Wetwired

Welcome, everyone, to the inaugural episode of It’s in a Book! “Take a look, it’s in a book…” This is our new on again, off again podcast within a podcast.  Instead of goofing off with the news and making fun of the public figures who’re trying to make life unlivable for the rest of us, we’re going to be taking a more serious (well, at least, a somewhat more serious). I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. These episodes will be a somewhat more serious look at some books and authors that change how people think, or at least have changed how we think. The books we’ll be checking out tell stories about the often unseen machinations that shape the world. These are books that might make us rethink society, power, and conflict and how we relate to them. We’re not trying to put together some kind of great books canon here. We’d barely know where to start. Which is why a lot of the books we’ll be talking about are chosen by our guests. For this first episode, we're joined by Gabriel Kennedy. The book he chose for us was The Illuminatus! Trilogy, an 800-page exploration of political paranoia, both a parody of it and a meditation on it, lampooning right-wing conspiracy culture while also destabilizing the reader’s sense of certainty itself. The book is inexhaustible. Every reread reveals something new. It offers sharp insights into “deep politics,” especially in its treatment of the JFK assassination. Rather than arguing a single conspiracy, it presents multiple overlapping assassination attempts, redundancies layered on redundancies, mirroring the confusion and contradictions of the official narratives. One scene places a hired assassin in Dealey Plaza who suddenly realizes there are multiple shooters. His reaction: “How many of us are there here?” captures the essence of the book’s approach: uncertainty as a feature, not a flaw. Once you push through the first hundred or so pages, the book really opens up. It becomes an education in anarchism, political paranoia, and intellectual curiosity. It inspires readers to look things up, to chase references, to question assumptions. Authors Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea blend high philosophy with pulp fiction and pornography, real historical events with slight distortions, and truthful fictions. Find Gabriel online and buy his book: https://chapelperilous.us/ Merch: Fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/ Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Lester James Woodward - 1984 VHS Ident Lester James Woodward - Be Kind Please Rewind https://BlueFoxMusic.com

We get into the media coverage of Venezuela, hot takes on Maduro’s kidnapping, Denmark's getting nervous as Trump eyes Greenland, 19th century style US imperialism, and the breakdown of all the international norms we all love. This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired No holds barred is the defining feature of politics of the 21st century. We're witnessing the abandonment of even the pretense of propriety. It used to be that politicians did the hard work of lying to the public for weeks or months before taking us into military conflicts. There were Congressional hearings and presentations in front of the UN General Assembly with stacks of spiral bound books. They used to drag out charts and boxes of evidence. Colin Powell did one. Around 50 years earlier, then Vice President Richard Nixon made the case to the public for removing Arbenz in Guatemala. It all amounted to what looked like serious evidence that important matters were being weighed with the seriousness they deserved. Of course, those were all also largely fictions. Iraq didn't have WMDs. There was no yellow cake uranium. Arbenz wasn't a communist puppet of the Soviets (FDR was his ideological hero). It's time we acknowledged that the rules have changed. It's not even the case that they've changed entirely for the worse. No one is interested in making us feel good about the US kidnapping the president of Venezuela. That could be a good thing. Or at least some good may come from it. The baldness of it is refreshing in a way. We've all grown so used to living in a muck of deceptions that it might be hard to recognize the obviousness of all the motives on display. It's past time we sharpened those senses. Music: HoliznaCC0 - Hard Mode HoliznaCC0 - Down In The Basement Check out our first merch offering! Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/

We're with Anthony Banua-Simon, director of the documentary Cane Fire, to talk about the colonization and exploitation of the Hawai'ian people first by corporations, then by the US military, followed by Hollywood, and finally by tourism. Few places hold as large a place in the American imagination as Hawaiʻi. For many people, Hawai'i represents paradise. It is the exotic. But maybe above all the other ideas about Hawaiʻi, it’s at the center of so many fantasies of escape.  In order to sustain any fantasy, we have to perfect it in our minds and turn it into a curated object. Part of doing that is learning to ignore any complications or contradictions that could break the spell. In the case of Hawai'i, those complications are the people—those pesky people, always getting in the way when capitalism is trying to have a good time. Watch Cane Fire: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/cane-fire/umc.cmc.77a7aja56b4olltstnkm3ts21  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zI6-HX8P9k  https://means.tv/programs/cane-fire  https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/cane-fire?frontend=kui Learn about Anthony's other projects: https://anthonysimon.net/ https://anthonysimon.net/The-Experiment-Station We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!! We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts are better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/ Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

We hope everyone is having a good holiday season and you’re all getting ready for the solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, the date of the Buddha’s enlightenment (some time last week), or whatever dates you mark. This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired We’ve been slowing down for the holiday season ourselves but we’ve also been working on a miniseries that we’ll release sometime in the next month or so. We’re not going to talk about it much. I can hint that it’s centered on the ground shift in longstanding Republican institutions as all the old timers figure out how to deal with all the youths raised by Discord and Pepe memes. But we’re taking a break from that today to talk about something else we’ve been enjoying for the past year, the coverage of the convicted Jan 6 rioters who got pardoned by Trump and then almost immediately committed new crimes.

We're teaming up with Bradley Plaisier and Robert Skvarla to talk about the show that 30 years ago introduced the normies to alien abductions, secret government programs, and global conspiracies. Somehow, the X-Files was exactly the right show for its time. It harnessed the untapped cynicism and suspicion of the 1990s and assured us that there really might be answers out there if you know where to look and who not to trust. This is an unlocked premium episode. Get extra episodes every month, and get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes for $5 a month. patreon.com/wetwired More from Bradley: https://x.com/bpleasies https://bwp.threadless.com More from Robert: https://x.com/RobertSkvarla The Endangered Alphabets Projecthttps://www.endangeredalphabets.net/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1529408245 We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!! We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/ This is an unlocked premium episode. Get extra episodes every month, and get access to all of our past subscriber only episodes for $5 a month. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC BY 4.0)

We’re joined by Daniella Mestyanek Young, the author of Uncultured. She was born a third generation member of an influential family, within The Family International, better known as the Children of God cult. She escaped at fifteen, put herself through school, and graduated from college as valedictorian. Daniella joined the Army, became Captain, and she received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award. She was an Intelligence Officer in one of the Army’s first Female Engagement Teams. In two tours and six years, she saw patterns in the military that were just like her experiences in the Children of God. Here are Daniella's 10 characteristics of a cult that we talk about: 1. Has a charismatic leader (and a skinny white woman) 2. A sacred assumption 3. The transcendental mission 4. Self-sacrifice of members 5. Limits access to the outside world 6. Distinguishable vernacular 7. Us versus them mentality 8. Exploits members' labor 9. High exit costs 10. Ends justify the means mentality Find Daniella online: https://twitter.com/daniellamyoung https://www.instagram.com/daniellamyoung_ https://www.tiktok.com/@daniellamestyanekyoung By Daniella's book UnCULTured https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250280114 We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!! We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/ Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

First up, we have some Jordan Peterson news. His daughter says he’s under spiritual attack after being exposed to a moldy attic. We also cover some of the comments Kamala Harris have been making during the book tour for her 2024 election memoir 107 Days. Reassuringly, pro-Palestine protesters have been showing up at just about every one of her tour stops. We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!! We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/ Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

We’re here on the eve of the end of America as we’ve come to know it, and the two of us thought, “what could be a more fitting way to honor everything we love about this country than to do one of the most American things possible?” That would be watching a movie and then arguing about it.  This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired The movie we picked to divert our attention from the machine like roll of militarism and xenophobia across the US is Paul Verhoevan’s Starship Troopers.  That means we’re talking: propaganda, fascism, more propaganda, some xenophobia, a lot of militarism, and then even more propaganda. So, essentially, we carefully chose a movie that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to anything happening out there in the real world. This episode was born out of a conversation Jules and I had last week about a clip from Starship Troopers someone posted on Twitter. It was the scene of the cow in the lab getting gored to death by a giant bug. In that clip, a couple of guys in lab coats walk a cow into a room with one of the arachnids and then hurry out before the bug gets to them. Immediately, that seemed to me like an encapsulation of the entire movie’s message. My takeaway from that scene and the move overall that fascism is stupidly overconfident, everyone is expendable, and safety is for pussies.

Independent filmmaker Jacob Gregor joins us to talk about his bleak and unsettling new film End of History. We talk with Jacob about his discomforting vision of a nameless young man who drives cross country to Alaska listening to nothing but podcasts and AM radio. Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired This is the sort of man who has been living close by all along, right under your nose. You've seen him online countless times and probably didn't even notice. You didn't see him because his isn't an influencer, he's not in charge of anything, and he's never posted anything that went viral. He's a reply guy. We chat with Jacob about his character's flat arc, making this movie, and the online-too-much guys who just want everything in the world to be like it was when they were 8 years old. Find Jacob online: https://x.com/JacobGorb https://www.instagram.com/jacobgorb/ We're also excited to announce that our long promised merch is here!! We know it's tough sometimes to express your leftist feelings in public. Your ratty Che Guevara and CCCP t-shirts seem better left at home. Now you can fly your crypto-leftist flag and still be completely under the radar with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. https://wetwired.printful.me/ Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired Cops, laws, prisons, and the military are political violence. Crackdowns on strikers and protesters are political violence. Poverty, hunger, and crime are all political violence. The state's will is not enforced with good vibes and polite suggestions. Its defining feature is its monopoly of violence within its borders. “Political violence” as seen on TV just lacks state sanction and operates outside the monopoly of violence of the state. The state’s policies may be determined without violent force, which is where liberals and conservatives can superficially separate themselves from political violence, by confining the term to the extracurricular activities of non-state actors.  “There is no place for violence,” and “violence is never the answer,” aren’t aphorisms from pacifist monks, sweeping the ground as they walk to save the lives of would-be squashed bugs. It’s only the pejorative “political violence” when it’s not blessed by the state and the ideology of the speaker. This framing obscures the role of violence in all political activity. It may not be outright dishonesty or hypocrisy when talking heads and heads of state are clutching their pearls after some kind of public violence, it’s just a terrible model of reality that confuses how violence is really valued in a liberal democracy. There’s an Irish aphorism, “Is minic a bhris béal duine a shorn.” Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose. Anyway, Charlie Kirk got shot last week.

This is our first conversation with independent filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell. We with him again about the feature length release, Failed State, which he co-directed. Miss Me Yet is a chronicle of the George W. Bush presidency, which means that it also documents the early days of the War on Terror, beginning with 9/11. Chris draws us back into the early 2000s by painstakingly splicing together archival footage of Bush interspersed with commercials that amplify the cultural moments. It seems appropriate to rerelease this episode, not just because it's the 200th anniversary of 9/11 (or whatever), but because the seeds of so much we've grown to live with and so much of what we've become numb to were planted in those years. Trump used an Iraq War era Congressional authorization for the legal pretext to assassinate Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Of course, as we've seen many times recently, we've moved well past the need for annoying legal authorizations. Arguably though, we might not have become so inured to extrajudicial violence if we weren't first used to Congress rubber stamping it. Congress' approval was never even requested for the recent US attacks on nuclear sites in Iran. From the original episode description: In this episode, we talk with filmmaker Christopher Bell about his docuseries Miss Me Yet. Chris brings the horror and absurdity of the George W. Bush years back to life as he tells the story of a political heir who becomes president, is branded a liar and war criminal by many, and finally drifts into the semi-reclusive painterly life.  Miss Me Yet is currently showing on Means TV.https://means.tv/programs/missmeyet Find Chris bell on Twitter:https://twitter.com/UpdateTheGrids Watch some of Chris' other films:https://linktr.ee/christopherjasonbell Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en We're unlocking this ep for a while because everyone should get to know Chris and hear about his docuseries Miss Me Yet. Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

I guess we could call these archive releases "ReWired". This episode was extremely educational for us. It was part of a group of episodes where we dove into the background and origin story of a person or people who've had an outsized impact on shaping the way many Americans as well as people worldwide see themselves and their place in the world. Subscribe on Patreon to get extra episodes and listen to our back catalog patreon.com/wetwired As we continue our retooling of this show's format, we'll be releasing some of these older episodes that we think are especially important.From the original description: The law of attraction permeates the world of self-help and spirituality. In this magical world, everything you think you know about the causal nature of reality is wrong. All that you experience, all that you have and are, is a consequence of the vibrations that you attract. You don’t have to explain the mechanism or prove the results, because it’s all self-evident–if you don’t get what you want, you weren’t wishing hard enough. If you want something, all you need to do is believe. Even if you’ve never heard the words “the law of attraction,” you’ve heard its message from pop signers and film stars. Even Peter Pan knows this one weird trick to flying, “you think of a wonderful thought!” However, you probably have heard of the law of attraction from the 2006 film, The Secret. The messenger behind the message, Esther Hicks, got the idea from 100 ghosts, whom she channels in seminars for her captivated audiences, in books, and even on cruises. Without The Secret, we wouldn’t know Esther and her spooky friends, and without Esther Hicks, there would be no film. Subscribe on Patreon to get extra episodes and listen to our back catalog patreon.com/wetwired

You might think QAnon has faded away, or maybe has been just laying dormant for the last couple of years. You'd be wrong. It’s been there all along, stewing and metastasizing beneath the surface, mostly. You can find people decoding the news all over Telegram still, and it’s absolutely thriving Twitter. Having Trump in the Whitehouse and QAnon influencers like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino in the FBI, and all the other psychos in lower offices all over the government, means that the regular news is often QAnon news. Always looking for the secret truth behind current events, QAnon and Sovereign Citizen accounts have taken a special interest in Trump's Executive Order sending National Guard and Federal law enforcement into Washington, D.C. For them, these actions aren't just Trump flexing political muscles, or worse, breaking the law. For a Sov Cit or a QAnon follower, Trump federalizing law enforcement in D.C. is nothing short of a killing blow struck at the Deep State. It's pretty nuts. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Kevin Hartnell - Reflections (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

First up, we talk about Sam Altman’s overhyped and supremely disappointing release of ChatGPT 5. Then we get into the AI hype machine that has the potential to take down the US economy when the bubble finally pops. We wrap up with a dip into r/AISoulmates, the community for the Wireborn and the humans they've chosen to love. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

This is Part 6 of Cold as ICE. This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired We go over the ballooning Homeland Security budget and ICE's unprecedented expansion. None of this looks good for anyone in the US but as always with things like this the most vulnerable people are hit first and the hardest. Unsurprisingly and despite their positive comments, the real winners won't be Trump's supporters. It's the private contractors who are coming out on top. Companies like GEO Group and Core Civic are vacuuming up money as fast as the US Treasury can print it. All the while, DHS has been running a Blood and Soil ad campaign on social media.

Breaking from our sabbatical to talk about Dems cowardly criticisms of Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza after spending 18 months supporting the genocide and Bernie Sander’s failed legislation to restrict military aid to Israel. We also get into the resurrected 2 state solution as a platitude that even if they meant it would be impossible to achieve. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

We start off with a truly bizarre story about a yeti blood oath and some of the different types of priests. Then we get into the MAGA mindset and talk about how all the old Epstein stories are new again, why Trump's distractions aren't working like they used to, and why his lunatic base just can't let go of Jeffrey Epstein. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

We kick off this episode talking about the terrible politics surrounding the floods in Texas. As if the mass death tragedy isn’t enough, the crank caucus has decided that antique emergency systems isn’t grabby enough for a headline. Instead, they're pushing a new weather conspiracy and claiming that "someone" in the government caused the heavy rains and flooding on purpose. While Texas was experiencing a thousand-year flood. Grok, Elon Musk's AI butler was busy transforming itself into MechaHitler and letting us know what a racist, abusive sexual deviant it is. Last, we get into the fallout caused by Trump telling everyone to shut up about Epstein. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired

This is Part 5 of Cold as ICE. This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired In today’s episode, we begin with the recent spectacle in MacArthur Park in an LA community with a large immigrant population. We move on to talk about dehumanizing undocumented people, the national citizen registry, and the parallels of a rising authoritarian state and colonialism.

We talk about the homicidal attention seeking of the White House that demands Trump did a very, very good job destroying the Iranian nuclear program. We also cover the hysterical reactions from both Republican and Democrats to Mamdani winning the Democrat mayoral primary. Our conclusion is that good things can happen, but mostly haven’t been. We also reveal our plan for an upcoming series, “It’s in a Book” as well as our impending first merch drop. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. patreon.com/wetwired