the real predecessors.
Marc:Coming out of Orange County.
Marc:In the conservative movement.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So that's where your elders come from.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then, and then Robert Anton Wilson and these guys see this and think, oh, great.
Guest:Let's hijack this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so then they started, they started, they start creating their own anonymous pamphlets.
Guest:And then Robert Anton Wilson is using his position as an editor at Playboy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was the letters editor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he would write letters and publish them in the letters page.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:saying, you know, Henry Kissinger's a member of the Illuminati.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Richard Nixon is secretly a member of the Freemasons.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then, and this is how this differs from QAnon, is that they actually had a sense of humor
Guest:And the certain puckishness about them that they would actually publish letters saying that Robert Anton Wilson was a member of the Illuminati.
Marc:Who would?
Guest:They themselves.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Robert Anton Wilson would write a letter.
Marc:Well, the other difference also is that they're just sowing seeds of chaos to dismantle the bullshit, whereas QAnon, you know, has an objective.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That that is is political.
Marc:You know, theirs was just to start shit.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, well, to start shit and to to dismantle the the Bercher propaganda.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, now you're chipping away at that.
Guest:And now there are now you have that's when the Illuminati becomes a Rorschach.
Guest:So you have like the liberals who think that the Illuminati are Nazis, secretly Nazis running the country.
Guest:And then you have like the right wingers.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:The Illuminati are secretly communist.
Guest:And Jews.
Guest:And Jews.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Secretly controlling the country.
Guest:And the Illuminati at that point becomes this weird ink blot.
Marc:So the Freemasons were always sort of there.
Marc:And then the Illuminati gets the new treatment in the 60s by the Birchers and by the anarcho hippie guys, the Discordia guys.
Marc:But ultimately, you know, when I what I was going to get around to was the other exposure I had to this was probably in George Bush seniors period.
Marc:I went to some weird meeting at a hotel somewhere because I saw an advertisement for the New World Order.
Marc:And it must have been a Bircher because it was a guy that was doing out handouts.
Marc:Maybe it was Lionel LaRouche.
Marc:It must have been one of his guys.
Marc:It wasn't him.
Marc:But the two books that were recommended and sold were the Ralph Epperson books, which is the New World Order and the Unseen Hand.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I have both of those.
Marc:Those are Bircher, right?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, essentially, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it could have been a LaRouche.
Marc:That's what I think it was.
Marc:But it was all, you know, look at the money, you know, the pyramid, the eye in the pyramid, all the way through it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that was the trip.
Marc:So that's a Bircher trip.
Guest:And what year was this?
Marc:I don't know, dude.
Marc:It must have been, you know, in the early 90s.
Guest:Early 90s.
Guest:Now, seeing how far this particular edition of Apocalypse Culture you have is a first edition.
Guest:So you bought this at the time when it came out.
Guest:What time was that?
Guest:Well, this is, I think, 89, I believe.
Guest:87.
Marc:Yeah, so it would have been around there probably.
Guest:I'm just curious.
Guest:Was this a personal obsession of yours or did you have friends who were also into this kind of thing?
Marc:Like I bought, I'm trying to remember where I got that.
Marc:Like I got, I think it was like, I think it was in New York and there was stuff going on.
Marc:There were bookstores around, you know, and the Amok Press like meant something, you know, and like so did Semiotext.
Marc:I was trying to wrap my head around a lot of stuff.
Marc:And Semiotext was primarily philosophy that I couldn't quite handle.
Marc:And I'm trying to remember where I picked up that first edition of Apocalypse Culture.
Marc:I'm trying to think what bookstore I got it in, but I was so thrilled about it.
Marc:You know, and then I interviewed Parfrey before he died, too.
Marc:Oh, did you?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, I should.
Marc:Dig it up.
Marc:Dig it up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and I was just I just became fascinated with this world because like the outsider art thing in there and then like it just like I don't I wish I remember where I bought it, but it was almost like it gave me an entirely new template for my mind.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Which I think was the goal of that book.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I think Robert Anton Wilson saw conspiracy theory as a mind-altering venue.
Marc:Isn't Operation Mindfuck one of his sayings?
Guest:Well, Operation Mindfuck is the—that's the Discordian.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It comes out of Illuminatus first and then Cosmic Trigger later on.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Operation Mindfuck is what we've been describing.
Marc:So he thought it was—
Marc:A change in perception, a mind altering.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In other words, sort of like you could put conspiracy theory into the same category as, say, ceremonial magic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:LSD.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the secret society.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Really?
Marc:That's true.
Marc:That's how I see.
Marc:That's a context that helps me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In terms of it's something that's a circuit breaker.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So he was like into the mind fuck.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, in a positive way, in the sense of this is—I once interviewed Bishop Stephen Heller, who's the Gnostic bishop in L.A., and I asked him if—what was it about Gnosticism that—
Guest:that was so taboo.
Guest:What was it that Christians and the mainstream culture didn't like about it?
Guest:And he said, well, it was because it was a way of seeing society in a completely different context.
Guest:It was that aspect of it that was so fearful.
Guest:And I think the early Masonic initiations, like when you went to the third degree,
Guest:was an early attempt to create a circuit breaker in your brain.
Guest:You know, this was an attempt to take you to a different mind space.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you can do that with ceremonial magic.
Marc:Which is why it was like there's some of that in Freemasonry.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:And there's some of it, like, and that's the whole Crowley trip.
Guest:And Heller said, he was talking about how he knew Israel Regardie.
Guest:He's Crowley's legacy or guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Regardie said that you should have some rooting in psychology before you attempt ceremonial magic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it can really screw with your head.
Guest:And Heller said, but the problem is...
Guest:The exact opposite people are attracted to it.
Guest:So if you have any kind of like personality disorder or anything like this, you probably shouldn't, you know, go into ceremonial magic.
Guest:Without having a context.
Guest:Without having some grounding.
Marc:Grounding.
Marc:So like when you go to find your answers, you can come back.
Guest:Yes, and I would say that conspiracy theory is that it's almost the same as ceremonial magic.
Guest:You should have some grounding before you go into it, because otherwise you're going to get lost in the void and not come back again.
Marc:But here we go with QAnon.
Marc:You're saying that that is exactly the intention in terms of old school propaganda.
Marc:It's weaponized.
Marc:It's weaponized, but it's an amalgamation of at least a half dozen, you know, pre-existing conspiracy theories.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And all this stuff is, you know, they're, you know...
Marc:It seems like almost all of the pushback against these things or the interpretation of the world this way is fundamentally some form of Christianity.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And so QAnon, you know, after the beginning of it, you know, sought to in your book, I think the supposition is at a certain point, they realize they got to give some meat to the Christians because those are going to be the ones that drive it.
Marc:Because in my mind, if you believe in God, you'll believe anything.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So they needed to get those guys.
Marc:They need to get the Christians.
Marc:So that's when it became – it evolved into that.
Guest:I think what's ingenious about QAnon is I think somebody at some point looked at, say, the George W. Bush administration.
Marc:Right.
Guest:The base was evangelical Christians.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And someone said, why limit us to that?
Guest:And so they create a mythology, a mythos, QAnon mythos, that –
Guest:is kind of a big tent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It goes beyond just evangelical Christians.
Guest:It includes them.
Guest:It includes your friend who you were emailing with.
Guest:The guy who got turned.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's how I got into it because right at the beginning of, uh, at the lockdown, uh, which I'm sure probably happened to a lot of people.
Guest:You start talking to people you hadn't talked to in a long time, family members you lost touch with.
Guest:I'm talking to a friend of mine who's about 10 years older than me.
Guest:Uh, he lives, lives in the Midwest.
Guest:Uh, and, uh,
Guest:I'm talking to him about teaching my creative writing classes on Zoom, how weird that is.
Guest:And he says suddenly, oh, I think COVID-19 is going to be a really good thing, a positive thing.
Guest:And I said, oh, well, why?
Guest:And he said, well, when Trump is reelected, he's clearing out the dumbs.
Guest:He's going to get rid of the black hats.
Guest:All the people who are involved in this adrenochrome trafficking.
Guest:And I'm like, now I knew I was aware of QAnon.
Guest:In fact, I have a friend who was there when the first post appeared on 4chan because this guy lives on 4chan.
Yeah.
Guest:And but so I was aware of it vaguely, but I didn't think it was worth my attention for you outside of, you know, what are black hats?
Marc:You knew what adrenochrome was, right?
Guest:Well, sure.
Guest:I mean, having I use I've taught Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my composition classes off and on for like 20 years.
Guest:So, it's funny.
Guest:I used to include a little, like, I would create this little quiz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had this bonus question, which was, what is adrenochrome?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people, if they read the section, they would know how to answer it.
Guest:Then post-2017, I started getting responses like, adrenochrome is the drug that is used, that is taken out of the children who are kidnapped by the Illuminati.
Guest:You know, the students are, like, writing this as if it's, like, a factual thing.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you've got young people who are like who looked it up and they're like, oh, well, this is what it is.
Marc:Yeah, this is what it is.
Marc:It's taken out of the adrenal glands of the kids they've got in the caves.
Marc:Yeah, right, right.
Marc:Illuminati, you know.
Guest:I actually think I may have discovered the source of Hunter S. Thompson's inspiration for using adrenochrome in that section of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Guest:Because in the context of the book, you know, Duke and Gonzo are in the hotel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Gonzo, who's an attorney, says, I was representing the Satanist freak and he couldn't pay me.
Guest:So he gave me this adrenochrome taken from the pineal gland of a living person.
Guest:And it takes you higher than you've ever been before.
Guest:So I was reading the collected letters of Conner S. Thompson, the Proud Highway.
Guest:And in there he mentions...
Guest:that he had just read in the late 50s, Brave New World, Huxley's book.
Guest:So I thought, well, he doesn't mention it, but it's reasonable to assume that he probably also read Brave New World Revisited by Huxley, which is a collection of essays that Huxley wrote in 58, reflecting back on Brave New World and saying, how close are we to what I imagined in the 30s?
Guest:And, uh, there's four chapters in there, chapter four, five, six, and seven that I always assign to my students because it's so amazingly pressing in what's going on now.
Guest:I really recommend pulling out Brave New World Revisited, read chapters four, five, six, and seven, and just think about what he's saying in context and now.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:But there's one paragraph there.
Guest:It's one of those chapters where he starts talking about adrenochrome, which is an actual chemical that's formed in the brain.
Guest:It's not a recreational drug.
Guest:But I imagine a young Hunter S. Thompson reading it and plucking that word out and it going into the back of his brain.
Marc:Sure, man.
Guest:And then years later, he's writing Fear and Loathing, and then adrenochrome, that idea comes out.
Marc:Yeah, it's like Burroughs searching for ibogaine.
Guest:Yeah, which he called telepathine.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:So, like, it's the quest for the perfect eye.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:It seems like the bourgeois has landed on ayahuasca, but those guys were looking for something deeper, man.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the...
Guest:That whole idea of extracting the pineal gland and then taking it and making you younger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a movie from the late, no, 1960.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Directed by Edward Dean called The Leech Woman.
Guest:This black and white universal horror movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's about these white explorers going to Africa and they discover this tribe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the members, the natives have a ring with a spike on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And during this ritual, they spike the back of your neck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the spike pulls out your pineal gland while you're still alive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then they give it to the leech woman.
Guest:She drinks it and she becomes younger.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And then she goes to Los Angeles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the adrenochrome, well, they don't call it adrenochrome, but the pineal fluid runs out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So she has to keep killing people to remain young.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, that's what's fascinating about QAnon.
Guest:It's pulling in like pop culture.
Marc:But like I think the big challenge of the book is that like clearly there's all this sort of satanic imagery.
Marc:And I think a lot of us who know that, you know, once you are fully able to objectify the enemy in religious terms, you're just shy of being able to kill them without conscience.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:So there's no difference between a Democrat and a Satanist in the minds of the initiated.
Guest:And there's no difference between... This explains the dichotomy on January 6th of people wearing Blue Lives Matter shirt attacking cops.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because if you're preventing them...
Guest:from going into the Capitol and saving the children that are underneath in the dungeon, you're not a blue life anymore.
Guest:You're either a demon in human form, like literally perceive you as being a demon in human form, or you're a tool of the demons.
Marc:So the people that really believe in these subterranean tunnels where these children are in prisons and they're,
Marc:They're tapping their adrenal glands.
Marc:And anyone who's a liberal or left or woke or Democrat or a Democrat are with Satan, are with the demons, and they're not really human.
Marc:And there are people that – because this imagery –
Marc:you know, has proven effective in almost any tribal culture.
Marc:So they've somehow planted it through the psychic vessel of modern Christianity into the brains of these people that are terrified.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Well, Marshall McLuhan said that with technological advancement comes the loss of identity and with the loss of identity comes violence.
Guest:The loss of identity leads to violence.
Guest:I think he said that.
Guest:That's a paraphrase, but it's from cultures or business, I think.
Guest:That kind of sums it up right there.
Guest:They're frightened, and then now you have a savior coming in with a mythos that explains why you're frightened and who you should be frightened of.
Marc:So the savior is Trump as propped up by the propagandists.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:You know, like, you know, whatever he believes, it's all about him.
Marc:But, you know, because of his nature, like the pass he was given by the evangelical community of, you know, sometimes God chooses monsters.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, like he's just a ramming rod.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You know, for for fascism.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And but, you know, the the higher ups in the in the Christian infrastructure or political world are, you know, they got a good thing going.
Marc:Yeah, so – and most of them are fairly self-aware grifters who are, you know, leading their flocks of whatever, but they know how to get on board for the big win and who they're going to go with.
Guest:And to be fair, there are some –
Guest:Christian preachers, pastors, who I've read interviews with them where they have tried to speak out against QAnon because they knew how many of their congregation were into it.
Guest:And they were just outed.
Guest:They were just like, okay, you get out of here.
Guest:You're obviously working with Satan.
Guest:And some of them have had to like toe the line.
Guest:Oh, I better not say anything about QAnon.
Guest:The congregation is going to throw me out of the church.
Marc:Well, there's a big problem because, you know, I think—I don't know which branch of Christianity that once you start to break down, you know, or how it was originally broke down, what is necessary for the second coming to happen.
Marc:And, you know, the signs are always the signs.
Marc:The world is ending or whatever.
Marc:But, you know, what is—there needs to be some things done in Israel—
Marc:for the shit to go down.
Marc:So you get this evangelical support of the Israeli government as long as they're about getting Arabs out of Jerusalem so they can rebuild that temple.
Marc:And, you know, so there's that whole faction of it.
Marc:And then whatever's being fought here, I don't know how many of them believe that, you know, that I don't know how much of the anti-Semitism in the Christian world is rooted on, you know, getting Jews out of America to Israel, which is the intention of Israel, because they believe we all got to be there in order for the thing to go down.
Marc:For the end to happen.
Marc:So it's not necessarily about killing Jews, but it is about getting us to Israel.
Guest:Which there's a paradox there that's always confused me about evangelical Christians, particularly those who believe in the rapture and that the end times are coming.
Guest:One of the signs is the decadence of society, right?
Guest:So why did they care about Drag Queen Story Hour?
Marc:You think they'd be celebrating it, right?
Marc:Oh, it's coming.
Marc:We should be happy.
Marc:Why are we stopping it?
Marc:Well, but see, that's also...
Marc:You know, the decadence is also a signifier of the intent of fascism, right?
Marc:You know, like in Berlin.
Marc:I mean, decadence is what sort of becomes the root of what we're working against.
Marc:So that is what you're saying, that there is a conflict of interest there.
Guest:And there's also the—you're familiar with the red heifer?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:But yeah, has it come?
Marc:Did they find it?
Guest:No, they keep trying to genetically engineer the red heifer.
Marc:The red heifer is one of the indicators of the second coming.
Guest:Yeah, it has to be purely a red heifer.
Guest:And they tried to genetically engineer one.
Marc:But the Kabbalistic Orthodox Jews are in on this, right?
Marc:Aren't they needed?
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's the sort of weird...
Guest:Sure.
Marc:That's why they pray at the walls.
Marc:They can't get to the Mount because the Dome of the Rock is there.
Marc:And then the second temple needs to be rebuilt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There are extremist Israeli factions and extremist Christians in America who are like teaming up together.
Guest:For the metaphor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For the metaphor.
Guest:Right.
Guest:To make the metaphor literal.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's the big problem.
Marc:That's the problem.
Marc:Is the manifesting of the metaphor, making it literal through repetition, through ritualistic, propagandistic black magic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:That that's the that's the main propaganda.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Now, now, in terms of like the amalgamation of all this stuff, including science fiction, which you discuss in your book, that there's elements of QAnon that are, you know, age, you know, you know, ancient conspiracy theories, new conspiracy theories, new sort of comic book representation of demons, a little bit of 50s and 40s sci fi here and there.
Marc:Bits and pieces of crackpots from the past and their narratives.
Marc:So in the last part of the book, I mean, where does it start in earnest for you?
Marc:I know it starts on 4chan and it becomes an issue, but the seed of it you think was nefarious and organized?
Yeah.
Guest:I think I have two thoughts on that.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:One is that it's possible that the first post that appeared on 4chan where the dude calling himself Q posted a photo of a Christmas tree and it was clearly taken in the White House.
Guest:And it could be that that initial post was a genuine, you know, that was Q, right?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And then either quickly hijacked, you know?
Guest:By trolls.
Guest:By trolls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or by...
Guest:And these Cyclops, PSYOP operatives who saw a good thing.
Guest:Ex-military.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Your guys.
Guest:Paul Valladolid is one of them.
Guest:Who is that guy?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:This is very interesting because right after the lockdown, there was a kind of QAnon recruitment video that took the internet by storm called Out of Shadows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They never mentioned QAnon.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But ultimately, everything in there is QAnon stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They do focus on Pizzagate at the end, which is, you know.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That's what brought it to the masses.
Guest:That's what brought it to the masses.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so at one point, it begins ostensibly saying this is a documentary about how Hollywood is used to insert propaganda into the American consciousness, which is true.
Guest:Hollywood has been used for this propaganda arm of the government going back to World War II, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so it begins with a valid thesis.
Guest:You could do a whole documentary about that.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Within eight minutes, it's gone off into the Twilight Zone.
Guest:And now they're talking about this guy named Michael Aquino, who if you read Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper, you'll know that Michael Aquino was a psychological warfare officer.
Guest:He was a Satanist, or rather, technically, he was a Setian.
Guest:He used to be a member of the Church of Satan with Anton LaVey.
Guest:Yeah, but that was a bunch of carnival hacks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, Aquino thought so, too.
Guest:So that's why he broke away from LaVey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And started the Temple of Set.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So LaVey wasn't hardcore enough.
Marc:So that was more Crowley, moving towards Crowley?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or an arm of that type of magic?
Guest:More...
Guest:Different from Crowley.
Guest:It's more hardcore than Crowley.
Marc:Okay, because like Anton LaVey was just a guy who wanted to fuck a lot.
Guest:This is an interesting, I'm going off on a slight tangent, but it's interesting.
Guest:Anton LaVey was hugely influenced by the 1940s version of Nightmare Alley, the film.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Nightmare Alley, Del Toro, just, you know.
Marc:Well, he was a carny LaVey.
Guest:He was a carny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his name was Stanton.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he, the main character in Nightmare Alley is named Stan.
Guest:And he saw some sort of connection between him and the main character.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he even had a framed poster of Nightmare Alley in his house.
Guest:He named his daughter Zena, who Adam Parfray dated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He named her Xena after the character in Nightmare Alley.
Guest:And also, once a year, he would have friends over, and he had an early, you know, like a reel-to-reel actual film version of Nightmare Alley.
Marc:Film projector, yeah.
Marc:Film projector.
Guest:He'd play it, like, at a party every once, like on his birthday.
Guest:Yeah, wow.
Guest:Nightmare Alley.
Guest:The original one, yeah, of course.
Guest:Yeah, so this is someone who clearly...
Guest:recognized that he was a con artist and knew that, you know, unlike Hubbard.
Guest:You know, I mean, I don't know.
Guest:I don't know if LeVay ever really believed his own bullshit.
Marc:No, I think LeVay was like interested in surrounding himself with other hedonists and to make it popular.
Marc:He wanted the attention of sort of like, oh, it is some version of do what thou wilt.
Guest:In a way, yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, but he was, I think he was just a guy that wanted to party.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:You know, and he liked partying with Hollywood people and Satan was sexy, man.
Guest:And like Sammy Davis Jr.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Have you ever seen the, on YouTube, you can see the pilot episode of a sitcom that Sammy Davis Jr.
Guest:was going to do in the 70s where he plays Satan?
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:I got to watch that.
Guest:So Aquino.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So Aquino, he sees through that LaVey's just a con man.
Guest:So he starts his own thing called Temple of Set.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's also a psychological warfare officer in the military.
Guest:He had a severe widow's peak.
Guest:He had a wife named Lilith.
Guest:He looked kind of like an overgrown- Lilith, the destroyer.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Okay, go ahead.
Guest:He looked like an overgrown Eddie Munster.
Guest:And he was given the task by his boss, Paul Vallely, in the 70s of writing-
Guest:What Valle wanted.
Guest:What was Valle's job?
Guest:Valle was the head of the PSYOP.
Guest:In the military.
Guest:In the military.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And he said, post-Vietnam, we need a paper to show us what direction can we go in from here?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What type of, how does PSYOP evolve?
Guest:Post-Vietnam, where do we go from here?
Guest:And I think you're the guy to be able to figure this out.
Guest:So Aquino writes this paper called Mind War.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the paper, he says, in this new electronic digital age that we're entering into.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You have to create a form of propaganda where the target is not aware.
Guest:They think that all of the ideas that they're having are their own ideas.
Guest:So you have to create a rapport with the target that almost works at an ESP level, where the target absorbs the propaganda in such a way where they think that they're generating it on their own and that what they do is their own choice, not something that they're being manipulated by doing.
Guest:And so now what's interesting is in the Out of Shadows documentary, they mention Mindworn Aquino to show that you see there is Satanists in the military.
Guest:Oh, so he's a bad guy in that.
Guest:He's a bad guy.
Guest:And Aquino is, you know, during the satanic panic, he gets wrapped up in an investigation.
Guest:He was accused of running a child trafficking ring out of the Presidio.
Marc:Because of the set.
Marc:The house is set.
Guest:Because of the temple set.
Marc:Temple is set.
Marc:But not because of writing this thing.
Guest:No, not no.
Guest:That has nothing to do with it.
Guest:The mind war thing has nothing to do with it.
Guest:And he appears on an episode of Oprah Winfrey during the satanic panic and he's trying to defend himself.
Guest:And eventually he's cleared of any charges of running a child trafficking ring.
Marc:But that's that long ago that child trafficking is, you know, a trope.
Guest:Well, yes, I mean, that's huge in the 80s, and then it's now resurrected in 2017.
Guest:So what's odd about the documentary is they never mention the fact, they talk about mind war in this documentary, and they say, you see, this is the plan.
Guest:This is the satanic plan to control your mind.
Guest:They never mention the fact that, and they show the cover letter of the title page.
Guest:It says mind war by Paul Vallely and Michael Aquino.
Guest:They never mentioned the fact that Paul Valaway is the one military figure who has come out and said Q is a real person.
Guest:All the information that Q is giving you is real.
Guest:Donald Trump does not trust the CIA, the DIA, the FBI.
Guest:So he's relying on a group of retired and active intelligence agents called...
Guest:the something-something of Northern Virginia, the army of Northern Virginia.
Guest:And these retired and active intelligence agents are feeding him information, and Q is a representative of those intelligence agents who are helping Trump.
Guest:And so the QAnon community just went wild.
Guest:Like, this is the first official...
Guest:And that's Valily?
Guest:That's Valily.
Guest:He went on all these radio shows saying this.
Marc:And that's Aquino's boss.
Guest:Aquino's old boss.
Guest:And he's very highly respected, decorated.
Guest:The psyops guy.
Guest:The psyops guy, right.
Guest:And then when you see that, and then you read Mind War, you suddenly realize that all the QAnon posts
Guest:fit exactly the description of where PSYOP should go in the mind war.
Guest:And this happened before, like, it blew up.
Guest:Vallely's statement.
Guest:Vallely comes and starts making public statements about QAnon probably about a year into QAnon.
Marc:So he sees that this is the ticket.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that's why your assumption is they picked up on it.
Marc:They either picked up on it or they started it.
Guest:How do you think that?
Guest:Well, I mean, you could just go on 4chan and start posting his queue and that's how you start it.
Marc:Oh, so you're saying that he laid the groundwork and then came out and said, this is legit.
Marc:He could have had two or three people doing it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You can tell, you know, I'm a creative writing teacher.
Guest:I look at literature all the time.
Guest:I can see writing styles.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Like, I could tell immediately it wasn't just one person.
Guest:Well, what about that guy and his dad?
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, those two guys are probably involved.
Yeah.
Guest:I doubt that they did that entirely on their own.
Marc:No, but but clearly the father is ideologically.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:In line.
Guest:And I would think that they would probably be paid.
Guest:What are their names?
Guest:To Watkins, Ron Watkins and Jim.
Marc:But who do you think that, you know, that Valley was currently working for?
Guest:Well, you have Michael Flynn, who is a PSYOP officer himself.
Guest:I mean, that's his background.
Guest:And now Michael Flynn's going around.
Guest:He formed this thing called the Rear Rake in America Tour.
Guest:Are you familiar with this?
Guest:With a guy named Clay Clark, who's this really evangelical.
Guest:It looks like a clown show.
Guest:It's a clown show, but it's hugely influential.
Guest:I mean, they're getting people...
Guest:They're usually at churches.
Guest:It's from San Diego to Florida, across the country.
Marc:So they have a pretty large bunch of people whose brains they have broken and are now on board.
Guest:And Michael Flynn has given lectures at the Rearaken America tour saying, this was a few years, not long ago, he said, what we need to do is we need to target the school boards.
Guest:That's our next step.
Guest:Target the school boards.
Guest:To what end?
Guest:To...
Guest:You know, kick out the Illuminati reptilian bastards.
Guest:Well, that's what they're doing.
Marc:But it's in the name of Christian moralism, right?
Guest:In Florida, Texas.
Guest:And, you know, Ron DeSantis, he has QAnon people he's working with.
Guest:There's one woman who's the head of some – it's like mothers against everything.
Marc:So this is it.
Marc:This is the origin myth of modern American fascism.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Christian fashion.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That's what I was calling it that while back.
Marc:And I've always felt that that whether like but I tend to you, you know, you did the homework, but I tend to detach from that and just say, like, I don't care where it came from.
Marc:It is what it is.
Guest:Well, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, in a way, you know, that HBO documentary about QAnon?
Guest:Yeah, I saw that.
Guest:The whole question was, who is Q?
Guest:I wasn't particularly interested in who is Q. Not at this point.
Guest:I'm more interested in why is this more successful than all the other conspiracy theories that have flourished on the Internet since the year 2000 or late 90s?
Marc:Because you've got you've got people within the government.
Marc:that realize either they believe it, which I think is maybe 60, 40, 50, not even.
Marc:I imagine a lot of them just realize, because what's happening is that there is a shameless fascist movement that is saying what it wants and doing what it needs to do in order to take over the government of this country.
Marc:They're not hiding it.
Marc:And QAnon, if they want to use that tool to sort of mobilize that constituency, they do.
Guest:I think that's the ultimate irony here is like the whole metaphor of the deep state because deep state implies it's kind of ironic.
Guest:There's something almost Gnostic about it.
Marc:When Trump got in, I was like, well, that doesn't exist.
Marc:Why aren't they taking him out?
Guest:He's saying now, if you reelect me, then I'll go in, I'll take care of the deep state.
Guest:Why didn't you do it in the four years that you were in?
Guest:Also, by the way, there are some of the QAnon people who say that Trump still is president now.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So how can he run a third term by their own logic?
Marc:They don't care.
Marc:You see these people and they are literally like on drugs.
Marc:They're saying things that they have no support for.
Marc:Altered consciousness.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Like they are cult members who are saying things.
Marc:And when pressed a little bit, they're like, I don't know.
Marc:It's just I have a feeling.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:They'll say, well, in fact, I saw Jordan Klepper asking one of these guys.
Guest:He said, wait a minute.
Guest:You're saying that Trump is in charge of the military right now?
Guest:He goes, yes, secretly he is.
Guest:He goes, OK, so he's to blame for Afghanistan.
Guest:Oh, no.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like one step away.
Marc:That they operate on this surface level, and I guess the only interactions they have are with like-minded people or people who are equally as shallow and duped and brainwashed.
Guest:I think that also what happened, it's not just the Q post.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:This whole idea of creating a rapport with a target, getting them to think that they made the choice themselves, I've suspected early on, I mentioned in the book that I was –
Guest:It would be impossible to monitor every single QTuber in existence.
Guest:So I was focusing on this Rick Renne show, and he had this guy named Gene, this anonymous guest, Gene, who claimed he had military contacts.
Guest:And he would repeat everything that this military contact had told him to say.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So about the deep underground military bases and all of this.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I remember thinking at first, is he making this stuff up or is someone actually telling him this stuff and he's repeating it?
Guest:Eventually, right about January 3rd, so it was like three days before January 6th, Gene goes on the air.
Guest:And I heard other QTubers say this as well, a woman named Kirsten Weldon, who's now dead.
Guest:She died of COVID.
Guest:On January 6th, 2022, she died of COVID.
Guest:Kirsten Weldon, this guy Gene, other QAnon people were saying,
Guest:They actually went on the air and said, listen, three days from now, on January 6th, if you see tanks coming down the street and Trump declares martial law, don't go for your guns.
Guest:Don't go for your guns.
Guest:That has to happen.
Guest:That's the plan.
Guest:Trust the plan.
Guest:And martial law is the tool that Trump is going to use to route out all the demonic Satanists.
Guest:So don't go for your guns.
Guest:So they managed to take these libertarians who all the way back in the early 90s,
Guest:had been paranoid about imminent martial law.
Guest:There was this book called Operation Vampire Killer 2000 by Police Against the New World Order.
Guest:And it was this saddle-stitched book that I ordered away for it.
Guest:Because the title, Operation Vampire Killer 2000, that sounds great.
Guest:And it was by these ex-police officers headed by this guy named Jack McClam.
Guest:And they didn't like Bush.
Guest:They were libertarians.
Guest:And they were concerned about the militarization of the police.
Guest:And when I read it at the time, I thought, this is interesting.
Guest:This would create like a bridge between these kind of far-right libertarians and progressives who are also concerned about the militarization of the police.
Guest:I mean, this is something that both are concerned with.
Guest:This could actually create a kind of bridge between these.
Marc:Oh, interesting.
Marc:So that was sort of where it happened, huh?
Guest:And then, you know, a few years after that, then it gets wrapped up in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Guest:And any hope of that happening, like, that was far too optimistic, the thought on my part, you know.
Marc:Well, I mean, but what has happened is the left and the right do – like they're certainly the progressive spiritualists, you know, who revolve – who are very anti-vax.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Because that's a gateway drug to QAnon is anti-vaxxers.
Guest:In fact, at the Reawaken America tour, one of the speakers has been Robert Kennedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, he's been doing that for a long time.
Marc:But like, you know, the yoga instructors, the massage therapists, the crystal gazers, like all sort of got in line with this thing.
Guest:That's what was so brilliant about QAnon.
Guest:It figured out how to pull in people who would never enter this evangelical sphere.
Marc:But yet were either searchers or paranoid, broken people, you know, that were incomplete and untethered from a true foundation of self.
Marc:And also what you would call like one issue voters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So if you're interested in.
Marc:Just angry morons.
Guest:If you're interested in vaccines, like that's your main thing.
Marc:Yeah, we got.
Marc:Then you have to.
Marc:So again, tell me.
Marc:So Valerie.
Marc:OK, I understand he's aligned with Flynn.
Marc:But, you know, so their agenda was always fascist America?
Guest:I think the QAnon posts were meant to build up to January 6th.
Guest:That January 6th was like the plan B. Okay, okay.
Guest:Or the plan Q. If it looks like he's not going to win.
Marc:A Q coup.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're going to initiate plan Q. Because they were like, you know, if we can just let this motherfucker run roughshod over the government for another four years, we've got it forever.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just a few days before January 6th, all 10 secretaries of state, all living secretaries of state published an op-ed piece saying, listen, if you're in the military, you have to understand you have to accept whoever is president.
Guest:I read that and I thought, what was the panic freakout that made them publish this?
Guest:This has never happened before.
Guest:I mean, they all got together and said, we need to publish something.
Guest:It's a coup.
Guest:Because they know that this was...
Guest:And I don't think people are aware of how it was just a series of weird synchronicities that prevented that mob from getting in, kidnapping Pelosi, hanging Mike Pence.
Marc:For sure, dude.
Marc:The guy with the handcuffs, there was going to be blood spilled.
Marc:There's no doubt.
Guest:That's why when I was watching it, I thought the MAGA and QAnon people are the cover.
Guest:You know, they went there probably not thinking that they were going to be involved in a riot.
Marc:So you're saying that the real...
Marc:The activators who were going to do the damage were deep op people.
Guest:The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, most of whom are military people, were ex-police officers.
Guest:The guys with the zip ties, the cameras.
Guest:They believed that they could hijack this thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you've got the chaos of the Malaga QAnon people who have been revved up.
Guest:And in the midst of that chaos, you've got these zip tie guys with the camera mounted on the chest, camo fatigues.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What were they going to do with those cameras?
Guest:You know, were they going to kidnap Pelosi and start executing people, you know, live streaming it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Until, you know, Mike Pence does what Trump wants him to do.
Guest:I mean, it was only – there was one cop who – the doors to the chambers were open, unlocked.
Guest:And he actually led the crowd away while Pelosi and Pence and Schumer and everyone else fled out the back.
Marc:Yeah, I saw that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he was the guy going, you know, like that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the crowd didn't know it was unlocked.
Guest:So they go and they chase that guy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's just that one synchronicity that prevents that from being a bloodbath of a day.
Marc:So where do we stand now with Q?
Marc:How's it doing?
Guest:I just wrote an article called The Silent Civil War that is going to be appearing on Evergreen Review, which kind of updates things from Operation Mindfuck.
Guest:And the fact that Q popped up, popped his head up again one more time when Cassidy Hutchinson
Guest:was doing her testimony in the January 6th committee.
Guest:I thought, well, somebody must have gotten really nervous about her because suddenly Q starts posting again with all these questions.
Guest:And that goes along the way that the posts are structured where they're all questions.
Guest:That ties into that mind war philosophy.
Marc:Well, that's how they answer questions with questions.
Guest:With questions.
Guest:And then that way you're reading the question and you think you're answering it and coming to the conclusion yourself.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:When in fact, there's only one conclusion based on all of the questions.
Guest:Well, we have to support Trump.
Guest:That's the only conclusion you can come to.
Guest:But you think you've reached it yourself.
Guest:Or you think it's your idea to storm the Capitol.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When in fact Trump was the one who told you to go do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Or a lot of these QTubers, there's one woman named Radix.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Radix Viram.
Guest:That's her, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she started a YouTube channel called Patriot Soapbox, one of the early proponents of QAnon.
Guest:And I've heard her in an interview say how at the beginning, Jerome Corsi, who's one of these major, he writes for World Net Daily.
Guest:He's the one who came up with the whole birther thing, the Obama birther thing.
Guest:Jerome Corsi suddenly appears on the subreddit, the QAnon subreddit for Patriot Soapbox and is commenting.
Guest:And she's like, oh, I know Jerome Corsi.
Guest:He's on Alex Jones.
Guest:And Jerome Corsi is suddenly offering to take part in this YouTube channel that started by these two random people.
Guest:And they're really impressed.
Guest:And they're posting the Q post and talking about it.
Guest:And Jerome Corsi tells them, I know that this information is correct.
Guest:Keep doing it.
Guest:I'm going to help you.
Marc:So he's one of the elders.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:She has said, at the time, I was really naive and I was really impressed that this guy was on Alex Jones and was telling us that we were on the right track.
Guest:And now looking back on it, she goes, I think he inserted himself to amplify the QAnon thing and to direct it.
Guest:So she had to come to Jesus' moment?
Guest:She did, yes.
Guest:She realized that she had been taken.
Guest:She'd been had.
Wow.
Marc:So do you think it's leveling off stronger, weaker right now?
Guest:I think it's stronger.
Guest:I think it's – now the situation is there are a lot of QAnon people who basically they just – they don't mention Q. Sure.
Guest:Like for example, have you ever watched Newsmax?
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:It can be amusing and frightening at the same time.
Marc:Yeah, I got enough of that just in my own mind.
Marc:The amusing and frightening.
Marc:I don't need it validated all the time.
Guest:There's a show called Greg Kelly Reports.
Guest:Greg Kelly used to be on Fox.
Guest:Now he's on Newsmax.
Guest:And basically the whole thing is a QAnon adjacent show.
Guest:He never mentions Q, but for example, when the guy attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband, there's this QAnon theory that he was actually a male prostitute.
Guest:And that got picked up in the mainstream press?
Marc:Immediately.
Marc:It's so fucked up like that.
Marc:So you're telling me that now...
Marc:QAnon's become a secret society within the conservative.
Marc:In a way, yes.
Marc:Within whatever the fuck is.
Guest:Yeah, because if you watch like Newsmax, they do QAnon reports all the time.
Marc:So it's a secret society within the new Christian fascist movement in America.
Marc:But it's definitely, you know, they are in it for the long haul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Even Marjorie Taylor Greene did an interview recently where she said, oh, I was never really into Q. Yeah.
Marc:And they read that as, you know, she is.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, good.
Marc:Not optimistic.
Marc:No.
Marc:But we did a thorough job here.
Marc:I think we covered it.
Marc:I was very excited to have the conversation, and I'm satisfied.
Marc:And I like the book.
Marc:Like, it didn't spin me out.
Marc:Oh, that's good.
Marc:I'm grown up enough to contextualize conspiracy theories.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You didn't start analyzing the buildings.
Marc:Not again.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:That didn't come back.
Marc:So I'm happy about that.
Marc:Thank you for talking.
Marc:Well, I hope you kept up with that.
Marc:I hope it was understandable enough.
Marc:Operation Mindfuck, QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump is available now.
Marc:Hang out a minute, folks.
Marc:If you liked that talk with Robert, we did an episode a few years ago.
Marc:You'll also dig.
Marc:Episode 1155 is called Bad Internet.
Marc:And the first half is a talk about the Pepe the Frog documentary.
Marc:And then I talked with Andrew Marantz from The New Yorker about online fascism and conspiracy communities.
Guest:The underlying systemic forces of how social media works, what it's incentivizing people to do, the kinds of feedback loops it's drawing people into, the system is still working exactly as designed.
Guest:So a couple of the individual as designed as designed by by who and for what reason?
Guest:As designed by the social media company.
Guest:So the reason that I call my book Antisocial is because the word antisocial applies to the creeps and propagandists and disinformation agents who I hang out with.
Guest:And I would sit at their side and watch them destroy America.
Guest:And I would kind of call them and say, hey, you are doing this thing from your laptop in Orange County, California, or in Michigan or in wherever.
Guest:Can I come sit in your kitchen and watch you destroy America?
Guest:And they'd say, yeah, sure.
Guest:And so I would do that.
Guest:They were the kind of antisocial ones, but it's also antisocial in the sense of, hey guys, social media is doing this to us in a very concerted way.
Marc:So the design of social media, the intention was not to destroy America, but you're saying that fundamental to the design of it
Marc:The way these loops create by by amassing followers around ideology and then by other people sort of, you know, entering it through random tweets or reactions that the design of it, which was idealistically to bring people together, it's doing that, but in the most malignant way.
Marc:Correct.
Guest:So it's bringing people into these forms of community.
Guest:And it's also doing at the most basic level what the algorithms are designed to do, which is just to maximize and monetize attention.
Guest:They're just trying to suck in your attention, get you to stay on the platform for as long as possible.
Guest:And often it's not even the human beings, but it's the algorithms who are figuring out that if you want to get someone to stay on your platform for eight or 10 hours a day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Actually, the best way to do that is to radicalize them to some kind of new cult ideology that they will then sit in their bunker and explore and do all this research.
Marc:Again, that's episode 1155, Bad Internet.
Marc:And you can listen for free in whatever app you're using.
Marc:OK, here's some drone for you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives.
Guest:Monkey and LaFonda.
Guest:Cat angels everywhere.