Failed State Update

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.

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.”

Long-time friend of the show Lucien Greaves will be on FSU tonight. What will be talking about? The arson at the Satanic Temple's HQ? Probably. Sovereign Citizen death threats? Youbetcha. Satanic Panic? That is to be expected.

Jack Brewer is a freelance writer with a longtime interest in the UFO genre. He maintains the blog "The UFO Trail," where he posts credible info on incredible topics. Brewer is the author of "The Greys Have Been Framed: Exploitation in the UFO Community," in which he explores how public perception of the UFO phenomenon has been distorted by the intelligence community and suspect researchers. Neither a debunker nor a believer, Brewer integrates objectivity and critical thinking into his writing while keeping an open mind. His latest book is called "Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC." NICAP is one of the first UFO investigation organizations, and IC stands for "intelligence community."

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlSQcUGK7hQ

Douglas P. Horne is a former staffer for the Assassination Records Review Board and the author of several books, including Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. In this episode of Failed State Update, J.G. and Douglas discuss Operation Northwoods, the Pentagon's (very real) plan to down aircraft, blow up ships, or possibly kill American civilians as a pretext for an invasion of Cuba. President Kennedy, wisely, thought the whole thing was nuts and prevented it from happening.

Northwoods is a bit of a history lesson, but it's an important one. It exemplifies the lengths that the military may go in order to get its way. And as conspiracies go, it's as bizarre as anything Alex Jones has cooked up. And it's all real.

In Tumacácori, Arizona, a stone’s throw from the U.S. border with Mexico, roughly 85 “destiny reservists” await their fate. They are the followers of Gabriel of Urantia. Born Anthony J. Delevin in Pittsburgh in 1946, Gabriel’s life work is a community known as the Global Community Communications Alliance (GCCA). They live in a compound in the desert where they raise animals, harvest hemp, and study their prophet’s teachings. This is all in preparation for the end of this world, and the coming of the next.

And the apocalypse, according to Gabriel, is closer now than it’s ever been.

Last week, Paladin called the cult’s radio station KVAN-FM last week to address the people of Tucson on the air. “We are living in a transition period,” Gabriel/Paladin says in the voice of the trans-dimensional space creature.

On today’s Failed State Update, former GCCA member Joshua Lilly listens to Gabriel's latest broadcast with us and helps us understand both the message and cult psychology in general.

But first, J.G. and Lenny discuss Monarch mind-control conspiracies and why they are the perfect myth of our time. This is the subject of Monarch, the debut novel by Candice Wuehle.

LINKS:

What do UFOs, the CIA, the conflict in Ukraine, and the Philadelphia Experiment have in common? Tune in to find out!

You're in for a treat! For this edition of Failed State Update: The Podcast, J.G. Michael interviews author and extremism expert Spencer Sunshine on the Oath Keepers' role in January 6, the militia movement in general, and what happens when antisemites infiltrate leftist politics.

Is the United States collapsing, or is all of civilization collapsing? To explore that question we bring you John Zerzan, an anarchist and primitivist author whose work has been compared to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, of all people. His books offer an alternative vision of history that focuses on the destructive nature of technology. And more importantly — and this is why we spoke to him — his work suggests a possible future free of the alienation and control of capitalism-run-amok.

Havana Syndrome is back in the news. On the one hand, it's clearly a psychogenic illness that's being misdiagnosed as the result of commie death rays. On the other hand, by treating it as an attack by America's enemies, politicians can use it to help further their foreign policy objectives. Which side do you think the media is going to take?

Robert E. Bartholomew is a native New Yorker who teaches history at Botany College in Auckland, New Zealand. His many books include The Martians Have Landed! A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes and Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior. Most relevant to this episode, he is the co-author of Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria with Robert W. Baloh.

The subject of political cults continues with Marley Clements, a writer, producer, and documentary filmmaker whose work includes Active Measures (2018) and QAnon: The Search for Q (2021). Her company Bunker Crew Media is responsible for the Kremlin File podcast.

Joshua Lilly is a former follower of Gabriel of Urantia, the subject of my book New Age Grifter. He’s also something of a “fan favorite,” so — due to popular demand — I am giving him an (almost 2 hours long!) episode of the FAILED STATE UPDATE podcast to tell us about his life and times in (and out of) a religious cult.

New Age Grifter is the story of Gabriel of Urantia, a self-proclaimed holy man who currently presides over a spiritual community (some call it a cult) in the desert of Southern Arizona. In a fenced-in compound, three generations of the Global Community Communications Alliance soak in Gabriel's teachings as they wait for the end of the world. 

My book on the group, titled New Age Grifter: The True Story of Gabriel of Urantia and his Cosmic Family is out today.

Raymond Buckland founded The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in 1966. After visiting the late Gerald Gardner and his collection on the Isle of Man, Raymond was inspired to start a collection of his own. While working for British Airways, he was able to acquire many of the artifacts in this collection from all around the world. He initially displayed his museum on a few shelves in the basement of his Long Island, N.Y. home. However, over time, Raymond’s witchcraft collection rapidly grew to well over 500 artifacts, ranging from Ancient Egyptian ushabtis to documented artifacts from the Salem Witch trials. This was the first museum of its kind in the United States with an anthropological approach to the world of folklore and the supernatural.

This episode of FSU features Steven Intermill, the director of the museum, which has been located in Cleveland since 2017. We talk about the museum itself, alternative religions, harassment by fundamentalist weirdos, and much more.

Joseph Daniel Casolaro (everyone knew him as Danny) was a journalist who died in Martinsburg, West Virginia, thirty years ago this August. He was in town working on a book tentatively titled The Octopus, which promised to tie together damn near every conspiracy theory of the decade: including the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and the FEMA concentration camps.

When Casolaro was found dead in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel, his wrists slashed with a razor blade, the medical examiner ruled the death a suicide — a ruling that continues to be controversial.

In this installment of Failed State Update, I speak to journalist Tim Shorrock and historian Jack Calhoun about PROMIS — the software that sits at the center of The Octopus — and its surprising relevance to the modern surveillance state. I also speak to Dominic Orlando, Danny's cousin, who shares his thoughts on the media's (mis)handling of the story.

A story crossed my desk recently: "Inside TikTok’s booming dissociative identity disorder community" (Input Magazine, July 6). The author, Jessica Lucas, looks at the unique world of social media influencers with multiple personalities. While it provides a unique look at a fascinating subculture, it does not portray the truth about Dissociative Identity Disorder (the clinical name for multiple personalities) and how the diagnosis has been abused by therapists over the years. 

Not only are these conspiracy therapists harming patients, they are a telling example of America's decline. 

My book Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention: Manchurian Candidates, Recovered Memories, and the Dark Side of Conspiracy Culture is finally available as an audiobook! From the back cover blurb:

Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention looks at the role that conspiracy theories play in American life and the current political climate. The audiobook begins at a convention for therapists who uncover “memories” of past lives, extraterrestrials, and government mind-control operations. From there, the listener will encounter Pizzagate enthusiasts, conspiracy entrepreneurs, Satanists, flat-earthers, and more. Ultimately, the author cautions that right-wing conspiracy culture is a fascist confidence trick that will only get more violent over the coming years.

In the first half of this episode, I speak with Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting Fellow at In These Times. He is the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. 

After the flip, I speak with Jeremy Kuzmarov, J.P. Walker assistant professor of history at University of Tulsa and the author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs and Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century. His series on Biden's foreign policy is available at Covert Action Magazine.

It's the big FOUR-OH! and today I'm speaking with Mike Elk, labor reporter and the founder (in 2016) of Payday Report, a crowdfunded news agency focusing on labor and union news. In this interview we talk about the importance of independent media, getting past the over-intellectualization of left-labor reporting, and the shocking reality of sexual harassment in unions.

The notion of "repressed memories" has been widely discredited, yet it stubbornly persists—on trash TV, in poorly researched self-help books, and now on New York Magazine's website. In this episode of Failed State Update, Lucien Greaves, the co-founder of The Satanic Temple, breaks down "The Memory War" by Katie Heaney, a weird example of pro-conspiracy theory agitprop that has more to do with QAnon than legitimate reportage.

The return of Mark Jacobson. We expand on our previous conversation to talk about the zeitgeist. We get into QAnon,  the Ghost Dance, and of course, Bill Cooper.

We are living in a time of unprecedented distrust in America…

Faith in the government is at an all-time low, and political groups on both sides of the aisle are able to tout preposterous conspiracy theories as gospel, without much opposition. “Fake news” is the order of the day. This book is about a man to whom all of it points, the greatest conspiracist of this generation and a man you may not have heard of.

A former U.S. naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one bestseller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated—because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth—by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy to decrease the population of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals; and the Illuminati are secretly involved with the U.S. government to manage relationships with extraterrestrials. Cooper died in a shootout with Apache County police in 2001, one month after September 11, in the year in which he had predicted catastrophe.

In Pale Horse Rider, journalist Mark Jacobson not only tells the story of Cooper’s fascinating life but also provides the social and political context for American paranoia. Indeed, with the present NSA situation and countless other shadowy government dealings often in the news, aren’t we right to suspect that things may not be as they seem?

Jared Yates Sexton has been an important voice decrying the little Hitler in the White House (for one more week) and the future, not-so-little Hitlers that are on the horizon if we don't wise up quick. His message is more important than ever, so I'm reposting two of his appearances here in case you missed 'em the first time...

I didn't set out to present a Christmas episode of this podcast, but when the talk got around to the harmful nature of the Santa Claus myth, I knew I had a timely program. Pastor Harry Walther is the founder of The Church of Philadelphia-Internet and host of Doomsday Talk Radio. I met him in 2012 while filming a series of videos for The Verge about American end times beliefs.  In this episode of Failed State Update, Harry and I talk about why The End didn't happen on December 21, 2012, and why it just might be around the corner now. We also talk about his 2011 book, Jesus: Son of God, Clone of God, and why Santa is harmful to children.

CORRECTION: Pastor Harry's ministry is called: "The Church of Philadelphia-Internet," not "The Church of Jesus Christ-Internet"

There is an internet community of people that call themselves Targeted Individuals. These people claim that they're being surveilled and harassed by the U.S. government or other unknown entities. Sometimes this activity is called "gangstalking" because, unlike traditional stalking, the harassment involves teams of people. Fears of gangstalking seem to me to be motivated by, among other things, the same anxieties that create UFO abduction narratives and QAnon theorists. 

Are we living in a failed state? And if so, so what? Between the environment, pandemic, and everything else that 2020 has given us, I think it's probably high time that we look at ourselves in the mirror and decide what's really important. And if you're of a spiritual or metaprogrammatical bent, you could probably learn a thing or several from Antero Alli. His latest book, State of Emergence, covers his experiments in group ritual. It's one part Jerzy Grotowski, one part Carl Jung, and 100% mind-blowing.

If you know anything about the assassination of JFK, the odds are good that you learned it from Oliver Stone. Even if you haven't seen JFK (1993), the claims made in the film — claims made by the likes of homophobic New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Fletcher Prouty — have kind of seeped into the mainstream and become part of our common understanding of the tragedy. In his latest book, On the Trail of Delusion, author Fred Litwin turns the clock back on the Jim Garrison investigation and makes us reconsider what we think we know about November 22, 1963.

In this action-packed episode of FAILED STATE UPDATE, I break out a certain conspiracy theory-themed trivia board game ("Conspiracy Theory" by Neddy Games) and host an action-packed competition between four fascinating dudes. Come for the conspiracy questions! Stay for the learned discursions! With internet celebrities Joseph Matheny, JG Michael and Jon Marsh (and one international man of mystery, Kirk 'Mad Dog' Cooke).

Pearse Redmond is a podcaster, writer, and one of the leading figures of the Jeffrey Epstein research community. For years, when no one in the mainstream media cared, Pearse and his cohort were diving deep into Epstein-world, trying to figure out what the man was up to and how to get him put in the slammer for good. In this episode of Failed State Update, we discuss some of the more bizarre aspects of the Epstein case and why it took the mainstream media so long to catch up with the conspiracy theorists.

What we have here is my first ever presentation to a conference, in which I use the story of The Finders—a small commune unfairly maligned as a "cult"—to discuss the political dimension of conspiracy theories. The talk also covers the story of Ted Gunderson, who went from being an FBI-COINTELPRO guy to a major figure in conspiracy theory culture. And of course, I tie this all back to QAnon. Ends with a brief discussion of Grey Faction, the group that sponsored the conference. There's a lot of interesting, little-discussed history here, suitable for listening during jogs, long car rides, and wherever else you consume your podcasts.

Very excited to once again have author, academic, and political commentator Jared Yates Sexton on the show to address the (failed) state of the union. He has a new book out called American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People, and it's one you're definitely going to want to check out, as it lays bare all the myths and falsehoods that Keep America Great Again for the 1%. 

Podcast up this episode of FAILED STATE UPDATE to hear about political cults,  the Third Reich as an American phenomenon, how Pizzagate has been going on since the Roman Empire, and why Americans are suckers for fascism.

In this episode of Failed State Update I'm joined by film critic, artist, and social media provocateur Dylan Coleslaw to discuss cTom's 2011 film Song of the Blind Girl.

There are underground filmmakers, and then there's cTom—or Tom Charley, as he's also known (both are pseudonyms, actually).  cTom has directed four films, all of which are ham-handed polemics against elite pedophilia and other crimes against the republic. But there are two things that make these films stand out: The fact that they were made a decade before QAnon, and the all-out incompetence of the director's craft. His films are perfect examples of the "so bad it's good" (a/k/a "awfulsome") approach to filmmaking. 

On the latest episode of Failed State Update, journalist and author Alexander Zaitchik discusses the profound implications of capitalism-run-amok on the pharmaceutical industry and the battle against COVID-19. It's one heck of a wild ride! 

In 2002, Richard McCaslin raided the elite Bohemian Grove campground in disguise as his alter ego, The Phantom Patriot. His plan was to prevent the kind of ritualistic child sacrifice that Alex Jones had talked about in the film Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove. Luckily, there was nothing of the sort going on. He would spend the next six years in jail for the armed raid. 

Author Tea Krulos, who knew McCaslin personally,  joins me in this episode of FAILED STATE UPDATE to discuss McCaslin, Alex Jones, and the strange turn this country has made over the last year or so. Where The Phantom Patriot was once a lone kook, these days the kookiness is endemic. 

Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington DC and 2019 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow. Tonight he's visiting the Failed State to talk about his latest for Columbia Journalism Review, "Journalism’s Gates Keepers." In the post-Covid world, where Bill Gates is seen as something of a technocratic foil to Trump's science-blind political posturing, it's important to examine the Gates's eponymous foundation with a critical eye. And that's what' Schwab has been doing, in articles for CJR and The Nation that ask if all that cash the Foundation is spreading around doesn't have some pretty significant strings attached.

Mark Laxer is an author and former follower of the cult leader Frederick Philip Lenz. He broke away from Lenz some time ago, only to realize recently that Trump's base is going through the same process that he went through as a member of a destructive cult.

Mark has written about this in two books: Take Me for a Ride: Coming of Age in a Destructive Cult (1993) and his latest, Rama Trauma Trump: I Left the Cult and Now Look What Happened.

Has "cancel culture" hit the UFO scene? Probably not. But MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) has had a few controversies over the years, including a recent one where the State Director of Vermont and Rhode Island lost his position for some really messed up Facebook posts. To shed some light on what's happening there, I spoke with Eric Smith, a MUFON field investigator based in Rhode Island. He says that the UFO scene is getting increasingly younger and more progressive — and that MUFON doesn't seem to be keeping up. We'll also speak to Andy Gittlitz, host of The Antifada podcast and author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, a book about a strain of communism that isn't afraid to incorporate more outlandish ideas into its philosophy. Tune in and find out what "fully luxury automated communism" is anyways,

NOTE: I've fixed the wonky audio 30 minutes in and updated the file.

I've always been fascinated by the weird, parallel Christian media universe, so for this episode, I figure we'd consult the experts. Boys Bible Study is a podcast known for its hilarious and insightful reviews of faith-based movies (a fair amount of which involve Kevin Sorbo somehow). In this episode of Failed State Update, I will be joined by the Bible boys: Ash, Julian, and Scott, as we discuss The Reliant (2019). This film ostensibly stars Kevin Sorbo and Eric Roberts, but in reality, it's just two hours of kids camping in the woods. Their time is spent cowering from a vague, Antifa-like threat that has taken over the cities and whining about God. It's a look into a parallel reality that's only becoming more prevalent in this country every day.