The ground is definitely shifting in the conservative base. From the Republican staffers who had their private texts between each other leaked revealing A LOT of racist messages to Nick Fuentes showing up on one mainstream conservative show after another, it's obvious that many Republicans are becoming more openly sympathetic to the racist Groyper ideas.

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We're going to do a couple of episodes talking about conservatism in the US, how things are changing for the Republicans, what's happening with the old conservatives, and the Groypers who are trying to take their place.

In this episode, we talk about the fallout at the Heritage Foundation after Kevin Roberts' weak defense of Tucker Carlson for having Fuentes on his show, followed by an even weaker apology for defending him.

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.

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We're with Devin Thomas O'Shea, author of The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis.

Most of Devin's book surrounds a Gilded Age secret society founded in St. Louis in the late 19th century. The story would probably begin and end in St. Louis if that little group for racist businessmen and politicians who liked to throw parties had fizzled out like most secret societies do. This one didn't.

Founded in 1897, the Veiled Prophet Society exists to this day. Over the course of its life, it's had bank presidents, captains of industry, judges, at least one police chief, and more than one US presidential advisor as members. As Devin tells us, the organization was purposely conceived to create a venue for money to mix with politics. This makes the story of the Veiled Prophet Society also the story of how power is captured and wielded.

Find Devin online:

linktr.ee/devintoshea

The book will be available on June 23, 2026.

Preorder the book:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet

Our long promised merch is here!!

Fly your crypto-leftist flag 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.

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Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.