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/

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Music:

Lester James Woodward - 1984 VHS Ident

Lester James Woodward - Be Kind Please Rewind

https://BlueFoxMusic.com