Failed State Update

In this bonus episode of The Inner Empire, I read my recent article, “The Uses of Manson,” originally published in Failed State Update.Charles Manson has been used to explain everything from the collapse of the 1960s counterculture to the supposed workings of a CIA mind-control program. But the stories people tell about Manson often reveal more about the storytellers than their subject. In that sense, his story gets at one of the central concerns of The Inner Empire: how beliefs are manufactured, circulated, and eventually mistaken for reality.Be sure to subscribe to Failed State Update at: https://lennyflatley.substack.com/And be sure to listen to The Inner Empire wherever you get your podcasts.

From Joseph L. Flatley, publisher of Failed State Update.THE INNER EMPIRE is a podcast that pulls together a lot of what I’ve spent years reporting on and thinking about: cults, the occult, conspiracy culture, and the platforms that have inserted themselves directly into our daily life.Here’s the simplest way I can put it: for five hundred years, people have known how to install a belief in someone’s mind: magicians did it with ritual and symbol, cults did it with repetition and isolation, ad men did it with images. What’s changed is that the same basic mechanism now runs automatically, every time you open an app, with nobody at the controls. This show is about tracing that mechanism across history and figuring out how it ended up running our lives without anyone deciding it should.Enjoy this introduction. Be sure to subscribe so you can hear new episodes when are released.Available wherever you get your podcasts.And be sure to sign up for my newsletter, Failed State Update: ⁠https://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠

The United States is failing fast, taking many of its most storied institutions with it. As a child of the former Soviet Union, occult artist @AnimaNoira has seen this all before. Watch us discuss magick and decline live tonight! Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glqt06mGrco Sign up for the Failed State Update Newsletter: https://lennyflatley.substack.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnimaNoira Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anima.noira/ website: https://animanoira.com/

Oki is a Canadian documentarian with a keen eye for unusual subject matter. We spoke to him back in January when he infiltrated a cabal of conspiracy theorists who use hypnosis to "prove" that there is a secret space program operating throughout the universe. His latest doc, The King of Stolen Valor, is a must-see. It is the story of Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a former U.S. Army non-commissioned officer who was found guilty of running a private prison in Afghanistan and torturing Afghan citizens. Idema was posing as a US government-sponsored special forces officer at the time. The US government claims no knowledge of his operations. After spending three years in an Afghan prison, he traveled to Mexico, where he died of AIDS in 2012. Oki's latest doc, The King of Stolen Valor is on YouTube. Oki on Twitter: https://twitter.com/OOHKAYEYE Oki's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OkiWeird/  Failed State Update newsletter: http://lennyflatley.substack.com/

Ravi lives in Silicon Valley, he's a former Google employee, and he’s a Targeted Individual. That is, he believes he has been the subject of high-tech surveillance and harassment. Whatever the cause of the trauma he has experienced, the trauma is very real. “I felt like committing a crime” at one point, he says. “I felt like avenging what happened to me.” But after learning that there is a whole community of people like him out there, he doesn’t feel so alone anymore. Besides, to do something drastic, he says, would be “in vain.” Today’s episode of Failed State Update is a conversation between Ravi and Joseph L. Flatley. Be sure to check out our feature article on the Targeted Individual phenomenon called “The Nightmare of Targeted Individuals in the Age of Paranoia” on the Failed State Update website. Failed State Update on Twitter: https://twitter.com/failedstatenews Failed State Update on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg8ztAapPSlqeHcEKeQAdmA