The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
The Arterburn Radio Transmission is a blend of cutting edge commentary, fused with guests who are the newsmakers and trailblazers of our time. Your host Tony Arterburn is a former Army paratrooper, entrepreneur, and historian. Tony brings his unique perspective to the issues facing our country, civilization, and planet.
The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
#36 Paratruther - Catcher in the Conspiracy
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is Paratruther episode number 36. I've got Mr Anderson and his brain. I always mention your brain, mr Anderson, this top priority here.
Speaker 2:Apply pressure on me to do well. I know what it is.
Speaker 1:So I bring the chaos and you bring the order.
Speaker 1:So order ab ko there you go, everybody's like illuminati confirmed at this point. Um no, this is an interesting. It's going to be a fun episode, if, if you like, conversation on esoteric, hidden history, strangeness and connectivity to the zeitgeist, if that makes any sense. A little background here before I tell you what the episode's about. Folks, in 1997, I was 17 years old and a movie called Conspiracy Theory came out with Mel Gibson. You've probably seen it if you're anywhere near my age.
Speaker 1:Great movie, and in the 90s this was, this was rife for, like, there was the right wing, if you even want to call it that, like the movement that sprung up in the post-Ruby Ridge and Waco, and it culminated, kind of just peaked, right around the time of Oklahoma City, which is a that. The reality that we're shoveled, that we're spoon-fed by the mainstream media or by the educational establishment is nonsense. Educational establishment is nonsense and I understood that very well. You know I've talked about this before my dad, who's, you know, very successful. But you know, after again, those events like Ruby Ridge and and Waco and the assault weapons ban, he started to to question what the hell's going on Like and so I went to meetings with him. I've got to see Bo Grites speak, speak. He was, you know they just awesome.
Speaker 1:We need to do one on him oh, we need to do one on bo like I met him in person a couple of times. Uh, just an amazing individual, listen to him on the radio. When I was, you know, 15 years old and I tune in. This was like the patriot radio, wars and stuff. I grew up around this. I mean, my dad had like copies of like black helicopters over amer Wars and stuff. I grew up around this. I mean, my dad had copies of black helicopters over America and stuff.
Speaker 1:I knew about conspiracy theory and one of the connecting issues with the strangeness of our times, especially the 20th century. If you watch the movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson is as soon as he goes and he has, he has to his comfort item like his, his blankie, like Linus has on the peanuts, is a copy of the catcher in the rye and he goes into a bookstore, if I'm my memory serves, and as soon as they scan it it goes into like a database and they're like, because they were looking for him, like who's buying the catcher in the rye and we're going to get into like JD Salinger and the catcher in the rye and other things. But it wasn't until 2009 I was going through. It was a strange time in my life too. I was out in Utah, I went out to to go to the VA there and I there with a friend of mine that I was in combat with, and the day that I was leaving, having gone to the VA and that's a whole other podcast how strange that time was for me.
Speaker 1:So I just turned 30. And he had a copy of the Catcher in the Rye and I was in the utah airport. It was like a massive delay, weather delays getting back to to dallas, and so I read the entire book. Just, you know, in the, in the difference in time and waiting and delays and everything, I read the catcher in the rye and I that was probably the worst thing I could have read at that time too, but I'm like you know, I have to be weird well, he wrote it going into war, so it's right.
Speaker 1:It's really funny yeah, it's a, it's a and it's such a strange book like there's the mere fact and I don't want to ruin some of the notes that you have, but the mere fact that this could, that the catcher in the rye, is some kind of comforting thing. It's an awful, awful book. Like it's, just like it's not. I mean, if you really dig into the, the character and the uh, the message there it's, it's almost like it's you're reading something that I think is meant for something else, like and and that's probably why it has such a, the mystique around it and the lore around it is because what you're reading isn't really the story. There's something, I think there's like a hidden message in it, but I want to throw it to you, mr Anderson, again, welcome back to episode number 36. And I'm glad you're here with with your brain, and that you're able to to communicate from the other dimension that you're in, sir.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm glad we're doing this. We've been talking about doing one on old Jerome JD Salinger for a while and there's a pretty good documentary if people are interested. He passed in 2010. I believe it came out in 2013 called Salinger, and it does a pretty good job delving into a lot of the history that I didn't even know about. I mean, I watched this documentary I think almost a decade ago, a little after it came out, but there's some strange stuff about Catcher and so why I mentioned it was being written while he was going into war.
Speaker 2:Was he was actually initiated into World War II on D-Day? Was he was actually initiated into World War II on D-Day? And he was initially rejected by the army for medical reasons. He had to really fight tooth and nail to get in, but that's when he was initiated and at the time he had six chapters of Ketcher in his backpack and he mentioned later it was the only thing that kept him alive. He mentioned this to a guy named Whit Burnett, who is a short story professor at Columbia, which is where he went, and actually the editor at this magazine called Story Magazine that published Salinger's first piece because he'd written a lot of you know pieces and things like that before, but this was his first really effort to write a book and so there's actually a picture that's captured. It's the only picture of him riding catcher and you can see him sitting down at a bench during World War II.
Speaker 2:And so his entire mission during World War II was kind of strange in and of itself. He was in counterintelligence, so he was picking up Nazis right and trying to extract information from them, and even after the war I mean, the poor guy he did suffer like a psychological breakdown. There was like one part of a letter I remember, where he was writing to his mom and he said I don't even remember what it's like to be a civilian. You know I dig my foxholes down to what a coward would do. That's how deep I'm going.
Speaker 2:Because he was scared, he was petrified, but he ended up being admitted into Nuremberg Hospital and was there for a couple of months after VE Day and the Germans surrendered and then he stayed there after that VE Day and after his. You know, whatever he was doing at Nuremberg Hospital when he was admitted there and was in this denazification program and actually one of the people he interrogated that was a member of the Nazi party was his first wife named Sylvia, and he married her, which was a big no-no and brought her back to the States. And there was a research who confirmed it through logs at Ellis Island that he did marry her. And he had this weird connection where he said they could communicate telepathically and they met each other in dreams and could finish the dreams with each other. So I've often wondered how this ties into MKUltra. And again, he hadn't finished the book yet and he actually didn't even finish it when World War II concluded or his service in World War II concluded. It actually took like another year or so afterwards. So I've always wondered.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's when it was published. But he fought a while to get it published because he took it to I forget which place it was. But the guy, the lead editor, after reading the book said it's a good book. But of course Holden is crazy. And so Salinger like stormed out and was crying when he left because I think Holden Caulfield in a lot of respects was a version of his shadow self.
Speaker 2:But I'm often interested in what sort of black magic you know, so to speak, is wrapped up in that book and what kind of mind experiments may have been performed at Nuremberg Hospital and whether Sylvia was some sort of handler for him for a while, because they were actually married like two years. But shortly after arriving in the U S he he filed for an annulment on the on the grounds of deception. But if you're working in counterintelligence that long and you have friends who are working in counterintelligence who know you very well and it's illegal to bring home a Nazi, let alone marry her, then of course they knew that Right. So why'd they allow it? That's a lot to unpack, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I would also say that my experience in combat and being in an elite unit to work in counterintelligence I only met one guy in the entire and I met people from CIA, I met people from FBI, I met people from Delta Force and other things that we worked with, but I only met one guy who was CI and he was a little bit older than me at the time. This was early 2000s and I thought what do you do again? He just showed up one day and he explained to me counterintelligence. I said we have military intelligence here. Why are you not attached to them? I'm not in the MI, it's a small club. I mean, it's like it's a. It's a small club. You know like again, I only met one, one guy, the entire mind that I know of, and there's psychological operations, there's a, there's military intelligence or special operations, but counterintelligence is a whole other animal.
Speaker 2:I know. So I wondered how he even Was commissioned to do that, somebody who had no. I mean, he actually went to a military school. I think he went to Valley Forge, because he would often joke with his friends that JD stood for juvenile delinquent, because he was kicked out of so many prep schools as a kid. A kid. So they put him in Valley Forge, a military school, and he kind of got his act together, but outside of that he had no military training.
Speaker 2:So how do you go from that into counterintelligence immediately? I never understood that. And then after you suffer a mental breakdown and are hospitalized or institutionalized at Nuremberg Hospital for a couple of months, how do they not send you immediately back? How do they keep you on the payroll, so to speak, and working towards? You know it had to have been Operation Paperclip, he had to have a hand in that.
Speaker 2:But it's also really telling to me because if you kind of follow the arc of his storyline of him wanting to be a writer and going to Columbia and, like I said, he met that guy, whit Burnett, a professor at Columbia, published his first short story. He just fought so hard to be published in the New Yorker and it was funny because up until the breakout of our involvement in the war following Pearl Harbor that same year he just kept being issued rejection after rejection. I think one response from the New Yorker after rejecting one of his short stories was something like it would have worked out better for us if Mr Salinger had not strained so much for cleverness. But right before Pearl Harbor he did have something accepted and it was called A Slight Rebellion Off Madison and it was the first time he introduced this character, holden Caulfield. He was the author of this particular short story and it was funny because it was accepted and then they shelved it because immediately following the acceptance I guess they wanted to reorient themselves or make priority for things that might have been more thematic for the war Because, like I mentioned, pearl Harbor happened almost immediately after that.
Speaker 2:But the short story even before that was weird. It was titled I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. I don't know why he wrote that, but he did so. He was livid that they shelved it after accepting it and he kept trying to write short stories and he had some published even when he was overseas fighting during World War II. But the first one he wrote that was actually published after coming back from World War II was titled I'm Crazy, and again it was this reemergence of Holden Caulfield. But that's just so telling to me. After you're institutionalized, the first short story you write that's published is called I'm Crazy, and you see Holden show up for the second time. It's odd.
Speaker 1:When's the last time you read the book? A while ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a long time. I got really bored with it actually.
Speaker 1:I mean I long time I got really bored with it. Actually, I mean I absorbed it. There's a theme in there. It's very unmasculine, so what I got from it it's like mass shooter type rage against society. That's the way I felt when I read it. It was like the expectations this young man, holden Caulfield, has, and then he's just constantly rejected, dejected, if you will. There's an underlying theme there of not fitting in being an outlier. Um he, he uses the word phony yes over and over.
Speaker 1:It's a phony, you're a phony. I just remember that's what I kept, like you know some of the thing, and then gd, like just gd, all the time right you know, in the book.
Speaker 2:Right, there's something with that and a lot of people will um talk about the, the last, how the book concludes, like the last two sentences, and it's what is it? Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. It's like I don't agree with that. Don't tell anybody anything, just keep it all pinned in. Like that's the recipe for like an implosive personality, especially if you're going around taking the Lord's name in vain and everything and calling people phonies, which, if you look at some of the people who you know you were mentioning them at the beginning of the show you know the guy who killed John Lennon them at the beginning of the show, like you know the guy who killed john lennon and then, shortly after that, you know you had reagan and that's how they labeled people were phonies, right yeah martin david chapman right shot john lennon.
Speaker 1:Was that 1980? That? Was 1980 and then 81, you had john hinkley. I was just looking here. John hinkley jr was a lonely mid-20 who was obsessed with the book the Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon. So he was obsessed with John Lennon but he shot Reagan and of course he also had the Jodie.
Speaker 1:Foster, you know, supposedly had the Jodie Foster obsession After his assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981, police found the catcher in the rye in his hotel room. Hinckley later admitted to being an admirer of Mark David Chapman and studying his attempt on John Lennon which wasn't an attempt, I mean he killed John Lennon.
Speaker 2:But Right Outside the Dakota.
Speaker 1:Right, and of course you get into the whole Hinckley background. Like Hinckley background. Hinckley and I can look this up and maybe not unless they've scrubbed it from the internet, but his brother, john Hinckley's brother, had a meeting with one of the Bushes. The Bushes and the Hinckleys were really well connected, of course. Bush 41, george Herbert Walker George Herbert Walker Bush was vice president at the time. You know stood to gain everything by Reagan being shot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I shot him and his press secretary and they didn't even look at that. Right, they just kind of glossed over that connection. And John Hinckley, I think he said if you want want my defense, all you have to do is read catcher in the rye. But now he's writing some good country music, isn't he?
Speaker 1:he's on youtube. Uh, yeah, he's, I see him right here. He's on youtube.
Speaker 2:He's writing some songs isn't that on that spotify list you shared with me?
Speaker 1:it's funny, john Hinckley's on YouTube and I got banned. So that's interesting, it's always fun. Yeah, there's like there's. There's articles up like just if you just type it in, like the bizarre connection between John Hinckley Jr and the Bushes. There's, it's tons of articles. Bush's son had dinner plans with Hinckley before shooting. Neil Bush, the son of Vice President George Bush, had a meeting with John Hinckley's brother yep, that's totally insane.
Speaker 2:And then there was someone, uh, in 89 I believe it was named rob bardo, right, he killed an actress, rebecca schaefer, and same thing, he was carrying a copy of catcher in the rye. He just had this kind of onslaught or pretty three hope high profile murders or attempted murders, and it's all being tracked back to catch her. So he put something dark in that book and again I've always wondered how much of that was was him or whatever he was programmed to write, if there was any programming after he was hospitalized at nuremberg I'm just looking stuff up as you talk too.
Speaker 1:I'm going to see if I can find, like the last. I remember reading the last page of the Catcher and the Riots, really strange. Let me see if I can find it.
Speaker 2:Well, he wrote a lot of strange things in addition to Catcher, though, so the first piece that was actually published in the New Yorker was completely strange as well, and it was following World War II and the title, if you want to read. It is called A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish, and it just goes into this guy who's on vacation with his wife and severely depressed so he decides to blow his brains out while she's sleeping in the bed next to him, and people thought this was a great story yeah, I'd always, I'd always wondered what the the draw was and then I read it, probably in a.
Speaker 1:You know, like my mental state at the time, I was obviously functioning. But you know, like my mental state at the time, I was obviously functioning, but you know, gone through a lot. This was like on the heels of my three tours overseas and stuff and and culminating in some personal stuff. And I remember reading at the time and it was uh, it did not provide any sort of like. I wasn't drawn to that at that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not really sure either. I mean outside of the, I mean discussing subjects like that, like someone on a vacation with their wife deciding to blow out their their brains while she sleeps and sleeping, you know, in the hotel next to him. It's just very taboo, right. It catches you off guard and maybe there wasn't a whole lot of writing styles like that at the time, but I mean I would be concerned with somebody writing that way. But he did it a lot. Actually.
Speaker 2:It was a theme in a lot of his short stories and he didn't really publish. He stopped publishing for the longest period of time and that's why people were, you know, kind of fed up with them. After a few years of releasing catcher, it's like, okay, you gave us this, what else do you have? And he retreated into, you know this, this area in the mountains, the white mountains, near the border of New Hampshire and Vermont, and I think he initially his intention was just to run like a gas station there. He retreated in a lot of ways, but he kept writing secretly, and so you might've heard mention of these stories that have never been published.
Speaker 2:There were some short stories that mentioned them, but he wrote actual books about this family called the Glass family and it's the same theme, it's the most bizarre, like setting up of a story or a certain group of characters.
Speaker 2:There's like seven brothers and sisters and they're all geniuses somehow and they participate on this television program called it's a Wise Child, on this television program called it's a Wise Child, and the eldest brother, who's like the most brilliant of all of them, for whatever reason, he commits suicide. So this idea of suicide and killing it's prevalent throughout all of his works. I mean he was a deeply depressed person and again I think back to that quote in that letter he wrote I believe it was his mom when he was serving and you know, digging his foxholes down to cowardly depths. You know you feel bad because he was suffering shell shock. I mean even the little bit of, you know, background research I was doing, I mean with his journey through World War Two. It wasn't even like they suffered the most casualties at D-Day, it was after that. I mean they would, they would like, cross across certain paths or fields and lose like 20 or 30 people.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and just hiding behind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hiding behind trees hoping you just don't get hit, I mean that would be a terrifying experience.
Speaker 1:I mean, d-day was June 1944, june 6th, and then the war concluded, you know, with V-E Day on May 8th 1945. So there was a lot of fighting in between. You know, d-day was pretty horrendous but there was a hot war all the way to the end day was pretty horrendous, but there was.
Speaker 2:There's a hot war all the way to the end, right, and there's some other interesting parts of that narrative with him in world war ii um, I think you've seen it. Have you seen a midnight in paris? Midnight in paris by woody allen. I think he actually took some details of salinger's life and put it in the main character, owen wilson's character. Because, if I remember correctly, ow Owen Wilson's character.
Speaker 2:Because, if I remember correctly Owen Wilson's character, he was a writer too, but he had never written a book before, and so while he was traveling to Paris with his hoity-toity wife and her family, he was in the process of writing this book. And then he'd take those walks right and he'd get picked up and transported to a different time period full of writers that he admired and, if you recall, ernest Hemingway was one of them and the depiction of Ernest Hemingway in that film is so funny. But he read Owen Wilson's book or the draft he had at that time and really admired it, and that meant a lot to Owen's character. Well, that actually happened to JD Salinger.
Speaker 2:So after the liberation of Paris and all of the celebrating that was going there, he actually met Ernest Hemingway and the draft of Catcher he had at the time. He passed it off to him and got feedback and Ernest Hemingway said he liked it or what was in it at the time. So it's an interesting detail Again. Just somebody again who's only published a couple of short stories really doesn't have a name for himself at that point is able to, you know, hold that much time with Ernest Hemingway and for him to review the work. Now, why Ernest liked it, I don't know. He might have just been nice.
Speaker 1:He might have just understood.
Speaker 2:There's if I say I don't like it, he might shoot himself just something.
Speaker 1:There's a, there's an energy in the, in the story that I found and maybe you have to be in a certain mindset. That always stuck with me and I still have the copy that I borrowed. I took that from a friend of mine that I was in combat with. You know there was a lot of. There was writers like Gore Vidal came out of world war two and had a a very anti-war slant his whole life. You know, after serving he was in the Pacific and he wrote his first novel. So he's around the same same age is, uh, jd, salinger and hemingway.
Speaker 1:He came out of world war one, he was an ambulance driver right you mentioned him being all the expats there and and uh, uh, rod serling, who wrote the twilight zone, was a paratrooper in the pacific and he came out and his serling's lessons I think he was had had shell shock or whatever you want to, his combat stress and all I mean it was you know anything about the pacific. He was a paratrooper in the Pacific, which you know. A lot of those guys. I mean they were fighting on these islands and these Japanese islands and you talk about like horrendous warfare at least, like if you're in Europe and you go through and you go through a French town and you are able to kick the Nazis out. There's wine and food and people. That's not how it was in the Pacific. I mean, it's just a series of islands Like Douglas MacArthur had this strategy of island hopping and it would be like places like Iwo Jima and stuff that were just hellscapes and guys would go blind from drinking like aftershave and stuff, like they had no booze or they had no.
Speaker 1:There was no recreation, just war, you know. And so like you have uh serling, who I identify with so much. That's why later in life I was like I just gravitated towards the twilight zone so much, because serling would lay out these morality tales and I have a biography on him called the Television's Last Angry man. It's really good and it just talks about his morality. I don't get that from Salinger. I don't get that same. I get something else. There's an underlying dark energy in the Catcher in the Rye and then it permeates into so much of our assassin culture, as we mentioned, pinkly uh and uh, mark david chapman, but there's others. I mean, in your research did you find it's not just those two, those are the most prominent. But like that book pops up and you could tie that to things like Mind Control or MKUltra. Maybe there's a combination of words in there or something that people are picking up on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. The other person, like I mentioned, that was higher profile, was 89, and it was Robert Bardo, and he killed the actress um rebecca schaefer, and he was carrying a copy of catcher in the sky with him, uh, when he was apprehended. Yet that the whole, his whole um personality. I mean he came from wealth. Jd salinger did his. His father was named solomonalinger and Solomon was the son of a rabbi of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and Solomon was an importer of cheeses and meats, which I guess is pretty unkosher but made a lot of money. And his mother was named Marie and she actually had to change her name before she could be accepted into the family and marry into it. She actually had to change her name before she could be accepted into the family and marry into it, and so she changed it to Mariam.
Speaker 2:But he came from a lot of wealth. Even after World War II, while people were struggling to find work other writers that he associated with and played cards with he was living in this posh apartment with his parents on Park Avenue and so he almost had this way that he said he detested the lifestyle but he benefited a lot from it. He would say he wasn't impressed by the lifestyle. But it kind of reminds me, or reminded me of that interaction in the Aviator right when Howard Hughes and the mom says we don't care about money around here, mr Hughes, and he goes yeah, it's because you've always had it.
Speaker 2:You've always had it, excuse me and gets up and leaves. Well, he kind of had this attitude too and I think it permeates into his writing. I just think he comes across as a very angry person, and it's not only in the short stories he's written and how he communicated with friends. I mean, he lost a really close friendship of his because his friend worked underneath an editor at one of these publishing magazines and they were accepting one of JD's works and he said make sure nothing's changed. And he said I'll do what I can, but I don't have the final eyes on anything. The editor does that. And he expressed to the editor his friend did that. You need even the punctuation, like he will go crazy if you remove a comma from whatever he has written. Nothing can be changed without conveying it to him first and getting his acceptance. Well, the editor ended up, um, going along with all of that. But he changed the name of the actual short story to something like blue melody and jd salinger, like his friend, just felt awful. He said I don't know how I'm gonna to break this news to him. So they went to their favorite hangout, had a drink. He told them and he said JD just turned like this bright red and just said basically you're dead to me and left and never talked to him again and I remember watching an interview with his friend discussing it and he was almost on the verge of tears.
Speaker 2:So people were really expendable to him. So he had that arrogance to him that you tend to get from those sort of posh lifestyles, and I mean we were talking before the program about this. I mean, the way he treated young women wasn't very nice either. He had an affinity for, like, really young girls there was, yeah, so you want to talk to that. So after the war he met this one girl named Jean Miller who in her defense she really said nothing but nice things about him. But she did mention some details about how he, salinger, actually viewed his work and he thought it was ordained by God. But she was the one who really suggested that the process of him riding catcher stripped away layers of his soul and made him a more degenerate kind of depressed person. But he met her in Daytona Beach when he was on vacation and she was 14. And so the entire like week and a half Jean was there with her family. He was taking her on walks on the beach, eating, you know, feeding the seagulls popcorn, eating ice cream, and said before she was going to depart that day hey, you know, I'd really like to kiss you but I can't. He was about 30 at the time, so she was 14. So he later wrote a story called For Esma, with love and squalor, which was about this, this sergeant names.
Speaker 2:I think his name was Sergeant X and he was about to actually enter into World War Two, but he wasn't on the front lines yet. He was in a tea shop in England and in the short story it describes his mind teetering like on the brink of, you know, erupting in some way, and kind of compared it to like luggage teetering, you know, as you hit turbulence on an airplane. So he meets this girl who's 12 years old and he's trying to explain it to her and it kind of kind of reminded me of that scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You remember, when he's on the porch and he's having all those alcohol withdrawals and can't remember his lines. And he's talking to that young, pretty actress and she's like what are you reading? And he's talking about that story of the Bronco Buster with Easy Breezy and just about to cry. She's like it's okay, easy Breezy will be fine, you'll find out. And he goes well, give it 10 years and you'll be living it. And she goes what?
Speaker 2:So, anyways, this Sergeant X is confiding in a similar way with this 12 year old girl, but what she says to him at the end of the novel that he was writing after he met gene is so revealing to me. The girl tells sergeant x to be sure to return with all of his faculties, and it spells it out like f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s in in the short story. And so, yeah, you could think of faculties as arms and legs, but you, you know, when someone talks about a faculty, they're already thinking of something else, right? So I don't know, there was this sexual energy associated with it, at least that's what I picked up on. So he kept in communication with Jean Miller and, right, when she turned 18, like, he took her to New York and she was a virgin and she wasn't after that and he just stopped talking to her and he did this with a lot of other women, like his first wife was 19, claire douglas, before the war, there was a girl named una o'neill.
Speaker 2:Her father was this guy named eugene o'neill, who was who is the only only Nobel Prize winning dramatist and she used to be pictured in the Stork Club drinking milk and they were dating before he went to war and he was 25. When he went to war she was 16. And she ended up moving to LA being in a Charlie Chaplin film and he married her when she turned 18, and he was 53. But he did this a lot with girls, so he had this kind of garvin variety type really pretty smart girls, but very young, who really admired him and then once they kind of developed and became mature and that admiration started to teeter a little bit, he just got rid of them yeah, there's a spirit in the book that you get from Holden Caulfield.
Speaker 1:It's like a suspended maturity, arrested development kind of thing. There's something in that as well, like the pressure of manhood or responsibility is too much and he'd rather just be an outlier. He'd rather just be an outlier. And then if you look and this is just me by memory, but you know, he, I think he goes to New York in the book and then he gets a prostitute and she like wears a green dress. And so you fast forward, like Mark David Chapman, like recreates would, before he kills John Lennon, like he, he orders up like an escort with the same and asked for the same you know green dress and the type and all of that. And then, if I, if memory serves me as well, you may be able to back me up on this after Mark David Chapman shoots linen, he just sits down and starts reading the catcher in the rye.
Speaker 2:Right. He asked the cops where it was afterwards too, Like he needed to be close to it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Just like you were describing with Mel Gibson.
Speaker 1:That's why they wrote I think it was written into the film that way. But there's something to that and it's almost like it's an operating manual or something Like if you're very sick, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a lot to what you're saying about this kind of Peter Pan philosophy of never having to grow up, because the last girl that was younger that he had a relationship with was this writer. She was a young writer, her name was Joyce Maynard and she was 18. And again, just that garden variety really admired him because he would write letters to these girls randomly, and she later found out that he did this with everybody. In fact, the last person he married, colleen O'Neill I think. He married in 88, and he died in 2010. They stayed married. All that time he did the same thing he was courting these young girls. 2010,. They stayed married. All that time he did the same thing he was courting these young girls.
Speaker 2:But anyway, she ended up moving in with him and he had this very regimented schedule about, you know, when they were going. He was a Hindu. He was a lot of things. He had like a giant statue of Buddha in his little compound, but they would do some sort of breathing exercises, meditation, and then it was just steadfast writing. But he also liked to watch old movies and his favorite movie, according to her, was this movie I'd never heard of. It was called Lost Horizon and it is about a place these people would go and never grow old, and that was something, according to her, that they watched all the time and it was his favorite. So there's something in his psychology that I don't know. It impeded his ability to like grow up, and so he was always attracted to these young women. And again, gene millard never said he did anything inappropriate until he was 18. But you know, as soon as I mean that's kind of shitty, right, I mean I mean she's a virgin, and then after that you know I don't like you anymore.
Speaker 1:It's almost like he's grooming, yes, and then once it hits a certain, it's kind of like you hear about these actors and stuff, big wigs, you know, like DiCaprio, yeah, dicaprio.
Speaker 2:Didn't Ricky Gervais have like a? He had some joke about that when he hosted about something. You know, something that was very young and he mentioned still too old for Leonardo DiCaprio.
Speaker 1:Right, you see that, you see that as something in entertainment and others like it's.
Speaker 2:It's pervasive and and others like it's uh, it's pervasive, yeah, it's very predatory. Um so again, she didn't really speak ill of him but it was just a really crappy thing to do to somebody, especially that young, but it was a common theme in his life. But he, he was a weird guy. I mean he locked himself up. He didn't even do interviews for the longest period of time.
Speaker 2:I think his last interview, until 1974, was something like in the early 1950s and he just randomly called this journalist who worked for the San Fran Bureau. Her name was Lacey Fosberg, she used to work at, I think, the New York Times and was on the police beat. And she answered the phone and he just said this is a man called Selinger and the reason he was calling her was because at the time there was this pirated selection of short stories that were being sold and they were his short stories that he never wanted to be published that way, and so he was raising awareness of that. And what was so weird to me about that is after she published her article about the conversation, because she naturally asked like what are you up to these days? And he's like I'm always writing, I'm writing 10 hours a day, but he just hadn't published anything around that time.
Speaker 2:But the FBI immediately got involved after that conversation and that that pirated selection of short stories. They were just nowhere to be found after that. So how did he carry so much weight that, not even using a lawsuit, he could get the FBI involved? That doesn't make sense to me, unless he was complicit in some other activities, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but once you're in in in intelligence, that doesn't make sense to me, unless he was complicit in some other activities. Right files showed that Lee Harvey Oswald was had connections to intelligence, which anybody you know, like our friend Don Jeffries, has been researching this his entire adult life has already known that. You just couldn't prove it. There wasn't like definitive evidence other than like, when they went in to get Lee Harvey Oswald's belongings he had a camera that only operatives were given in the 1950s. It wasn't something that was mass produced. If you were in a certain intelligence apparatus, as a matter of fact, I just found this as you were speaking. This is off of just some links I found on rareus. It had the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald.
Speaker 1:The man charged with JFK's murder also had connections to this book. In a raid of his Dallas apartment following the assassination, catcher in the Rye, along with other books like George Orwell's Animal Farm and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf were found. And this also mentions, you know, lee Harvey Oswald's, not not that I think Lee Harvey Oswald is the lone shooter, but he definitely had Trump does that's so unfortunate so in Fort Worth? Well, yeah, that's a whole. That's a whole other pair of truth. I don't even understand that. I watched Trump, live on air back in 2016 or so, call out Ted Cruz's dad for being associated with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Speaker 2:I didn't know.
Speaker 1:And I was like whoa, like that was a. I'd never seen anything like that and we're in a completely different reality now, but I was. This says a psychological assessment conducted from a short stint he spent this is lee harvey oswald. That he spent in a juvenile reformatory due to consistent truancy from school revealed his tendency for vivid fantasy life. So that's another like the peter pan phenomenon of like the suspended. Know, like they, they pick these people, like if you look at Hinckley or you look at Mark David Chapman, these aren't winners. You know, like this isn't like it's, it's a very it's. Or any of the school shooters, or was it? Who was the? I'm thinking of Dylanylan clebold, the people from columbine there was, you know, outliers and losers suspended. You know, in this weird place between being a boy and being a man, like they had that as well. Yeah, adam lanza, that was adam. If you look at adam lanza from from the sandy hook thing, whoa, you almost alien, like uh, but nowhere near being a man.
Speaker 2:There's, there's something, there's something to that yeah it's almost like a primer for it yeah, they're, that's what I was about to say. It's like they're primed in certain ways to be receptive yeah, uh, I'm just.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna read a little bit from this article. Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr behaved so strangely once killing their target. Chapman was found reading the book and Hinckley was still trying to shoot the gun that he had emptied of bullets. Yeah, he was still trying to shoot it. Most assassins killing people of such high stature don't kill their targets so publicly or stick around at the scene of the crime.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like the Manchurian candidate.
Speaker 2:And people were drawn. I mean, there are so many accounts of people driving across country after reading that book to seek him out because there are rumbles that he operated some gas station in the white mountains and people would actually find out where he lived, even though locals tried to guard him from it because it became so, so prevalent. They would make contact with him and bring all their troubles. There's this one interaction where I think Salinger is asking the kid, like you know, what are you doing here? And the kid responded I hope you could tell me that, which is a really weird response. And I think Salinger responded something like you know, I'm not a psychiatrist, you know, have you been medically evaluated? I might pose difficult questions but I don't pretend to have the answers. But regardless of all of that, that happened a lot. Evaluated, I might pose difficult questions but I don't pretend to have the answers. But regardless of all of that, that happened a lot.
Speaker 2:And I remembered I watched something years ago and it was highlighting John Lennon. People would do that to John Lennon. They would just show up to his house and ask him about his lyrics. I remember seeing a recording of one of it and he was like sometimes I just play with words. They don't even mean anything. Yeah, but in both of those cases, which are connected right through the murder of John Lennon, that was happening to them, there was something that each of those guys was writing that was drawing people to them like a giant magnet, and that's what I don't understand.
Speaker 2:That's where the conspiratorial side of me starts saying okay, well, are they planting patterns in the words or the phrasing, or something like that? Are there certain triggers that they're laying out in their art?
Speaker 1:I don't know just more from this article that popped up. It's some of the same themes that you hit on, and saying that the novel some people believe it to be autobiographical can be seen. The author is talking about his own experience in the army, which is where they started the whole book. Jd Salinger spent a year in the army in 1942. It consisted of two phases. Initially, his job was to interrogate captured Nazis. With the Counterintelligence Corps, an intelligence sector responsible for providing security for military installations and staging areas, located enemy agents and acted to the counter stay-behind networks. They also provided training to combat units in security, censorship, the seizure of documents and the dangers of booby traps. Towards the end of the year, the CIC joined Operation Paperclip. This was a tight-lipped operation that involved the US recruiting over 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians to help win the race with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Speaker 1:Well, so much came out of that. Like that's where you get the idea of the Fourth Reich and the you know so many have pointed out. Like you, look at Stanley Kubrick's work, you know Dr Strangelove, and like you and I have watched that many times, my Fiora it's like Peter Seller trying not to do the Nazi salute. You know, and, but that was real. You know, like they brought in, you know, the space program and the military, industrial and intelligence fluoride in the water mind control. That's when you get the birth of the CIA in 1947, along with the Air Force and the NSA, and following Roswell, that's the birth of the National Security State. But it's really the birth of what so many researchers, people like Jim Mars, have pointed out is the birth of the Fourth Reich.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:The fusion of that.
Speaker 2:And that wasn't really known at the time. I mean, when Kubrick released Dr Strangelove, that was 64.
Speaker 1:Hold on a second. Is that Hinckley's country song? Yeah, it's Hinckley. I was 64. Hold on a sec. I don't want to my phone.
Speaker 2:Is that Hinkley's country song?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's Hinkley. Can you believe it? I just reached over my phone and started playing, so that's pretty interesting. I didn't even touch it. So yeah, it must be.
Speaker 2:Even the imagery right of Catcher in the Rye and how that book gets its name. It's about this group of children, like thousands of children, right in this field of rye, and they're headed for a cliff and he's trying to save them from that imminent doom. I mean, that's just weird imagery to me. You know, it again conjures up this idea of grooming intellect in some way.
Speaker 1:There's just so much here Looking at. I mean, we get the major themes with Hinkley and Chapman, but it really it permeates and there's a whole subculture. You talked about the documentary Salinger. I watched that about the documentary Salinger I watched that about the time I was running for Congress I remember it was on Netflix or something and I watched it a couple of times. I was always fascinated with Salinger, just like he's such a recluse.
Speaker 2:And you talk about living in the white mountains, right, and uh, that guy trying to track him down and just have a face-to-face with him before he died yeah, he thought he was owed it because he read the book and this guy was married, he had, like children and he was going through this crisis, I think in his early 30s. Yeah, it's, it's, it's. It's all very strange and the thing that was really interesting about that documentary it's a little long but it has a lot of interesting details. But they mentioned there are a lot of books to be published that are in his literary trust. Because he had this huge vault. Even that girl, joyce Maynard, the last one before he he married his um, his last wife, when she was living with him. She would see him access the vault and put things in it but didn't really get a glimpse of what was in there. But in his trust there's all sorts of books that are still released, to be published and I think his son, matt, is overseeing that.
Speaker 2:But there's one book that's about a counterintelligence agent's diary in World War II. There's another one about a World War II love story where the main character meets somebody and they have this telepathic communication which again he attested that he and his first wife, sylvia, had the Nazi. And then there's a religious text and a complete chronology of the glass family and he what was so interesting to me about the glass family is he started writing about the glass family in his little bunker. You know he'd escape for weeks at a time in his little bunker and tell his wife. He didn't want to be disturbed. But he really started writing about the the glass family in 55, which was the same year his, his daughter, was born. So there's this divergence. He had like two families that were created in 55, but the one he prioritized was his, made up one. That's all strange, but I would like to see what these books are about, especially the counterintelligence agents diary and then the World war ii love story.
Speaker 1:Those sound strange well, there's definitely a theme. You look in the some of the, they've called it the, the bible of teenage angst, which is that's what the catcher in the rye is. It's like just highlighting that but keeping you in that state of not fitting in and being an outlier Right. There's something to that. It really hearkens and screams to me like mental illness. That's what I felt like when I finished the book. I was like this is just not. I probably read it the worst possible time I could have read it at, but it stuck with me because I but I, I didn't, I didn't need to have a copy of it with me at all times. I never felt like. I never went back to it and read it again.
Speaker 2:I never thought it was you should have put like three in the background wearing a cat from the right it had no effect on me.
Speaker 1:It hasn't really affected me. Hold on, I have to read a chapter before we can go live. There's a lot to unpack. There's something with him, there's something in the book, and that's why I thought it would be at least a short episode here on Paratrooper, just to kind of unpack the history and who this guy was and the strangeness of it. And sometimes these type of episodes will lead the audience. If you listen to it, you're like I might want to know more and dig into it, because it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it drove people to love this book so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it all butts up right against you know MKUltra Jolly West right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That documentary Chaos just came out on Netflix, if anybody wants to watch it. It's loosely based on Tom O'Neill's book, but I mean, I can't help but think there's some sort of MKUldra you know black magic going on here, just with all the details of his war experience and the hospitalization and again through the entire arc of his tenure in the army and counterintelligence and then later Operation operation paperclip.
Speaker 1:He was still writing the book, so all those activities were influencing his psyche, whether he knew it or not, maybe well, it definitely had made its mark, especially in the 20th century and in the lore of assassination and conspiracy and mind control, control. It will forever be there, if you know anything about this genre, and it just hangs there. It's an enigma. What is in it that is inspiring? I guess the interpreter you know like if you have a mind that is susceptible to whatever that is, it clearly infects it, and if not, then it's just a book to you. But I don't know of any other work like this.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Like you could say you know, if you're a white supremacist or you know some sort of like neo-Nazi or something, then it would be like Mein Kampf or something. But you don't, even that's not usually a literate thing. It's like it's not usually people carrying around books. This is something else, like you have to go find it. You're looking for it or it finds you in some way, and then I don't know, it's uh, there's, there's, there's a, there's a code in it or something that I think maybe it unlocks certain things in certain personalities and that's why they put it out there. Or maybe just framing the book as a as, uh, you know, you, like Hinkley, admired Mark David Chapman, but where did Mark David Chapman get his influence? Right, you know?
Speaker 2:Um and I can't think of many people, let alone authors, who encourage one way or another so many others to make a Mecca of sorts to your trip to Mecca to see them. Right, this pilgrimage to go see JD Salinger, that's just so bizarre that even those people didn't, you know, go off the cliff, they were still pushed to the point where I need to see this guy, I need to talk with him about this writing, about this work. That is so bizarre.
Speaker 2:I mean again, I've seen it with John Lennon, but who else I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'll never forget watching that as a kid I was 17 watching gibson. Had to go in and get that copy of the catcher in the rye. And then you find out that movie. You know it's uh, based on him being an mk ultra being experimented on, you know, as being a manchurian candidate, like he was right about the conspiracies, because he was part of one. You know his, his. You know his interactions with uh. Uh, I forget the actor's name uh, he played john luke bickard on uh, on on star trek. You know um, but that's where he gets. You know he's being trained, you know to to. That's where he gets. You know he's being trained, you know, to be an assassin and he has all these subconscious starts to manifest that like in his own life and he's completely paranoid, but for a reason. You know Patrick Stewart's the guy's name.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the actor.
Speaker 1:But well, it's fascinating, fascinating. Well, it's a fun episode, so I do. You have any other, anything else you want to throw out there, any other notes or stuff that you found when you were doing your magnificent research there?
Speaker 2:no, those were all the high points. Um, you mentioned to me, you know, a couple of days ago about about Argentina declassifying a bunch of stuff. I didn't know if you wanted to mention that we were contemplating doing some episodes on that material and related.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we just happened to be talking because I'd like to do these type of episodes where it's just good conversation and you know there's research and we actually can show source material. But I was mentioning I found this book from the 70s about this journalist. It's published by Simon Schuster, where he's talking to Martin Bormann like in the 70s and Martin Bormann was Hitler's second in command. I mean, he rerouted all of the corporations and wealth and holdings of the Nazi empire and of course he had the rat lines and other things, like they fled to South America and possibly to Antarctica at New Schwabenland and all that stuff, like when World War II ended. But yeah, there's a book called Aftermath that I found at a used bookstore and I'm like why didn't I ever know about this? I think Jim Mars mentioned it in the Fourth Reich and I have to go back to my notes on that.
Speaker 1:But this kind of ties together with that, because it's a series of events together with that. Because it's a series of events, you know, like you have, the united states didn't have especially the rule by, and we're ruled by, intelligence and banking after world war ii and, like I mentioned, the nsc document 68 and that was the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency and NSA and other things like the Air Force, and that's what you get in 1947. A lot of that is directly linked to Operation Paperclip and Operation Paperclip again linked to Salinger. So there's probably something here, because everything the reality that we understand post-World War II and you know you had it was the late 50s or mid-50s, if memory serves me that you get Operation Midnight, climax and then MKUltra and you talk about, you know, jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb.
Speaker 1:You know who were these you, you know psychiatrists, doctor, quote whatever the, whatever nomenclature you want to give them uh, that were with intelligence, creating mind control programs and uh, using lsd and other things, and it's it's a weird rabbit hole but it's um, it definitely has its links to the aftermath end of world war two and uh, so much of our culture does too. So this, I think, the catcher in the rye, is one of those um, it's a product of that and a product of war and it's something that would have never existed, you know, had America first triumph. And and somebody you know uh gotten wind that fdr was uh setting our, our navy, up to be attacked for harbor. Like, if that had not, if that had been exposed like we'd have a completely different reality. But you know, the united states is definitely and we had a different path. So, um, a lot of these things are byproducts of that so interesting history to dive into if you want to understand the past, and I think these things have linkage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Seems as though they were trying to infiltrate the hippie anti-war movement, right? That's why Joe West set up those offices in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we definitely got to dig into that. I've been reading about that for years and there's a lot to unpack there. But definitely Salinger weird and one of those things and you know there's a lot to unpack and you know it can be some interesting research.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hope we didn't bash him too much. I mean, I to a certain extent I feel bad for him and you know the shell shock and all that had to.
Speaker 1:Be very real and unsettling, but very strange well, I mean it is, but you can go different ways with it. You can be a rod serling or you can be a Salinger, that's true. Or you can be a Vidal Gore Vidal. You know the people call him the gay Pat Buchanan. He was very much America first and all that stuff, just very left wing with it.
Speaker 2:I love that documentary. What was it called? Best of Enemies? No.
Speaker 1:Best of Enemies. Yeah, yeah, was it called? Best of Enemies? No, best of. Enemies yeah, yeah, with William F Buckley and Vidal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he took them to task.
Speaker 1:And Buckley. You know Buckley was the same generation as Vidal. We should do a show on those two, because I know a pretty great deal about it. I was studying it for years and Buckley had ties to intelligence. The entire modern conservative movement, along with people like Timothy Leary from the LSD movement and Gloria Steinem from feminism all were on the CIA payroll Right. Vidal wasn't, though.
Speaker 1:The people that I like that I find that I go back to and read their essays and read their books and things that definitely have that. I find that I go back to and read their essays and read their books and things that definitely have that slant of being open-minded for peace or reason and other things, and Vidal strikes the chord with me on that Not all things, but and Serling for his morality tales and the Twilight Zone and other things, but Salinger, you know, uh, it was one and done. I read it one time and I thought this is I don't get the appeal, but I think you have to have a certain you know it's like people that are, you know, demon possessed, like maybe you just open to it, you know, and there's something in the work that is off.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So well. Thank you for doing all you do, Mr Anderson, for your magnificent. That's why I say it's your brain. You brought your brain and laid this out for everybody and I know you don't want to be found and you're going to. You know you're out in Taiwan right now. How does it feel to be out there? You feel like the Chinese are going to invade.
Speaker 2:We're all a little unsettled by the tariffs, but we'll see what comes.
Speaker 1:Paratrooper got tariff 25 percent. That's why we hadn't put a show out in a few weeks.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, crazy, crazy times. But appreciate you being here, brother. I want to remind the audience if you like the episodes, please go give us a five-star review. Uh, over on uh Apple and uh, the Arterburn radio transmission, also once a week live. Uh, we put that up on this channel as well. So, you know, spread that around. We're we're hidden by the algorithms, but, uh, you know, these are our, our shows are. You know the conversations that mr anderson I have? We'll have some great guests. We have don jeffries coming up. We're gonna go over american memory hole, which is a great book, and I'm catching up on that now, and then, uh, we'll dive into a series on um, on the fourth reich and operation paperclip, and some of that. As soon as I told Mr Anderson about hey, let's do this book on aftermath, literally the next day the government of Argentina released documents on their ties to the Nazis post-World War II and the rat lines.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot to unpack there, yeah that'll be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll definitely have some fun. All right, folks, we appreciate you. Yeah, give us a review, share the links and come back next time for episode number 37 with the legendary Donald Jeffries. You guys take care of each other in the information war.
Speaker 2:Be a paratrooper.