Billy Corgan Claims George W. Bush White House Tried To Enlist Him For Influence Campaign

Erewhon influencer and Bar Mitzvah host William Patrick Corgan recently welcomed Conrad Flynn to his The Magnificent Others podcast. You might've seen Flynn — writer, occult historian, grandson of Jingle All The Way cop Robert Conrad — on your timeline a few months ago because he referenced Nurse With Wound on, unfortunately, The Tucker Carlson Show.

That's how I know who he is. (Like Billy Corgan, who infamously appeared on Alex Jones' Infowars multiple times in the '10s, Conrad Flynn will talk to any podcaster.)

Towards the end of the episode, which went up on New Year's Eve but I am telling you about now because I was not paying attention to Billy Corgan's podcast on New Year's Eve, the Smashing Pumpkins leader said that "the Bush administration" once tried to enlist him for an influence campaign. We can only assume he means #43, and that the Bush Sr. White House was not hip to Gish.

Here's the relevant part:

CORGAN: At different times, I've been approached by elements of the US government to be involved in things that were just way above my pay grade. I've never talked about them in any depth publicly. But I've had experiences where I would find myself in a room with people and think, why are they talking to me? It was something out of like Eyes Wide Shut.

FLYNN: Really?

CORGAN: Oh, yeah.

FLYNN: And what did they say?

CORGAN: I'm not going to tell you.

FLYNN: Okay.

CORGAN: No, because I haven't talked about it. I can certainly talk about it in a sort of a kind of a, I was there kind of way. But it's similar to when I talked about experiencing a shapeshifter on Howard Stern. It became this thing where I was hunted in airports. "Please tell me the shapeshifter story." All I can say is I've experienced supernatural things and I've experienced things where I've had elements of the US government reach out to me because they somehow want to hook my influence, which is not that great, into whatever they're after.

…

I've been, you know, invited to the White House two times to have meetings that were, you know, essentially off the record meetings. Why? So if you want to call me crazy or wacky or talk about my…

FLYNN: Can you say which presidency this was?

CORGAN: It was during the Bush administration.

FLYNN: Oh, wow.

CORGAN: And I'm not a Republican. So that was even more shocking to me. I grew up in a blue state.

Why did the George W. Bush White House need a '00s Billy Corgan psyop? Were they commissioning an electronic alt-rock song about the Patriot Act? Or was Condoleezza Rice just trying to get the Pumpkins to reunite? Corgan, incidentally, told The New York Times in 2018 that he was a "free-market libertarian capitalist" and had not voted since 1992. I do not know his feelings about George Bush, though he was famously not a fan of the band Bush.

Regarding "the shapeshifter story," in 2017 Corgan told Howard Stern he'd once had an unexplainable encounter with one. He returned the next year with more details:

There is a history of shapeshifters in popular music, according to Flynn.

FLYNN: In one of Barney Hoskyns' books, great music writer, he talks about a boyfriend of the folky Judee Sill. And she's reading some Rosicrucian manuscript and she becomes this snake-like figure. And then I have a friend of mine who I think has worked with Current 93. He's opened for Nick Cave. And I don't know if he wants me to reveal his name in relation to the story. We were talking about this kind of stuff. And, you know, the artist Diamanda Galás, is it? So he's like, "oh, I've seen her shapeshift on stage" or "I've seen her disappear onstage." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he goes, "she just became pixelated, like she was doing her speaking in tongues, flipping out." And he goes, "She just faded in front of my eyes, faded." And then Burroughs and Gysen too [so] you're not alone, Billy…

CORGAN: Well, I've been told for over 30 years in public life that there's something wrong with me or I'm crazy. And I feel like I'm the guy in the movie who's actually quite sane. Kind of like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. And I think there are forces in the world that go out of the way to marginalize or other particular voices, in this case, the artist class, because they refuse to accept sort of the given narrative. And if you look at the history of popular rock music, say over the last 10 years, you'll notice that there's not a lot of edginess actually going on anymore. There's a tremendous amount of edginess going on in the rap music community and other communities.

But rock has been... rock is probably the greatest social change force. And of course, I'm including, you know, folk and Bob Dylan and rock in general terms because it influenced the Byrds and the Beatles and all stuff like that. Does anybody think that that's kind of strange? That somebody decided to push a button somewhere and make sure that people like myself don't say certain things anymore.

If you wanna devote an hour and forty minutes to watching the chat you can learn the pair's thoughts on Charles Manson and Gnosticism.

(I believe the Diamanda Galás thing.)