If you missed my 4-22-22 interview on Gary Andersen's NIGHT DREAMS TALK RADIO, you can still catch up with last night's show by clicking right HERE.
Topics under discussion include Bela Lugosi, Charles Manson, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Manly P. Hall, MK-Ultra, mind control, paranormal research, unconstitutional surveillance, Southern California serial killers, and more!!!
My next book, OPERATION MINDFUCK, which is on the cusp of publication, has just received a new endorsement from none other than award-winning author Mitch Horowitz:
“One of the most difficult aspects of confronting QAnon conspiracism is finding the time and resolve to delve into its ever-expanding network of self-reinforcing connections and concepts. Robert Guffey does that work for you in OPERATION MINDFUCK, a codex to madness and a critical examination of how a massive fraction of our culture has imbibed a counter-reality. Guffey also explores underground sources lost on many mainstream historians, bringing us into an (occasionally ingenious) netherworld of outsider thought forms. Guffey is the Ernest Shackleton of paranoia—and one hopes his journey will result in a happier ending.”
—Mitch Horowitz, PEN Award-winning author of OCCULT AMERICA and UNCERTAIN PLACES
You can pre-order OPERATION MINDFUCK directly from OR Books by clicking HERE or (if you prefer) you can order it from Amazon right HERE!
Now, a new tranche of documents released by the DIA to Motherboard based on a FOIA request filed four years ago shows, in detail, the exotic and occasionally downright weird research priorities of the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP), an at-times overlapping program whose existence has been known about for several years. Some of these documents were also released several weeks ago to John Greenewald at the Black Vault; others have been circulating on Reddit for the past several weeks, indicating that the DIA has recently released a backlog of very old FOIA requests. The Sun also published some details about some of the documents, which it also obtained via FOIA, earlier this month. (AATIP and AAWSAP appear to have been, in practice, almost interchangeable; a DIA spokesperson previously told Greenewald, “[AATIP] was the name of the overall program. [AAWSAP] was the name of the contract that DIA awarded for the production of technical reports under AATIP.”)
The nearly 1,600 pages of documents released to Motherboard are a mix of scientific research, contracts, presentations, briefings, and memos related to the program; there are also many documents written for or by former Senator Harry Reid, who was responsible for the creation of the program, that detail meetings about AATIP or AAWSAP, argue for or against certain research or contracts, and the like. In many cases, documents prepared for the DIA about the theoretical applications of certain technologies were prepared by a person or entity whose name is redacted. Motherboard is publishing the full scope of what we received for transparency and to aid researchers and other journalists. Those documents are available here.
The documents make clear that the AAWSAP was focused on studying the defense and military capabilities of a variety of exotic speculative technologies, including invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes, stargates, negative energy, antigravity, high frequency gravitational wave communications, and an (obviously) never-carried out proposal to tunnel a hole through the moon using nuclear explosions. (“Gravity is the bane of aerospace transportation,” one DIA reference document reads.) In the coming weeks, Motherboard will examine a few of these proposals in detail.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Heads up! I'll be appearing on Gary Andersen's NIGHT DREAMS TALK RADIO later tonight at 7:00 PM (PST) to discuss CHAMELEO and related High Weirdness. Tune in!
What follows is a brief excerpt from David L. Ulin's 4-6-22 LOS ANGELES TIMES interview with novelist Steve Erickson. The interview focuses on Erickson's latest book, AMERICAN STUTTER:
Steve Erickson’s “American Stutter: 2019-2021” is a howling yawp of a book, a diary that becomes a work of witness and of reckoning. “This is not a … memoir,” Erickson writes. “It’s not a novel, either. Everything that any reader believes to be fiction may be remembered. Everything that sounds remembered may be fiction.” Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a hallucinyx, which Erickson defines as “the literary equivalent of a hallucinogen,” before admitting — or does he? — that this is an invented word.
In many ways, the slipperiness tells us everything we need to know.
Erickson has long eclipsed boundaries; “Leap Year” (1989), his account of the 1988 presidential election, incorporates elements of the fantastic, while his recent novels “These Dreams of You” (2012) and “Shadowbahn” (2017) engage histories real and imagined and fictionalize the author’s family. The same characters — or their counterparts — appear in “American Stutter.”
In more basic terms, the book is an impassioned argument against the chaos of the Trump presidency and its hateful politics, the collapse of civility and common cause. For Erickson, such breakdowns coincide with creative challenges and the breakdown of his marriage, which he addresses through a searingly personal lens....
To read the entire interview, click HERE.
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Given the fact that today would have been the 133rd birthday of a certain Nazi dictator, perhaps this would be an appropriate occasion to watch this minor masterpiece of American comedy....
"You Nazty Spy!" (1940)
My new book, OPERATION MINDFUCK, is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Take a few moments to marvel at Daniel Zender's haunting cover and Alan Moore's fantastic blurb, and then pre-order the book right HERE!!!
This surreal combination of horror-movie shocks and fascist marching orders is the signature of QAnon, which emerged from the dark corners of the internet in 2017 and soon became the galvanizing force behind Trump supporters, both during Trump’s presidency and in the volatile, ongoing aftermath of the 2020 election. But despite the strange pervasiveness of QAnon, its origins remain obscure. Who is behind QAnon’s messaging, and what do they want? And why do they pair their extreme political agenda with such obviously made-up, phantasmagorical beliefs?
In Operation Mindfuck, Robert Guffey argues that this is not as mysterious as QAnon’s anonymous “drops” of cryptic directives seem to be. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of conspiracy theories and mixing deep-dive research, political analysis, and firsthand notes from QAnon’s underbelly, Guffey insists that we’ve seen it all before.
Unraveling QAnon’s patchwork quilt of recycled material, from pulp-fiction spook stories to Hunter S. Thompson-style pranksterism to Nixon-esque dirty tricks, Guffey diagnoses QAnon as a highly engineered ploy, calibrated to capture the attention and lock-step loyalty of its audience. Will its followers ever realize that they’ve been had? Can this new American religion be dispelled as a cult like any other? The answers, Operation Mindfuck reveals, are hidden in plain sight.
Here's an excerpt from my 8-30-20 SALON article entitled "Making Sense of QAnon: What Lies Behind the Conspiracy Theory That's Eating America?":
"In 2017, a year after Trump’s election, I published a novel entitled UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES, which was about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. After wading through hours of this humorless QAnon material, in which even the most innocuous Disney cartoons are flensed of fun and replaced with dark speculations about the demonic symbols hovering like unholy specters over Uncle Walt’s films, I’m beginning to think that my novel was far more prescient that I could have imagined."
Further proof of the existence of the "Humor Virus" can be found in Emily Crane's 4-7-22 NEW YORK POST article entitled "Marjorie Taylor Greene Reports Jimmy Kimmel to Cops Over Will Smith Joke":
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said late Wednesday that she had reported Jimmy Kimmel to Capitol Police after the late-night host joked on air that Will Smith should slap her.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Would you like to see more "Humor Virus" Proofs? If so, you can find them in this CRYPTOPOST and this CRYPTOPOST!
PRAISE FOR
“By turns mystical and ashcan-real, insanely funny and grimly ghastly, Guffey’s novel cuts a zigzag trail through conventionality as it follows Elliot Greeley in his half-serious, half jesting quest for some deeper meaning to existence. If you build your life on laughs, what happens when the laughs disappear? Kissing cousin to Max Barry’s novel Lexicon, about killer language, and to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, about language killed, Guffey’s standup debut is standout speculative fiction.”
--Paul DiFilippo, Locus
“Taps into the cultural zeitgeist…. A nihilistic
satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new
level.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“Guffey’s debut takes full advantage of an
absurd, unexpected premise, delivering one of the strangest dystopian novels in
a year filled with them.”
--B&N Sci-Fi &
Fantasy Blog
“Guffey’s sardonic, cleverly written comedic
debut relies heavily on absurd synchronicity, bold characterization, and heavy
irony to make its points about the apocalyptic nature of American
humorlessness.”
--Publishers Weekly
“Not only a novel unique to this [political]
moment, but one that is to comedy what Catch-22 was to war. One
of the great books of the year.”
--Adam-Troy Castro, Sci
Fi Magazine
“A playful amalgam of Andy Kaufman and Philip K.
Dick by way of Shaun of the Dead.”
--Damien Lincoln Ober, author
of Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America
“This satirical tale explores the role of comedy
in maintaining a healthy democracy…. A clever concept.”
--Kirkus Reviews