Here's more grist for your very compelling mill -- a call to potential civil war posted on the notorious Hal Turner's website: https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/news-nation/the-gauntlet-is-thrown-down-oathkeepers-to-president-invoke-the-insurrection-act-or-we-will-fight-a-bloody-and-desperate-revolution-to-throw-off-biden-chi-com-puppet-regime

And here's an obviously rightist-biased but useful reminder of just who this Hal Turner is: https://www.americanussr.com/american-ussr-hal-turner.html

If you're still game, Joe, have fun exploring this "rabbit hole," one of many, in the covert-action world's "Wilderness of Mirrors"
 

Weekly off-topic reminder:

Friday nights 8 PM - 9 PM North American Central Time:

The Magical Mystery Tour. Host Tom Wood takes a look at the Beatles from a different angle each week.

Friday nights 9 PM - 12 AM North American Central Time:

Beaker Street, the legendary rock radio program, has returned. Iconic host Clyde Clifford has returned from his medical absence.

Both shows can be found at Arkansas Rocks.

If you can't catch Beaker Street live, MP3 files are available soon afterward at this site.
 

If anyone makes a serious attempt to blame this on a right-wing nut, are we in the midst of a psy-op designed to oust Trump from power?

The CIA has been running the executive branch since 1963. The President either goes along for the ride as the figurehead on the front of the ship, is brought to heel, or is removed from office... in one way or another.

The only thing the election decides is whether the CIA spends four years riding a rambunctious bull or a docile old gelding.
 

It doesn't look like Anthony Quinn Warner is being spun as antifa -- if anything, current speculation seems to be he may have been caught up in QAnon-spread 5G paranoia -- but for the sake of completeness I should point out Future for America, in addition to predicting a July 18 nuclear bombing of Nashville that I don't recall happening, also predicted a *second* attack would take place somewhere in America on December 25, 2021; it would be this second attack that truly marked the beginning of the end times. (Check their July 2020 newsletter.) So Warner may have been trying to immanentize the eschaton, after all.
 

Uh, Anon @ 7:06 PM:

If the "Deep State" controls the Presidency, and the "Deep State" did not want Benedict Donald to become President, how did he manage that feat?
 

Anon 7:06: If you believe the CIA is autonomous (a favorite Langley myth) your suspicions are misplaced. The Agency has always been the cat's paw for the wealthiest of the wealthy. Have you never learned the Golden Rule -- not of ethics but of history?

"He who has the most gold... rules!"

And when any politician becomes seriously uncooperative with the wishes of the real rulers, he or she gets neutralized one way or the other.

Of course, there can be some very bloody proxy duels, from time to time, between rival financial-kingpin factions, as Kirkpatrick Sale (and his edgy disciple, Carl Oglesby) pointed out so clearly, decades ago. We're in the midst of one now.
 

If you haven't heard it already... search the web for stories about previous vehicles whose drivers were arrested for disturbing the peace by blaring a recording of the song "Downtown," the same song A.Q.Warner's RV was later reported to be blaring shortly before the blast. An MK-Ultra "trigger" to a bomb-equipped "sleeper," perhaps?

And if that doesn't make your tinfoil hat tingle a bit, do you suppose the name A.Q.Warner stands for "A Q(anon) Warning"?

Mr. Warner's "manifesto" attacking the dangers of 5G hasn't been "discovered" or made public yet, but if and when it does, I'll bet it's as authentic as some of the diary-ghostwriting done, back in the day, by E.Howard Hunt!!!
 

This comment has been removed by the author.
 

That name business is ridiculous. It is so typical of QAnoners -- of which I suspect you are one -- to see "hidden messages" everywhere. Back in the day, Jordan Maxwell was a past master of this sort of inanity. It's unbelievably distressing to see so many of my fellow Americans fall into this sort of blunder.

Seriously, what are you proposing? That more than a half-century ago, "The Elite" paid Mr. and Mrs. Warner to name their son Anthony Quinn Warner because they somehow knew that QAnon would exist in the year 2020? Isn't it simply more likely that Mr. and Mrs. Warner (whoever they were) were simply fond of a certain actor? (By the way, I always thought that Anthony Quinn was a truly great performer. I hope his fine work has not been forgotten by the present generation.)

As for this MK-Ultra "trigger" business: Movies like "Conspiracy Theory" have convinced the public that hypnosis works this way. But in order to make a persuasive argument, you have to cite an actual case study from the standard literature on hypnosis. In other words, you can't simply wave around the magic words "MKULTRA" and then let imagination do the rest.

In other words, you need to do REAL research, the kind that can be conducted only in large academic libraries. What appalls me about most conspiracy theorists is that they never admit how lazy they are. (I know this for a fact because I have been called a conspiracy theorist myself from time to time.) They think they are the hippest of the hip, when all they've read is literature produced by cranks and outsiders. Based on a voluminous intake of fringe literature, the theorists fool themselves into thinking that they KNOW something.

In this case, I've read the relevant literature fairly extensively and I cannot think of a single experiment in which a musical cue triggered an illegal, anti-social act. Most hypnotists would deny that the trick can be done. Personally, I'm not saying that such a thing is absolutely impossible. But at the same time, we must admit: You have not demonstrated that this sort of "cued violence" has ever happened -- not even once.

Again: Citing fringe research is NOT sufficient. (I hope you won't bring up the usual charlatans.) You must cite academic work, a government document, or something with a little weight to it.

Hell, I'll even take an interview with an acknowledged professional in the field of hypnosis. Look, I'm trying to be reasonable here. My standards are not impossibly high.
 

Was Walter Bowart a right-wing charlatan, Joseph? I don't think so.

His well-researched, heavily footnoted book "Operation Mind Control" was initially announced for hardcover publication by Delacorte but canceled at the last minute (and you know well the CIA's control of big-time book publishing back in the 1970s). Then Dell Paperbacks bought the rights and rushed their edition out to newsstands (remember those?) in a pocket-sized edition -- only to have thousands of copies of it purchased off the racks, often in multi-item buys, within just a few days, making it literally impossible to find in most cities very quickly. No "establishment" reviewers ever took notice of it. And to this day, whenever some serious journalist, scholar or documentary producer chances to broach the subject, Bowart's work is usually (and tellingly) absent from citation or bibliographic inclusion -- more likely, I suspect, out of ignorance than behind-the-scenes suppression.

On the contrary, John Marks' "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate" (which covered much of the same MK-Ultra ground) got heavy media coverage and many reviews. All the major bookstore chains (remember them?) stocked it, and it became a favorite of conspiracy-theory "debunkers" -- because it portrayed all the MK-Ultra experiments as foolish and cruel "failures" by the "evil-but-incompetent" CIA.

Yes, there have been quite a few "convenient" charlatans in the field of mind-control "research," and many of their wildest claims, heavily spread and even amplified by the tabloid-style news media, have ultimately served as the perfect smokescreen (in the stories' implausible, even laughable excess) to instantly discredit, in the public mind, Bowart's genuine revelations of how the minds of carefully selected and conditioned "patsies" can be weaponized for covert-action purposes.
 

"Was Walter Bowart a right-wing charlatan, Joseph?"

Did you know him? I did.

Whenever I think of the classic left-to-right shift, I think of Walter. Former editor of the East Village Other who pissed off a lot of his friends when he segued into John Birchian madness. His kids were rich -- he had briefly married into the Mellon family -- but for the longest time they wouldn't help him out, even though he was nearly homeless, because he had gone so far right.

You may not know that the famously reactionary Mellon family has a very small left-wing branch that nobody talks about. They live in San Francisco and keep to themselves, although they do quietly fund some leftish causes.

Eventually, Walter and his kids reconciled. The kids weren't going to let their Dad live on the streets, even if they thought Dad had gone totally nuts. Which, frankly, he had. (In part, I blame all the pot he smoked. Over-indulgence affects some people badly.)

For a while there, Walter was so wedded to what we would now call Alt Right ideology that he alienated everyone, including me, who tried to help him. There's only so much shit I'm going to take from someone who wants an end to Social Security.

A charlatan? Not the word I would use. But god DAMN, that guy was paranoid! He accused me and his kids and Peggy (his ex) and everyone else he ever met of being part of the Massive Plot to Get Walter. Believe it or not, he even wrote the synopsis of a screenplay about the Massive Plot to Get Walter.

(Wonder if that document still exists somewhere? It was pretty interesting. He included a lot of little-known history of the early hippie movement in New York. According to Walter, Peggy was sent by THEM to seduce him away from hippiedom. Because it's all HER fault that he married into money, y'see.)

The original version of his book is a melange of good stuff and bad stuff. His standards were so flakey that he cited L. Ron freakin' HUBBARD as an authority. I once called him on that. He defended Hubbard!

It is indeed true that, thanks to Peggy's money, Walter did get hold of the declassified MKULTRA documentation at the same time Marks and Opton and Scheflin did, so that part of his book is based on something solid. But making sense of the material was kind of beyond his capability, as he more or less admitted to me. You really need a sizable staff for a job like that, and he didn't have one. Marks DID have a staff, and he was the one who tracked down the actual scientists and collected their published research.

As I said, Walter's book has some good stuff. The Castillo story is, in my view, more or less accurate, but you have to understand that Walter was summarizing work done by Richard Popkin. There are other sources for this story out there, but you really have to look hard to find them.

The updated version of Walter's book has a lot of pure crap in it. Walter always lacked the intellectual rigor necessary to separate the crap from the candy. I'm quite sure that I was better read than he when it came to the hypnosis literature.

As I recall, his book says nothing about the use of musical cues to trigger anti-social behavior. Again, I'm open to the idea -- hell, I'm open to all SORTS of wild ideas -- but in the end, you need evidence, not conjecture.

I would prefer to drop further discussion of this topic. My mind is elsewhere these days, and I don't want to get into a long-running bitch fight over this ancient stuff. So even though I know you are tempted to mount a long counter-argument -- please don't. I will probably delete it without reading it.
 

Walter was never a Bircher, Joe. That's a cruel insult to his memory -- and Langley's coordinated suppression of his book, among other psychic wounds, is what drove him to paranoia. The years-later, privately published, second edition reflects what happened to Walter when he was driven into the arms of the Alex Constantine/Jim Keith crowd of highly imaginative, albeit intuitive, speculators.

End of BRIEF counter-argument, which I hope you won't ignore or delete. out of intellectual honesty.
 

Brief counter-counter-argument: The second edition came about -- at least in part -- because I told him there was a market for it, and he was hurting for money. No shame in that: I'm hurting right now. (The blog may go dark for a while if I can't keep the lights on.)

My idea was for him to add a few chapters to the original text -- HARD science, not conspira-crap -- and get it published with a "real" publishing house -- preferably hardback. And then I suggested that Walter follow up with an "I remember the 60s" book. His stories about those days were really good, and back in the '90s there was a market for that sort of memoir.

Well, he went another route. He offered a self-published opus which included a lot of nonsense and which sold for a whopping $100 a pop, which he decided to push on the lecture circuit. Walter always HATED Tim Leary, but I think he secretly envied Leary as well. So he was trying to emulate Leary's shtick and become a kind of counter-cultural messiah.

Didn't work.

Not sure if Jim Keith was any kind of influence on him in those days. Maybe. It's not like Walter and I were that tight. Anyone who wants rid of Social Security is a Bircher as far as I'm concerned, or so close to Bircherdom as to make no difference to me. If you knew my family history, you'd understand why I'm a HUGE believer in Social Security.
 

Added note: Now that I think back on it, it makes sense to suggest that Keith and Walter were in communication. A guy like Keith would surely bring out Walter's worst side.
 

Maybe you only got the impression that Walter hated Leary out of envy, but I recall Walter eventually expressing actual sympathy for the dude, after having tracked down some of Leary's former cellmates, who described him being quietly removed from his cell nightly, after "lights out" and returned there before "sun-up" -- and after weeks of this routine his personality (and political outlook) changed markedly. Walter's speculation was that Leary had been receiving "treatments" in the wee hours from a "Dr. Jolly"-type "therapist".

Years later I asked Leary about this episode and he suddenly, visibly stiffened, his voice became shrill, and he declared several times something like, "I don't know why Walter says such terrible things about me. I used to be his friend!"

But he wouldn't confirm or deny the story.
 

You know, Anon, I've started to enjoy this chat, and normally I HATE talking about all the weirdos I got to know during the '90s. It may be overstating the case to use a term like PTSD, but...well, that's kinda what I feel whenever I'm reminded of the bad old days.

In my experience (which admittedly was not THAT extensive), Walter just would not shut up about Leary. I enjoyed talking with him about his hippie days, but when then he would veer off into how much he hated Leary and he just wouldn't shut up, no matter how much I tried to get him to change the topic. So naturally, I presumed that envy played a role. Timothy Leary was able to make a living more or less just BEING Timothy Leary, and Walter Bowart obviously wanted to make a living BEING Walter Bowart.

Maybe Bill Cooper was another unconscious model. More than a few people (even those who considered him evil and dangerous) were envious of Cooper in those days.

It should go without saying that Leary really was a clown. But by the '90s, he was pretty much in the past tense. As for the "Dr. Jolly" theory -- I'd have to spend a few days researching the issue to come to some sort of assessment of that theory, and right now my mind is focused on other things. Like paying the damned light bill.
 

Thanks for mellowing a bit, Joseph. Your PTSD and mine (from the scars of parapolitical jousting in the late last century) may not be of the same agonizing intensity, (mine's tempered with a semi-effective palliative of bemused detatchment) but I sincerely CAN feel at least some of your pain upon recollections.

Now that two relatively reasonable "conspiracy mavens" I once enjoyed exchanging speculations with, Keith "Vyzygoth" Hansen and Kenn "Steamshovel" Thomas have seemingly, permanently retired from all public probing of the covert world, I've tried in recent years to discuss related issues with you, via the comment section of this blog. Sometimes the results have been very fruitful; at other times, when I've inadvertently pushed one of your "hot buttons" you've flown into such a (PTSD-style) rage that I've had to change my IP address and come back with a different nick. But I still love ya, guy. And I've been a reader of Cannonfire since way back before the deep doubts (not yours, I know all too well!) began to quantum-multiply about how those you-know-whats fell down in that City By The Hudson.

I admire your mind, your research skills, your grim sense of humor, and all the readings you've retained in memory and can still sharply analyze from your tragically lost, Alexandrian Archive.

I haven't been to Baltimore for decades, but if I ever get back while the Lord still gives you breath, I'd sure like to buy you a brew and chill.