Christmas pit bulls

Apparently I wasn't the only one who got the idea to dress their pit bull up in a Christmas sweater.

How Secret Societies use Astrotheology for Mass Mind Control

For as long as people have been organized under a centralized government, the personal lives of populations have been molded by the dictates of national and religious elites whose authority is replicated in miniaturized form within family structures. Despite this predictable pattern, large segments of the alternative media have identified the coordinated destruction of nations, religions and the family as the final game plan of the global "power elite", while ignoring how these same institutions have enabled social inequality far eclipsing all but the furthest extremes of political injustice found in the modern era. The cultural upheaval of the 60s, a favorite target of right-leaning conspiracy theorists, has been recognized for its emphasis on values such as social equality, civil rights and ecological sustainability, all of which are vital elements in any democratic society. However, there is a shadow side to its origins that has not been explored except by social conservatives whose underlying political agendas often fall in line with the neo-colonial plotting of corporate-military globalists.

Contrary to the story told by major media outlets, a significant component of modern cultural change was set into place by social scientists who received grants to engineer human consciousness through media experiments, as well as other forms of behavioral conditioning. In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, the Romanian historian Ioan Coulianu traces the origins of modern state propaganda models to techniques utilized by Renaissance occultists, who saw desire as the universal common denominator capable of subliminally inducing mass hypnosis via the collective mind of entire nations. Coulianu credited the Rosicrucian Giordano Bruno for the development of proto-crowd control techniques that would later surface in the sphere of social sciences as public relations, market research, disinformation and espionage. Bruno believed that society could always be divided into its essential components, manipulator and manipulated, and it was the role of the occultist, who would later become the scientist, to enchain the spirit of the common people through the window of their imagination, more commonly recognized as the libido. Bruno envisioned these chains as “phantasms” capable of affecting and influencing human consciousness and, by extension, social behavior. The ultimate purpose of Bruno's phantasms was to replace the external coercion of the state with internal compulsion, thus creating a self-regulating system of government.

This paradigm can easily describe the guilt-driven compulsions underlying the belief systems of the religious right, just as it can the more permissive society of Alduous Huxley's Brave New World. Setting aside political differences, there is an extensive documented history of secret societies such as the Freemasons employing occult symbolism through corporate marketing campaigns. While the alternative media typically focuses on hidden symbolism in the entertainment industry, there remains a widespread lack of discussion around the presence of occult symbolism in the logos of military contractors, agricultural companies and fossil fuel industries. What this coded media language amounts to is an avenue of social control for a shadow government comprised of elite fraternities attempting to bypass the democratic process through covert organizations. On either end of the political spectrum, the influence of fraternal orders rooted in ancient mystery cults can be discerned with careful observation.

Many mystery cults were composed of mystics who worked to provide a framework for enlightenment, a method to reach the divine through acts of mutual aid and service to others. Simultaneously, there were those within these schools for whom spiritual mastery was not a practice for managing the harmful qualities of the self, but instead a means by which to control the populace and create a class of subjugated people. Within these latter groups can be found the centuries old tradition of organized ritual abuse, whose existence is still disputed by the legal system in part because the phenomenon has been simplified as being primarily “satanic” in nature. Sophisticated mind control techniques are typically based around organized child abuse, where the developing mind of the child is shaped according to a combination of advanced scientific and occult principles. The science of trauma-based mind control is essentially an esoteric tradition, with widespread social control measures functioning as the exoteric expression of its ideas. In every case, fear-based conditioning is the basis of manipulation, whether those techniques are applied to individuals in a cult setting or to society as a whole.

The word "occultism" has traditionally been understood to convey practices such as astrology, divination, alchemy and spell-casting. The actual definition is a lot more complex, translating from the Latin word, occultus, to mean “knowledge of the hidden”.  This definition contrasts occultism with the scientific method which can be defined as “knowledge of the measurable”. The Latin translation necessarily extends esotericism into the realm of Judeo-Christianity as well as indigenous cultures which, on the surface, have no commonalities with Western magical traditions. In truth, Western occultism was heavily influenced, and even shaped, by both monotheistic and polytheistic spiritual faiths. From its early origins in Hermeticism, occultism has drawn heavily from the field of what would come to be known as comparative religion, assimilating varied traditions into a methodology similar to what many contemporary occult practitioners describe as shamanism.

Because intensive study of non-Christian faiths was, during the early beginnings of the history of occult practice, considered to be potential evidence of impiety, religious institutions governed education and attempted to prevent the “heresy” of polytheistic faith. As a result, blanket condemnation of occultism carries with it the strong likelihood of racism even while many occultists have themselves been complicit in imperialism and cultural appropriation. As the history of occult orders is closely related to that of empires based on the practice of parasitizing the labor and psyche of their citizens, the details that follow are, in several passages, quite violent and difficult to absorb. Thankfully these more unpleasant aspects of esoteric history have been balanced by the traditions of organizations that strive towards the creation of communities based around principles of social justice, while not limiting the process of enlightenment to a chosen few.

No history of the rise of religious elites, along with the mystery schools and fertility cults that formed around them, is complete without a basic understanding of how these societies were shaped by their surrounding ecosystem. Prehisorical indigenous cultures utilized sacred symbolism as a method to communicate with and appease spirits of nature. In contrast with later societal uses of symbolism, which were often divorced from their immediate meaning and form, indigenous cultures understood symbols as living embodiments of the unseen forces that shape the material world. Indigenous horticultural societies developed elaborate systems of forest gardening that preserved the biodiversity of surrounding riparian habitats, thus ensuring the continued existence and sustenance of their communities. Horticultural societies are typically perceived as a temporary development bridging the gap between hunter-gatherer cultures and agricultural societies even though many of them, such as the Native American Hopewell cultures, persisted for close to a millenium. While romanticized accounts of indigenous egalitarian utopias can be discounted as ahistorical fiction, the archaeological record does convey societal histories with far less social inequality than is characteristic of agricultural societies.

Historians have recognized that agriculture led to the rise of religious authorities because the availability of grain storage meant that power could be concentrated in the hands of whoever controlled the food supply, in contrast to earlier societies which relied upon perishable food. This oversimplified account of environmental history does not take into account the inevitable precarity of agricultural societies, whose very existence is based upon the degradation of their surrounding ecosystem, leading in turn to conditions that result in violent conflict for the control of natural resources. This process begins with the deforestation needed to clear way for agricultural fields, which over time suffer from soil salting and a loss of soil fertility, after which settlements are abandoned. In the Middle East, an area of the world once known as the “fertile crescent”, this loss of soil fertility has transformed the entire region into a desert unfit for sustaining human life. In other words, the mythology of “swords to plowshares” is an impossibility, because widespread tilling of the soil always results in a chain of events leading to famine, social stratification and violent conflict. These catastrophes of nature are then reflected in religious symbolism, in which seasonal procession is viewed as an inherently violent cycle governed by malevolent nature deities whose wrath must be appeased by the shedding of human blood. Therefore, any history of social inequality should be placed in a greater context of disruption of the ecological web of life, whereby the death of entire ecosystems through agricultural tilling results in a chain of events leading to warfare and human sacrifice.

The occult theocracies of Mesopotamia were the first centralized institutions to design tactics of mass social manipulation through ecstatic celebration. Although some well-intentioned neo-pagan authors have attempted to formulate visions of Mesopotamian empires as havens for individual rights, particularly the rights of women, the principles of the Babylonian law code tell quite a different story. The ruling classes of Mesopotamian nation-states effectively devised a prototype for the modern totalitarian state through near total control of social behavior. For example, Babylonian law states that a woman who was convicted of adultery would be stoned to death, a practice that continues in many Islamic countries to this day. Yet the religious ritual that united the majority of Mesopotamian cultures was a sex rite symbolizing the sacred marriage of the king with a fertility goddess, variously represented as Inanna, Astarte and Ishtar, among others names. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that all Babylonian women were bound by law to sexually perform for strangers. Far from being an unrestrained celebration, sacred marriage rituals were strictly regulated and designed to reinforce the authority of the king over his citizens. The philosophy underlying Mesopotamian fertility rites was the divine right of kings, a concept that would later justify the establishment of feudal aristocracies throughout Medieval Europe.

Like the Mesopotamian empires, Ancient Egypt was a theocracy supported by the subjugation of the lower classes whose agricultural labor enabled the comfortable lifestyle of the priests. Egyptians did not consider sexuality to be a taboo subject, as their mythology contained stories of adultery, masturbation, incest and same sex relationships. For the royal family, incest was seen as a holy act because it perpetuated the bloodline of the gods. One of the most vicious traditions that originated in Ancient Egypt was genital cutting, a ritual that was carried out as a devotional sacrifice to the Gods. In the present era, female genital mutilation is a pervasive problem that has caused chronic health problems in countless women, even leading to fetal death during childbirth due to blockage of the birth canal. Circumcision was exported from Egypt during the exodus of the Hebrews into Israel, along with the monotheism practiced by the hermaphroditic Pharaoh Akhenatan.

The Hebrew patriarchs devised the foundation of Abrahamic religions when they wrote the the Old Testament, in which Moses praises the necessity of strictly regimented social hierarchies similar to those of Mesopotamian nation-states. The Pentateuch explicitly outlines how God commands genocide, slavery and the mass rape of children as a way of solidifying Hebrew supremacy in Israel. In Numbers 31:17-18 God tells the Israelite soldiers “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” In ancient Israel the arranged marriage of child brides was seen as a way to ensure paternity as well as the continuity of the Abrahamic bloodlines. Wives were also required to obey their husbands as part of Mosaic law.

The Christian practice of administering sacraments can be traced to Greco-Roman mystery cults such as the festival of Attis, where an effigy representing the god was hung from a tree as a form of ritual sacrifice. March 24th was known as the Day of Blood and on this day a priest representing Attis drew blood from his arm and offered it to the gods. On the 25th the resurrection of Attis was celebrated with a sacramental meal, after which cult initiates were baptized in blood and they were said to be “born again”. The cult celebrations of Attis evoke the following passage from Deuteronomy 12:27: “And thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, the flesh and the blood, upon the altar of the Lord thy God, and thou shalt eat the flesh.” Greco-Roman mystery cults preceded the modern degree system of Freemasonry, with secretive cult initiations based on mystical theology. The violence of many of these initiations functioned as a code of instructions for an imperial warrior ethos that was enacted by adult men coercing boys and forcing slaves into a passive sexual role in order to condition them into accepting virtues of cruelty and unchecked aggression. These values were then absorbed by young soldiers who would apply what they learned in the subjugation of foreign peoples.

Running counter to the autocratic ideals of Rome were the Dionysian mystery cults, a decentralized religion that involved the induction of trance through music, spirit possession and intoxicants. The cults provided a gathering place for social dissidents including slaves, women and foreigners who were assigned positions of respect atypical of their role in greater Roman and Greek society. The mystery cults of Dionysus have been interpreted as an affirmation and mastery over humanity's primal nature which could then be reintegrated into civilized life. Although Dionysus was later absorbed into the Olympic pantheon, historians have come to a general consensus that the mystery cults were an indigenous tradition predating Greek civilization. The cults may have also been linked to the Dionysian artificers, an esoteric sect that incorporated aspects of sacred geometry into the construction of public buildings, which could then be used to feed impoverished people. Roman authorities outlawed the mystery cults, whose non-hierarchical structure they saw as a threat to the political status quo. The cult's central role in resistance against Roman tyranny was made apparent when the wife of Spartacus, who led a slave revolt against the Republic, was announced to have been a cult initiate who considered her husband to be an incarnation of Dionysus. As a final strategy, the Roman oligarchs decided to infiltrate the cults, which were then reformulated into a hierarchical structure and assimilated into the Roman state as the Bacchanalia. It may have been during this latter incarnation of the cult's evolution that stories of ritual violence, including murder, made their way to the floors of the Roman Senate.

Another decentralized religion that rose in opposition to the Roman aristocracy was the earliest phase of Christianity, which may be more accurately described as Gnosticism. The militant pacifism of the symbolic archetype of Jesus exists in striking contrast to both the imperialistic virtues of Rome and the genocidal mandates of Jehovah. These ideas should not be interpreted as a passive acquiescence to injustice but instead as an act of moral force, whereby those who had been compelled to obedience through a societal paradigm which recognized strength as the only law took on a new role by leading and transforming the nature of their communities. Some of the first Gnostics were female priests who led congregations in private homes, a practice that directly opposed the values of Roman society which saw women as primarily breeding stock. In Mathew 5:9, Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Taken from the the context of a time period defined by war, slavery and gross social injustice, this statement is profoundly transgressive in a sense that is difficult to appreciate coming from the perspective of a modern person living in a democratic society. Where "survival of the fittest" is the law, women and children will necessarily take on a subordinate role sheerly by virtue of their lesser physical strength alone. This principle also applies to indigenous communities which obviously have not had the military strength to defend themselves against centralized nation-states even when unavoidably necessary attempts at self defense have been made. Unfortunately the philosophy of the early Christians that "the meek will inherit the earth" was later horribly corrupted as the Roman Catholic Church went on to murder and enslave countless numbers of indigenous communities while enshrining social inequity as the mandate of God himself.

There has been endless academic debate about whether Jesus was a truly historical figure or a representation of the teachings of a much larger number of priests and mystics. Scholars are in unanimous agreement that the Gospels were written during the time of Gnosticism, the decentralized spiritual movement that believed the God of the Old Testament to be a malevolent being who created our world as a fallen universe separated from the Divine. Many Gnostic texts, especially the Gospel of Thomas, emphasize the idea that the light of Christ is accessible to everyone without the intervention of a priestly hierarchy, including polytheists and other supposed heretics. Religious worship frequently took place in private homes instead of churches. Gnostic beliefs regarding human sexuality varied greatly, from those of the Ophites, who invoked the serpent of Genesis as a symbol of forbidden knowledge through orgiastic celebrations, to dualistic views about the ultimate incompatibility of spirit and the body. Dualism was later embraced by the Roman Catholic Church, which also outlawed the ordination of female priests while branding Gnosticism a punishable heresy.

The establishment of Christianity as the central faith of Rome can be seen as a way to commodify divergent forms of spirituality that had the potential to undermine the powers of the state. In order to achieve religious centralization, the clergy appropriated elements of polytheistic iconography and essentially preserved the hierarchical cults of antiquity through the Church. Evidence for the influence of pagan religions on Catholicism is displayed in the architecture of Gothic cathedrals whose rose windows, supposedly representative of the Virgin Mary, are actually an ancient symbol for the Egyptian Isis, wife of the solar deity Osiris. The mythology of Isis is permeated with stories of miraculous pregnancies and she is also traditionally depicted wearing a cloak of stars, the same as the Virgin Mary. Osiris was one of many solar deities whose mythology represented the cyclical path of the sun as it symbolically died during the winter solstice and was born anew as a young child. Ancient pagans saw the sun gods as a personification of the life-giving force and their resurrection was often celebrated during the spring solstice through sex rites intended to ensure agricultural bounty.

Gothic cathedrals were built by early guilds of stone masons, who utilized their knowledge of sacred geometry to construct the churches in the image of the human body. The spires, obelisks and steeples represent pagan phallic worship with the church domes and entrances mirroring the receptive female. The rays of the sun, as they penetrate the rose windows, symbolize the moment of conception. Roses were also a symbol of the worship of Venus, a Roman goddess associated with love and fertility. The Greek virgin goddess Astraea was an additional inspiration for the Virgin Mary. Astraea's festivals were celebrated during August, the same time as the Catholic feast of the Assumption, signifying the day when the Virgin Mary went to heaven. The phallic reverence of the Roman empire is preserved in St. Peter' Square at the Vatican, where an obelisk was placed after being shipped from Egypt by the Roman emperor Caligula. Stories of solar deities like Dionysus were suppressed by the Church and later reconfigured into the mythology of Christ. Dionysus, whose birthday was celebrated during the winter solstice, was invoked during festivals where his body was symbolically eaten as bread. The Persian god Mithra, also born of a virgin, was known to have performed exorcisms and cured the sick. The Phyrgian deity Attis, born of the virgin Nana, died and was resurrected with his flesh symbolically consumed as bread by worshipers. All of the various solar deities were combined in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated during the winter solstice.

Orthodox Christianity basically outlawed goddess worship while demoting female deities to the status of a mortal human whose role was primarily reproductive. Yet aspects of the Gnostic veneration for feminine archetypes reemerged several centuries later in a heretical Christian sect called the Cathars. The Cathars rejected Catholic deference to hierarchy while preaching that all men and women were equal. They believed that hell was reincarnation in the material world which had been created by the fallen god Jehovah. The Cathars were also devoted to universalism, a system of faith founded on the idea that all religions offer a pathway to heaven, the ultimate destination of all souls. The inner core of the Cathars were celibate, although this practice was not compulsory for all members. The sect preached that non-procreative sex was less morally problematic than the procreative variety, a teaching that led to them being labeled as sodomites in opposition to the biblical mandate of “be fruitful and multiply”. Catholic doctrine maintains that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage while minimizing the potential for marriage to create a spiritually transcendent experience. Ethical questions about procreation must be analyzed from the context of the Medieval time period, during which one in five women died during child birth and approximately half of all newborns never lived past their first year. Many contemporary historians have discovered through the Malleus Malifecarum (Hammer of Evildoers) as well as other medieval documents, that herbal practitioners, particularly midwives, were a special focus of the Inquisition. Medieval herbalists were likely familiar with the plant commonly known as Queen Anne's Lace, an emmenagogue (menstrual promoter) that has been used for centuries to prevent implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterine lining. Several different modern herbalists have conducted studies concluding that Queen Anne's Lace prevents pregnancy at a rate very close to 100% without the toxic side effects of synthetic estrogens or the waiting period necessary for surgical abortions. Compared to the modern abortion and birth control industry, medieval herbalists had formulated a medical practice that was, in numerous ways, superior. There are many situations, even factoring in medical advances of recent decades, where the scientific record has shown that continuing a pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. During medieval times, when women's access to effective, sanitary health care was minimal at best, the suppression of vitally useful information about herbal contraception undoubtedly led to an exponentially greater number of deaths for both mothers and their babies. When this information is taken into consideration, it stands to reason that Catholic dogma promoting procreation as a moral necessity ironically displays a callous disregard for human life.

Papal intolerance of divergent viewpoints continued into the Albigensian Crusade, when the Cathar stronghold of Languedoc was invaded on orders of Pope Eugene III. Many thousands of Cathars were slaughtered even though their only provocation against the church had been strictly philosophical. The Church's predilection for genocide extended well into the 16th century with the Spanish Inquisition, an event that can effectilvely be interpreted as a continuation of polytheistic blood sacrifice rituals. Another sect that has received much attention from both historians and the media is the Knights Templar, an organization that was in many ways the polar opposite of the Cathars. While the Cathars lived in voluntary poverty and tolerated other religions, the Templars amassed enormous fortunes and pillaged Muslim-controlled territories. A disproportionate amount of the media spotlight directed at the Templars concerns allegations of the fraternity engaging in violent sex rites where demonic idols were anointed with the fat of unbaptized babies. Most historians maintain that these accusations are inventions of the Church and, as a result, the Templars have come to be romanticized as martyrs of Christian persecution. In truth, the fraternity's inception was funded entirely by the Church and their extensive properties became the storehouses for Roman Catholic finances. The lurid details of ritualized orgies have since obscured the political ramifications of Templar banking, which was so widespread as to effectively set a precedent for the present day financial conglomerate. The Templars were organized in ways nearly identical to a modern corporation, even possessing a legal exemption to the Christian prohibition against money lending. In time, the Templars became so powerful that they accumulated numerous castles and estates, while managing much, if not most, of Europe's capital through the fledgling system of fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking is a practice that allows banks to loan astronomical sums based on a tiny fraction of tangible assets. This new system enabled small networks of bankers to collectively engineer economic collapses by calling in all debts at the same time, thus drastically reducing the amount of currency in circulation. Today, engineered collapses are coordinated by inside traders who declare bankruptcy after transferring the funds of their customers to offshore accounts that function as tax havens. Financial practices engineered by the Templars made it possible for Church authorities and feudal landowners to amass wealth in a way that had not been possible in previous eras. So the fraternity did a great deal to increase already vast disparities in wealth and social status, directly leading to a dramatic reduction in living standards for the majority of Europe's population.

The historical record indicates a strong possibility that, after the Templars were officially disbanded on orders of King Philip, many of their members went underground and resurfaced in other esoteric fraternities throughout Europe, such as the Knights Hospitallers, The Order of the Garter, the Knights of Malta and the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians were an anonymous brotherhood who claimed to be devoted to reviving the arts and sciences of classical civilizations. The fraternity's impact on the cultural ethos of their time period was so significant that the award-winning scholar Frances Yates argued that both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment originated in Rosicrucian philosophy. While undoubtedly many within the organization were genuinely working for the stated Rosicrucian goals of providing free education and health care, other, more influential members maneuvered to create an elite brotherhood to rule over the commoners.

The Rosicrucian occultist John Dee, consultant and astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I, even coined the term “British Empire” while using his expertise in navigation to train European explorers who would go on to colonize and enslave Native Americans, among other “uncivilized” peoples. The Confesio Fraternitas is one of two doctrines widely regarded to have been written by founding members of the Rosicrucians and it contains the following quote, perfectly summarizing the contempt with which the author, and in all probability many other highly-placed members within the sect, regarded the common people: “A thousand times the unworthy may clamour, a thousand times may present themselves, yet God hath commanded our ears that they should hear none of them, and hath so compassed us about with His clouds that unto us, His servants, no violence can be done.”

Some of the most blatant examples of Rosicrucian-inspired occult symbolism can be found in the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth. In the Rainbow Portrait, she is portrayed draped in a cloak decorated with dozens of eyes and ears, a statement that seems to imply the nearly metaphysical supremacy of Elizabethan England. This analysis becomes reasonable in light of the fact that her court was the wellspring of the Secret Service, with Dee playing a prominent role in its genesis. The portrait is named after a rainbow that Elizabeth clutches in her right hand, an image that a variety of world cultures have interpreted as the mystic’s bridge between earth and the celestial realm. Additionally, Hinduism assigns a chakra to every color of the rainbow, possibly indicating an intellectual or spiritual influence of Dee's, who was known to dabble in the yogic tradition. This hypothesis is further reinforced by the coiled snake on Elizabeth’s cloak, since the serpent has traditionally been viewed as an allusion to the path of illumination through the rising of the kundalini force.

The court of the Medicis is considered by many researchers, including Yates, to have been a converging point for Rosicrucians, and the family itself is rumored to have contained grand masters of the esoteric Priory of Sion fraternity. The Medicis commissioned countless works of art containing occult themes, including Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus, a painting adorned with fertility symbols such as roses, a snakeskin and a beehive. The Allegory of Venus is one of many paintings of the Renaissance that can be seen as a reenactment of Roman bacchanalia. Of the Bacchanalia, Roman historian Thomas Madden writes “…there was no crime, no deed of shame, wanting. More uncleanness was committed by men with men than with women. Whoever would not submit to defilement, or shrank from violating others, was sacrificed as a victim.” Viewed in this context, the golden apple of Venus most likely represents a fall from Christian standards of purity. The dove in the lower left hand corner has also been associated with the Egyptian goddess Semiramis and then with Isis at a later point. The mask in the lower right hand corner also points towards the painting being a depiction of a mascherate (masque), a masked ball that combines poetry and musical performance. The mascherate had been perfected and performed by Lorenzo de Medici, who wrote the majority of the poetry for the masques which happened in his lifetime. It is abundantly clear that Lorenzo modeled these occasions after Roman bacchanalia, since he decorated the theater in which the masques took place with not only a replication of Roman triumphal cars and arches, but also their trophies, sculptures and ornamentation. Usage of the masks within the mascherate was another appropriation of polytheistic cultures, since the mask has a long history of being worn during pagan ceremonies in order to achieve a dissociative state through dance and chanting. The spirits of animals were believed to possess the wearers as they danced. Masks have also been used in conjunction with masonic initiation ceremonies where the initiate is masked before undergoing a symbolic death and rebirth.

It is notable that Machiavelli once remarked that the masques were merely a way for autocratic rulers to quell dissent among the populace. A nearly identical concept in the Roman world would have been the distraction of the masses by bread and circuses, which were made available to all citizens in order to prevent rioting. The Roman bacchanalia have historically been associated with political crimes and conspiracies, suggesting that the “debaucherous” activities contained within were at least in part a ruse by which political elites could elicit the secrets of those who they wished to direct into a desired course of action. Present day incarnations of this pattern can be seen in the Cremation of Care ceremonies at the elite Bohemian Grove, where a wooden effigy is ritually burned in front of a a circle of chanting revelers wearing white robes. On the surface, the Grove is a summer camp for the nation’s elite, with a guest roster that has listed Bush Sr. and Jr., Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Predictably, the site has been linked to personal scandals ranging from crossdressing to child prostitution and murder.

The presence of ritualized androgyny at the Grove may be yet another occult influence since, for the Rosicrucians, androgyny was a way to reach the divine through the unification of polar opposites in harmonious perfection. Rosicrucian ideas about the transformative nature of androgyny may very well have originated with the accounts of European colonists, since literally hundreds of indigenous cultures throughout North and South America have placed gender deviant tribal members in a shamanic role within their respective cultures. Yet mystical androgyny took shape in a very different way in the highly codified world of European high society, because it was placed into a greater context of social inequity instead of relatively democratic culture as had been the case with indigenous cultures. An alchemical text from the 17th century, Philosophia Reformata, contains a drawing of a crowned man and woman turned towards one another in bed, alongside two soaring ravens and two images of the sun. The description says that the royal brother and sister are purified by fire, after which they are “united” and cleansed of corruption by the dew of heaven. A subsequent drawing depicts the siblings emerging from a grave as a hermaphrodite underneath the storm of a rain cloud. It may be that the text's not-so-subtle reference to incest is an acknowledgement of the European resurrection of Egyptian traditions perpetuating the divine bloodlines of the royal family through intermarriage.

According to a countless number of inside sources, nearly all the campers at the Bohemian Grove belong to occult fraternities descended from the Templars and Rosicrucians. The camp's name itself is likely derived from the occult history of the kingdom Bohemia, which, particularly during the reign of Frederick V was regarded as a center for Rosicrucian activities and research. It is probable that the cyclical nature of the personal scandals of political elites are attributable not only to the banalities of human nature, but also to the covert machinations of occult fraternities, where ill-favored initiates are ousted from the cult either by taking the blame for activities of the group or, more ominously, by unexplainable disappearance. It is known that the first four sonnets of Lorenzo de Medici’s Comento were dedicated to a woman named Simonetta, who appears in the masque as Venus. This fact is significant because Simonetta died at the age of 23 on April 26, in the brief window of energetic potency that occult practitioners believe surrounds the pagan holiday of Beltane. Exactly two years later to the day, Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano was assassinated by the papacy, begging the question of whether their deaths were yet another facet of the revived Bacchanalia.


The French Revolution, next in the line of major historical events impacted by occult fraternities, is marked by the abolishment of feudalism and a transition away from absolutist monarchies towards constitutionalist states and republics, which have since become the dominant forms of government in the modern world. All of these political accomplishments originated in grass roots peasant uprisings that were then later attributed almost entirely to middle class intellectuals whose ranks were composed of many members of esoteric organizations such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. As with the Rosicrucians before them, many Freemasons exhibited genuine revolutionary sentiment, however, many members who came from the aristocracy primarily continued to view peasants as a source of expendable, cheap labor. During the time of the revolution, Edinburgh philosophy professor John Robison attended meetings of the sect only to later report that the true aim of Freemasonry was to subvert revolutionary uprisings in order to establish international hegemony on behalf of the ruling classes. In successive centuries, the elite families tied to Freemasonry would play a crucial role in the expansion of the British Empire, a series of military conquests that left Native populations devastated by mass famine and poverty due to war, slavery and ruthless taxation by the British. In Treason in America, Anton Chaitkin meticulously documents how the British East India company established Masonic lodges in China to enable the unimpeded importation of opium, an act that ended in addiction for tens of millions of Chinese peasants.

The social stratification represented by the degree system of Freemasonry is a logical extension of natural law, the Catholic ideology by which rigidly maintained social hierarchy was deemed a necessary component of any holy society. The Eye of Providence, colloquially known as the all-seeing eye, was first a Catholic symbol intended to symbolize the divine providence of God watching over humanity and superseding in human affairs through ecclesiastical authorities. The earliest depiction of the Eye of Providence in Europe was within the Palatine Chapel, whose construction was begun by Charlemagne in 786. Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor, and his accession inaugurated a return to the divine right of kings in Christian Europe. In the New Testament, the concept of the divine right of kings had been justified by the statement of St. Peter that all Christians should honor the pagan Roman Emperor. Throughout Medieval Europe, the same idea applied to feudal properties, which were believed to be owned by God and managed by Kings, who were in turn answerable only to the authority of Popes. This arrangement of power formed the basis of the figurative pyramid whose base was composed of serfs living in conditions akin to slavery in all of its most essential aspects. Feudal plantation owners were legally allowed to beat, murder and rape their serfs, while the serfs were forbidden from owning or selling property. The etymology of the term “serf” can be traced to the Latin word “servus”, which literally translates to slave.

In 1865 slavery was permanently abolished within the United States by way of the Thirteenth Amendment. Less than a year later, the Holy Office responded via an instruction signed by Pope Pius IX, which states: “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just titles of slavery, and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons … It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given”. This policy was not officially changed within Canon law until 1918. Medieval texts used the words “peasant”, “serf” and “slave” as synonymous representations of the overwhelming majority of the population who did not own property. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a census of Britain's million and a half inhabitants, noting that less than three percent were free landholders. The feudal pyramid explicated a regimented division of value whereby corporeal hierarchies of serfs, lords, abbots, knights and bishops were arranged below heavenly hierarchies of saints, angels and, ultimately, God. As a material extension of these values, religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries maintained a significant portion of European feudal properties while simultaneously amassing vast fortunes as a result.

The social stratification of greater Medieval society was also applied to individual families, which were typically formed according to strict laws and customs as opposed to individual choice. For example, the lord of an estate could prevent serfs from marrying women from another estate, while also exercising the power to choose husbands for their tenants' daughters. Medieval laws also required parental consent for marriage up to the age of 30 for men and the age of 25 for women. The doctrine of mutual consent also allowed for spouses to abandon their families based on “confession” of prior marriage to a different spouse. As merchant classes arose in later centuries, the doctrine of mutual consent ostensibly allowed for freedom of choice in marriage, however, in practice, parents controlled the choices of their children by denying inheritance rights to those who married against their wishes. The free bench was an English manorial custom that defined a widow's inheritance rights as dependent on her chastity, and remarriage, as well as any ostensible evidence of sexual activity, required the widow to forfeit her lands. Similarly, the Legrewite was a fine designed to punish single sexually active women, a fee often compounded by the childwite, yet another fine for the birth of illegitimate children. As stated previously, the doctrine of mutual consent allowed for previously married women to have their children classified as illegitimate regardless of the wife's commitment to her marriage. In France, unmarried pregnant women were systematically interrogated at local government offices.

The “virtue” of blind obedience to religious and political authorities was promoted by the Jesuits, a Catholic fraternity that predated both the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. In his Letter on Obedience, Jesuit (Society of Jesus) founder Ignatius of Loyola wrote “And so, I should wish that all of you would train yourselves to recognize Christ our Lord in any Superior whomsoever, and with all devotion, reverence and obey in him His Divine Majesty. And this will appear less strange to you, if you keep in mind that St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, bids us obey even temporal and pagan Superiors as Christ from Whom all well ordered authority descends: Slaves, obey your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your hearts as you would Christ: not serving to the eye as pleasers of men, but as slaves of Christ.”
Loyola's apparently tolerant attitude toward polytheistic cultures did not, however, prevent the Jesuits from playing a central role in the Goa Inquisition. The office of the Inquisition on the Portugese state of Goa was responsible for sanctioning the death by torture of dozens of Hindus and Muslims for the crime of practicing their native religion. The Goa Inquisition was originally installed after Francis Xavier, a student of Loyola's, one of seven original Jesuits and co-founder of the same group, wrote a letter to King John III of Portugal, requesting Catholic expedition to India as a route to ensuring Christian purity. As Xavier departed to lead the mission, the pope appointed him apostolic nuncio to the East, an ecclesiastical diplomatic title equivalent to that of ambassador. The Inquisition's first act was to establish the death penalty for open practice of the Hindu faith. Hundreds of prison cells were set up to accommodate the accused. Hindu temples were destroyed and ransacked, their contents confiscated by army action. The local Konkani language was suppressed, Hindu holy books were destroyed and Portugese became the compulsory national language.
The Jesuits organized an annual mass baptism on January 25, the Feast of Saint Paul, whereby their African slaves were ordered to grab Hindus and smear their lips with beef, an act that resulted in many Hindus being labeled as untouchable by their own people. In his book, the Goa Inquisition, Indo-Portugese historian T.R. De Souza writes “...the government transferred to the Church and religious orders the properties and other sources of revenue that had belonged to the Hindu temples that had been demolished or to the temple servants who had been converted or banished. Entire villages were taken over at times for being considered rebellious and handed over with all their revenues to the Jesuits.” The Goa Inquisition also exhaustively details the methods of torture through which Catholic missionaries enforced religious conversions, including flogging, dismemberment and amputations carried out so slowly that the victims remained alive throughout the process. The auto-de-fa was the Catholic ritual of public penance whereby condemned heretics and apostates were burned at the stake. According to De Souza, Francis Xavier was present at the first Inquisition, where two of the accused, including a French cleric, were burned alive. For his efforts, Xavier was canonized as a saint by Pope Gregory XV, at the same time as Ignatius Loyola, and proclaimed the “Patron of Catholic Missions” by Pope Pius XI.
Aside from their work in suppressing cultural and religious expression abroad, the Jesuits also endeavored to suppress European institutions that threatened the power of the Catholic church, particularly in the areas of politics and scientific discourse. In 1616 the Inquisition declared the scientific proposition that the Earth rotates around the Sun to be heresy, shortly after the Index of Prohibited Books banned any writings that advanced Copernican heliocentric astronomy. Jesuit astronomers argued that geocentrism, the theory that the earth is the center of the universe around which all heavenly bodies revolve, was in accordance with a literal interpretation of Scripture, particularly Psalms 96:10, Chronicles 16:30, Psalms 93:1, Ecclesiastes 1:5 and Psalms 104:5. The chief theologian of the Inquisition, Robert Bellarmine, was a Jesuit who read the astronomer Galileo Galilei the decree of the Index and ordered him to abandon his research into the Copernican system. When this decree was ignored, Galilei was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. Galilei's discoveries were so ground-breaking that he has since been dubbed the “father of observational astronomy”.
The Society of Jesus was also able to gain political influence by hearing the confessions of kings, princes and other political authorities. According the New Catholic Encyclopedia, “they acted as royal confessors to all French kings for 2 centuries, from Henry III to Louis XV; to all German emperors after the early 17th century; to all Dukes of Bavaria after 1579; to most rulers of Poland and Portugal; to the Spanish kings in the 18th century; to James II of England; and to many ruling or princely families throughout Europe.” Confessions in this context functioned much as the Bacchanalia had in previous centuries: organizations in a position to elicit incriminating secrets were much more likely to gain the advantage of political blackmail. Royal confessors were thus able to promote the interests of the Papacy, such as when LeTellier, Jesuit confessor to King Louis XIV, convinced the monarch to revoke the Edict of Nantes which granted substantial rights to Calvinist Protestants. Because of this history of political maneuvering, the Society was expelled from most states across Europe, as well as a number of European colonies. In Portugal the Jesuit royal confessor Gabriel Malagrida was declared guilty of high treason on account of his role in plotting the attempted assassination of King Jose I. Malagrida was not executed because the Papacy expressed opposition to the execution of a Jesuit by secular authorities. Instead, he was confined to a dungeon beneath the tower of Belem along with other Jesuits, who were also arrested for their role in the plan.
Aside from political intrigue, another charge commonly leveled at the Society was economic exploitation, especially regarding trade revenues derived from colonial mission plantations. As a religious order the Jesuits were technically forbidden from buying and selling for profit, however, as had been the case with the Knights Templar before them, this rule was largely disregarded. Referring to the Society's financial management of mission plantations, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 states “...this was allowed, partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly in order to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries.” In the Americas, Jesuit acquisitions were so extensive that suppression of the order resulted in widespread economic changes. The Society had owned the largest number of black slaves in Chile, so when Jesuits were expelled from the country there was a sharp decrease in the number of imported slaves. After Jesuit vineyards in Peru were auctioned, wine production also declined because the new owners did not have the expertise necessary to manage the fields.
The combined political, economic and academic influence of the Society contributed to numerous anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories alleging the order to be involved in plotting to overthrow nation-states on behalf of the Papacy. Many of these theories were a product of French anti-clericalism and claimed a rivalry between Freemasons and the Society of Jesus. Ironically, historians documenting the origins of speculative Freemasonry have unearthed evidence indicating that Freemasonry is in large part derived from Catholicism, with the Jesuits in particular playing an important role in their expansion throughout France. According to Chevalier Ramsay, a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as a tutor to King James' two sons, Freemasonry was founded in antiquity and renewed at the time of the Crusades. Crusaders utilized a symbolic language derived from the ancient Mystery cults, which was intended to differentiate Crusader from Saracen. The close relationship between these early Masons and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem eventually resulted in the Blue Degrees which are named St. John's Masonry. Masonic participation in the Crusades may also be the reason why, according to Freemasonic legend, the original Lodge is “symbolically” located in Jerusalem. It may also be worth noting that Ramsay was a Baronet in the Jacobite Peerage (a hereditary honor granted by the deposed Stuart dynasty), so he may have been in a strategic position for absorbing the guarded secrets of high-ranking initiates.
One of the oldest surviving Masonic documents, from December 1658, suggests that the commonly held belief of the ideals of Freemasonry being opposed to royalism may, in truth, be erroneous. The document states, “That as formerly we and predecessors have and had from the temple of temples building on this earth one uniform community and union throughout the whole world from which temple proceeded one in Kilwinning in this our nation of Scotland and from that of Kilwinning many more within this kingdom of which there proceeded the Abbey and Lodge of Scone, built by men of art and architecture where they placed that lodge as the second lodge within this nation, which is now past memory of many generations, and was upheld by the Kings of Scotland...this Lodge is the most famous Lodge (if well ordered) within this kingdom-of which name of Mylne there had continued several generations of Master Masons to his Majesties the Kings of Scotland ." Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts is a book by architectural historian Vaughan Hart which further verifies this assertion, primarily through documenting the Hermetic-Cabalistic themes inherent in the masques of the Stuart court, which were typically planned and conceived by Masons.

Aside from the influence of Catholicism, one of the Enlightenment era philosophies associated with speculative Freemasonry was libertinism, a belief system that came to be defined as a complete absence of religious constraints. The ideology was named after the Roman god Liber, whose festival, the Liberalia, was celebrated by a procession in which a large phallus was paraded through the countryside to bring the promise of fertility to the land. Libertinism, in its most idealistic potential, attempted to expose the moral inadequacies of organized religion while providing a framework for community absent the constraints of social norms. Yet, without being grounded in political self-determination and mutual aid, the far more likely result of it propagation in a highly stratified society would have been abandonment of troublesome or inconvenient family members, since family life was considered a cornerstone of Christian ethics.

Perhaps the most recognized libertine of the era is the Marquis de Sade, an aristocrat, author, politician and alleged Freemason who is famous for inciting the storming of the Bastille, an event that inaugurated the French Revolution. Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille on account of his sexual torture of servants and prostitutes, acts that included rape, poisoning and cutting the women with knives. Although he is classified by many political theorists as a revolutionary, Sade was in fact opposed to the revolutionary goal of releasing feudal servants from debt bondage. During the September Massacres, a mass wave of violence directed against the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy, peasants ransacked the homes of nobility and burned records of feudal dues. De Sade immediately wrote to his deputy, Ripert, to order him to transport his family's estate books to a protected location in order to secure his inheritance. On September 2nd, several hundred priests were murdered by a mob who feared counterrevolutionary activity. Some of those who the rioters chose to execute were children that obviously could not have comprehended anything of the social injustice that motivated revolutionary impulse. De Sade later wrote of the massacres in a letter to his lawyer, saying "All of the refractory priests had their throats cut in the churches where they were being held, among them the archbishop of Arles, the most virtuous and respectable of men...There is nothing equal to the horror of the massacres, but they were just."

Given this predilection for status-seeking and exploitation of the lower classes, it should come as no surprise that De Sade was widely rumored to be a Freemason. Ex-Freemason and occult researcher Bill Schnoebelen contends to having seen internal masonic documents listing the Marquis as one of five founding members of the Illuminati. In one of his two major works, Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, De Sade describes a secret society of libertines whose lodge is founded by members of the Knights Templar. The organization contains members of the royal family who routinely engage in incest and sexual torture of commoners. De Sade claimed that much of the novel was factually accurate and based on real life experience.
Historical precedent for Juliette can be found in the life of Gilles de Rais, a member of the French court and commander in the Royal Army who was convicted of murdering dozens of children as part of of a highly sexualized occult ritual sacrifice. Rais was thought to have murdered up to several hundred missing children and many have speculated that he was part of a larger network of aristocrats that saw the common people as expendable resources for their own sexual appetites. Far from being a collective voice for the downtrodden masses, many prominent Freemasons agitated for the revolutionary uprising of peasants while simultaneously colluding with royalists who would likely have had the working classes exterminated if that course of action became advantageous to their own survival. The overriding imperialistic instinct intrinsic to the elite inner core of Freemasonry is observable in the fact that nearly every family member, military officer and council member in Napoleon's inner circle was an established member of the cult. Napoleon himself was depicted flashing masonic hand signs, even though his name was never listed in official records of the fraternity.

Masonic intrigue was ultimately the common denominator between the bloodshed of the latter stages of the French Revolution and the subsequent consolidation of empire under the direction of Napoleon. This political centralization would eventually lead to the present era of nascent global governance through a direct line of international organizations oriented towards political integration, which many critics of globalist policy would see as an embodiment of the world hegemony that so many detractors of Freemasonry had warned of. As a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna was called to redraw the political boundaries of the continent, which had been called into dispute after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Ostensibly a peaceful balance of European powers, the Congress set a prototype for The League of Nations and, later, The United Nations, globalist organizations that would come to be overwhelmingly staffed by members of occult fraternities, including the Freemasons.

According to Schnoebelen, another of the five founding members of the Illuminati was Francis Dashwood, 15th Baron le Spencer, Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of the British branch of the Hellfire Club. The Hellfire Clubs, formally known as the Orders of St Francis of Wycombe, were a series of exclusive clubs throughout Europe which provided an environment where politicians and other "men of quality" engaged in mock religious rituals allegedly involving prostitutes dressed as nuns. Rumors surrounding the club said its members routinely engaged in black masses, orgies and ritual human sacrifice. One of the buildings in which meetings were held, Medmenham Abbey, had been officially recognized by royal charter before being privately sold several centuries later. Dashwood had Medmenham Abbey redecorated in the style of Gothic revival, with the grounds of the former monastery ornamented with statues of mythological figures, phallic symbols and other relics of pagan cultures.

While the club's members played at blasphemy, they also worked hand-in-hand with Christian policymakers to limit the freedoms of the rest of the population. One member, Robert Vansittart, was a governor of Bengal under the direction of the British East India Company. His older brother Henry, also said to be a member of the club, was director of the company. Governor Vansittart presided over Bengal during the time of the catastrophic Bengal Famine of 1770, for which the British East India Company is generally regarded as having been responsible for. As a result of company policy, Bengal farmers were forced to pay five times the amount of land tax and most of this revenue left the country entirely, placing an undue burden on the local economy. At the same time, the company actively destroyed food crops which were then replaced by opium poppies, further reducing food supplies while funneling profits to foreign markets. Company officials passed laws forbidding the "hoarding" of rice, so when a relatively mild drought occurred in the spring of 1770, farmers were left with no surplus to feed their families. By the year's end, ten million people, or one third of Bengal's population, had died of starvation. Meanwhile, the British East India company had established a monopoly in grain trading, even managing to increase their already substantial profits during the lean years of the drought.

Other influential members of the Hellfire Clubs included Edward Thompson, member of British Parliament, and Philip Wharton, first Duke of Wharton and member of the occult fraternity Order of the Garter. Both would go on to be Grand Masters of Freemasonry, Thompson for the Grand Lodge of York and Wharton for all of England. Thompson, in particular, became a target of Jonathan Swift on account of his introducing a bill in favor of inland taxes that, as had been the story in Bengal, siphoned away the meager resources of the lower classes, a group which collectively produced the foods, clothing and luxury items the aristocracy had come to depend on. Swift's polemic stated unequivocally that every member of Parliament was driven exclusively by greed and loyalty to the Crown, a claim that obviously contradicts the revolutionary Hellfire aesthetic, rendered mere window dressing when compared to the political uprising of the productive classes which was motivated sheerly by economic necessity. Essentially, the clubs functioned as an incentive for politicians and other men of influence to adopt the customs of the dominant world order, fleecing the laboring classes of their resources while looking out for the interests of industry and the old money families that governed its development. The Hellfire Clubs also heralded the next phase in the inception of the modern intelligence agency, whose dominion over world affairs is reinforced through the induction of shame and secrecy in otherwise "respectable" individuals.

During the 19th century, libertine philosophy found expression through the first wave of the free love movement which was originally not oriented towards promiscuity but instead a separation of personal relationships from the domain of state regulation. Proponents of free love, which was closely tied to the first wave of feminism, valued marriage for its role in promoting personal happiness instead of an exclusive purpose in biological reproduction and maintenance of social order. A particular focus of some early libertine feminists was the repeal of divorce laws that prevented women from leaving abusive marriages. Another tenet of the free love movement was opposition to Comstock laws, which sought to restrict discussion of sexuality to doctors and moral reformers. The Comstock laws functioned as a medicalized continuation of Roman Catholic suppression of midwifery and herbal birth control, tools that could have alleviated the unnecessarily high rate of maternal death, a problem that had reached epic proportions by the 19th century. Central demands of the free love movement included choice in marriage and resistance against state censorship, however the ethical aspirations of the masses which composed that movement proved to be more comprehensive than that of its founder, whose public scandals revealed a personality driven by self interest.

The phrase "free love" was coined by John Humphrey Noyes, the son of a Vermont congressman who formed a religious community called Oneida in upstate New York. Oneida was centered around the idea of complex marriage, a form of polygamy where monogamy and emotional attachment to individuals were explicitly forbidden. As it turns out, free love wasn't quite so free at all since Noyes presided over the decision-making process regarding the selection of appropriate sexual partners for each community member. Oneida was heavily invested in the practice of stirpiculture, a form of selective breeding in which only the most virtuous members were allowed to breed, and only after applying for the privilege and being approved by a committee headed by Noyes. This process was intended to achieve moral and spiritual enhancement in successive generations. The stirpiculture developed at Oneida is believed to have been the first selective breeding experiment involving human beings, a field of research that would eventually result in forced sterilizations and labor camps for those members of society deemed to be physically or morally unfit.

Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the children born on the commune were fathered by Noyes himself. The community was eventually disbanded after Noyes was accused of statutory rape, after which a son of Noyes formed a joint stock company, Oneida ltd., which went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of cutlery. A 1994 article in The Register-Guard newspaper reported that thousands of Oneida ltd.'s records were burned in the 1940s, an act that mind control researcher and author Fritz Springmeier contends was taken to keep the abusive sexual activities of the cult a secret. Springmeier contends that these practices included seances and sexual initiation rites. The same article noted above mentions that Oneida girls were made to burn their dolls in a ceremonial rite intended to banish the “doll spirit”, a form of graven image worship that encouraged unhealthy emotional attachment. One of the doctrines taught by Noyes was the idea of “ascending fellowship”, whereby a central committee of elite members selected by Noyes would choose young virgins to have sex with. The idea behind the practice was that those closer to perfection could provide guidance through physical and religious relationships, thus ensuring that the younger members could achieve salvation in the afterlife. Another Oneida doctrine was “mutual criticism” a practice used to strictly control the behavior of low-ranking members. Springmeier states that Oneida provided inspiration and instruction for techniques in cult mind control that would later be used by elite organizations, including the intelligence community. Like other initiatory societies before it, Oneida contained within its ranks at least one political assassin, namely Charles Guiteau, who was convicted of assassinating U.S. President James Garfield.

The commune had originally been named after the Oneida people, who were one of five tribes comprising the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois people, far from having a centrally planned, hierarchical community structure like that created by Noyes, were perhaps one of the only functional examples of a participatory democracy during that time period since every adult member exerted influence over political decisions. Iroquois clan mothers, for example, appointed chiefs who would represent the interests of their clan at the Grand Council, and only women were granted the ability to remove those chiefs from power if the policies they advocated did not fall in line with the wishes of their community. Iroquois society was also matrilineal, meaning that clan lineage was passed down through the mother's family. Like most First Nation peoples, the Iroquois held property collectively and the entire extended family resided within a single dwelling, cultural traits that European settlers saw as indecent violations of Christian propriety.

First and foremost, contemporary historians have explained European conquest of the Americas as being impelled by colonists' desire for land. This aspect of colonization should not be ignored or minimized because forcing First Nation peoples from their ancestral homelands almost totally destroyed their culture, spiritual traditions and ability to survive, since, unlike European society, literally every element of Native American daily life, including religion, was tied directly to the land. President Andrew Jackson, Grand Master of the Freemasons of Tennessee, was responsible for the Indian Removal Act, the federal policy which allowed for the forcible removal of Southeastern tribes to barren lands in Oklahoma, leading to the deaths of many thousands during the Trail of Tears. Holocaust expert David Cesarani has argued that "In terms of the sheer number killed, the Native American genocide exceeds that of the holocaust".

While land-grabbing inarguably played a defining role in colonization, another aspect of European conquest that has been somewhat neglected by modern historians is the way that First Nation peoples' conception of gender norms provided rationale for some of the furthest extremes of cultural imperialism, even going so far as to justify outright eradication of Native culture as a whole, which differed from the patriarchal social order that had characterized Europe for millennia. Christian missionaries were alarmed by Native women's influential role in their communities, an attitude which is not surprising considering that they had been infused with the belief system of Church fathers such as Thomas Aquinas, who wrote "There is another kind of subjection which is called economic or civil, whereby the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit and good; and this kind of subjection existed even before sin. For good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates."

In 1887 the General Allotment Act authorized the U.S. government to survey tribal land which was then divided into individual land parcels designated for nuclear families. Also known as the Dawes Act, it was established for the explicit purpose of destroying the political power of tribal kinship networks, which for centuries had been viewed by moral reformers as a threat to Christian virtue and, by extension, Manifest Destiny, the idea that the westward expansion of the United States was an expression of God's will. In many areas, this compulsory assimilation resulted in Native women's status being lowered in their kin networks, since land that had traditionally been held by women was now owned by the male head of the household. Previously, divorce had been an easy procedure in most tribes, but after the Dawes Act took effect women were disinclined to divorce because land titles were preferentially given to men, a change that restricted womens' freedoms considerably.

Of particular focus for the cultural imperialism of Christian missionaries were two-spirit Native Americans, not only because their gender presentation deviated from Victorian moral standards but because they so often played a central role in polytheistic tribal practices, which were viewed as heathenism by monotheistic European settlers. Amongst the Pueblo tribes, two-spirits frequently led ceremonial dances and acted as intermediaries between the clan and deities representing powers of nature, which were invoked in order to ensure success in hunting, warfare and agriculture. Spanish settlers viewed the animism of ceremonial dances as blasphemous idolatry, using what they interpreted as "sexual perversity" as a justification for massacring entire tribes en masse. Many First Nation peoples of the Plains region practiced solitary vision quests where two-spirits acted as shamanistic guides between normative reality and the spirit world. In addition to their participation in religious ceremonies, two-spirits played an important role in tribal kinship networks through assisting in child care, adopting orphans and caring for widows and the elderly. When U.S. marriage laws were imposed on tribal cultures, same-sex marriages were outlawed, destroying many centuries of Native American cultural heritage while denying legal recognition to the relationships of two-spirits and their spouses.

By the late 1800s the U.S. government had entirely failed to honor its treaty promises to protect Native reservations from encroachment by settlers and gold miners. Without arable land or the large bison herds which had formerly been a staple food for the Plains tribes, the overwhelming majority of First Nation peoples of that region sunk deep into crippling poverty. During the solar eclipse of 1889 a medicine man of the Paiute peoples, Wovoka, experienced a vision in which he saw the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ, resurrected as a Native American. In his vision the civilization built by European descendants was obliterated, and the former lands of First Nation peoples were rejuvenated and rich with game, while the ancestors of tribal communities were brought back to life. Wovoka's vision became the basis of the Ghost Dance religion, an effort to resist the subjugation of Native peoples through cross-cultural cooperation between tribes. U.S. Indian agents were disturbed by the site of Great Basin and Plains tribes performing the Ghost Dance and quickly moved to outlaw the practice, in the process arresting many tribal leaders who refused to obey government orders. The conflict over the right of Native peoples to perform ceremonial dances was what initially triggered the Wounded Knee Massacre, during which hundreds of tribal members, including women and children, were murdered by the U.S. military.

In an effort to dissolve social unrest on reservations, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries Christian missionaries established compulsory, off-reservation boarding schools as a way to extinguish the cultural legacies of tribal nations. In many cases officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly kidnapped children from their homes, at times threatening their families with reduced rations if they refused to comply. Since reservations were located on lands that, due to a lack of arable soil, could not possibly provide economic sustenance, tribal communities were forced to participate in their own culture's annihilation sheerly for survival purposes. The boarding schools placed strict regulations on every aspect of students' lives, forbidding any expression of Native culture, including language, religion and clothing. Students who broke these rules were punished by whipping, starvation and public humiliation. School administrators were especially concerned with assimilating Native children into adopting the gender norms of Victorian morality, including cutting the long hair of boys and forcing women to learn housekeeping skills, while prohibiting their work in the fields even though agriculture had traditionally been women's domain. Conditions in many schools were austere, with Native children undergoing perpetual undernourishment and disease. In Canada the federal government funded the establishment of a parallel residential school system which was run by Christian churches. Due to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and medical care, as well as incredibly high rates of physical and sexual abuse, the death rate in Canadian residential schools was up to 69 percent for First Nation students, a history that has resulted in the quite reasonable allegation that the Canadian federal government, as well as the churches who oversaw the residential school system, are guilty of cultural genocide.

Many Christian theologians have argued that Native peoples benefited from European colonization, especially as regards the status of women in polygynous tribes, since, up until the recent past, most anthropologists assumed these women lived in a condition of unbearable hardship and drudgery compared to male tribal members. To provide a complete picture of colonists' impact on indigenous society, it is necessary to avoid glamorization of Native cultures because, despite the fact that most indigenous tribes placed women in a higher social status than that of European-American women of the Victorian era, there were a minority who practiced dismemberment of adulterous women. The Blackfoot Confederacy, in particular, passed on a tradition of chopping off the noses of adulterous women and little can be gained by minimizing this cultural atrocity. Yet, when the effects of colonization are considered thoroughly, does the historical record confirm that European settlers were truly the defenders of women's empowerment that theologians have penned them to be? First, an analysis of the immediate consequences of colonial marriage laws is required.

In The Importance of Being Monogamous, Sarah Carter outlines the myriad ways in which marriage laws served to lower the status of both Canadian aboriginal and European-American women while justifying the encroachment of settlers onto Native territories. The imposition of bigamy laws meant that deserted wives and husbands were unable to remarry, and those with children were left with little means to care for their family. Catholic women who remarried were met with public humiliation by excommunication while women who "lost their virtue" before marriage were regarded as social outcasts. Since the nuclear family was seen as the cornerstone of social order, the Canadian government unilaterally barred single women who were not widows from owning property, since they were not contributing to society via marital reproductive labor.

The customs of English common law formed the basis of Canadian law codes, and these laws had historically preserved the idea of the "doctrine of marital unity" under which the legal autonomy of wives was subsumed by their husbands who were allowed to "chastise" their wives in so far as that chastisement did not put her life in jeopardy. In practice, divorce was expensive and exceedingly difficult to obtain, so it was ruled out as an option for all but the wealthiest members of society. Divorces were granted solely by Parliament and involved the examination of witnesses as well as public debate, an obviously embarrassing procedure that few women were willing to endure even in the most distressing situations. Furthermore, a husband was legally entitled to divorce if his wife had committed adultery, however wives could not divorce their husbands on this qualification alone, needing evidence of extreme violence or desertion.

No one benefits by minimizing the abuses perpetrated by members of the Blackfoot tribes or other indigenous communities, yet the fact remains that, before colonists arrived, the concept of illegitimacy, including single motherhood, was unknown in Native cultures. Within many aboriginal communities, the terms "mother" and "father" applied to cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings. Complex kinship systems predominated and came with the assumption that the community shared collective responsibility for children. Previously, marriage laws of Plains aboriginals had been flexible on the issue of divorce, but after colonial bigamy laws were enforced, women in abusive relationships had little recourse to leave dangerous situations. Officials from the Department of Indian Affairs were given nearly unlimited amounts of power over aboriginal communities, since they alone were able to authorize the legal validity of a marriage, meaning that DIA agents often arranged marriages, refused to recognize marriages they deemed unacceptable and captured "runaway wives" who were then returned to their former husbands.

When residential schools enforced enrollment of First Nation children, indigenous communities consequently began arranging marriages of very young girls, since marriage exempted their daughters from being subjected to the dangerous, unhealthy conditions of boarding schools. According to Carter, "Aboriginal women were often labeled immoral prostitutes who posed a serious danger to public health. The movement of aboriginal women off their reserves was restricted and monitored through a pass system", a limitation that did not apply to DIA agents who routinely trespassed on Native lands. Moreover, it is surely not a coincidence that, at the time bigamy laws were established, tribal communities were in the majority of Canadian populations and had fomented several armed uprisings which threatened the stability of colonial expansion. In conclusion, while theologians and politicians alike wax philosophical about how two parent families form the basis of moral societies, scant analysis has been focused on the ways that standardization of the nuclear family has destroyed communities while aiding in the suppression of dissident populations.

Judge orders CIA to produce data on MK Ultra experiments

I'm a bit late on this article but thought it was worth posting because projects like these so rarely end up in the public eye. The small number of people involved in the lawsuit are only a drop in the bucket but one can at least hope that this case will set a precedent. If the American public had any clue that their own government has been regularly performing dangerous, illegal experiments on countless US citizens, including children, then there's a chance that the already dwindling support for the bloated war machine could dry up in a heartbeat.

Apparently Wikileaks is threatening to release documents about MK Ultra along with all the irresponsible, counterproductive info like blueprints for nuclear weapons and the like. That particular document seems to be removed from the site so I see no harm in discussing it since the leak reveals what may very well be state propaganda, especially considering Assange's outright dismissal of the 9/11 truth movement. What I don't understand about the whole drama is that the supposed advantage of open source networks is decentralization, including the ability for mass networks of people to subvert hierarchical paradigms, yet instead it's being used to pander to someone's obvious megalomania, a mistake that could easily lead to internet censorship and other draconian measures.

I sense something very off about the situation because usually people with credible information don't end up in the papers. But instead it's garnering front page news, bringing far more attention to the site than if nothing had been done in the first place. There's a great article at Global Research regarding how many of the cables simply reiterate what has already been stated in the mainstream media about the supposed dangers of Iran, meaning that wikileaks may be a tool of the neocons. Regardless of all this, I hope that ethical people within the organization can get it together and start making some critical decisions about what documents to release, MK Ultra records being a good starting point for that. Because anyone who doesn't have their head buried in the sand knows that the project did not end in 1975.

CIA Must Disclose Data on Human Experiments

(CN) - A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ordered the CIA to produce specific records and testimony about the human experiments the government allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975.
Three veterans groups and six individual veterans sued the CIA and other government agencies, claiming they used about 7,800 soldiers as human guinea pigs to research biological, chemical and psychological weapons.
The experiments, many of which took place at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick in Maryland, allegedly exposed test subjects to chemicals, drugs and electronic implants. Though the soldiers volunteered, they never gave informed consent, because the government didn't fully disclose the risks, the veterans claimed. They were also required to sign an oath of secrecy, according to the complaint.
The veterans filed three sets of document requests to find out who was tested, what substances they were given, and how it affected them. Between October and April, the government produced about 15,000 pages of heavily redacted records, most of which related to the named plaintiffs only.
The CIA argued that much of the information requested was protected under the Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
U.S. Magistrate Judge James Larson acknowledged that some of the requests were too broad and ordered the veterans to be more specific and to reduce the total number of requests.
For example, Larson said the plaintiffs' definition of "test program" is "overbroad," as it not only named experimental programs like "Bluebird," "Artichoke" and "MKUltra," but also included "any other program of experimentation involving human testing of any substance, including but not limited to 'MATERIAL TESTING PROGRAM EA 1729.'"
He ordered the veterans to provide a list of specific test programs and test substances.
But once the plaintiffs narrow their requests, Larson said, they are entitled to most of the information. Each government agency must respond individually to each request, he said, and if an agency denies any request, it must explain -- in sufficient detail -- why the records are purportedly privileged.
The CIA has already claimed that some documents are protected under the state-secrets privilege, but Larson said the agency needs to be more specific. He asked for a "supplemental declaration explaining with heightened specificity" why the documents are considered state secrets. Because these documents might contain sensitive information, the judge allowed the CIA to file the declaration under seal.
Larson rejected the government's bid to limit the scope of discovery, saying doing so "removes the remaining hurdle" for the CIA to respond to the veterans' sets of requests.
"Defendants should respond in earnest to Plaintiffs' discovery requests, regardless of any ongoing or prior searches, investigations, or litigation," Larson wrote. He said the government can't limit disclosure to information about the six individual plaintiffs.
The CIA insisted discovery was unwarranted in its case, because it never funded or conducted drug research on military personnel.
Larson wasn't convinced.
"[T]his court rejects the conclusion that the CIA necessarily lacks a nexus to Plaintiffs' claims, and orders the CIA to respond in earnest" to the veterans' requests, "particularly because defendants have presented evidence that would appear to cast doubt on that conclusion," he wrote.
The government also tried to avoid deposition, claiming too much time had passed since the alleged experiments, and any witnesses familiar with the projects likely no longer work for the government. The CIA further argued, unsuccessfully, that the court should stay discovery until the Department of Defense completes its investigation of the experiments.
Larson reminded the CIA that it "cannot use the DoD investigation as an excuse to avoid discovery responsibilities."
He then addressed which topics are fair game for deposition, saying the government must produce witnesses to testify about the following: communication between the VA and test subjects on their health care claims; a 1963 CIA Inspector General report on an experiment called MKUltra, and the basis for each redaction on that report; the scope and conduct of document searches; the doses and effects of substances administered to test subjects; any contract or research proposals concerning the experiments; a confidential Army memo about the use of volunteers in research; all government-led human experiments from 1975 to date, but only those that involve specific drugs; and whether the government secretly administered MKUltra materials to "the patrons of prostitutes" in safe houses in New York and San Francisco, as the veterans claimed.
Judge Larson ruled for the CIA on other issues, however, saying the agency's not required to testify about test subjects who withdrew their consent or refused to participate; devices allegedly implanted into certain test subjects; the alleged use of patients at VA hospitals as guinea pigs in chemical and biological weapons experiments; or the drug research studies conducted by Dr. Paul Hoch, who was purportedly funded by the government and caused the death of a patient named Harold Blauer.
Though Larson declined to sanction the government, as the veterans sought, he warned that he would impose sanctions for any "future unjustifiable discovery recalcitrance."
Named plaintiffs are the Vietnam Veterans of America, Swords to Plowshare, the Veterans Rights Organization, Bruce Price, Franklin D. Rochelle, Larry Meirow, Eric P. Muth, David C. Dufrane and Wray C. Forrest.

Pentagon linked to child pornography

This story broke in late summer and was buried so deep in the papers that apparently nobody noticed. Hmmm. Here is CNN's coverage, as well as another article from the Baltimore Sun. This isn't exactly news for those of us who have been trying to raise awareness about the CIA's complicity in torturing American children during the ongoing MK Ultra project. All the same, it's wonderful to see that the story has finally reached the light of day.

Pentagon reopens investigation into child-porn purchases among ranks

The Pentagon has reopened an investigation involving more than 250 Department of Defense (DoD) employees who are alleged to have subscribed to child pornography sites using their government e-mail IDs and physical military addresses. The military's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) first launched an investigation into the issue in 2007 after being alerted to the problem by officials at the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Bureau. However, it quietly dropped the investigations in early 2008, citing resource constraints.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, James Burch, deputy Inspector General for Investigations at the DoD, said he has asked the DCIS to once again review each case, and to ensure that proper action is taken against individuals if the circumstances warrant it.

In situations where criminal charges will not be pursued, relevant information will be referred to the leadership at the relevant DoD organizations for appropriate administrative action, he said.

Gary Comerford, chief of public affairs at the DoD Office of the Inspector General, said that Wednesday's decision stems from persistent calls the Pentagon has received to reopen the investigations, but he did not elaborate.

The ICE operation that triggered the whole DCIS investigation was called Project Flicker. The operation was launched in 2006 and probed an overseas criminal organization that operated 18, commercial child pornography Web sites.

As part of the investigation, ICE had compiled a list of more than 5,000 U.S. residents who had subscribed with the Web sites being investigated. Several in that list had used .mil email IDs and Army Post Office addresses to register on such sites.

An inquiry by the DCIS subsequently identified 264 DoD affiliated individuals who had registered on child porn sites under investigation. Of those, 9 individuals had the highest-level security clearances giving them access to some of the nation's most sensitive secrets according to documents on the investigation that are available on the DoD inspector general's site.

In addition, 13 had Top Secret clearance, 8 had NATO Secret Security clearance, and 42 possessed a Secret Security clearance, according to the documents.

The Upshot, a Yahoo news blog which first broke the story, reported that among those in the list was a contractor for the National Security Agency, a staffer in Defense Secretary Robert Gates' office, and a manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The DCIS conducted follow-up investigations on 52 individuals, several of whom pleaded guilty on child-porn related charges and received varying prison sentences. However, it dropped the investigations into the rest of the individuals on the list in January 2008.

"Due to the short-term nature of this project and the need to focus more resources on other DCIS investigative priorities this project is closed as 'finished'," the DCIS had said.

The Upshot's story, which quotes an unnamed source, said the DCIS focused its initial investigations on people with Top Secret clearances and those working at military installations apparently because of concerns over the vulnerability to blackmail.

But it dropped the investigations citing resource constraints even before it had completed looking at all those in the list with Secret and Top Secret clearances.

Elite Human Trafficking: updated

I wrote this story after hearing Susie Bright's radio interview with Debbie Nathan, an investigative journalist who has written a number of pieces attempting to discredit the idea of satanic ritual abuse and organized human trafficking. Bright and Nathan believe that these ideas are perpetuated solely by Christian fundamentalists trying to deliver nonbelievers and porn addicts straight back into the arms of Jesus. I hope that this short paper can help to clarify things a bit for these two, or at least create a few new questions. My perspective is slightly different than the aforementioned Christians, mainly because I am not even slightly religious and have no ulterior political agendas lurking beneath the surface. However, my experiences, and those of many of my friends and acquaintances, have demonstrated the clear reality of highly organized trafficking and ritual abuse rings that cater to the most wealthy and powerful people in the world.

My own part of the story began when I arrived in New York shortly after turning 17. In the East village of the spring of 1997, the traffic in underage flesh was flowing so freely that it should have been a five lane highway. There were a lot of “photographers” who seemed mostly interested in taking naked pictures of all the runaways in Tompkins Square for really pitiful amounts like $20. Those pictures are probably all on the internet by now, making someone a lot of money. One night I went to a party with my friend Alice and we found a suitcase on top of the dumpster outside that was filled nearly to bursting with laminated photos of prepubescent boys and girls. The children were all either naked or in their underwear, and included in the suitcase were documents like birth certificates and social security cards. A woman who lived at the apartment we were visiting said that we shouldn’t turn it in because their building was a squat and since it wasn’t up to code they could get in trouble. The people at the party were under the impression that the suitcase had been planted there as a way to evict the squatters.

On another night I was wandering around with a friend named Josh and we got picked up by an older Mr. Rogers type. He brought us to an illegal after-hours club that he said was owned by the mafia. The waiters there were Italian guys who brought drugs to people’s tables as if they were items on a menu. Mr. Rogers got us some coke and brought us in the bathroom to put on a show for him while he doled out bumps. A few weeks after the mafia club, I was walking down Avenue B and ran into a boy I knew named Ryan. He said he could take me to a store where the man who worked there could feed us. When we got there, the man behind the counter got on his phone to call some friends he said would help us out. Five or ten minutes later a car full of Middle-Eastern men in nice suits pulled up and they brought us both to an apartment. One of the men there wanted me and Ryan both so he brought us to a room in the back and gave us some heroin. Unfortunately, since I was already drunk at this point, my memories of the rest of the night are very sparse.

I met a lot of people when I was panhandling. Around that same time period, another businessman took me out to eat and gave me a bottle of klonopin. He told me I could stop wasting my time with small time guys because he was in the business of arranged marriages and could hook me up with $4000 to marry a wealthy Russian man. He assured me it would be strictly for the green card and I didn’t have to live with him, but we should go to the Russian’s apartment anyways. Something told me to leave that situation alone, so I took his number and told him I would think it over and get back to him. Recently I read an article in the British paper the Guardian exposing a Russian snuff porn ring that had international distribution into Italy, Britain, America and Germany. The men involved with the ring would find homeless teenagers to be in their videos by going to the train stations or orphanages and promising a meal or a place to stay for the night. A follow up article reported that prices for the videos ranged as high as $20,000.

In DC I answered an ad for an "escort agency" in the back of the City Paper. When I arrived it became apparent that the agency was just a pimp with a small group of women. Abdul arrived to pick me up from the Metro station in a shiny black sports car with one of his women, Kelly, riding in the passenger seat. He brought me to his house right away, where he showed off his five vintage cars and a TV set that was six feet wide. Abdul told me that his family was Afghan Mafia and he would call them on me if I ever tried to leave him. He said this in as nice of a manner as he could have. Kelly told me that she liked for him to manage the money because he was better at it. Abdul owned escort agencies all across the country and claimed that much of his customer base was made up of politicians. The next day I spent with him driving me to various nice neighborhoods around DC to do outcalls. Although he took over 80% of what I made, I still walked away with nearly $1000. To gain his trust, at the end of the day I thanked him for providing security before promising to return after picking up clothes and make-up from a friends house. Abdul left a few messages on my cell phone, but I never returned his calls.

During the spring of 2000, I hitchhiked through Mexico with my friend Julia. We spent most of the trip camping in the city and countryside, which was way more of a hassle than we had planned on. On the edge of a small town right outside of Mexico City, we searched through overcrowded streets for a place to sleep. Eventually, exhausted and resigned to a less than adequate night’s rest, we unrolled sleeping bags in the driveway of a building that looked to be vacant. In the middle of the night, a car full of men and women rolled up and one of the men got out and began speaking to us rapidly in Spanish. Since my grasp of Spanish is minimal at best, the only thing I understood was that he wanted us to come inside the house where we could stay. And like insects flying into a light, we followed the men into what was clearly a whorehouse while their women waited outside in the car.

Inside the building there was a bar and a group of women standing around it in tight spandex dresses. After the men spoke to them for a few minutes, they led us downstairs to a cement room with all the charm of a military bunker. On a bare mattress was a pair of black underwear, on the floor a bloody condom, and a sink in the corner held a collection of used speculums. Within a few minutes we were asleep. In the morning we awoke to discover that someone had locked us into the tiny room. While I was panicking from visions of white slavery, Julia threw her pack out the window and swung it up and onto the roof. Looking out the window, I saw that we were on the side of what appeared to be a steep cliff, although I don’t know for sure, because the bottom wasn’t visible due to all the dense foliage. But we took our chances anyway and clambered out onto the roof. When we jumped off of it on the other side of the building, a large group of children crowded around to watch.

In the fall of 2002 I was 22 but could have easily passed for younger. Wandering around North Beach one night I got picked up by a white guy named Frank who said he was an insurance salesman. When I got into his car he asked to see my ID and insisted that I must be 16. I obligingly showed him my ID but that didn’t convince him. When he eventually incorporated the 16-year old thing into a fantasy he was having, I understood what he was into and agreed that I was 16 and had been lying to him all along. Over the course of the night, my age gradually decreased until eventually I was about 11. At one point, he asked that I get his inhaler out of the glove compartment and when I opened it, a huge pile of laminated photos fell out. The pictures were glamour shots of two girls, probably about 5 or 6, posed provocatively in different positions, sometimes clothed, sometimes naked or in frilly underwear. He told me they were his daughters and I decided the safest thing to do would be to pretend that I was into little girls too. I was concerned about him seeking retribution since I had discovered his secret, even if he wanted to be discovered.

He drove us across the bridge and into Marin County, where he lived in a wholesome looking townhouse. Inside the walls were cluttered with many photos of the same two girls as well as a constantly recurring Disney theme. There were so many pictures of Frank’s daughters that I could barely see the walls. Upstairs his bedroom had a king size bed, a TV that looked to be about 5 feet across, and a vast collection of porn. Frank had done so much speed that he couldn’t get it up the whole night so instead we talked about his fantasies. I encouraged him to talk about anything he wanted and even participated to a certain extent.

He told me that he really enjoyed 13-year-old runaways. Frank said he liked to videotape a group of his friends gang raping them, after which he would post the videos all over the internet. I made a careful effort not to appear judgemental about anything he told me and did my best to play the part of the willing voyeur to his confessions. He asked me if I knew any girls like that and I assured him that I knew many and could hook him up if he brought me back to the city. He promised to pay me extra if I could do that for him. On the trip back I talked about nothing but the girls I knew and what he would do to them. When he dropped me off on Polk Street, I told him that I would be right back and disappeared out of sight as quickly as possible. I never saw him again, but by the end of the night Frank had given me about $400. At the time I didn’t know it, but Marin County is actually the center of a large child trafficking ring that Frank was most likely connected to. But that part of the story doesn’t happen for a few more years.

Several summers ago, my friend Chris returned from Portland and told me about his run in with what was most likely another trafficking ring. Walking down Stark street one afternoon, he got picked up by an older man who brought him over to an apartment. The man told Chris that he was a little older than he preferred, although Chris was only 19 at the time and could have easily passed for 15. The walls of the apartment were decorated with life size photos of blonde prepubescent boys who were artistically posed with sullen expressions on their faces. Chris said the apartment seemed unlived in because it was unusually clean with freshly polished floors, fancy antique furniture and a bed with perfectly creased corners. There was nothing there that made it seem at all personalized. He described it as seeming like an expensive hotel room designed as a shrine to underage flesh.

If it wasn’t for all the stories I heard, I probably would never have become so interested in the subject of elite trafficking. Academics will tell you to discount rumors as irrelevant old wives tales, but at what point does a story become legitimate? Maybe when it has footnotes? If someone that you trust completely tells you a story that they swear up and down is true, when do you believe them? It is interesting how many people I know who have worked as escorts, or other slightly more respectable jobs in the sex industry, have never been exposed to either trafficking or kiddie porn types of organizations. I think that people who are into seriously vile activities like trafficking or pedophilia think that they can relax and let it all hang out around street people because they are just human garbage anyways, not like the upstanding citizens that many of those people are probably married to.

In Portland, my closest friend was an ex-marine named Billy who had just gotten out of prison. He told me he was framed for murder because he found out about a trafficking ring that many of Portland’s politicians were involved in. Billy was trained to work in construction in tunnels beneath the city, a job that he said he wouldn’t have gotten except for classified clearance he received while still in the military. Billy told me that he discovered a whorehouse connected to the basement of a psychiatric ward where many military personnel and city government workers, including the district attorney, were frequent visitors. The women, and possibly men, who were being sold there were former patients in the psychiatric facility.

During the time that I was close with Billy, his picture appeared in the paper in an article about convicted felons who were released to halfway houses. The caption accompanying his photo described him as a “convicted serial killer.” Billy said that after he went to the police about the trafficking ring he discovered, he was accused of the murder of several local prostitutes. One afternoon he took my friend Casey and I on a hike through Forest Park. We walked for miles away from any houses or civilization to a large system of ventilation grates that military personnel supposedly used as an entrance into the tunnel complex.

I paid attention to his story because my own experience has confirmed that there is a military/police presence in the infrastructure beneath American cities. A week after September 11th, I arrived in New York after a long absence. Some crackheads in the park told me about how the military was swarming all over the abandoned parts of the subways and so, since I had lived in the tunnels on and off for several years, I decided to see what they were doing to my former home. Walking down the tracks towards an abandoned station, I ran into a police officer that told me he was under orders to shoot anyone he saw. Eventually he let me go after I talked to him for a few minutes.

I was drawn to the subways in the first place because of rumors I had heard about the city infrastructure. In Atlanta, a friend described 12-foot-hight tunnels that ran beneath the freeways. He said that the tunnel floors were large enough to accommodate a hummer. While wandering through them he encountered a group of heavily armed military personnel who told him the same thing the police officer later told me—that they were under orders to shoot anyone they saw. Another friend, also from Atlanta, discovered this military infrastructure by accident while she and her boyfriend were looking for a place to sleep. In an abandoned factory they found a staircase that led to a lower level. This level led to another successive level and each of these basements was in turn the size of another factory. In the final basement my friend found a room full of computers and heavily armed military personnel who told her that she was in a restricted area and needed to leave.

A commonly recurring thread among people I have known is the story of religious cults who are deeply involved in the trafficking of children and young adults. This phenomenon has been characterized as satanic ritual abuse, which is really not very accurate, since Satanism is a religion whose system of belief is dependent on Christian ideas, making it essentially Christian in its origins. Besides, many modern historians agree that Christianity is basically a combination of the traditions of earlier polytheistic religions, which means it is basically a pagan religion in disguise. I don’t trust any of these religions since they have all been used for social indoctrination at one point or another. Many if not most instances of ritual abuse can be traced back to Christian churches, although there are also a lot of associations with new age type religions as well.

Ritual abuse gained international attention during the trial of Marc Dutroux, a Belgian serial killer who kidnapped dozens of underage girls and later imprisoned them in a soundproof torture chamber in his basement. Although the public record states that Dutroux’s only source of income was state welfare, he owned six mansions across the country that were alleged by several of his surviving victims to have been paid for by a high-level child pornography ring. They also told stories of large cement tunnels leading out from beneath the basement. One of his accomplices, Jean Michel Nihoul, went on court record stating that he had trafficked several of Dutroux’s girls into orgies that were attended by prominent government officials and law enforcement officers. The chief investigating magistrate, Marc Verwilghen, was so convinced that he went so far as to say “For me, the Dutroux affair is an issue of organized crime.” Dutroux had earlier served three years in prison for the rape and torture of five young girls.

Shortly after his release, Dutroux’s neighbors went to the police with reports that they heard children’s voices coming from his basement. After a brief search of the premises, the investigation was dropped. CNN reported that “police ignored tips from an informant who said Dutroux was building secret cellars to hold girls before selling them abroad.” The Guardian elaborated “Belgian police could have saved the lives of two children allegedly murdered by the paedophile Marc Dutroux if they had watched a video seized from his home which showed him building their hidden cell.” When the evidence for a powerful network of well-connected child traffickers became too great to ignore, Belgian citizens came out to the streets in droves, blocked traffic and brought cities to a halt with a general strike that was called for by the families of Dutroux’s victims.

One of the first people who told me about ritual abuse was a girl named Aurora. She had left an abusive home at the age of 13 and was shortly after adopted by a cult that her boyfriend’s family participated in. Aurora said that as part of her initiation, she and other children younger than herself were forced to torture animals. During one of the rituals, children were tied to chairs and whipped before adult members of the family took turns having sex with them. Aurora told me that the kids were constantly being tested by their ability to endure pain, and the weaker members were sometimes killed.

Aurora said there was a hotel right by 16th and Mission where she had been held at gunpoint and abused for several days by a group of Mexicans. She told me that the manager of the hotel had collaborated with these men to keep her there and ignored her calls for help even when he was standing right on the other side of the door. Shortly afterwards, another girl I know named Maria told me that she experienced the exact same thing at the same hotel. She even repeated the same detail about the manager standing on the other side of the door. I never told Maria about what happened to Aurora either so I doubt she was making it up. The Mexicans were part of an organized gang called the Border Brothers who trafficked in narcotics and had kidnapped Maria on several occasions when she was a child. The first time that she was taken came as a result of her mother’s drug debt. Another woman I know told me that the Border Brothers are famous for their violent rape and trafficking of prostitutes and she cautioned me against even discussing them.

One of the girls I knew from both Telegraph and Haight Street also told me about her experiences with trafficking rings. When I told her that I was writing this story, she asked me to tell as many people as possible. Over the course of a number of years, Jenna told me about an elite network of girls priced in the $10,000 range who are passed around by the wealthiest men in the nation. Since these men are often politicians or prominent businessmen whose work means exposure to the public sphere, they operate in this way in order to maintain secrecy and prevent a public scandal. Jenna had been trained to be part of this enterprise by a family who was deeply involved in organized crime. By the way of her family connections, she worked in elite prostitution, party promotion and the black market sale of narcotics.

Networking with a tiny group of wealthy Bay Area socialites led Jenna to private warehouse parties where she witnessed instances of human trafficking as well as ritual abuse. She said that within some of these buildings were entrances to tunnels where she saw men transporting groups of female prostitutes. The raves Jenna frequented often had orgy rooms, as well as chill out rooms where people went when they had done too much ecstasy. Sometimes the parties were centered around an organized ritual presided over by a high priestess. Part of the ritual involved the high priestess having sex with all of the men in the building in order to gain their power. In the middle of the night, someone who was unpopular or owed someone drug money would be ritually sacrificed in front of an altar while the ravers danced and performed focused meditations to the rhythm of the music.

For those who haven't experienced this kind of ritual abuse first hand, or had a loved one who has, these types of stories will almost certainly sound implausible. If it wasn't for the events of the next few years, I probably would never have fully believed them. Shortly after hearing about the experiences of Jenna and Aurora, I coincidentally found the writing of Fritz Springmeier and the stories I had heard began to make a lot more sense. Springmeier details how the CIA studied the minds of cult ritual abuse victims in order to create subservient personalities through the practice of trauma-based brainwashing.

Under the Monarch Project, a sub-project of MKUltra, psychiatrists employed by the CIA and M16 discovered that when the mind confronts trauma too difficult to process, it creates amnesiac barriers that splinter the personality into different selves. One of the effects of this process is that the brain overcompensates for this disability by the formation of nearly superhuman abilities. One doctor involved with the Monarch project, Ewen Cameron, later went on to become president of the World Psychiatric Association. Among many of the experiments performed by Cameron was one during which he removed sections of his "patient's" brains after dosing them with LSD without their knowledge. Eventually, psychiatrists discovered that the subjects of the Monarch Project often developed photographic memory, an abnormally high tolerance to pain, and even paranormal abilities like ESP. These abilities allowed intelligence agencies to use their patients as programmed assassins, human computers, elite sex slaves and spies enhanced with clairvoyance. If ESP sounds scientifically impossible, then consider that in the summer of 2007 Japanese scientists invented a device that could move a model train by processing brain activity through a mapping device. The mapping device was connected by optical fibers to a band around the head of a research subject performing simple calculations that would in turn move the model train forward along the tracks. In previous years, this “new invention” would have been called telekinesis.

Ritual abuse has been closely related to the Monarch Project on many different occasions, but for those who live in the Bay Area, the most relevant case may be that of Army Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino. He was a psychologist and brainwashing specialist who, during the 80s, was implicated in a ritual abuse ring operating out of a daycare center in the Presidio. The San Jose Mercury News reported children's stories of being abused by Aquino during rituals of the Temple of Set, an offshoot of the Church of Satan that Aquino founded in the mid seventies. In recent years, Aquino was accused of trafficking children into the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive summer camp for the nation's elite. Around this time, a radio talk show host named Alex Jones infiltrated the Grove and videotaped a ritual where men in white robes circled around a 50 foot tall white owl and performed a "mock" human sacrifice. In his documentary about Bohemian Grove, Jones displays newspaper articles from the early 1900s that openly discuss how the Bohemians cart in an actual corpse every year to be burned as an effigy. Past attendees of the retreat have included Reagan, Bush sr. and jr., Bill Clinton and William Randolph Hearst. Clips of Jones' video footage of the ritual are freely available all over the web.

When I read about the relationship between the Monarch Project and paranormal abilities, it instantly made me think of Aurora, who has been interested in occult practices like astrology and telepathy for as long as I have known her. She once told me that she had been repeatedly harassed to join the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult organization that wanted to use her for her abilities. In the abandoned building where we used to stay sometimes, she frequently had visions of a young girl in a white nightgown hovering over her at night. Many people have since told me that she is gifted with mind reading abilities, which I have experienced to a certain extent myself.

After her ordeal at the hotel in the Mission, Aurora began to slip into periods of catatonia. I would see her sitting immobile and speechless for hours at a stretch on the sidewalk and even the Haight Street kids said she was going crazy. Sometimes I would sit and talk to her for awhile and occasionally she would respond with a few words or sentences. Based on her facial expression and word choice, I could tell that her intelligence was the same as always and her personality intact, although buried under layers of emotional trauma. When Aurora was gone for a few days, I asked around and found out she had been sent to the psych ward at SF General Hospital.

I went to visit and saw right away that she was very different from her old self. Her eyes were glazed and she walked with a slow stumble, the characteristic Thorazine shuffle. She seemed confused and incoherent, although she was at least able to tell me what medications she was on. My friend Natasha works as an advocate for mental health clients, so I asked her about the side effects of antipsychotics. Natasha sounded very worried, since she was a friend of Aurora as well. She told me that antipsychotics are often linked to extreme brain damage. So I did my own research and discovered that researchers have even acknowledged a particular form of brain damage caused by taking atypical antipsychotics. They call this new disease neuroleptic-induced deficit syndrome (NIDS). The symptoms of NIDS are very nearly identical to those of Parkinson’s disease. NIDS is estimated to effect anywhere from 67 to 100 percent of drug-treated patients. As recently as the 1970s, the Soviets used psychiatric medications as a way to quiet and punish political dissidents. People whose ideas were threatening to the Soviet government were diagnosed with schizophrenia and their reformist ideas interpreted as proof of their delusions. In 1972, the U.S. Senate began an investigation into the Soviets’ “abuse of psychiatry for [the purpose of] political repression.”

One patient, Leonid Plyushch, a mathematician who spent several years in Soviet concentration camps, spoke before a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences: “The purpose was to force the patient to change his convictions. Along with me there were common criminals who simulated [mental] illness to get away from the labor camps, but when they saw the side effects – twisted muscles, a disfigured face, a thrust-out tongue – they admitted what they had done and were returned to camp.”

Another patient remembers: “…As a result of the treatment, all the subtle distinctiveness of a person is wiped away…. Those who take aminazine completely detereorate after taking it. Intellectually, they become more and more uncouth and primitive. Although I am afraid of death, let them shoot me rather than this. How loathsome, how sickening is the very thought that they will defile and crush my soul.”

The next day Natasha and I went to go visit Aurora to tell her about the drugs she had been prescribed. Natasha told Aurora that Risperdal, the medication she was taking at the time, has been linked to extreme brain damage and birth defects, a problem that was relevant because Aurora was pregnant. I doubted her ability to understand what we were saying, since she was speaking very slowly and slurring her words like a very drunk person, something that I had never seen her do before. But I was without recourse since I wasn't related to her and had no legal rights to remove her from the hospital. In the end we gave her a copy of a book by psychiatrist Peter Breggin, called Your drug may be your problem: how and why to stop taking psychiatric medication, which details all of the dangers of antipsychotics. Later I found out that one of the nurses had thrown it away while Aurora was sleeping.

Eventually she was released from the psych ward, but only under the condition that she remained on antipsychotics indefinitely. Since her stay at the hospital, I have seen her on a number of occasions, and her personality has never been the same. Aurora seems to have been reduced mentally to the age of a young child. Recently I saw her wandering down Mission Street half-dressed and barefoot, wrapped in a dirty blanket and missing a few teeth. Although she is a white girl, her feet were as black as coal and it looked as if she hadn't bathed in months. When I tried to talk to her, she spoke in garbled, incomplete sentences and seemed as if she didn't even recognize me, despite the fact that we have known each other for about eight years. In a just world, the doctors who destroyed Aurora’s mind and personality would be jailed, but psychiatric abuse has yet to be truly recognized as a human rights issue, so there is a long way to go before doctors and drug company CEOs can be held accountable for their actions.

Unfortunately, Aurora's story is far from being an anomaly. It is extremely common for victims of ritual abuse and trauma-based brainwashing to be forcibly medicated and dismissed as delusional. One of the most famous cases of this kind of cover up is that of Frank Olson, a biochemist who was employed by the CIA to do research involving biological warfare and interrogation techniques for the MKULTRA Project. When Olson witnessed his colleagues performing lobotomies and electroshock on foreign POWs, he decided to come forward and expose the project for the human rights violation that it is. Within a few days, he was dosed with LSD without his knowledge by CIA personnel who then committed him to a psychiatric facility. Olson wasn't there for long before he was thrown to his death from an 18th story window.

Although the US government claims that his death was a suicide, Olson's son believes differently. Eric Olson has been writing a book centered around the idea that Frank Olson was murdered because of his knowledge concerning the overlap between MKULTRA and biological warfare experiments performed on US citizens and foreign POWs. During an investigation into CIA abuses steered by the Rockefeller Commission, CIA director William Colby released a stack of documents pertaining to Olson’s ”suicide”. The documents outline the conflicting stories of the only witness to Olson’s death, CIA employee Dr. Robert Ashbrook, who first stated that he saw Frank plunge through the window and then later changed the story to say that he was awakened by the sound of shattered glass and only realized that Olson was gone when he noticed the empty bed across from where he had been sleeping. Even the New York Times reported that the Colby documents appeared to be ““elliptical, incoherent, and contradictory.” The Times stated that: “Taken as a whole, the file is a jumble of deletions, conflicting statements, unintelligible passages and such unexplained terms as the “Artichoke Committee” and “Project Bluebird” that tend to confuse more than enlighten.”

When the Olson family was informed of Frank’s death, they were told that his body was too mutilated to be seen. The casket was finally opened 41 years later to reveal that, contrary to the New York Medical Examiner’s report of 1953, Frank Olson’s body remained intact and recognizable. The forensic team discovered a suspicious hematoma on the temple that they concluded could only have come from a blow to the head. Based on this evidence, as well as a string of inconsistencies involved with the CIA’s version of the story, in 1996 the New York District Attorney’s office opened a homicide investigation into the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s death. During the course of the investigation, a source close to Israeli intelligence came to the DA with an allegation that Olson’s murder had been used as a model case of a perfect murder at an assassination training unit of the Mossad that was stationed right outside of Tel Aviv. The New York DA was also provided with a CIA training manual that had been used as a template for Israeli intelligence assassination techniques. The many synchronicities between the manual and Olson’s case led the Assistant District Attorney in charge of the case to state that “The assassination manual reads like a script for the murder of Frank Olson. The only question is which came first, the manual or the murder. Was the manual based on the murder or was the murder carried out according to the manual?

Over the course of the past decade, I have known many people who have suffered as a result of their involvement in brainwashing programs very similar to those witnessed by Frank Olson. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened as a result of these acquaintances until I met Bobby. I have to admit, with a certain amount of embarrassment, that when he first told me about his family and their involvement with organized ritual abuse I suspected him to be a compulsive liar. He told me that his family was descended from William Randolph Hearst and had been involved in cult activities for decades. Bobby said that they were the richest black family in all of Sonoma County and owned properties all across the country. Although he was homeless and his story seemed unlikely, I tried to remain open minded, sine it was apparent that he had acquired a great deal of education.

When Bobby was a teenager his family tried to recruit him into a San Francisco cult that performed serial killings on white people. His initiation into the cult involved murdering three white babies. When he learned what he was being asked to do, Bobby escaped his family and came to the city. This particular detail is what caused me to dismiss the story as a paranoid fantasy. Years later I discovered a newspaper article that confirmed the existence of Bobby's cult. The Zebra Killers were a black supremacist group that was responsible for the deaths of at least 16 white people between 1973 and 1974. A researcher named Alex Constantine linked the cult to the CIA, who even sent some of their agents out in blackface in an attempt to disrupt the civil rights movement and initiate a race war. Bobby had also told me that his family had ties to the Klu Klux Klan, as well as the upper levels of Bay Area politics and business. As a child he was even introduced to members of the Klan's hierarchy. He believed that a network of individuals involved with his family were stalking him in an effort to get him to rejoin the cult. Bobby said that he had received death threats because he threatened to reveal their secrets.

Although I was skeptical of many of his claims, I sometimes brought him over to stay at Chris’s apartment on Linda Street. Bobby believed that a network of cultists had been responsible for the murders of homeless prostitutes throughout the city. This is when I began to take him seriously, since I had been hearing about these murders for years. One of my best friends had even found a bag full of fingers in Golden Gate Park. When I was staying in the park, I often heard screams in the middle of the night, and once awoke to discover that I had wrapped myself in a blanket that was splattered with blood. Mixed in with the blankets were some women's clothes and a couple of used condoms. Since that particular spot was a place where I had frequently camped with Aurora, when I arrived there I had believed the blanket to be hers. Another guy I knew, a speed dealer named David, told me that he used to sell speed to a group of professional gay men who had a "gentleman's club" that participated in the ritual sacrifice of homeless prostitutes. At one point, David had even found a human arm in their trashcan.

A few months after this I ran into Angelica, a tranny whore I have known for years, at a leather bar off of Market Street. Without me repeating David's story, she told me she had witnessed a group of gay businessmen ritually sacrifice a female prostitute in the basement of another gay bar. One of the things I have always had a hard time with about Angelica is that she has serious racism issues and is not afraid to vocalize them in as offensive of a manner as possible. Once I was on a bus with her going through the Bay View and she started screaming at all the black people and calling them niggers. I think the only reason we weren't seriously injured is that she looked completely unstable and capable of violence. Angelica told me that the group of gay men involved with the murders also had ties with the Aryan Nation. She had mixed feelings about the whole venture, especially when I asked her for an extended interview. Eventually Angelica decided against revealing more information, since she had been raised by the Aryan Nation and couldn't betray their loyalties.

After Bobby put some of these pieces together for me, I began asking questions of many more people. It was around this time that I first experienced what seems to have been surveillance by intelligence agencies or other related organizations. At the apartment on Linda Street, I checked my voicemail and heard dozens of messages containing strange electronic noises like blips and beeps. Bobby claimed that the calls were typical of the sorts of harassment he had been receiving from his family. But my friends told me to stop being paranoid--the calls probably came from a mechanized telemarketer. At the same time, someone had been going through the trash every night and scattering the contents across the sidewalk. I had a notebook that I had been writing this story in, and when I moved out of the apartment, I ripped out the most important pages and stupidly threw the rest of the notebook away. That night someone methodically went through my notebook, ripped out every page, crumpled them each into a ball and left the pages scattered across the sidewalk. I should also mention that not one trash bag on our entire street was ripped into besides ours. Still, any one of these incidents could easily be interpreted as an unsettling coincidence.

One of my favorite places to go that winter was the UCSF medical library, because unlike the public library, it was quiet and I could stay on the internet for as long as I wanted. One day I brought Bobby there with me and after spending a few hours reading we went outside to get some fresh air. I found a spot not far from the library on a street empty of traffic where we sat down on the sidewalk to talk. We weren't there for more than twenty minutes before an expensive black car rounded the corner, slowly rolled down the street and turned diagonally towards us over the curb before stopping a few inches away from our feet. Inside the driver's seat was a white man in a black suit and black sunglasses who stared at us without expression. Without exchanging a word, we got to our feet and walked down the street and away from the black car. When I told acquaintances of mine that I knew from the entirely different world of progressive politics, I could see by the look on their faces that they thought I had finally lost it.

One afternoon Bobby told me that he wanted to show me something and so the two of us walked over to Linda Street, where a new mural had been painted in the spot by Chris’s apartment where the garbage had been ripped open. The mural depicted a black guy who looked quite a bit like Bobby standing underneath the city with occult symbols surrounding him. What was truly strange was that the man in the painting had a crescent shaped scar over his right eyebrow the same as Bobby. He interpreted it as a warning that he could become the next “false initiation”. Apparently it was common practice for the cult gathered around Hearst to induct a black man into their ranks only to eventually sacrifice him to the owl statue that they named Moloch after the Babylonian deity of the same name. (note: Some researchers have pointed out that Moloch was not originally associated with owls, so it may be that either this particular item is a mistake on the part of either myself or Bobby, or that Moloch is represented by multiple icons. Moloch, or Molok, is also the name of a deity that was worshipped by the Ohlone peoples which resided in the area surrounding Mount Diablo, located 40 miles away from the Grove. Springmeier has pointed out the importance of regional deities in organized ritual abuse, so this correspondence may explain the origin of the cult in that particular area. Additionally, many details Bobby told me that were not written about publicly were later corroborated by other researchers, so I tend to believe that he was, in general, correct. One particular example I can think of is a gangstalking target who was followed by a man carrying what appeared to be a microwave weapon inside a suitcase, a claim also made by Bobby.)

A few days later, Bobby got into a bit of trouble in the park. We were just sitting on the grass when a big group of guys walked up to another guy and started beating him over the head with skateboards. When Bobby rushed over to break up the fight, the group of boys turned on him with their skateboards and in a very short time Bobby hit the ground flat. After my dog chased the attackers away, I saw that he was lying in a pool of blood. Luckily there was a hospital right down the street where doctors told Bobby that the boys had brought him very close to death. The doctors gave him injections around his eye socket because the bone in that park of his face had been shattered and they were concerned his eyeball would fall out.

During the weeks leading up to the mural’s appearance, we had been having many conversations about the different variety of intelligence projects that are rumored to occur within underground bases. One of the projects that Bobby claimed to have witnessed involved experimentation on homeless people with microwave rays, a practice that left them with cancerous skin growths and altered brain chemistry. The last time I saw him was shortly after he had recovered from being attacked in the park. Bobby told me that his family connections would allow him to enter a base near his hometown in order to expose the gruesome experiments that had been occurring there. The last time I saw him he said he was on his way north in an effort to rejoin the cult and infiltrate the organization. That was five years ago and none of his friends have seen Bobby since.

I continued to talk to many people about the murders that had been occurring throughout the city. My good friend's mother told me about her time spent wandering in the tunnels. A boyfriend of hers had shown her the entrance to one of them in the back room of a Chinatown hotel, so one night she went exploring alone while on a speed binge. Lily found enormous storm drains that she followed for a good distance beneath the streets. Many of these branched off into smaller tunnels, one of which she followed until becoming lost. When rounding a corner, she smelled something horrible and looked down to see a pentagram stretched about six feet across on the floor of the tunnel, drawn in blood. Around the pentagram were written the names of many people she knew, people who were for the most part tweaker whores or their dealers.

Lily's boyfriend was a dealer called Sundance who later went to prison for his part in aiding a San Francisco based serial killer. Her long term relationship with him eventually resulted in Lily being subpoenaed to testify during the killer’s trial. The Chronicle reported that Jack Bokin was a plumber who had been murdering prostitutes throughout China Basin and the Mission. Sundance played his part by hooking the killer up with girls, despite the fact that he probably knew exactly what Bokin was doing. After Bokin went to prison, the murders seem to have continued at the same pace, but without surfacing in the papers. My friend Danny was sleeping in a tent underneath the freeway, in a spot where he heard screams every night the same as I had in the park. One morning he was asked to leave by the highway patrol who told him to watch out because that location had been used by a serial killer to deposit his bodies.

Another friend Marie has a boyfriend, Chaco, who works as an EMT. Chaco was sent out one night to clean up an accident in a hotel in the Tenderloin. He arrived to see a room that had been meticulously arranged, with an altar, candles and body parts strewn across the floor. Since then Chaco has been sent to the same hotel to an identical scene on several different occasions. One of the rumors that I have repeatedly heard is that many of the bodies found in both Buena Vista and Golden Gate parks have been decapitated. What I wonder is why these murders never end up in the papers. While I was researching this paper, an online acquaintance mentioned to me that their Dad ‘s friend was a detective who investigated a string of murders that happened in Golden Gate Park. At least one of them involved the decapitation of a homeless person, a fact that never became public knowledge. What is strange about this is that there are a lot of urban legends on Haight street about a killer who decapitates homeless people.

In November of 2004, I went to go stay with a girl named Sherry at an apartment on Valencia Street for about a month. She was living rent free with a sugar daddy landlord named Navin whose family was Indian Mafia, the same group of people who owned all the scummy hotels in the Tenderloin. Sherry came from a very strange family. Her mother was part of a religious cult and briefly had a CIA boyfriend. Sherry's Dad was a former heroin dealer who collected swords and was by all accounts not a very nice man. While staying in Navin's apartment building it was impossible to get any privacy because he insisted the doors to the apartment remained unlocked at all times so that he could barge in unannounced. He had a lot of different women living in the building rent free and it seemed that he had given up even attempting to make any money off of it. Although his buildings were barely up to code, Navin lived in a mansion in the Marina and spent all of his time partying as far as I could tell. Sherry wanted to bring me to one of the parties but it seemed like the sort of thing that we really should have been getting paid for. The party hosts insisted that anyone who attended remove all of their clothes at the door, after which they would be ushered into a room without any lights. After Sherry told me about the details of the party, I decided not to go.

Shortly after Thanksgiving of that year, Navin kicked us out and I got my own room in Oakland. During that winter, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Sherry when we weren’t staying at each other’s houses. A lot of our conversations bordered on phone sex, mostly revolving around our mutual pimp and ho fantasies. If I had any idea that someone was paying close attention to these calls, I probably would have been a bit more modest, but as it was the situation devolved into a significant problem for the both of us. The first thing to let me know something was wrong was when we both started receiving dozens of phone calls that had static or blips and beeps in the background, which again would have seemed fairly minor if it wasn't for my previous experience.

Recently I found the blog of a freelance journalist who had been through a similar situation involving the mysterious hang up calls. Hers had started as a teenager very soon after she began researching covert military technologies, after which she would pick up the phone only to hear a series of clicks followed by silence. Eventually her mother called the phone company, British Telecom, and asked the operator to trace the call, a request that is now impossible but was then common practice. The operator told the journalist's mom that he was not supposed to tell her, but informed her anyways that the call had been traced to the Ministry of Defense and then immediately hung up. My opinion about these calls is that they are placed by an artificial intelligence who has a "list" of targets, since I would imagine that global intelligence operatives probably have better things to do with their time than personally contacting every person who causes a minor annoyance for them.

During the time the phone calls first started happening I had a voice mail number that I had only given out to four people, all of who were friends. One night I got a phone call from what sounded like a black guy who said "Hi, this is your pimp. You should have paid me by now so I shouldn't even have to be calling you." My first thought was that Sherry had gotten one of her friends to leave the message as a practical joke, so I just laughed and deleted it. But she said that she didn't have anything to do with the message and so did all the rest of my friends. A few weeks later, Sherry received a phone call from an older man who said he found her from an ad she had left on craigslist. He wanted to spend the night with her and in exchange he would give her a truck. What is strange about this is that she had been telling me about how she wanted a truck beyond any other kind of car. For months she had been telling me this.

Sherry accused me of posting the ad despite my insistence that I didn't. She believed that I invented the story of the pimp voicemail message as a way to get attention, or something like that. I was starting to be confused. I had only known her for a few months--was it possible she had invented the entire situation as a way to manipulate me? I began to wonder how well I knew my friends. Considering that each person who had my voice mail number knew this situation was causing me a considerable amount of stress, it was disturbing to know that someone didn't know when to quit the "joke".

A few weeks later I discovered a record store I had never been to before in Alameda. I had a strange moment at one point when my eye caught the CD of a folk singer named Michelle Shocked. The CD cover brought back a memory of sitting on the floor in the kitchen of my old house in Chicago while my mom played a Michelle Shocked cassette and cooked dinner. When I saw the CD, I clearly remember thinking that I hadn't thought about or heard any Michelle Shocked in about 15 years. That night I got home to another curious message on the answering machine. This time it was what sounded like an older man who said, "Hi, this is Michelle Shocked, I'm looking for some ladies."

When I heard the man's voice my blood ran cold. I hadn't mentioned the Michelle Shocked memory to anyone, so now I realized that none of the previous messages had been left by Sherry. The Michelle Shocked message was most likely an instance of what the intelligence community calls remote viewing, a practice typically only engaged in by psychically trained spies. The phrase "I'm looking for some ladies" has a personal history as well.

One time while living in DC I visited my mom, who gave me the key and said she wouldn't be home that night until late. This was during a time that I was working at a legitimate escort agency and I made the unfortunate mistake of giving my mother's phone number out to one of my clients, naively thinking that he would be respectful and only call during the times that I specified. I left that night around nine, and in the middle of the night my mom received a call from a man who said "Hi, I'm looking for a lady". Since I was living with another ex-prostitute at the time I received the Michelle Shocked phone call, the man who called could have been referring to her, or possibly Sherry. When I spoke with her a few months ago, she was enrolled in some kind of training institute for clairvoyants.

Not more than a few days after the Michelle Shocked call, I woke up in my attic loft bed around 6 AM to the sight of a black helicopter hovering 30 feet outside my window. I had been warned on an internet conspiracy forum that if I pursued the subject of ritual abuse and human trafficking, I could expect a visit from a black helicopter. I lay in my bed for half an hour watching the helicopter before going down the ladder for a minute to retrieve my glasses so that I could get a better look inside to see who was the pilot. By the time I got back, it was gone. I asked the neighbors and they all told me there had been no drug busts or arrests in the neighborhood that week.

Recently I came across the websites of several different civil liberties activists who have detailed the phenomenon of organized gang stalking. As a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, in the early 1990’s the federal government began employing independent citizens to target and harass activists who were believed to be a threat to national security. Gang stalking is financed under cover by corporations and often carried out by organizations like Community Oriented Policing Services. The intent of the stalking and harassment is to psychologically demoralize the subject and make him or her appear mentally unstable in order that their experiences and stories will not be believed. Most of the practices that make up the gang stalking phenomenon are actually quite subtle. Some of the tactics I found the most relevant were “trash strewn on the target’s lawn, driveway and property in such manner as to make it obvious that it was a deliberate act…sending the target messages that let the target know they are being watched…day-in and day-out hang-up phone calls or wrong numbers”.

During the spring of that year my landlord illegally raised the rent again and again and since I have a tempermental rottweiler mix and no credit history, my options were limited. I eventually ended up getting a job at a BDSM house in East Oakland. People have often told me that dominatrix jobs are the best because you are always in control of what happens. But my boss Kitty turned out to be one of those people who takes the dominatrix thing way too seriously. The whole time I was there she pressured me to work as a submissive despite my insistence that I wouldn't be doing that. Kitty would even go so far as scheduling sessions with me as a submissive and then getting angry and coercive when I refused to meet with the clients. Fortunately a good portion of the customers there were likable and interesting people so I tried to ignore the conflicts that I was having with her.

After I spent a few months giving spankings to petulant businessmen, Kitty let it slip that one of her clients used to be a serial killer named Charles Ng who kept women chained up to toilets in his basement for months at a time. His partner in crime, Leonard Lake, was also a customer. Apparently every girl who worked there had bottomed to them at one point in time, although none of those girls were working there anymore since my boss never seemed to keep employees for long. After Kitty told several of us who worked there about Ng and his revolting appetites, the other girls started getting freaked out about it and she refused to answer my questions and tried to change the subject. She must have realized that it was bad for business.

It wasn't very difficult, however, for me to find information on Ng and Lake since she had already given me his name. I read their entire article on crimelibrary.com and discovered that the killers had been found with detailed blueprints for a network of underground bunkers that they could use to transport guns, food and sex slaves that they would use to repopulate the earth after the imminent apocalypse. Lake had even bragged to his girlfriend about his participation in a satanic "death cult" based out of San Francisco. Like many serial killers, they seemed to have some kind of arrangement with the police. When the cops were called out to his property he had dozens of bodies buried in the backyard and some women were still being kept alive in the back room. Even so, they decided to wait on searching his property. I wondered about the reasoning behind such staggering incompetence, since I had witnessed pretty much the exact same type of police cover up in my own life on several different occasions.

Bobby had told me a few years previously that an ex-military man we knew named Twilight was involved with some of the killings going on in the city. Bobby believed him to have ties to the Church of Satan. Twilight was like a tweeker pedophile version of the pied piper, luring underage boys with drugs, stuffed animals and promises of ninja training. He bragged to me of hosting drug-fueled orgies composed entirely of underage boys out by the abandoned castle behind the zoo, a place that was referred to as Camelot. I would sometimes see him around the city with boys who looked to be as young as eight, but more often he was with slightly older runaways. On several occasions, groups of street kids from the park got together and gave Twilight a royal beatdown, although he never seemed to have any interference from the police.

Twilight told me that he was a trained assassin who had killed many people. One day when I was talking to him he lifted his shirt to reveal a perfectly sculpted six pack like off of the cover of a muscle magazine. Friends of mine who stayed out at Camelot told me that he usually supplied them with copious amounts of alcohol and methamphetamine. They said that he had hidden guns and swords all around the building to keep out anyone that he didn't want to be there. Apparently he was successful, because as of 2007, he has been the only consistent person to live there as far as I know. I was very curious about this fact, because in San Francisco it is very difficult to keep an abandoned building for any length of time due to a thriving real estate market, police interference and competition from other homeless people. Twilight is the only person I know who has ever managed to keep a building for a number of years, so I asked him how he was able to secure an entire castle all for himself and his guests. He told me that the city paid him to "protect the children".

On another day, I was sitting in the Dolores Park with a large group of people including Twilight. When a police officer walked up and told us all to leave, Twilight responded by performing martial arts on the officer, who had to call back up and have him taken to jail. Not less than two days later, I saw him sitting on the sidewalk at Church and Market as if nothing had ever happened. Another curious thing about Twilight is how he always seems to have money but no one I know has ever seen him do anything to make any. One time I even saw him eating in an organic restaurant. It would seem to be ridiculously obvious that there is no way a toothless black homeless man could get away with assaulting police officers and molesting children unless he had some kind of inside connection. I thought it was interesting to note that Twilight had named his castle Camelot, because the Grail myths are a very common programming script in Monarch brainwashing programs. Each script is like a computer program that calls up a specific set of behaviors.

The connection between Twilight and Charles Ng was made apparent for me when I came across the research of Dave MacGowan. In a book called "Programmed to Kill", MacGowan writes about how many serial killers have connections to Manchurian Candidate-like brainwashing programs originating in Cold War intelligence operations. At an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists, Lt. Commander Thomas Narut divulged how the Navy took convicted murderers from military prisons, trained them with behavior modification methods and then relocated the killers in American embassies worldwide. In an article about serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, MacGowan exposes how Lucas spoke of being inducted into an international satanic cult named the "Hands of Death". He claimed to have been trained in assassination techniques at a mobile paramilitary unit in the Florida Everglades. Lucas worked as a contract killer and trafficker of children and drugs, at times even being contracted to assassinate foreign dignitaries. In a similar vein of research, Maury Terry also wrote a book linking the Manson, Zodiac and Son of Sam murders into an interlocking network of politically motivated religious cults.

Ng and Twilight were far from being the only serial killers who have made inroads into my circle of friends. In Atlanta, there was a guy named Joel who everyone I knew was terrified of. A couple boys I knew had been at Joel's house one time when he walked into the living room with an arm and started bragging about how many people he had killed. He had different stories for different people, some of whom he told that he was actually a friend to the police, and had called them on several different occasions to report finding dead bodies. Everyone was under the impression that he had some kind of "arrangement" with them. Joel also happened to be a martial arts instructor, another common area of training for mind control programs. Another friend of mine accompanied Joel into the tunnels while on a crack binge, where Joel showed him dozens of bodies with a flashlight before they left.

A few months ago, Chris told me about another killer who was based out of Manhattan. English was a burly, highly educated heroin dealer who liked to prey on street kids. The other dealers around Tompkins Square Park told Chris that he had been chased out of his own neighborhood in Brooklyn for being a serial rapist. English had violently raped many of the homeless girls in Tompkins Square Park after finding where they were staying and following them there. At one of the squats where many people were staying, English told a number of folks that he had buried bodies under the building. Several people saw him walking around with a knife that had brain matter on it, and with bloody towels on a different occasion. English had hidden knives throughout the park, mostly pushed with their hilt fully into the grass for later retrieval. He was known for attacking people there without any kind of police repercussions. Once English split a man's shoulder open with a meat cleaver about five yards away from a group of policemen. He did go to jail, but was out within a few days.

When I passed through Denver about five years ago, another traveler told me that while camping in the park, he had witnessed a van full of white men in black suits pull up to the curb, get out, drag a couple of bums back to the van with them and drive away. I have spoken to so many different people who have personally witnessed events like this that there is no way it could be a coincidence. In SF, many of the older homeless men, and a handful of people my age, told me that they saw men in black uniforms marching in military formation through Golden Gate Park in the middle of the night. My suspicion is that these coordinated and institutionalized murders are allowed to happen because they are a continuation of U.S. government eugenics programs that eventually resurfaced in military population control experiments.

In the fall of 2005, I was on a bus when I spotted a man reading one of my favorite books. We struck up a conversation and when I mentioned that I was doing a paper dealing with human trafficking, he told me I should speak to his friend Sarah whose kids had been trafficked through the court system. Thunder was a DJ for Berkeley Liberation Radio and the organizer of the Leonard Peltier drum circle that happened every month in front of the Oakland federal building. On the fourth of July, he drove me up to Stinsen Beach to do a taped interview with Sarah. She told us a story that that wove together organized crime, social services and the federal government into an intricate web of corruption. Unfortunately, since the three of us had very little knowledge about the legal system, many of the criminal maneuverings that happened around her could have been better told by someone besides myself.

Sarah’s story began when she received an illegal eviction while living in Berkeley. After blowing all of her money on court fees in a failed attempt to fight the eviction, Sarah was soon on the streets and drove up to Marin County to live out of her car with the kids. Before the eviction, her autistic son had been locked up in Letterman Hospital, which was part of the same Presideo Army base that was the alleged location of the satanic ritual abuse allegations during the 80's. Here her son was forcibly drugged and smothered with pillows by hospital staff. Fritz Springmeier has listed Letterman Hospital as a site involved in
split-brain military programming, pornography, satanic rituals, the drugging of infants and enforced isolation. According to Sarah, her son was originally singled out for psychiatric treatment after he told the adult leader of a local church youth group that the crucifixion of Jesus was a Satanic sacrifice, and was subsequently reported by said leader.

Upon arriving in Marin County, Sarah was directed to a home schooling organization called Oracle that operated out of the home of a juvenile probation officer named Don Dean. Don is a wealthy socialite who owns the Coastal Beacon newspaper, as well as a bar and hotel called Happy's. Before her kids were able to join the Oracle program, Don said that Sarah needed to sign a document that would allow him to call an ambulance if one of her kids was injured on his property. He told her that her kids could live with him and they would have joint custody until Sarah found a place to live, after which he would return her custody. Sarah’s case was assigned to Judge Michael Dufficy, who turned out to have some kind of arrangement with Don. She even saw them wink at each other before the hearing began. At the time she wasn't aware that she would never regain full custody of her children. Years later, she discovered that Don had arranged for her son to be an emancipated minor in order so that her son could sign over custody of Sarah's daughter to Don.

At the time of the court case, her daughter Anna was 10 and her son Ryan 17. Left without any legal option, Sarah was only able to see her kids by coming over to the house when Don wasn't there. Through what her kids told her, she discovered that the house was mostly just a crash pad for strung out underage girls for whenever they weren't living with their adult boyfriends. One day Sarah hid herself in her daughter's loft bed in order to listen to a house meeting that had been scheduled by Don. During the meeting, she learned that one of the girls who lived there had gotten four abortions within the course of one year. Don screamed at the girl, who had become pregnant again, to "take care of the problem". Ryan told Sarah that the house babysitter, Don’s brother Tony, was a porn director who told the kids, five of whom were middle school girls, all about the business of making movies for the Mitchell Brothers. One of the girls who had previously lived at the foster home was a heroin addict and another worked as a prostitute outside of Don's bar. While sitting in Happy's one day, Sarah overheard one of the bartenders claim that she lived rent-free on account of allowing her home to be used for organized sex parties, stating that politicians and all kinds of important people attended the events.

Through an organization called Parents' Rights, Sarah became acquainted with a freelance journalist formerly from the Bay Cities Observer named Viginia McCullough. She had written a series of articles documenting how Marin County's Family Court and Child Protective services had a long history of covering up instances of child abuse and pedophilia within foster homes. McCullough reported on the existence of a hidden organization within the court system called the Militia, which controlled the course of events through hand signals and other coded forms of expression. Judge Michael Dufficy, as well as several other judges and the district attorney, were implicated again and again by many different families as enablers of child abuse who habitually sided with the abusive parent or foster parent.

At the center of the controversy was a woman named Carol Mardeusz, who claimed that her potential testimony in the Polly Klaas case was the greatest factor in the Marin courts taking her daughter Haleigh away during a custody hearing. Carol had originally filed a police report about two men who had been stalking her teenage daughter Natalie, as well as several of her classmates, throughout the neighborhood where they lived. Natalie and her friends identified one of the men as Richard Allen Davis, who would be arrested several weeks later for the murder of Polly Klaas. During the beginning of Davis’ trial, the Mardeusz family was arbitrarily eliminated as key witnesses in the Klaas murder by Sonoma County District Attorney Mullins.

It may be necessary here to explain the relevance of Polly’s murder, since most people are unaware that her grandfather had just finished writing a book that exposed ritual abuse networks operating out of Northern California. When Polly’s body was found, it had been deposited directly outside of one of the entrances to Bohemian Grove. Crimelibrary.com reports that while he kidnapped Polly, Davis repeatedly told her two friends “I’m just doing this for the money.” That same night, police stopped Davis in front of an estate while he had Polly confined within his car. Court records state that while sipping a beer, he told them that he was stopped there to pick up some marijuana and visit with associates. They let him go. Virginia McCullough discovered that the property where Davis was stopped belonged to Naomi Phillips Knock, the wife of a man who had been arrested for his association with a marijuana trafficking ring that generated $165 million a year.

With Carol as a witness, Richard Allen Davis now had an accomplice, changing the basis of the flawed Klaas story that has been fed to countless media sources. Shortly after the removal of the Mardeusz family from the witness stand, Carol was charged with child kidnapping when she attempted to pick Haleigh up from school. The day she went into court, Judge Dufficy informed Carol that custody had been transferred to her ex boyfriend Leo Magers, a man who had already been charged with child molestation and convicted of cocaine distribution. Carol’s police reports about Leo’s child abuse were used to paint her as a crazy woman unfit to care for her own children. This was despite court records that stated that Leo had broken the nose of one of his previous girlfriends and locked her in a bedroom for two weeks.

During the custody hearing, Carol told the court that she had previously attempted to gain full custody when she found Haleigh’s passport which bore a fake name and a photograph of the girl wearing heavy make up. She believed that Leo had gotten the passport to involve Haleigh in drug trafficking. Carol began distributing flyers that linked Leo Magers to drug and human trafficking rings closely involved with the Bohemian Grove. Her open discussion of these issues during the trial is probably what led to a perjury conviction. I wish I could have spoken with Carol personally, but unfortunately she is now in hiding while she finishes a book about trafficking networks in Northern California. Leo Magers was recently convicted of child abuse while living in Paris with Haleigh. Virginia McCullough reported that Magers was living in a condo that belonged to Judhge Michael Dufficy at the time of the arrest. When Carol provided photographs of the abuse inflicted on her daughter by Leo Magers, her story became the focal point of a popular citizen’s campaign to recall Judge Dufficy and many of his associates. Many Marin and Sonoma County newspapers wrote articles about the recall campaign, although the parts about human trafficking rings were noticeably absent. One reporter for the Coastal Beacon newspaper, Jim Scanlon, did write an article linking the Mardusz family to a cover up in the Polly Klaas case. He died in a car accident within a few weeks of the articles publication. Sarah was acquainted with the girlfriend of the man responsible for counting the votes for the recall campaign, and the girlfriend claimed that he was offered a bribe to keep quiet about the results. Previous to this offer he had been arrested without charge on the way home from counting votes, then held for 10 days and released with no explanation.

One afternoon Sarah went to go visit her son, who right away asked for money. When she gave it to him, Ryan walked up to one of the bartenders at Happy's and bought a package of white powder that she later discovered was speed. Not long after this, Sarah was at a party in Novato and one of the guests made a passing reference to "Don Dean's whorehouse". The man said that everyone around town had been talking about how Anna was seen in a hot tub with an older man at a party near Don's house. Sarah then went to see Anna, who told her that she had no memory of the night. She had been given a drink by Mary, another girl who lived at Don's, and suspected that her drink had been drugged. Sarah then went to Don's office above the bar with her friend Pearl to confront him about his mistreatment of her daughter, and he called the cops to have her removed from the premises.

On another occasion Sarah was listening to the bar band at Happy's and was approached by a man named Armond. Armond was the head of the local Hell's Angels chapter and a big time speed dealer who claimed to have carried suitcases full of money and drugs across Lake Victoria in Canada. Armond came from a mafia family and was friendly with a number of politicians, including the Rockefellers and the Aliotos, who even allowed him to drive their car. Sarah quickly became involved with him and they were soon spending a lot of time with each other. One night on the way to her house Armond got picked up drunk driving without insurance or a drivers license and was quickly released without charges by the police. After they ran into Don downtown, she was disturbed to learn that he and Armond were very close and had known each other for many years. Sarah became more alarmed when she saw that inside his home were weapons of all sorts, including guns and samurai swords. One time she looked inside a duffel bag he owned and found piano wire, black gloves and a ski mask.

Armond was also acquainted with Pearl, Sarah’s friend who had accompanied her to Don's office. Pearl was a bondage aficianodo who had constructed a spiderweb-like structure on the ceiling of his attic in order to better facilitate full body suspension. Armond told her that he sometimes participated in Pearl's bondage sessions by tying him to the structure. Shortly after Sarah and Pearl complained to Don, Pearl was found dead from asphyxiation while hanging from the spider web. Because of the events that followed Pearl's death, Sarah now believes that Armond may have murdered Pearl because of his attempt to disrupt the systematic corruption that was occurring under Don's roof.

Eventually she came face to face with his violent temper when during an argument Armond threatened to chop her up in pieces and bury her under the creek. Another night he took her driving and stopped at a payphone, saying that he had to get orders and refusing to explain further. When Armond got back into the car, he began to speed and drove the car into a telephone pole. When the car stopped, Sarah was paralyzed but Armond got out of the car and started running without saying a word. Before he got out, he told her to tell the police that she had been driving alone. If it wasn't for a stranger who called 911 to get help, she probably would have died from shock. As it turned out, several teeth were broken and vertebrae along her spine were severed. In the hospital, she tried to tell the doctor that someone had tried to murder her and they immediately transferred her to a mental hospital while her back was still broken and unhealed. Eventually she got out of the psych ward and decided to press charges. The District Attorney told her that they were going to prosecute Armond for driving under the influence of a controlled substance, driving without a license and gross bodily injury to a passenger. Despite this promise, Armond was released without conviction.

At midnight on Ryan's 18th birthday, Don immediately threw him out of the house despite the fact that he is disabled. He then went to live with Sarah in order to attend the local community college. At school, he was approached by a guidance counselor [name removed by this editor]1, who said that Ryan could live with him at his foster home. After living with [name removed by this editor] for a few months, he was thrown out and returned to Sarah's house. By this point in time, Ryan had developed a substantial speed habit and began stealing from her and going through her things. One time he left with her checkbook and Sarah went inside his room to see if she could find it. She found a stack of photos that appeared to be naked shots of her son wearing a goat's mask. When she asked him about them, he said the photos were taken by [named removed by this editor], who also took naked pictures of all of his others foster kids, most of who were prepubescent.
Later, Sarah ran into one of the other teens who had been living at said foster homes, an autistic boy who she overheard talking with two other teenagers. The boy said that [name withheld] had been forcing him to have sex. Several years later, Anna came to stay with her for a few days after she turned 18. Sarah admitted to me with some regret that she had resorted to looking through her daughter's stuff, since she couldn't get her to talk about anything that had happened at Don's house. Included in her bags was a collection of nine or ten photo albums that contained several pornographic pictures of Anna.

Sarah told this entire story to Thunder while I tape-recorded the conversation for later reference. In retrospect, she speculated that her children’s virtual kidnapping could have come as a result of her entire family’s involvement with a new age armageddon cult while they were still living in Berkeley. Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal Triumphant had such a profound impact on Sarah that she even named her daughter after insider church lingo that was meant to symbolize blissful union with Christ. It was only years later that she discovered through the writings of Fritz Springmeier that Church Universal Triumphant had been involved in well-established brainwashing programs. During this process, children who have a natural ability to drift into a deep trance, a rare but genetically inherited quality, were removed from the rest of the group and selected for further experimentation. Many of the situations experienced by Sarah’s children while living in various group homes are consistent with stories of other ritual abuse and mind control program survivors, like being locked up in psych wards and having experience in the occult. Anna once walked in on a group of girls while they were involved in a séance while Don supervised them. Her son was confined in a mental hospital for six months, where he was repeatedly strip searched and forcibly drugged, a procedure that has become standard practice not only for people considered a “threat to others”, but also nonviolent individuals, many of who are already experiencing emotional trauma. It could be that the coercive, dehumanizing procedures inflicted by hospital staff on ritual abuse survivors are meant to impose a permanent silence on potential whistleblowers.

A week or so after the interview I got a message on my answering machine from the two of them saying that they wanted me to speak about human trafficking on Thunder's radio show. That night they did their show and talked extensively about corruption within the Marin County court system and how it was connected with organized trafficking rings operating out of Bohemian Grove. The next day Sarah called and told me that Thunder had been murdered. He had been living in a camper under the freeway in West Oakland and was found dead in the front seat beside a busted window. Sarah discovered what happened because when she called him the morning after the show, the police answered his phone and asked who she was. They told her that Thunder had a diabetic coma and busted out the window from the inside of the vehicle. But when Sarah went to go see the vehicle after it had been towed, then later to transferred to Thunder's ex-girlfriend's house, she saw that there was a huge amount of glass inside of the car, as if the impact had come from outside the car. Sarah had also called Thunder's phone, upon which the the coroner had picked up and told her that Thunder had been covered in bruises at the time of death.

I wasn't sure if any of his friends knew what happened, since nobody was picking up his phone after Sarah's initial conversation with the police. That night I went to the anarchist bookstore in Berkeley, where Thunder had a lot of friends and acquaintances. He had been working as a manager for Zachary Running Wolf's mayoral campaign, so I waited around inside the store in order to tell Zachary the news firsthand. He believed that Thunder had been murdered in part because of his political organizing within Native American circles. After a brief conversation we promised to exchange details as they happened. A few days later, the East Bay Express published an obituary stating that Thunder had been found in a wealthy section of Emeryville, when actually Sarah had seen the empty camper under the freeway in West Oakland the day after she talked to the police. Soon afterwards I spoke to Zachary, who had become suspicious because he knew that Thunder always camped in the same spot under the freeway. Reading the article inspired him to investigate by visiting the site in Emeryville where Thunder had supposedly been found. The camper was there and sitting across the street from it was a police car idling in an empty parking lot. After he walked around the perimeter of the camper and looked inside the windows for a few minutes, three more police cars pulled up to the adjacent lot and parked so that they were facing him.

During the spring of 2007 I spent many hours on Market Street. It was during this time that I met Jonathan, another speed dealer who claimed to have worked in the tunnels beneath the city. He told me that he was hired by international embassies as a bonded courier, meaning that he was bound by oath not to ever become curious about the packages that he was carrying. Posted at all the entrances were sentries who reported any kind of activity within the tunnels. Most of his jobs came from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He said that some of the tunnels were opulently decorated with pillars corresponding to various historical time periods. These sections of the infrastructure were most often used for politicians or the very wealthy. Jonathan said that he also had worked as a type of janitor, cleaning up dismembered bodies that had been left behind during ritualistic sacrifices. Supposedly, in Chinatown wealthy businessmen serve human meat as a delicacy known as long pig. He told me that beneath the Tenderloin there is a room where these men can go and do absolutely anything they wanted with a woman or man of their choice. These sessions frequently end in torture and murder.

Jonathan was chosen for this kind of work because of an accident he had experienced as a child. While diving in the community pool, he slammed headfirst into the drainage system and split his head open. He remembered the accident clearly because when it happened, he left his body and observed from above the people clustered around him. Jonathan then began to experience episodes of precognition and telekinesis. It wasn't long after this that men from the military came to pick him up from his foster home on a regular basis. They would drive Jonathan to a building where he was taught remote viewing, mainly for the purpose of reverse engineering Russian technology. Sometimes he traveled in an underground magnet powered train that was mostly used by politicians. Despite a practically nonexistent education, it didn't surprise me that Jonathan would be capable of accurately describing complex technology at a young age. He was obviously an extremely intelligent person with a phenomenally developed memory. Most people would probably assume his stories to be the delusional fantasies of a compulsive liar. I have known a lot of compulsive liars, and the difference between Jonathan and all of them is the fact that he didn’t ever want to talk about it unless I asked him, and even then, he wouldn’t elaborate. His quietly traumatized demeanor and oftentimes one-word answers definitely didn’t strike me as bragging.

As Jonathan progressed in his psychic training, he was brought to a farm in Northern California where he lived with a military officer who trained him and a number of others in martial arts. By the age of eight, he was proficient in survival arts at the level of someone from the Marine corps. His "handler", as Jonathan described him, trained him in assassination as well as the drug trade. In his teenage years, one of his responsibilities was to coordinate massive shipments of marijuana and cocaine that came into America on barges. Unfortunately, Jonathan was not entirely forthcoming with me and many subjects were off limits, although I was persistent in asking questions whenever he seemed like he was receptive enough to answer them. I got the impression that the training he received was on a need to know basis, so that he would be unaware of any larger government projects that he may have been a part of.

One of the men that Jonathan worked with, Hana, was trained by paramilitary organizations and had ties to the mafia. Jonathan would often be brought out to his yacht to have "conversations" with him. As an example of how powerful this man was, he told me about an incident involving a client of Hana's who was late in paying a debt. When confronted with the issue of overdue payment, the client went immediately to the ATM, withdrew money in excess of what he owed and gave Hana a floor length ostrich trench coat. Inside the coat were holsters for a shotgun on one side and a handgun on the other. In the Bay Area Jonathan was introduced to a group of men who trafficked in snuff pornography. The man in charge of the venture sent the tapes out all across the world. One time Jonathan was responsible for strapping him onto a bondage table while he watched one of the videos. It was at this point in the conversation that he told me if anyone ever found out about him revealing information, he would be tortured to death and the same thing would happen to myself and all of my family members. Not long after this, Jonathan became very hostile and threatened me with violence if I revealed the things he had told me. As a result of his threats, I was left with no choice but to cut off all communications between us and haven’t spoken with him since.

While I was having these conversations with Jonathan, I let some people I know stay at my apartment for a few days. James and Tiffany were rowdy and belligerent Hell's Angels who I had expected to be your garden variety penniless drug addicts. It turned out that they both came from well placed military families and James owned properties all across the country. During the 60s, he had lived for a brief a brief time at the Manson Ranch, where he said he had a great time because of all the women and drugs. James was a Viet Nam vet who had worked as an explosives technician. It could have been either his military experience or that of his family that gave him military clearance to be in the tunnels. He said that while exploring many levels underground he saw abandoned saloons from before the 1906 earthquake. When I asked him if he knew anything about any of the murders that had been going on around the city, he became very evasive. He eventually told me that he had seen a woman's throat slashed at a ritual held by the Church of Satan. Tiffany also said that there were bodies deposited out by the tunnels at Ocean Beach but refused to elaborate when I asked her questions.

She was a very jealous girlfriend who responded to any woman who so much as looked at James with explosive violence. I saw her get into several fights over him just in one day of hanging out with the two of them. That night Tiffany came back to my house in a rage because she believed that a woman she knew had propositioned James. After a good ten minutes of spewing profanities, she said that she would get "the family" to take care of her. She said that they would "leave her out at Ocean Beach with a stick up her ass like they did the last girl". I pretended I hadn't heard what she said and instead made them dinner. The next morning I got them out of my house as soon as possible. When I asked Jonathan about them, he said that he had known James for many years and gave an accurate physical description of him right down to the birth defect on his hand. He said that a few months previous to our conversation, a number of prostitutes had disappeared, including several people he was close to. When Jonathan heard about what happened, he went down to Capp street to ask around. Several girls there told him that James had been the last person seen with four different girls who went missing shortly afterwards. He was under the impression that James had been hired by a group of men in order for him to find women for them. For months after James and Stephanie left, they continued to call my house looking for a place to stay. I almost always screen my calls, so when I didn't return their many messages, the calls became progressively more and more angry.

All of the situations described here have combined in such a way that make it possible for me to understand a curious series of events that occurred partly before I left home. Right outside of DC, bordering the freeway and an enormous Mormon temple, is a section of land named the Walter Reed Annex. The annex is down the street from the hospital of the same name that has become well known in recent years for mistreating veterans. Walter Reed was originally a Bohemian Grove type of retreat for visiting diplomats and industrialists during the formative years of the city. The people who built the complex designed it to have an international theme, with a Dutch windmill, gothic castles, Greek statues and Chinese pagodas. The main building housed a ballroom and a series of arched walkways. Originally, the annex was a hotel, later a Catholic girls school and after the Korean War, a psychiatric facility for veterans traumatized by combat.

During the mid to late 90s, Walter Reed was in ruins and, although still occupied in some places by the army, it was mostly abandoned. My friends and I spent many hours exploring the untended gardens of the complex while trying to avoid the machine gun equipped soldiers. It was an indescribably beautiful place. There was one statue, the Justice Lady, at whose base we would often find candle drippings all over the ground. One night my friend Katrina was walking through the annex after midnight and spotted a group of people dressed in purple robes circled around the Justice Lady and burning candles. But the inside of the main building was the most interesting part of the complex by far.

The psychiatric ward seemed like it went on forever, with rusted plumbing, crumbling paint and holes in the floor where you could see clear through to the floors below. We discovered what was clearly the scene of massive human experimentation. There were bloody hospital gowns, electroshock therapy equipment and boxes full of files describing the former patients hallucinations and subsequent medication plan. One document was titled "Human Use Committee" and it had phone numbers that listed addresses in third world countries. Someone had written "help me" in blood on one of the walls. In the ballroom my friend Candy found slides of monkey brains and sheep embryos.

Although it was illegal to be on the grounds of the annex, it wasn't too hard to avoid the soldiers, so I spent the winter of 98 with various people camped in and around its empty buildings. One night I was alone underneath the bridge leading into the main building and saw the largest vehicle I had ever encountered before. It was a black streetcleaner type of car covered with flashing strobe lights that changed colors. I was very uneasy about the vehicle and did my best to hide in the shadows of the bridge until it passed me by. Years later, while reading an internet conspiracy forum, the same one where someone warned me of the black helicopter, I read a description of the ominous car that was precise in its depiction right down to the flashing lights. Supposedly, it was the property of FEMA and set aside to be used to enforce curfew during times of martial law.

A few years ago, Chris told me about getting picked up hitchhiking by a military officer who had worked as a scientist at Walter Reed. Since I had taken Chris out there to look around a few years before, he asked the former officer questions and paid attention to the conversation. The man said that when he worked at the annex, the military had performed experiments on monkeys by injecting them with diseases. In order to insure that the soldiers were able to clean up any messes that might result, there were tunnels that ran beneath the complex, across the state and all the way into an underground base in Pennsylvania. The underground infrastructure was originally built during the Cold War for military and government leaders to be able to escape during a nuclear attack. The bases were also fortified with stores of food and arms.

A book written by Alex Constantine describes a similar situation occurring at Walter Reed during the time period that the officer described. Constantine writes about how, under the direction of the CIA, the annex was used for MKUltra experiments including electroshock therapy performed on monkeys. Evidence for a highly sophisticated underground infrastructure can be found in the press releases about Mt. Weather, an underground military base in Virginia that was designed to transfer and maintain key components of the American government in the event of nuclear warfare or other forms of disaster. An article in Time magazine reported that Mt. Weather houses apartment complexes, a cafeteria, a hospital, a sewage treatment plant, several large underground ponds, a utility plant and even a radio and TV studio in order for key officials to be able to address the nation in times of emergency. Far from being an anomaly, independent researchers have estimated that the Virginia base is actually the operational center for at least 96 other Federal Relocation Centers. Wikipedia reports that during September 11th, a line of government cars with police escort were seen heading from Washington DC straight into Mt Weather.

It should be abundantly clear by this point that there are many reasons for a massive cover up around the issues of organized trafficking and ritual abuse. The experiences outlined above point to origins in an international black market cartel trafficking in arms, narcotics and human slavery. With the additional indication of connections with paramilitary training schools and psychiatric brainwashing programs, human trafficking becomes an enormously complex subject that cannot be easily explained through the lens of partisan politics. Unfortunately, much of the discussion around these issues has been dominated by leftist journalists who see human trafficking as primarily a labor issue caused by Western imperialism. In an article published in Clamor Magazine, Yasmin Nair dismisses personal testimonies about American girls being trafficked as originating in “half-baked stories and rumors fueled by dubious sources”. The other side of the coin, mostly fundamentalist Christians, portrays trafficking as a problem caused by the moral ills of heathen foreigners. This analysis, from either side of the political spectrum, whitewashes the experiences of many people like myself whose history with trafficking doesn't fit this narrow model of the way things work. The limiting left-right dichotomy, including the perspective of radical politics, has so far effectively served to limit public exposure of these issues and cover up the crimes of the most elite strata of our society. It is my sincere hope that this story, as well as those of countless others who have had similar experiences, can help to expand the realm of possibilities past the limiting confines of the currently dominant sociopolitical paradigm.

Notes: Whenever possible I have obtained permission from people whose stories I’ve told here. Many names have been changed to protect those who may have preferred to remain anonymous. A number of people declined to have their story told at all for fear of reprisal. Specifically, a great deal of information regarding US military experiments in population control was given to me by someone who requested that the information not be published. It will require many more hours of interviews and research from other open-minded writers before this complicated story can even begin to be told.