Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes trace the Illuminati's evolution from Adam Weishaupt's 1770s Bavarian sect to modern conspiracy syncretism, highlighting how figures like Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill fabricated a fake religion centered on goddess Eris and fictional Marine Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst. Their narrative explores Thornley's time in New Orleans with neo-Nazi Gary Kirstein, his defense of Lee Harvey Oswald as an innocent patsy following JFK's assassination, and his subsequent FBI interactions involving lie detector tests and theories that Oswald was a CIA-created tulpa. Ultimately, the episode reveals how fringe occultism and political paranoia merged to reshape American conspiracy culture, influencing movements from QAnon to radical anti-establishment narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fake Stories and Financial Literacy00:02:15
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We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes, which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, folks.
Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
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It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
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Oh, it's behind the bastards, a podcast that is opened in a radically different way pretty much every week, but usually one that involves me making sounds with my mouth.
I don't understand how you're this successful of a podcast now.
No one does, Garrison.
Nobody does.
But they can't stop it.
They can't stop the signal.
You know, I'm like the Rolling Stones of podcasting.
The Andrew Tate of podcasting.
Thank you, Margaret.
Thank you for that.
That's what everyone's saying.
Cults, Mars, and the Illuminati00:14:53
For that unalloyed compliment.
Adorable.
We started this episode by talking about Adam Weishaupt and the Bavarian Illuminati, which started out as a nerdy kid kind of trying to find a way to smuggle cool books into Bavaria that were banned.
And in doing so, he created a fake religion so that rich people would feel like wizards and he could use their money to buy more books.
And it ended up with him funding illegal abortions until a lightning strike exposed his society to the cops.
And then he had to flee and spend the rest of his life having the equivalent of an extended Twitter argument.
This sounds so fake.
This sounds like such a fake story.
It is.
It's both sad and funny.
And I've continued my reading on this.
One of the troubles here is that there's an actual paucity of good historical books about the Illuminati who are not written by cranks.
I picked the one of the Charles River editors.
They are not usually my ideal source, but they do a decent job of summarizing all of the actual facts that are known.
I found another book that I have been reading through that is one of the crank books.
It's called The Illuminati, The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by Jim Mars with two R's.
And Mars is absolutely a crank.
For an idea of what a crank he is, his book on secrets in the chapters on the Illuminati, part one is Germany and part two is Zionism.
So you know we're going some good directions in this book.
That's going to bridge what we're going to have to talk about today, isn't it?
I want to read, there's some wild quotes in here, and most of them will not be most relevant until we get later on in here.
But I want to read a portion of something that I cannot speak entirely on the veracity of, but this is a chunk of his book when he's talking about the formation of the Illuminati.
In 1779, two years after Weishop's initiation into Freemasonry, he wrote to Zwackenhurtel suggesting the order be renamed the Society of Bees.
The Bee Connection again demonstrates the close ties of the Illuminati to Masonry, as the beehive has long been an important Freemason symbol.
Today's Masonic lodges were once referred to as hives, and any internal disputes are called swarming.
One 18th century Masonic ritual stated, the beehive teaches us that as we are born into the world rational and intelligent beings, so ought we also be industrious ones and not stand idly by or gaze with listless indifference on even the meanest of our fellows in a state of distress if it is in our power to help them without detriment to ourselves or our connections.
The symbol of bees also connects to the aforementioned ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries in which honey was thought to be a divine product of the gods.
So that's kind of cool.
Now, some wisher man shit.
Yeah.
I'm all for beehive.
I like the discussion of arguments within Masonic temples as swarming.
Yes.
Yeah, it's all so much of this story is extremely Twitter, like almost baffled.
It's nice to know that radicals have always been more or less the same kind of people.
Nice isn't the word I would use.
Yeah, it's reassuring.
It's a thing that's that's undeniable.
Yeah, so that's good stuff.
So we should probably get back into the story.
When we had left off, we had just been talking about how the conspiracy theory about the Illuminati started up after the French Revolution and kind of merged with existing fears about Masonry in the United States to be part of this big anti-Masonic movement.
You've got guys like Abigail Adams and even George Washington himself who bought into this conspiracy.
And this would be like one of the funny things about Jim Mars or about, I don't know, whatever, Mars' book, is that like when he talks about American connections to the Illuminati, he just says that like, we know that, you know, multiple members of the Founding Fathers were aware of the Illuminati.
And it's like, yeah, they believe the same shit you did.
Like they all had bought into the same conspiracy, buddy.
So far, the bastards is the people who believe in the Illuminati, not the Illuminati.
No, the Illuminati are not bastards.
Although, again, perhaps if you create a fake cult in order to do a good thing, you might wind up causing more problems than you solve.
That may be a lesson from the Illuminati that we can take into us today.
That's true.
You know what, Sophie?
Let the initiates out of the cage.
I think maybe we've been going down the wrong road.
You couldn't even get that sentence out.
Yeah.
I would never tell you to let the initiates out of the cage.
That's where they live now.
So over time, over time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory died out would be the wrong word, but it kind of faded.
But America's public obsession with conspiracy theories never quite did.
And politicians learned over the decades that stoking these conspiracies was an easy way to get votes.
After the Masons, popular American conspiracy culture pivoted to obsess over the Jesuits and then the Communists, which, despite the fact that they are kind of diametrically opposed in fundamental ways, often got looped in together as like a Jesuit communist conspiracy.
That was a whole big thing in the early half of the 20th century.
And of course, every time you would have sort of a new era in American conspiracy culture, the trappings of prior manias would roll forward into each new conspiracy that enraptured the voting public.
It's, you know, it's syncretism.
This is a thing that Umberto Echo talks about when he talks about like one of the key attributes of fascism.
And I think it is kind of worth noting and a little bit beyond the scope of this episodes, but to talk about how American conspiracy culture has always been proto-fascist in many ways.
And this is the syncretism of it.
And we've really seen this come to roost with Donald Trump and QAnon.
And sort of this is why you get a lot of liberals who are very surprised when they see these kind of people who had been sort of formerly crunchy granola hippie types get into the hardcore right-wing QAnon stuff.
And it's like, that's syncretism, baby.
That's exactly what Echo was talking about.
This also ties into like the idea of like the cultic milieu and how the shared space where all these types of conspiracies operate feed off each other and do and do kind of coalesce into this weird like a crypto or quasi-fascist politic.
Yeah.
And if you if you want to if you want to look at this as like, I don't know, if you wanted to like diagram this as like a soil or something like that or sedimentary layers, the base of it all is the Illuminati, right?
That is the Ur conspiracy in American political culture.
So yeah, meanwhile, the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s saw another surge of interest in the occult.
It seems like this kind of happens once every century or so.
That's been pretty consistent for like the last 300 years, something like that.
And over in Europe, a pair of wizards resurrected the Illuminati.
The founders were tied to the OTO and Aleister Crowley.
And the second Illuminati was never really much more than a sideshow.
Its primary contribution to kind of occult history in Europe was that in 1902, it allied itself with the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Now, the Golden Dawn had also been founded on, shall we say, shaky grounds, truth-wise, by a Rosicrucian named Wentworth Little, who claimed to have come into the possession of a coded manuscript that led him to a woman named Anna Sprengel in Germany, who was in touch with unknown superiors, who had taught him about a secret organization behind the secret organization behind the myth of the Rosicrucians.
And you can see shades of kind of what Weishaupt was doing with the Illuminati here.
This organization has a history that's actually much older than people know.
There's this group of unknown folks in addition to me who are actually running things.
Yeah, I want to quote here from our old friend pro-cult activist Massimo Introvine again.
Because he's he's again, if you're going to write a detailed history of this shit, you're going to wind up quoting a lot of cranks and weirdos.
It's mostly going to be cranks and weirdos.
This is just the fact of the matter.
Wescott claimed to have found Sprengel's address, to have written to her, and to have obtained the authorization of the unknown superiors to found an order in England placed under their authority, the Golden Dawn.
In spite of the great influence it exerted on art and literature, the Golden Dawn rested on a mystification.
There was no Anna Sprengel, and Wescott had simply invented the whole story.
It was Aleister Crowley who had been initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1898 and had immediately engaged in trying to overthrow its leaders, who in 1900 revealed the deception.
Crowley's a very complicated ways qualifies as a bastard.
But one of the cool things that he did was completely overthrow every magical community that he went into.
If you let this guy into your wizard club, he's going to take over.
He will take over your wizard club.
Stop him and make you admit that you made the whole thing up.
It's and then have a lot of gay sex in the desert.
So I am certainly the least knowledgeable about Crowley in our organization.
But the thing that I always took from readings about him is that he was able to do that in all these organizations because he had some jock energy to him.
Yes.
That like most wizards don't have.
So he's he just kind of had that confidence to let him bully his way in.
Is this kind of like when punks go to like nerd conventions, we're just in charge because we actually have social skills and we like.
Yeah.
Oh, this is gonna, this is gonna be very controversial on the subreddit.
Margaret Killjoy just got canceled.
Yeah, I can finally rest.
Crowley was really the first punk, is what you're trying to say.
Yeah.
I'm gonna take a stand and say that I absolutely know I actually don't know that much.
Somewhere underground in the Vault of the Golden Dawn is the very first battle jacket.
I'm into it.
Yeah.
But you keep talking about this thing where it's like it seems like the cultists are the okay ones and the conspiracy theorists are the ones who do the Nazi shit.
Yeah, I mean, because these guys, the people forming this new order of, I mean, the people who kind of form this new Illuminati and marry it to the golden dawn, I haven't come across any evidence that they're bastards.
Like they were people who wanted to dress up and do magic.
Like there's nothing harmful about what they're doing here.
It just, it's not wildly influential.
Ingle, who is one of the people who winds up in charge of this new Illuminati, funds it.
I found this interesting by writing a series of like short stories for dime novels under a shitload of different names.
He kind of does an L. Ron Hubbard, but in reverse, where like Hubbard writes all these dime novels and then creates a cult because he wants to get out of that industry.
Whereas Ingle funds his little cult by writing a bunch of like shitty weird fiction.
I don't know if it was shitty, actually.
I haven't read it.
I shouldn't be judgmental like that.
It might have been good weird fiction.
His Illuminati limps on into the 1970s when they fall afoul of Germany's militant post-war anti-cult movement.
There is, we talk about this in the episodes.
Sorry.
That's just really funny.
Yeah.
Well, we talk about this in the episodes titled The School That That Raped Everyone, which is a dark episode about how there was an element of kind of the progressive left in post-war Germany that embraced free love politics to such an extent that they started justifying the molestation of children.
And this is a big part of what gets the Illuminati in trouble.
I have not found any evidence that they are molesting anybody, but they are teaching sex magic.
And because there are a lot of problems with other kind of people who are broadly in the same sort of cultic milieu, you might say, as the Illuminati in this period, who are molesting children, they get caught up in...
I don't even want to call it a moral panic.
A lot of people were actually harmed, but the Illuminati does not seem to have been justifiably targeted here.
They were just like adults who were doing satanic orgies, which is fine.
Yeah.
I mean, like, but like this, this complaint continues on today how a lot of like sex cults and specifically the OTO is just kind of a sex cult for its, for its like older male members.
This is something that is very much a continuing critique.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with making a sex cult for you and your friends.
I've been in a couple of sex cults.
It's fine.
Yeah, they always end great is what's what everyone says about sex cults.
Some of them do.
Yeah, and the Illuminati doesn't end all that terribly, but it just kind of peters out after this point.
The last leader of the second Illuminati, a guy named Metzger, dies a lonely alcoholic in 1990, which is a pretty common way for things to end for the leaders of sex cults.
While Metzger's Illuminati was limping through the last arthritic stages of its life, events over in the United States were about to bring the Illuminati to a level of fame it hadn't enjoyed even in the days of Adam Eischopt.
Carrie Wendell Thornley was born on April 17th, 1938, in Whittier, California.
Whittier is today a suburb of Los Angeles.
It is back then it was kind of just like its own little town in the middle of Southern California.
If you Google the neighborhood that Carrie Thornley grew up in today, you'll immediately be shown a map that depicts the unincorporated community boxed in by bold blue pins that indicate a Costco, a Home Depot, a Savers, a Target, and a Trader Joe's.
They surround East Whittier like a capitalist pentagram, almost as if hermetic capitalist wizards were trying to keep some sort of dangerous energy contained within.
These are the things you think about when you spend 16 hours writing about the Illuminati late at night.
No one fuck up those stores.
Omar Khayyam and Shared Poetry00:07:38
We're all hell to be minced upon the world.
Yeah.
These will crawl from underneath the Costco and start taking over the suburbs.
These are the seven seals of neoliberalism.
This is a John Darnell novel, and I would read it.
Carrie was raised Mormon, and for much of the first seven years of his life, his father was overseas fighting in a little thing you might have heard of called the Second World War.
Most of the context we have for his childhood comes from a letter his brother wrote decades later that I found reprinted in a zine published by Carrie's ideological children.
Most of the good history on Carrie you find scattered in zines that are like 30 years old.
So it is a whole thing piecing it together.
I'm going to read a quote from that letter now though.
And this is his brother talking.
We were living behind my grandparents when I was born in what is now called Watts on 77th Street in LA, and our dad was in the Navy station in Okinawa at the time.
When dad had returned from World War II, Carrie was waiting to welcome him dressed in a sailor's outfit my mom had gotten him, and I was a newborn in a cradle.
Dad came in the door and rushed over to see me before he hugged Carrie.
Carrie got so pissed that he ran out the back door and climbed up the walnut tree and refused to come down.
That event, more than any other, set the tone for Carrie's relationship with me.
The rest of my life is punctuated with events in which Carrie did his best to get even with me from what I called his intellectual muggings when I was in college to writing parodies of letters that I would send him later in life.
Our father was a raging alcoholic, so by necessity, Carrie became like a father figure to me and Dick.
So he's like a complicated guy.
The fact that his dad is absent, I think has a big impact on him.
And he feels this sense of like jealousy for his father's attention because it had been so absent.
But also because his father is this violent asshole, he sort of acts to protect his younger brothers.
You know, it's a complicated thing.
I think he does, you know, he's obviously he's a kid, so there's sometimes he does shit out of spite to his brothers, but you get the feeling that he did the most that he could to try and fill that gap that was left by his dad being a non-functional person.
Like he did the best job I think you could have expected of a kid in that circumstance.
It's a difficult way to grow up.
Yeah.
Carrie met Greg Hill, who was three years younger, in high school in 1956.
The two were members of the very first generation of their nerds.
They're big fucking nerds.
And they were sometimes mocked by it.
Think like George McFly from Back to the Future.
That is exactly the kind of kids that we're talking about.
They were huge into Mad Magazine, which was kind of like, that was a lot of people who wind up very radical in the 60s and 70s start by reading Mad Magazine in the early 60s or whatever.
And they were interested in radical political ideas, much like the ones that had animated Adam Weishaupt centuries before.
They were also, again, big sci-fi nerds with what one biographer describes as a fondness for crackpots.
Their childhoods would have involved colorful, weirdly horny comic books and the short stories of men like Bob Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and L. Ron Hubbard.
Greg and Carrie were so excited by this stuff that they briefly attended meetings of a nearby UFO cult as adolescents called Understanding.
Greg later recalled, through our mutual general interest in wondering just what was going on out there in that gigantic world and our many common specific interests in humanism, anti-religionism, an enjoyment for Omar Khayyam, and a curiosity for the bizarre like black magic and hypnotism, plus our common warped sense of humor, we formed a close friendship.
So that's who these guys are, right?
Like they're kind of young kids in this boring town and they get really into science fiction and fantasy and that leads them into reading about the occult and reading all of these also kind of like mystic, they're into the Sufis, they're into Zen Buddhism.
Like they're not just into like kind of golden dawn stuff.
Yeah, they're pretty cool, actually.
Yeah.
I would say.
I don't know how this is going to end up.
So I'm going to hold on to them as being real cool right now.
It's going to end in a couple of different ways, Margaret.
Everyone involved in the movement we're talking about has a very, very different ending.
Okay.
I could choose your adventure novel.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I do want to talk a little bit about Omar Khayyam, who is a, he was a guy who lived from like basically around 1000-ish to 1100 AD.
He's a polymath, one of these guys who's like, he's doing math and he's a philosopher and he's writing poetry that's still very popular today.
And he's one of the things about him that's kind of interesting and that's probably going to be relevant.
That's going to definitely be relevant to the way that Carrie Thornley uses him because Thornley's obsessed with this guy is that for kind of centuries and centuries after his death, it became a tradition in a chunk of at least Islamic poetry to attribute your poems to Omar Khayyam.
And this started being done, this like for whatever reason in the 1800s, Europeans start doing this too.
And some of this is tied in with like Orientalism.
I'm not a great person to discuss because this is a very influential figure.
But one thing that's important to know is he is a real poet who also has become kind of this, I don't know if calling him a symbol is the right thing, but people decided to attribute poems to him that had not been written by him.
There's a bunch of these throughout history, these like shared author names.
They're really interesting to me.
Yeah, it is really interesting.
Obviously, Carrie Thornley is very interested in this guy, maybe in part because of that.
A lot of like occult authors also have this.
There's like Hermes, Trismegistus.
There's a lot of even the, oh, I forget the name.
Let me look it up quick.
Well, that's why I have a new book coming out by Alistair Crowley.
It's the name I write under now.
See, Margaret, I'm doing a totally different thing.
I'm just going to credit my next book to Stephen King and just take that money.
Just take that cash, baby.
I mean, in terms of co-authors who also did this, there was the fourth book of occult philosophy by Agrippa, probably not written.
No, by the actual Agrippa, who had been dead for several thousand years.
Yeah, it's just interesting a trend that that continues because, like the types of communities that were read, that were writing these occult text as groups really do get continued by the stuff that Greg Hill was actually inadvertently developing and it's interesting like, just how similar this type of stuff is.
Okay, and then one of the other of these shared names, Luther Blissett, is a Italian collective of radicals who then lots of people write under this name that put out a book called Q.
That's a conspiracy book that came out before any of this, before the QAnon and I believe and I might have I don't have the notes in front of me but Luther Blissett is like some like famous, like soccer player, and these like Italian radicals were just like we're just gonna use his name and the dude was like alive and they were like very funny and they wrote this like bestseller called Q. That's a conspiracy novel.
Shit's weird.
That is very funny.
And uh, you know what else is funny, Margaret?
Um the, the stuff, the adder, the products and services, the ads supporting this podcast, all of which uh, by the way, all of our ads are are written and produced by by Omar Kayam.
Capitalism, Ads, and Luther Blissett00:02:10
So you know, enjoy some of this classic Sell Juk capitalism poetry.
It's just gonna be some math ads.
I hope it's gold.
I bet he had gold.
Might have everyone did back then.
Yeah, on a recent episode of the podcast money and wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany, the Budginista Alicia, to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts.
Too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like i'm gonna get rich, that's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to money and wealth with John O'brien from the Black Effect Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey earners, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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We translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand, because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
Weird Tales from Atsugi 195700:16:08
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
You had a white collar stuff here.
Just hang out.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making a rap album?
Why couldn't you move?
I would buy it.
Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
Sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky.
I'm not a killer.
I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, Carrie Thornley and Greg Hill and a circle of their friends, and I am leaving, there's a lot of actual people here who you can read about who are also influential.
I'm not going to go into detail about all of them.
There's a reason I'm going to focus primarily on Thornley and Hill here.
I'll be suggesting a book later if you want to learn more about every single person who was involved in this next stage of the Illuminati.
But yeah, the core of this circle seems to be Thornley and Hill.
And there's something kind of magnetic about the two when they are together.
Part of it has to do with the fact that Carrie is an undeniably talented public speaker, and he seems to have kind of an ability to lead people or at least be so obsessed with something in such an endearing way that people feel the desire to follow him.
One of the things that Carrie and Greg both were really into was playing pranks on their classmates.
And I'm going to read a segment from a biography by a guy named Adam Go Rightly that talks about one of the pranks that they played on their school chums.
Carrie, Greg, and other unnamed cohorts made a recording of what at first appeared to be a regular radio program with music playing innocently from a radio positioned on the apron of the stage.
In actuality, the sounds were projected from a reel-to-reel tape machine hidden backstage.
Inserted into the seemingly mundane radio program, the pranksters had implanted a series of interruptions made by a newscaster to the effect that Soviet planes were invading the U.S. and dropping bombs.
As one classmate recalled, somebody had told me early on that it was a joke, but some of the students didn't know and got really scared.
What made me feel bad was that one of the boys in the class was so scared he was praying.
So this is like, I kind of know where this story goes.
Yes.
From this point on.
And the fact that they were doing this shit as kids is hilarious.
It's extremely funny.
This exact same style of prank and the kind of recklessness that they go about it gets continued on to massive proportions.
Like they do so much inadvertent damage by pranks of this style on a national scale very soon.
And it's so weird to just you're like just watching the train about to crash and you're seeing it go and you know what's gonna happen.
And it kind of in line with that, Garrison, Carrie's friends at the time, when interviewed later, would note that as a kid, he had a habit of excess.
He did not seem to know how to stop himself when the playing around got out of hand.
That said, he was also intensely empathetic.
And one of the stories told about him is that after his high school graduation, one of his close friends came out of the closet to him as gay.
This is in 1957.
And that friend, when interviewed, was like, yeah, he just like embraced me.
Like there was never any judgment.
He was completely, completely accepting and fine.
Which is noteworthy.
Some of these people are like actually really decent people and have had and have like pretty good politics and were doing kind of rad stuff in the 1950s and 60s.
Yeah.
Well, some of yeah, and let's let's put a pin in that one, Gary.
Yeah.
Thornley graduated high school in 1957.
He attended Marine Corps Reserve boot camp that summer.
This is not a thing he had a choice in.
Like a lot of people would just kind of join ahead of getting drafted in order to have some amount of like choice in where they went.
I had a lot of relatives who were like, well, if I join, then I get to like pick kind of what I'm, I have more agency in this process.
Yeah.
So he goes to boot camp and then he gets into the University of Southern California.
He spent a lot of time still at home with his friends, many of whom, namely Greg, hadn't yet graduated.
They spent the bulk of their free time at 24-hour bowling alleys where they could buy alcohol.
One night in 1957, yeah, and he's buying alcohol.
Greg is a couple of years younger than Carrie, so Greg is, or Carrie is often the one buying alcohol for his underage friends, which we always support here at CoolZone Media.
Definitely didn't make my living doing that.
When I was a 21-year-old street punk, no way.
You would never do something like that.
When it was the only way to make money.
Uh-uh.
One night in 1957, Hill and Thornley were discussing poems Carrie had written on order emerging from chaos.
Hill argued that order was a construction of the human mind.
Only chaos was real.
Now, there's a couple of versions of what comes next.
In the version that mirrors objective reality, Hill, an atheist, expressed his frustration with modern organized religions for claiming the existence of an organizing principle behind the universe.
The ancient Greeks, he expressed, had gotten it closest to right because they had a goddess of chaos.
Her name was Eris, or Discordia in Latin.
Hill felt that Eris was the only deity he'd ever seen any evidence of, and he suggested it might be a good idea if someone created a religion based around her.
It's going to go great.
It's going to go really well.
It's going to go so good, Margaret.
It's fine.
I'm so excited.
Now, while he was at college, Thornley attempted to join a fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi.
And what would be one of his only real brushes with the square world?
He pledged and he went through a hazing ritual called Hell Week.
That year, the brothers allowed a black student to pledge.
They made him go through Hell Week, and then after he had gone through all of that kind of hazing shit, they laughed at him and told him that, of course, as a black guy, he was not allowed to join their fraternity.
This was enough to get Carrie to leave and to turn him away from the concept of fraternities forever.
If he ever made a secret society, it was going to be one defined by radical acceptance.
Hill and Thornley kept up their correspondence on the subject of creating some sort of like, you know, they're talking about doing the same kind of shit that Vyschaft is doing.
They're just dead.
They're just talking about doing it from a perspective of like, this would be kind of a funny thing.
And they kind of chat about it.
It's just a prank, bro.
It's just a prank.
It's a prank.
It's fine.
It's casually.
And it is mixed with things they seriously believe.
You know, Hill is, you might call Hill a very early atheist activist, right?
You know, pre-Dawkins, pre-all of that, you know, that kind of guys who became really prominent in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Hill is that in the late 1950s, early 60s.
But also, he's like much less insufferable than the guys that follow.
I don't think he is.
Because he understands like the chaotic nature of existence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Thornley, I think, is simpatico with Hill on a lot, but Thornley is a little more mystical, right?
Like, yeah.
He seems to be kind of more moved by that stuff.
Although not to a degree that it seems to like grate on Hill, who is kind of fundamentally a materialist value or their vision of the universe.
That's at least my take on this.
There's so many much that also that's very contradictory about these guys.
So if you do your own research on this, you may come to some different conclusions about some of this than I am.
It really depends on which zines you stumble into.
And like a lot of these guys who are writing stuff about themselves wrote it contradictory on purpose to make things confusing because they thought it was a funny prank.
Because they thought it was a funny prank.
So all of French philosophy.
I really, yeah.
Yeah.
Thornley winds up joining the Marine Corps.
You know, after he does his, like, a little bit of time in college, he becomes active duty in the Corps.
And so he spends a couple of years as a Marine.
And while he is a Marine stateside, he spends, I think it's a little less than a year, serving alongside a bright young man that you might have heard of named Lee Harvey Oswald.
And Kerry and Lee Harvey Oswald become pretty good friends.
They are buddies.
And one of the things that Kerry likes about Oswald is that he's a little bit of a prankster.
Just a jokester.
Just a kooky guy.
That's what everybody knows about Lee Harvey Oswald.
He's going to tell a very famous joke in the not-too-distant future from this point.
Gets him a lot of attention.
It's a lot like pit tweet.
Pit tweet.
There we go.
I'm going to read it.
I advertise the projectors under this one.
Yeah.
I'm going to read another quote from Adam Go Reitley's book.
Quote, Later, Kerry would describe Oswald as the outfit eight ball, earning this dubious distinction by openly subscribing to communist newspapers such as Profta and cracking jokes with an exaggerated Russian accent, answering questions with da or nyet, and referring to his fellow Marines as comrades.
It was common knowledge that Oswald was studying Russian and was fairly fluent in conversational Russian.
Because of this, he acquired the nickname Oswaldskovich.
And this is...
No one's reporting this.
You're in a war against Russia.
No, no.
He's like, I'm a communist.
See, this is actually, I wanted to talk about this.
This is a thing I think a lot of folks who, because of the fact that they are more on the left side of things and maybe don't have a lot of first-hand experience with the military, don't get so much.
Because there's like a conspiracy theory going around right now, right?
That has been going on for a while, but because it was Pat Tillman got brought up at the Super Bowl by those fucks at the NFL, this was talked about recently where folks are like, oh, he was obviously murdered by his own guys because they heard him talking about how the war was bullshit and like saying like anti-American stuff.
And so they assassinated him.
This is a conspiracy theory.
That's not what happened.
It's incredibly common if you talk to guys who were serving in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq for people to say, this war is bullshit.
What we're doing is stupid.
I have talked to people who'd be like, yeah, half the unit thought that what we were doing over there was bullshit.
It was not uncommon for people to be like, fuck this stupid war.
It's like a thing that like soldiers fuck around and soldiers, like anyone else, often, while they are participating in whatever war, express opinions that are contra to the like, and Oswald is one of these guys.
And so he does get in trouble a couple of times, but like he's never drummed out of the Marines for making, for doing jokes about being a communist.
And they're not also entirely jokes.
And in fact, Oswald is, for at least a period of his military service, seen as a pretty good soldier.
In a later part of his life, Kerry and another one of their comrades would claim that he, Oswald, and this other Marine were approached by someone that they believe was a representative of the CIA and given aptitude tests.
Oswald and this other Marine were asked if they would be interested in parachuting into foreign countries and helping rebels do things like build radios.
This is school of America shit.
And there were absolutely U.S. soldiers who had this experience.
I can't confirm or deny whether or not that happened to Oswald in specific, but this is a thing that occurred, right?
Like, so it's not unlikely that some version of this happened.
By all accounts, he seems to be like decent at being a soldier.
He was a pretty good shot.
Pretty good shot.
So, Robert.
You're saying on the record that the CIA hired him to assassinate John F. Kennedy?
That is exactly what I'm saying, Margaret.
And actually, Margaret, hold up because it gets a lot more conspiratorial here.
Oh, okay.
So, Kerry would also later, and this is in a point of his life when his mental health is not so great, would also later claim that he was targeted by the MK Ultra program during this part of his life.
Now, here's the thing: after his time with Oswald, he was stationed at Atsugi Air Base in Japan as a radar technician.
And it is while he was stationed here that he starts having auditory hallucinations at night of radio chatter in his head.
Kerry became convinced that he was hearing actual radio traffic in his head.
This is at a later portion of his life.
Now, Atsugi Air Base is host to a major, was host to a major CIA base, and it was one of two foreign bases where the CIA conducted MK Ultra experiments.
In a Rolling Stone investigation published years later, an anonymous Marine who served at Atsugi around the same time as Kerry did, and Oswald, at a separate period of time, serves at Atsugi Airbase.
This guy claims, it was pretty weird.
I'm 18 at the time and chasing all the whores in town, and these CIA guys are buying me drinks and paying for the whores and giving me a whole round of drinks with lots of weird drugs in them.
Pretty soon, all the shadows are moving around.
We're in the bar.
See, the samurais are everywhere.
And I started seeing skeletons and things.
My mind just started boiling over, going about a thousand miles a minute.
Now, there's a distinctly higher than zero chance that either Oswald or Thornley, or quite possibly both of them, were dosed as part of the MKUltra experiments.
And if doing so, by the way, this is not like trying to say some conspiracy about the Kennedy assassination here.
They would, if that happened to them, they are just some of hundreds and hundreds of U.S. servicemen who were dosed by the CIA against their will.
This happened constantly to tens of thousands of people, as we've talked about in our MKUltra episodes.
We will never know for certain because the architect of MKUltra burned all of the files.
So just keep in your mind, it is possible that the first time Kerry Thornley has LSD, it's because the CIA drugs him, which convinces him that he's hearing voices at night.
We will never know.
It's also, there's stories from Oswald around this period that like one night he starts freaking out that there's guys shooting at him from like the woods when he's on guard duty.
That some people have theorized like, oh yeah, maybe he just got fucking dosed and had a breakdown.
This happens to a lot of guys.
It's certainly not impossible that it happened to Oswald and Thornley.
As someone who's been dosed against my will before this all tracks.
Yeah.
Because when you don't know that you're on drugs, it's a completely different experience than when you know you're on drugs.
Yeah, that is entirely possible.
And I think there's actually a pretty good chance at least one of them did because they're both at Atsugi and we know the CIA is doing this shit to service men at Atsugi.
So, you know, again, I'll just, I guess I have to just continue the story.
Oswald and Thornley were only stationed together for a brief portion of their service, after which they probably never saw each other again.
Or did they?
Or did they?
Well, a lot of people are going to ask that question, Mark.
Kerry gets sent to Manila next, where he sees such heartbreaking poverty that he becomes a Marxist-Leninist.
Lee Harvey Oswald and Fake Men00:03:37
He starts reading books on Marxist political theory, and he becomes more committed than ever to his pranks.
The ultimate example of this is a fake Marine that he creates under the name Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst.
And he does this by inserting fake records into the administrative files.
He gets so far into this that he gets the military to issue a locker and a bunk to this fake soldier.
And then after he leaves, there's a big base inspection, and all the inspectors can't find this guy who has a bunk and who has like a locker and who is supposed to be turning out for inspection.
And it causes like a big problem that he is made a fake man.
He's a very fun character in this part of his life.
After their time in the Marines.
Yeah.
After their time in the Marines, Oswald defects the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962.
So some amount of the jokes that Oswald was making about communism were not jokes.
He's like sitting around learning Russian, being like, hey guys, I'm going to defect to the Russians.
And everyone's like, ah, O Lee Harvey.
Yeah.
I'm going to make a sitcom about Lee Harvey Oswald called O Lee Harvey, just about all his many pranks, like that one he carried out in Dallas.
And anyway, so Kerry is like, wow, it's weird that this guy who I was a friend with left the Marines in order to defect to the Soviet Union.
That's kind of a neat story.
I'm going to write a book about it.
So he decides, he starts work on a fictional book based around a character that is a thinly veiled Lee Harvey Oswald.
This book is out today.
You can read this book that is a fictional story he wrote about his real friend Lee Harvey Oswald.
And while he was starting this project, his work on his first novel, he comes across a copy of another book that's going to change his life.
And unfortunately, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
He is so blown away by Miss Rand's prose that he converts from Marxism to laissez-faire capitalism overnight and basically becomes an objectivist.
Now, the thing you might be starting to get from Kerry right now is that he's a little bit of a seeker ideologically.
He is very prone to encountering a book and feeling that book on a almost spiritual level and changing his life as a result of that book.
This will be a pattern for him throughout his life.
Now, while he's doing this, he still has the same creative urges and he maintains his friendship with Greg Hill.
And he moves back home with his parents, briefly at least.
And during that period of time, he and Greg Hill launch a project that is an attempt at creating a humor magazine, which I mostly mention because of its title.
Apocalypse, a trade journal for doom profits, which is a great title.
I would love to see that.
Nobody, I haven't found a copy of this.
I would love to.
I don't even know if it exists anymore.
This is Proto-Zine Culture, which, by the way, these are going to be two of the guys generally credited with inventing the concept of zines.
And yeah, this particular magazine does not work very well.
So, you know, they give up that project pretty early on.
Lifeback and Whittier grated on them both, particularly the fact that the police would keep pulling them over for wandering around at night with no clear purpose, which was legal back then.
Beignets, Gator, and Zine Culture00:03:48
There were actually laws about like being out at night without a reason to be out at night.
So they decided to move to a place where there were no laws about staying up all night and being weirdos.
And that place was New Orleans.
And yeah, I think that's a good point to lead into an ad break.
Is it an ad for New Orleans?
I hope it's an ad for New Orleans.
Go to New Orleans.
It's a city where you can eat a shitload of alligator meat.
And I assume other things.
Beignets.
Beignets, exactly.
You can stuff a beignet with Gator.
I mean, Gator.
I'll put Gator in anything.
I love Gator.
And I like New Orleans.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
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If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey, and we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger, hips, wider.
This is the podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Well, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you gotta.
Do you want to white collar stuff here?
Just take off.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making a rap album?
I would.
Couldn't you believe I would buy it?
Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
That sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky I'm not a killer.
I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
We're back from New Orleans.
Gary Kirstein and Angry Rhodesia00:06:18
So they moved to New Orleans in 1961, and Kerry continues work on his novel, which he has decided to name the Idol Warriors.
After Oswald got back from the Soviet Union, he wound up moving to New Orleans too.
He and Thornley are living just blocks away from each other, and Thornley would claim for the rest of his life that he was unaware of this, that they never saw each other again.
And it's worth noting that according to Carrie's friend Becky Glazer, Carrie spent his time in New Orleans, quote, getting high off of everything.
So it's not odd that he would have been unaware.
There are stories that he gets high smoking banana peels, which do not get you high.
But Carrie claims like he makes blunts out of banana peels and claims to get wasted off of them.
There's going to be some stuff later in the story that makes this make sense.
This is more what I think of New Orleans about is instead of Gator is getting high off of everything.
Yeah.
Well, that is, again, so Kerry's going to claim I didn't see Oswald.
There's a decent chance of that purely because, like, he is spending most of his time getting wasted and hanging out with like weirdos on kind of the fringes of society.
And this is what's going to wind up bringing him into contact with a number of people who later become central parts in some of the early JFK assassination conspiracy theories, people besides Oswald.
One of these guys is a friend of Kerry's named Slim Brooks.
Now, Slim may have been a navigational consultant on the Bay of Pigs invasion.
We don't actually know who this guy is.
There's a couple of people that we know Kerry is hanging out with who give him names that we know are fake names because no one ever existed under those names, which is part of like what leads to these guys being part of the JFK conspiracy.
Also, this is a man who's known to make up people.
This is a man who's known to make up people, although other people recall these folks.
Okay.
And this is an unpleasant part of Kerry's history because Slim introduces him to a guy named Gary Kirstein.
And some conspiracy theorists of the Kennedy assassination think that Gary Kirstein was actually Watergate burglar and CIA spy master E. Howard Hunt, because Gary Kirstein was not a real person.
Now, Tu Kerry, the man who identified himself as Gary Kirstein, claimed to have unclear ties to intelligence agencies while he regularly spouted neo-Nazi propaganda.
Kerry later wrote, One of the first things I learned about Gary was that he also hated Kennedy, but for somewhat different political reasons than mine.
What a funny bit.
It is a funny bit.
The bit's going to get funnier.
Quote, he expressed his dislike for Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, Russians, Mexicans, and so on with a chuckle, usually, which left me with room to assume he wasn't really very serious about it.
That, of course, was the assumption I preferred to make, since I really liked Slim a lot and Gary was his friend.
Now, this is where we're starting to see some of the moral downsides of being as open-minded a dude as Kerry was, because he's kind of willing to be like, well, this guy likes talking a lot about Nazi stuff, but maybe he's joking.
I like his friends, so I'm not going to cause a problem, which is a bad thing to do.
And Gary makes another bad decision after this point, which is he decides it kind of becomes a common thing for him when he's hanging out at bars with these guys to joke about murdering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Now, this may have been recorded, and it happens often enough that numerous people have experiences of Kerry talking about killing JFK.
He puts up posters calling for JFK to be like arrested or otherwise taken out of the presidency.
Which Oswald might have seen.
It's not impossible.
Although, yeah, this is JFK at this point.
We're going to talk about that, Margaret.
So there's a couple of things he has against JFK.
One of them is that JFK supported the side who was fighting against the side backed by Rhodesia in the Congo.
It is unclear why he was angry at, he talks a lot about something called the Katanga Massacre, which during the Katanga War, which is this war that happens in the Congo, there were massacres on both sides.
I don't know specifically what he was talking about there.
He also, he's, again, he's an objectivist at this point.
So he hates Kennedy's economic policies, right?
But he also hates Kennedy for trying to invade Cuba.
Like, there was so many steps all over the map.
There's so many steps in Rhodesia that I lost.
The negative of the negative of the negative.
Tell me, where did JFK sit on Rhodesia and where did well JFK under him, the United States, backed a side in a civil war in Congo that was opposed to the side that was backed by Rhodesia.
And I don't know, Kerry never said anything pro-Rhodesia.
Kerry was angry that there were massacres in this war, which he blamed on Kennedy.
He was also angry at Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and for attacking Cuba.
So it's all over the place.
There's this mix of like right-wing and left-wing things that are like, again, he's all over the map kind of on this stuff.
But whatever reasons he had for hating Kennedy, he and his new buddies, Slim and Gary the Nazi, have a lot of theoretical discussions about killing JFK.
Kerry's contributions to the conversation include advocating the use of a poison dart that would, quote, blow his stomach apart, as well as another scenario involving a remote control plane carrying a bomb, which is at least innovative.
Yeah, gotta give Kerry credit for predicting drone warfare.
After Kerry finished with his mock assassination plots, Kirstein added, and next we'll get Martin Luther King.
Now, this is the point at which Kerry started to wonder if maybe he hadn't fallen in with a bad group of people.
But again, he has terrible judgment and he just kind of lets this slide.
FBI, Hitler, and Remote Planes00:13:27
Another example of his terrible judgment comes when Gary Kirstein pays him to help research a book with the title, strap in for this one, folks.
Hitler was a good guy.
Now, the premise of this book.
What is that?
Please, please enlighten me.
Oh, it's a little different than what you're expecting.
The premise of this book is that all of the other Nazis in the Third Reich were worse than Hitler.
So it's good that he was the Nazi who wound up in charge.
Now, this is an insane thing to write a book about.
This is full stop idiotic.
And Kerry does not get involved in this.
Kerry is like, well, this guy's a weird Nazi, but he's willing to pay me.
And I am broke and kind of willing to do anything for money.
Like, I don't mind writing out.
He's writing research for this thing, right?
So basically, his research for this is he's going through the library and he's reading books on guys like Goebbels.
And then he's writing out things that Goebbels said that sound worse than things that Hitler said.
Like, that's his research on this project.
So, yeah, it's all, it's good for, good, good for you, Kerry.
Now, while this is going on, he is a pretty prominent member of the New Orleans fringe community.
And this is, again, we've talked about, we did in our episodes on Gabriel D'Annunzio, who's the guy, he's this Italian poet who's generally considered to be the ideological founder of fascism.
He's the guy who inspired Mussolini.
He takes over this city on the coast of in between kind of, it's in Croatia now, but it's near Italy.
And it's after World War I, the city, Fume, is in this kind of awkward position where it's an independent city, City, but it wants to be part of Italy.
And he just goes and he takes it over.
And D'Anunzio is like a proto-fascist.
And a lot of the guys who back him in this are proto-fascists, but also a lot of them are anarchists.
And there are like anarcho-syndicalists involved in the government of fume and even some Marxists.
And part of what's happening here is that it, and this happens periodically.
I think you could look at the internet as sort of a digital fume in like the late 90s, early 2000s.
And we're in another New Orleans in this period is another similar situation where you've got all of these kind of fringe people, many of whom are going to be very influential in the 1960s, going to be big parts of like the hippies and all this stuff that happens, are like hanging out with like weirdo objectivists and Satanists and occult people and Nazis.
And they're all hanging out in a lot of the same spaces because none of them fit anywhere else.
And that's kind of what happens in periods of time and places.
This is like this is a pattern that repeats itself, which I'm not saying to justify on a moral level, like you should never sit down and talk to or work with or take money from a Nazi for a job like this.
That's an immoral act, full stop.
I'm saying that like this pattern of you having all of these different radicals coming at stuff from different views, this happens repeatedly in history.
Like the punk scene.
It just like the punk scene.
Right.
Then in the punk scene, there's a lot of work putting into making sure Nazis can't hold space there.
Right.
But it took a moment.
This is why in radical spaces, you have to be so diligent and proactive about, you know, we'll summarize it as punching Nazis because otherwise shit like this happens, right?
But that culture didn't really exist at this point in that part in that area, or at least Thornley was not a part of it.
Now, he's also hanging out with, it's not just these two weirdos, he's hanging out with a lot of musicians, a lot of like members of the local, like there's this kind of unique little Satanist sect in New Orleans at the time, and he's friends with a lot of those guys.
He's just kind of generally in the counterculture.
Now, he is also, again, very vociferously an opponent of JFK.
And largely, this comes down to, I think, economics, because by this point, Kerry considered himself a capitalist revolutionary.
And so he had wished death on the president on numerous occasions for the president not sticking to kind of Randian principles of laissez-faire capitalism.
I've met people like this in the goth scene.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
This is not a totally unique journey.
Yeah.
In November of 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Kerry was working at a restaurant at the time.
And when it came out that the police had arrested a former Marine, he immediately and publicly said, I bet it was my friend Lee Harvey Oswald.
Now, his co-workers think this is peculiar.
And here's an OPSEP OPSEC tip for you kids out here.
If you believe your friend has assassinated the president, maybe keep that one to yourself.
Shut the fuck up.
You might not want to be talking about that to the other guys at the kitchen.
If there's one thing that Thornley cannot do, it is shut the fuck up.
He is physically incapable of shutting his mouth.
Absolutely not.
It is a funny prank.
It is a funny prank.
Like the French Revolution, the JFK assassination is a moment so horrific and inconceivable that it spawned conspiracy theories immediately.
Kerry's co-workers suspected that he was connected to it.
Since he looked like Oswald, this is another factor in it.
He kind of resembles Lee Harvey Oswald.
There's talk that they might secretly be brothers.
These are the beginning stirrings of what's going to become a surprisingly influential conspiracy.
For his part, Kerry believes that Oswald is innocent.
He thinks that he was a patsy for the real killers.
And he, he, I think this is just because he was legitimately friends with the guy and he just didn't really think that he could do it.
And in fact, when Oswald gets killed, he falls into a deep depression because he's like, now no one's ever going to find out the truth.
The state has successfully murdered my friend in order to hide the fact that he was innocent of this terrible crime.
So that's where Kerry is immediately after the Kennedy assassination.
And obviously, when the president is murdered, the Secret Service and the FBI, you know, get out there, start looking at people, start knocking on doors.
And as they begin their investigations, they center them around these radical political communities that Oswald had also spent time around.
Oswald had been living in the same part of New Orleans.
So one of the areas in which the Secret Service and the FBI are looking around is New Orleans.
And they start running into a lot of people who are like, you know, there's this weird guy who spent like a solid year talking about killing JFK and putting up posters.
And he kind of looked like Lee Harvey Oswald.
And then they're like, oh, yeah.
And also he talked about how he and Oswald were friends.
So the feds become interested in Kerry.
And Kerry becomes convinced that he's being tailed by the feds.
Now, what if he creates Harvey Oswald?
Like, what if a homogenous, yeah, he's an agregore?
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Doppelganger.
Yeah.
He made his own, uh, he, he, he made his own Tulpa test.
That is to carry the assassination.
That is the CFK.
Not as far from what he winds up believing as I wish was the case.
No.
So, but here's the thing.
Again, you cannot emphasize how different kind of this the left is in this period of time and how differently people talk.
For one thing, what we know now today about like COINTELPRO and the infiltration of radical communities by the FBI, there were rumors about it then, but we don't like have all of the papers that we do now.
Oh, this is like a war, like this is like 63.
Yeah, 63, right?
So Kerry, when he finds out, when he decides, when he realizes the feds are tailing him and he hears they've been looking around, he just goes to the FBI and he's like, hey guys, I hear you're interested in me and the Kennedy killing.
You want to give me a lie detector test?
Thornley makes a lot of bad choices throughout his life.
I mean, this plus lawyer might not be the worst call.
This actually doesn't, because like the FBI immediately is like, oh, this guy's kind of a kook, right?
Yeah.
He also, he does have like an airtight alibi for the assassination.
And he, Kerry, frames it to them as, I want to help you track down the real killer because he wants to avenge Lee Harvey Oswald, which the FBI is probably also why the FBI is like, okay, this guy's a little bit of a kook.
Kerry would later recall that the main question the FBI asked him was whether or not Oswald had been quote unquote a homo.
Amazing God.
I love it.
Good, good work, guys.
Okay, was he?
I know he was married, though.
Okay.
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
That would be a proud moment in LGBTQ history.
Because, man, again, those are not easy shots to make.
So, really excited about this line of Reddit after this.
Oh, no.
It's just going to be people arguing that they could have hit that shot easy with a man liquor carcano.
It's hard, folks.
It's hard.
Look, not a great rifle.
That's why he had to, anyway, whatever.
So, yeah, Carrie, for the next year or so, Carrie, like conspiracies start to swirl around this guy.
Like, the conspiracy culture in the U.S. gets ignited again by the Kennedy assassination in a way it really hadn't been before.
And Carrie is kind of the first guy people suspect of being involved when Kennedy conspiracy theories take off the ground.
And that is going to have a lot of negative long-term consequences for Carrie and also everyone else in the world.
But the fascinating butterfly effect that is still continuing on today.
But yeah, let's talk about that next time and let's talk about y'all's motherfucking pluggables this time.
Well, if you want a copy of me that is armed with what was the right full no, wait, I shouldn't do that.
If you want a book I wrote, I wrote a book called Escape from Incel Island and you can read it in afternoon and it has people in it who are escaping from Incel Island.
And if you want to hear us play a role-playing game based on it, we did a live play that you can hear on the podcast Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.
It'll be one of the most recent episodes because, well, I mean, at the time this release is, otherwise, you might have to search for it.
And I have a podcast.
I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
We probably won't be covering this exact subject.
And well, now, you know, Margaret, this is interesting.
I actually did escape from an incel island once.
I think you people in the East Coast call it Rhode Island.
Yeah, yes, yes.
Very similar to your story, my experience on Rhode Island.
Yeah, it's just made of roads, also not an island.
Rhodes and incels.
Yeah.
In the 90s, when I did like weird website zine stuff, I definitely wrote weird things about being like, why is Rhode Island lying to you about everything?
And it's not.
I think it's a great place to target for cruel jokes because four people live there.
So what are they going to do?
Yeah.
Organize against us.
Well, and it's because I was involved.
Actually, the culture that I was involved in in the 90s was like IRC Discordian stuff.
So I was hanging out with like older goths who were all part of this shit.
So of the shit we're about to talk about next episode.
My plugs are: if you want to contribute to, well, it's not quite Discordian, but if you want to feel like you're contributing to the work of people in very secretive groups who are doing who are doing important work, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.
That is the main thing I'm going to plug along with my four-part series on Top Cop City that was just released on It Could Happen Here.
And yeah, let's support people in Atlanta.
Where this story ends, by the way, we are building to the city of Atlanta, Garrison.
I didn't know.
And that's because of the name Atlantis, which actually is the city of Atlanta.
That is because of the name of it.
It's from underneath the ocean.
I have been screaming about this for years into my CB radio, Margaret.
Very excited to talk with you all about this.
Anyway, go to hell, all of you.
Go to hell.
I love you.
Go with Christ to hell.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
The Nick Dick and Paul Show00:01:47
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