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The mid-terms are here and follow a full summer of meltdowns about Socialists. From the far right to the slightly less right wing of the US, establishment politicians lost their minds over DSA primary wins. The DSA went from an obscure, milquetoast corner of the U.S. Left to the largest leftist organization in the United States.  The Republicans are freaked out about the Red Menace, and the Democrats don’t know what to do with churlish ingrates who don’t want their oligarchy and genocide swill. Bernie cleaved open the door for young people especially to be open to socialism, if not for the word, for the ideas that aren’t just the neoliberal consensus. More people would be exposed to leftist ideas from grandpa Bernard’s 2015 campaign, and the overall effect would be a crowbar in the coffin of the Leftist movement in the US, resurrecting it from its grave in 1989. Bathroom Reading: https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2025/02/27/state-of-dsa-part-one-welcome-to-dsa/  https://time.com/article/2026/09/25/socialism-is-more-popular-than-ever-in-the-u-s-according-to-polls/ https://news.gallup.com/poll/714653/socialism-positive-rating-tops-first-time.aspx https://jacobin.com/2026/09/michigan-el-sayed-rogers-centrists  Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) “Party in The USA" (Miley Cyrus) Cover by Robyn Adele, Ft. Sarah Krauss and Darcy Wright For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield) Remix by DIRTYHERTZ

We're back with Gabriel Kennedy, author of Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson to talk about Oligarchy American style, Gilens and Page's research on American democracy, Harry K. Thaw's killing of Stanford White, and how sexual exploitation is the norm in elite networks. We wrap all this up in the context of Robert Anton Wilson's statement's back in the early 2000s that the conspiracy theory he most believed to be true is that the US is secretly an oligarchy ruled by the rich and that our democracy isn't much more than an elaborate sham. How right he was. Gabriel has a Kickstarter for creating an audiobook version of Chapel Perilous. He has some great bonuses for backers. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chapelperilous/chapel-perilous-the-robert-anton-wilson-biography-audiobook See all of Gabriel's work https://chapelperilous.us Learn more about TSOG https://rawsemantics.home.blog/2024/08/06/tsog-2025-other-scenarios/ Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a paper called “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/div-class-title-testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens-div.pdf

As a way to wrap up our Cold as ICE series about the creation of an American paramilitary force answering only to Trump, we wanted to find some solid historical examples where secret police forces were dismantled. The idea was to give some reasons to hope that things could be better. The problem was that we couldn’t find any examples at all! You could say this is an episode about trying to write that episode. In every case, once a secret police force was created, it remained. Very much like every expansion of state power or infringement on human rights, once they happen, it takes an enormous effort to put things back to something like they once were. When a secret police force or some brand of Brown Shirts was finally disbanded, it was always due to a constellation of internal and external pressures that ultimately took down the entire regime. The paramilitary arm of it just went down with it.  No one ever seems to get rid of a secret police force without dismantling the whole government. Along the way, we also talk about how IKEA helped support Romania's Securitate secret police under Ceaușescu. Later on this episode, we get into a Vanity Fair profile of a Sloperator VC fund called Harpoon and a little about Pete Hegseth's tailor. Bathroom reading: https://www.foxnews.com/media/homan-blasts-dem-hypocrisy-deportations-recalls-past-obama-gave-award-enforcing-border https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/04/ikea-funds-romania-secret-police-communist-era https://www.vanityfair.com/story/vc-defense-tech-harpoon

Editor's note: We originally recorded this episode in January 2026. Since then, Devin's book is now available in hardcover and ebook. Devin's been promoting it all summer on a whistle stop media tour at independent bookstores across the country. It comes out in paperback in July 2027. Tour info: https://devinoshea.wordpress.com/veiled-prophet/ Buy The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet Here's the original description for this episode. Enjoy! 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: https://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. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

We're joined by first time guest Bobby Campbell, creator of the beautiful comic book adaptation of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy, Tales of the Illuminatus! as well as many, many other wonderful things. We also have back with us long time friend of the show Gabriel Kennedy, author of Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Together we dig into some ideas about how we can make sense of things, stay sane, and win when the times get tough. Along the way we talk about why people are attracted to certainty over nuance, the ways that media and outright propaganda can shape our perception, and ultimately how Discordianism and RAW's Maybe Logic can cut through the noise. The topics range widely with a crowd like this. We dip into how RAW differs from a lot of superficially similar cultural figures. While scams, cults, and thought leaders (cringe) might identify real problems, they almost inevitably just end up replacing the status quo with their own half-baked ideas. RAW purposely went a different way. Instead of spoon feeding a replacement belief system, he encouraged people to stick with questioning and to keep interrogating reality (my words). We also bump into chaos theory, get into some gritty details about Discordianism, its founder Kerry Thornley (aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, aka Ho Chi Zen) and how he happened to know Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy's assassination, and so many other fun digressions. Inevitably, we keep coming back to the conclusion the chaos is unavoidable but how we respond to it is not. Instead of suffering under its weight, our time is better spent influencing our worlds with intention and valuing curiosity over certainty. Editor's comment: We had more than a few internet connection problems during this conversation. Gabriel enters and leaves like a chaos apparition throughout the episode. The unaffected of us were probably much more entertained by this than he was. But since he's a real pro, he didn't let it get him down. You, the listener, shouldn't either. Find Bob Campbell's work: https://www.bobbycampbell.net https://www.etsy.com/shop/WeirdoverseGiftShop https://talesofilluminatus.com/ https://x.com/RGC777 https://bsky.app/profile/bobbycampbell.net Bobby's Illuminatus! Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bobbycampbell/tales-of-illuminatus-3-opus-chao Find Gabriel Kennedy's work: https://chapelperilous.us https://gabrielpatrickkennedy.substack.com/ https://bsky.app/profile/propanon.bsky.social Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) 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/

That’s right everybody, Disclosure Day came and went and not much really happened. The reactions to the grifter ufologist hype cycle have been entirely predictable and hilarious. We’re talking too much about the substance of the UAP/UFO files released by the government. Mostly because how much can you say about a bunch of infrared videos of a bright dot moving around or FBI files that have been publicly available in essentially the same form for, in some cases, 60 or 80 years already? I think the proper way to understand what’s been happening over the past week is that it wouldn’t be a letdown if the hype men and women hadn’t been out there building anticipation. And whatever you do, don’t think for a second that any of this is anything more than a distraction from Trump failing completely to win a war with Iran that he started. Credit to this account for the outline of the hype cycle I built on in this ep: https://x.com/kyle_ferriter/status/2052768865503920471 Corrections: I gave credit to Robert Skvarla for noticing that the most recent file dump was in at least one case more censored than when the files were released in the past. It turns out that credit belongs to this account on Twitter: https://x.com/mrjeffknox/status/2053972920549232732 Follow Robert anyway while you're at it. He posts great stuff! https://x.com/RobertSkvarla Less importantly, I said that J. Edgar Hoover, while director of the FBI was looking into the communist ties of George Adamski. It was actually Frank Scully who he was looking into. Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY) 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/

We're talking about the Right's still rising reactionary star, Nicholas Joseph Fuentes. Fuentes’ videos posted on Rumble are regularly watched by 100s of thousands of people, but aside from a brief brush with Donald Trump as a dinner guest of Kanye West, he's been almost completely dismissed by mainstream conservatives. That is, until the last year or so. Since last summer, he’s appeared on multiple interview shows including Candace Owens, Dinesh D’Souza, Patrick Bet-David, and Piers Morgan but by far the most consequential person to host him last fall was Tucker Carlson. Despite their eventual falling out, Fuentes’ conversation with Carlson on The Tucker Carlson Show not only exposed Fuentes to Carlson’s extremely large audience (it was watched over 7 million times on YouTube and 18.5 million times on Twitter, if you can believe anything Elon Musk says), but it was also the chummiest, possibly aside from his October chat with Alex Jones. Fuentes is the most effective personality and movement leader who’s consistently out MAGAed Trump. He’s also the most successful among all those who've tried at separating the America First agenda from Trump and the cult of personality that surrounds him and has the potential to continue America Firsting after Trump is gone. That should terrify the Republican establishment since succession has always been that nut that the people at the center of MAGA have never cracked. This recent normalizing of Fuentes, who’s been known to liberally use the n-word, has praised the Taliban, is verbosely homophobic, proudly calls himself an anti-Semite and complains about the “organized Jewry”, and doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote or even go to school, has said he wants to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party,” shows that the gap between mainstream and the fringy far-far-right is as thin as it's ever been.

Welcome to Pristine Park, Ohio where the beer is light, the fireworks are silent, and everyone parties like it's the 4th of July, Polish style. I ambush Jules with a surprise recording session where I treat him to the story of the 4th of July LARPers. Based in Poland, for the last few years they've put on a 3 day live role playing session based around their takes on staples of American society. Set in the fictional Pristine Park trailer park, the 4th of July LARP isn't only a send up of the trailer park culture, it manages to be an incisive review of American society and the terrible turns of events that befall just about all of us.

Damn, this was a fun chat! Today we have Aaron Thorpe from The Trillbillies with us! Aaron’s hanging out with us today to talk about two of my favorite things: Star Trek and socialism. We also have as an unofficial second guest, the spirit of Kurt Schiller from Podside Picnic and formerly of Blood Knife magazine. He wasn't on the show but we mentioned him quite a few times during this episode. I keep asking myself, what is it about that show that keeps me coming back and watching episodes and seasons over and over again? At least one of the reasons is the social values.  Over and over again you see characters acting out a way of viewing the world that is entirely different from any examples I see in my own life. Just before we recorded, Kurt serendipitously posted on Substack an infinitely more eloquent exposition of this idea. Kurt describes the characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation as: [W]eird, ethics-obsessed utopian naval officers with a very particular culture and outlook that's not our own. They don't act like us, talk like us, and for the most part they don't really think like us. In fact, many of the aliens they encounter resemble modern people much more than the Federation - this was also the case in the original series, and both series use the Federation characters to comment on modern day society by imbuing alien species with our modern attributes (petty squabbles, greed, various culture wars, etc) while the Federation characters observe and comment from a fundamentally different viewpoint. Read Kurt's entire post here: https://substack.com/@knifepoint/note/c-227691504 The values defined throughout the early Star Trek series aren't just coincidental to the economic structure of the Federation, they're essential to creating and maintaining it. You can't get to their post-currency, post-scarcity world with replicators alone. You need to want it first, the replicators come later. Find Aaron online and check him out on The Trillbillies https://x.com/afrocosmist https://x.com/thetrillbillies Find Kurt on Substack https://substack.com/@knifepoint https://x.com/PodsideP Follow Wetwired on social https://x.com/wetwiredpod

In week 4 or so of Trump’s bumblings around in the Middle East, and after declaring victory a couple of times already, Trump has said that he’s willing to end the war as long as Iran agrees to just put things back the way they were before the US started bombing them and assassinated their leader. That’s just not good enough for some for the true Iran warmongers out there. We read from William Luti to hear some unhinged Iran war maximalism, learn about Trump's big uranium heist, and check in to see how AIPAC is doing in the midterms this year (not too good).

We get into the first five episodes of the HBO series Neighbors. What begins as a collection of petty disputes over lawns, fences, animals, and property lines quickly reveals something much deeper: a culture defined by paranoia, hyper-individualism, and the slow collapse of shared reality. From beachfront property battles in Florida to rural land feuds in Montana, suburban homesteading experiments in Indiana, and conspiracy-fueled standoffs in Texas, the show profiles a collection of misfits. And every one of them is convinced they’re in the right. And every one of them is also completely incapable of resolving their conflict. We have some chilling takeaways about how prominently surveillance culture (everyone is filming everyone) figures into nearly every neighbor feud, how actively posting about their beefs on social media virtually guarantees disputes will escalate, and how the convergence of conspiracy thinking, New Age spirituality, and political identity all but ensures a person will be a pig headed ass. We get into property rights and the legacy of Enlightenment brain worms, home ownership as a retirement plan (bad idea), American's obsession with lawns, and how getting the police involved never helps. If there’s one lesson to take away, it’s this: if you have neighbors, you’re on your own. You’d better figure out how to live with them. 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/ Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)

It might seem counterintuitive but conservative movements in the US are repeatedly shaped by donors, think tanks, and institutions not organic grassroots uprisings. Name the popular movement and 9 times out of 10 there's money interests behind it. And when the movement is genuinely organic, it's almost immediately co-opted by elites. Subscribe on Patreon to support making this show, get premium only episodes, and listen to our entire back catalog. From the Powell Memo through think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the rise of the Christian Right, and the legal infrastructure built by groups like the Federalist Society. The business elites, donors, media ecosystems, and culture-war politics fused neoliberal economics with religious nationalism and racial grievance. The throughline is continuity: each new “movement” is a remix of the same elite strategy: mobilize popular resentment while consolidating wealth and power at the top. All this makes you wonder whether there has ever been a genuinely conservative movement in the US. 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)

Last episode, we talked about the brewing conflict between what currently passes for mainstream conservatism and the schizophrenic reactionary Groyper politics of Nick Fuentes. We wrapped things up with the idea that conservatism has never really bothered to conserve anything. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the time they keep themselves busy fighting culture wars about immigration, civil rights, women’s rights, Christianity, and demonizing organized labor. What they keep trying to “conserve” is whatever the status quo power dynamic was when their grandad was a kid.  After the Civil War, they wanted slavery back. Women’s suffrage, desegregation—they wanted to get rid of all those things. This isn’t the first fight inside conservatism. As part of its periodic reinvention of itself, conservatives have gone back to the political well and dredged up the same slogans more than once. We tied this malleable idea of conservatism in with the evolution of the field of unashamed ideological political economists into what we now think of as the pseudoscience of Economics. At least the political economists were up front about whatever ideological bent they had. If you were a socialist, you’d start with your convictions about socialism being the absolute best way of running society on offer, and they work to come up with an economic theory or plan that made it seem possible. It was honest. By the time the 1800s were wrapping up, that wasn’t good enough. Economists wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started dressing the whole thing up like they were doing physics or pure math. They could talk about whatever economic system as if they were describing the laws of nature. That didn’t get rid of the ideology, though. It just buried it under metric tons of academic jargon and complicated formulas. After all, what’s the difference between modeling a tsunami and a stock market crash? The answer is that the tsunami wasn’t caused by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. That all brings us around to FDR’s New Deal and the era of John Maynard Keynes and what Matt Christman has called his "Keynesian machine for dispensing treats". As many contradictions as Keynes gathered into his economic model, it remains the only proven way to maintain capitalism. To set the tone, David Talbot has a quote in his book The Devil’s Chessboard about Bertie Pell, a friend of FDR’s who Talbot described as a “full-on traitor to his class”. “I am almost the last capitalist who is willing to be saved by you,” Pell wrote Roosevelt in 1936 in a letter beseeching the president to draft him for the New Deal cause. The following year, Pell wrote again, praising FDR’s accomplishments: “Your administration has made possible the continuance of American institutions for at least fifty years. You have done for the government what St. Francis did for the Catholic Church. You have brought it back to the people.” It turns out Pell was eerily correct. Those institutions managed to last just a little longer than 50 years. They are about gone now, though.

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. 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.

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: https://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. patreon.com/wetwired Music: Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)