Latest / The Dustlight Archives / The Dustlight Archives Book Club: Sinister Forces: A Warm Gun: Chapters 9-10 (preview)

Transcript

The Dustlight Archives Book Club: Sinister Forces: A Warm Gun: Chapters 9-10 (preview) · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, guys.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Happy to have you here again.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I am excited we are officially starting the second book in the Sinister Forces series, which is awesome.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're actually a third of a way through this beast at this point, so that's pretty cool.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I suppose let's just get started.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Book two is called A Warm Gun, and right away Lavenda begins with a quote from Twin Peaks, and this is a Twin Peaks Stan podcast.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I was definitely interested when I saw that.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the the quote is Mike the one-armed man, don't hurt on the overheads.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: The fluorescence don't work.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think a transformer's bad.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: To which Dale Cooper responds, we know that.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Mike says, Yes.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, I spent probably too much time trying to think about what that quote meant because it's seemingly so innocuous, and it is uh very short.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, like, I'm like Twin Peaks and Peter Lavenda both are so layered that I have a hard time believing that there isn't something deeper to this.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what I kind of came up with was like the idea of you have on the one hand in the scene he's telling Dale Cooper, don't turn on the overheads, the fluorescence don't work.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think a transformer is bad.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: To which Dale Cooper responds, we know that.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think partly, you know, there's a very basic sort of idea of like that we have to kind of travel through obscurity or through darkness or abstraction to find the thing we're looking for.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then I also it really got me thinking about like Lavenda himself and wondering like if he maybe possibly, and maybe I'm giving him too much credit here, but I'm like, maybe he kind of sees himself as the one-armed man because the one-armed man is a really complicated character in Twin Peaks.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: For like, I'm I mean, there there's a lot of mythology behind him, but just very uh broadly speaking, he is a man who is possessed by a spirit named Mike, who worked with Bob, who is the killer of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, they both feed on Garmon Bosa together, the uh uh food that is generated from fear and suffering.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference is that Bob obviously stays evil, and Mike ends up seeing the face of God and trying to turn things around.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in a weird sort of way, I feel like that is such a perfect uh uh metaphor for possibly how Lavenda could have been feeling in the moment when he wrote this book.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I think there's definitely parts of it where I think he is bordering on being knowingly deceptive, but I also do think this is probably, I mean, this or unholy alliance probably have to be the time period in which he is being the most illuminating or where he is being the most honest.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And like, what if this is kind of like a crypto confession for the idea that he has been working deep within the sinister forces that he's talking about?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and and we went over a lot of that in his biography episode that started this whole thing, you know, like uh him working with these weird international telecoms and writing the Necronomicon and all of this.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It maybe like he's reached this moment where he's trying to set his own moral barometer back to some sort of acceptable state in his own head by revealing some of these secrets.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, if that is the case, I uh think the real tragedy of this would be that uh that he uh obviously ends up going the other direction that he seems to double down after the publishing of this book with the shady connections and you know all of this working with the To the Stars Academy and some of the later books he's written signal somebody who is even less interested in delivering the truth and even more uh effectively obscuring things.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know, I I just I really kind of saw that quote and I guess I went off for a little bit because I I did think it was pretty pretty cool, pretty interesting.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Another quote that begins part two of this three-part book series is one from General Douglas MacArthur.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, We have had our last chance.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, our Armageddon will be at our door.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence, an improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: It must be of this spirit if we are to save the flesh.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to imagine, or at least I would hope, that in this moment maybe he was feeling the weight of the fact that less than a month earlier they had dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dropped nuclear bombs.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess this kind of ties back into my interpretation of the Levenda quote as well, because if that is the case, Douglas MacArthur would in very short time head wildly in the opposite direction of this quote.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, in both cases, they could have been full of shit right from the start.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I do question if I am giving them too much benefit of the doubt to even assume that these were moments where they felt some sort of guilt or some sort of need for a reckoning.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, he would go on to like be involved in the Korean War in just a few years, and where you know, where they're dropping napalm and biological weapons, and just you know, it's an absolute horror show.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then also at one point, completely going the opposite direction of this quote in any spirit I could imagine reading it.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: This insane motherfucker advocated for dropping 30 to 50 atomic bombs along the Yalu River corridor to create a belt of radioactive cobalt.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, this would have, besides the fact that I think like we probably don't even know what this would have done to the atmosphere entirely, if it would have resulted in wiping out all of humanity, it also, even if you just keep it centralized to that region, you're talking about deep environmental and human devastation and it uh like absolute like generational destruction that is so flippant about human life that it's almost hard to comprehend.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have the omnibus edition, if you're looking at this all as one singular work, we are doing chapters nine and ten this week, and most of my notes are about chapter ten because I think there's just a lot more forensically to chew on in that, and I'm not opposed to the metaphysical, but it really I find some of this chapter to be a bit tedious and to verge almost on not saying anything sometimes that like it just I don't know if it grabbed your attention.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry if it did, and you were really hoping I'd go deeper on it, but I it really didn't grab mine very much, and I think there's a couple of different points he makes in it that are interesting and worth talking about.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: One of those would be he he opens with a section on male versus female-based spirituality, and I more or less agree with this that safe, good spirituality is as far as like societally speaking in our modern world, is the spirituality that is incredibly patriarchal, and things that get defined as witchcraft or evil often come from the feminine traditions.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: He claims that rulers see themselves as working for the divine, and I think that may be true for a lot of history, but I also think that Satanism and its close cousin atheism have had deep effects on the psychology of our rulers that we still don't fully understand.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think the framework since the Abrahamic religions have existed more or less throughout a lot of the world, particularly, you know, what we would refer to as maybe the Western world, is doing the exact thing he's talking about initially, where we are coming from more matriarchal traditions, more feminine traditions, ones that are less hierarchical, and and you know, I think as societies have gotten larger in scale, this sort of embedded need for hierarchy has existed because the ruling class and their institutions kind of need it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you are operating a small tribe or commune or something like that, you don't necessarily need the people within it to have an epistemological framework that is so heavily based in hierarchy, but if you are running, you know, ancient Rome or Greece or the NATO countries today, or really, you know, there are dozens of other examples too, it all of this requires a belief in a certain hierarchy that if people were to not believe it, the whole thing would immediately collapse.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think where maybe I disagree with Levenda a bit is that he seems to still see these patriarchal religions as being kind of the ruling class's uh framework, and I I'm really not totally sure sure that's the case.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think something has changed.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in the last maybe hundred, two hundred years tops, like it really is a fairly new phenomenon historically speaking, but when you have stuff like theosophy or Satanism, whether that's crowlian or Levayan or whatever, like it's something fundamentally different.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in a weird way, I think it's actually sort of a corruption of the old feminine traditions, and it makes a lot of sense for our time because it seems like one big theme for the last hundred or two hundred years in some ways has been a certain decentralization and a lack of accountability, and I think that things like atheism are at the root of what a lot of our current ruling class believes as opposed to Christianity.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, plenty of them are Christians as well, but I mean, even in America, we have things like the prosperity gospel, and I think that even if people go to church, even if they identify as Christians, their framework, certainly in the ruling class, I think even more so than in the lower classes, is materialist at its root, and a lot of the other sort of vestigial religious stuff that has hung on is fairly surface level.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I might be rambling a bit, but I just I think that when you describe us as a Christian nation, there is definitely something that you are losing as far as our general ideological outlook.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: To get to something a little bit more grounded and forensic, uh Lavenda claims that St.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's Basilica was built directly over a toroboleum, which is a site where Mithraic sacrificial rites were performed.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to quibble too hard because I really don't think it alters the fundamental point totally, but it was actually built basically next door.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish sometimes in a book so long he'd be more willing to suss out these nuances, because the fact these actually existed side by side for a period is way more symbolically interesting in many ways, and I think would drive even more towards the sort of point he's making.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like he wants to kind of flatten the idea and just make it literally like, oh, there was paganism and then Christianity was built right over top of it.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like, no, these things existing side by side means they were influencing each other, and you could hear Mithraic rites being performed while you were worshiping at St.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's Basilica, and there's something about that that I think is a lot more complex.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It actually builds his argument better.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he also claims the Catholic headdresses worn by bishops are called meters, and he does write seemingly, he hedges on this, but he says seemingly in honor of Mithras, which is complicated because we can actually trace the etymology, and it makes way more sense given the origins of Roman Catholicism that it would have developed from the Greek word mitra, meaning headband, sash, or turban, and not the Persian Mithras.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you wanna be real pedantic about it or give them the benefit of the doubt, both words do descend from the Proto-European word me, meaning to bind.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: In Greek, you know, that would be something like a headband, and in uh the Mithraic religion, it would be closer to the binding of contracts.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: But these things have been on totally separate etymological paths for centuries before Roman Catholicism ever existed.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I will say though, with all of that on the table, I am also not totally opposed to the idea that words as vibrations have some sort of intrinsic meaning that goes deeper than what we give them as human beings.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the ancient connection between these things actually, to me, to a degree, is fairly fascinating and not something to be totally written off.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: It it really depends just how much symbolic weight you are willing to give the sounds we make when we pronounce words.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is there something you you know, obviously when you speak, it it is a vibration.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are using your mouth to create a vibration, and these vibrations exist on frequencies.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And whether or not this matters, it all comes down to whether or not you believe that we just make up words and that words themselves are created by us to attribute meaning, or if you believe there is some sort of intrinsic meaning that's built into those vibrations.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I go back and forth on that, but I do think it is an interesting sort of philosophical discussion.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: After that, he goes on a tangent that's basically about the idea of priesthoods existing in order to act as a buffer between us and the true knowledge of reality.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I mostly dug this part.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think one of the core tenets of this podcast and of parapolitical research more broadly is an absolute aversion to arguments from authority or the idea that truth has to be handed down through institutional means.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: I can speak personally, and I imagine a lot of you would agree that I am immediately sussed out by anything that claims it can't be explained to me, and that I have to take the word of somebody else whose motives I don't trust or know.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: I really, I really do, you know, that there's some things like really complex physics or abstract math or something like that where, you know, maybe you would need to take a lot of time to explain it, but I I really am of the belief that if you are a reasonably intelligent person and the person who is explaining the thing to you truly understands it, that they can get these ideas across to you.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that when people claim whether it is a priest claiming that they need to be a conduit between you and the divine, or whether it's the New York Times claiming that they need to be a conduit between what reality is and what you understand reality to be.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: I I really just fundamentally conceptually disagree with that, and I think that Levenda does too, and he expresses it fairly well in this part.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, getting to chapter 10, Wallowing in Watergate.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: He mentions Richard Nixon almost letting Marina Habe's murderer off the hook by claiming the perpetrator was guilty and almost causing a mistrial.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you remember, we talked about Marina Habe a couple episodes ago, and sh it is a really interesting murder, and the family is very interesting because her father is, as I said in an episode a while ago, is a uh man named Hans Habe who was doing intelligence work in Europe and was the first person on the scene to like one of the like kind of nascent proto-Gladio events.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I am very fascinated by her murder.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: But when he talks about this, he's referencing what Nixon said about Manson during the trial for the Taylor Bianca murders.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm inclined to believe Manson was probably not involved in Marina Hobb's murder, but that it very well could have been done by the straight Satans, who obviously have connections to Manson because they're a biker gang he wanted to hire for security.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Also, the story of Manson pulling a newspaper out and showing the jurors the president's remarks to try to get a mistrial is pretty amusing.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the judge allowing the trial to continue as long as the jurors promised not to be swayed is uh it's pretty sus.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Next up, Lavenda claims the Romanovs left behind a swastika on the wall before they were murdered, and this is something that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Really need some kind of disentangling.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's intentionally fudging things a bit by phrasing it in a way where it sounds like it was carved in the cellars minutes or hours before they were killed.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is they were under house arrest for months.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when they first arrived at the house, they would eventually die in she carved a swastika with a date next to it, marking it as April 1918.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: But they would be held prisoner and not die until July 1918.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I get his symbolic point here, and I do think it's interesting, but I also just have to say I think he's being incredibly slippery or sloppy with his language here.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: First he says, and this is a quote, when the Romanov family had been led to its murder by the Soviets in 1917, one of them left behind a swastika swabbed on the wall.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'd say the first problem is that swabbed is the wrong word.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Penciled or drawn would be more accurate.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Secondly, they would have been in an entirely different house in 1917 when they were first captured and not the house where the swastika carving was found.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: They spent 1917 after their capture in Alexander Palace, and the house they would spend the last few months of their lives in during 1918 is Ipatiev House.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Also, it's a little disingenuous when Alexandra, who carved it, had a habit for years of carving swastikas.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: He kind of paints it as some sort of prophetic marker from her based on the implication of how he lays out the facts.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was just something she had done on any random Tuesday her whole life.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: The whole thing is honestly baffling in its layers of factual half-truths when you don't really lose much, if anything, with an accurate recounting of events.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: There is still a symbolic weight that travels from the white Russians to the Nazis to Manson, which I think is the point he's driving at.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you can do that with all the correct historical details.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: He dives back into 60s counterculture, and you know, I I really don't want to beat this dead horse anymore.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's done it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure he's gonna continue to do it, but he kind of explicitly states that Manson and something like The Grateful Dead or Timothy Leary are somehow like diametrically opposed forces, and we've already we've already gotten into this quite a bit, but it it's absolutely silly, and the evidence is overwhelming for the idea that they're not actually opposed nearly at all, and it are in fact pumming from identical roots in many ways.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: He also claims to have been on the phone with the Presbyterian church when the famous bomb went off while being made in a brownstone home by the weathermen that set off on accident, killing several of them as well as stymieing their movement to a degree.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: He claims it was close enough to hear a deafening blast, and the person on the other line said, a bomb just went off.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, his ability to seemingly claim being everywhere something historically significant happened in the region is it's wild.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: At this point in this book alone, he claims to have been a casket bearer for RFK's funeral, gone to a church famous for canonizing wandering bishops, been captured in Colonia Dignidad, and now on the phone with somebody who heard a very historically significant weatherman bomb go off as it was happening.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: He also claims to have met Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I just need to stress that, and I just feel like I need to point out that the only provable thing of historical significance he was involved in was the writing of the Necronomicon, which ironically he still denied at this time.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but at a certain point, like if you've ever had a friend who just bullshits a lot, sometimes Levenda can sound a little bit like that to me, and that's obviously speculative when he talks about his place in these historical events.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and a lot of the kind of surrounding facts will be correct, which does lend some credence to the idea that he's telling the truth, but I would just say like he's gonna several more times in this chapter alone claim to be personally involved in pretty big things, and I just have a really hard time believing that it's that it's all true.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: For what it's worth, I did a little more digging on the Colonia Dignidad thing in particular because it does appear in his biographical section that was put out by his publisher, and that made me doubt for a second, maybe my skepticism here, because I'm like, oh, okay, this was actually put out by the publisher themselves, which feels like maybe there would be a higher standard of evidence required or liability on their end if it was not true.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: But after doing some research that doesn't seem to be the the case, it turns out that these biographies are usually just given to publishers by the author or the author's agent.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And since he's not making claims about anybody but himself, there's really no liability issue.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: He and he is really on one in this chapter because next he brings up that the owner of the lingerie store he worked at had a son named Stephen Brandt, who killed himself because he was scared of the Manson family.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that we have gone over in the first episode uh of the book.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a bit more inclined to believe this one, and that it is actually probably true.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can't prove that he worked at this lingerie shop, but if he did, I track down who the owner would have been, and his name is Willie Brandt.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, with caveats, I mean this checks out.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: He makes claims that one of Manson's jurors worked for Ashland Oil, and I'm genuinely not sure what he's talking about.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody knows more about this, I mean feel free to hit me up.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, could because it would be significant.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like I do think there's actual meat there if that is the case, but I can't find any source on this.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was actually able to find several of the jurors' names and a few of their occupations, but I couldn't find anybody directly tied to Ashland Doyle.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: He then points out that Nixon resigned on both the fifth anniversary of the Tate LaBianca murders and the fifth anniversary of the haunted mansion opening at Disneyland.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: He also points out that Walt Disney once owned the house where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were slain, which is something I found in other Manson literature, but I couldn't verify through any primary sources.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is a genuinely fascinating set of connections, and I love when Lavenda is able to make these kind of polls, but I also have a very hard time making sense of what any of it could actually mean exactly, or how a person could articulate its meeting without just devolving into abstraction and pure mysticism.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's the kind of thing I love to just keep in the back of my mind, though, in case it ever makes a puzzle piece fall into place later.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you're doing this kind of research a lot, you'd be amazed at how often that actually happens.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, guys, that is the end of the free preview of the book club for this week.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you would like to hear the rest, please head over to my Patreon link.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And for just five dollars a month, you can hear this in all of the other backlogged episodes that I have there.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like I've said before, I know I say it every time, but if you truly can't afford it, hit me up.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to gatekeep this, you know.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: I am a communist, and like I do hate having to live in a world where I monetize.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if you can afford it, I mean it really helps me and it allows me to spend more time doing this sort of stuff.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's like a lot of content there.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like we get into a lot of really interesting stuff this week about Howard Hughes and Watergate that I think uh Levette goes really hard on, and then I did some of my own research too to try to supplement it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, uh go on and head over there if you can, and if you're interested, and we will be back next week with the what is most likely the finale of the Axiom series.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got some big stuff in store for that.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: So definitely tune in for that, and I will see you later.