Now that our series has introduced the CIA’s introduction of cult mania, let’s examine what makes the agency so expert on the subject.
Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul once reckoned that democracy in America had effectively ended when former CIA Director Allen Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission. The most suspect perpetrator of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was assigned to investigate that very crime. There is something to that idea (see e.g. CIA Mind Control and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy). After more than sixty years of whistleblowers’ and dogged researchers’ revelations, it is now fairly clear that the Warren Commission’s de facto mandate was to create the ‘record’ that would marginalize anyone with an independent thought about who actually killed President Kennedy and thus really controls the country.
One of the first and most important high level government whistleblowers of the early seventies disclosed that the military industrial complex and its intelligence community had usurped the Presidency long before the Kennedy assassination. He was Col. L. Fletcher Prouty who had served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Kennedy administration. Oliver Stone said of Prouty (who served as his model for whistleblower “Mr. X” in his film JFK), “Fletcher Prouty is a man whose name will go down in history.” In 1973 Prouty published an expose that showed the CIA and military intelligence acting as an independent deep state unanswerable to the American public, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, republished by Skyhorse 2011. Because of his unique position, Prouty never signed CIA non-disclosure agreements so the US government was powerless to censor him, legally. The CIA did succeed in limiting distribution of Prouty’s book through unlawful domestic covert operations against its wide distribution.
In the wake of Prouty’s struggle with censorship, former Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department official John Marks published a book that carried the ball further, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Alfred A. Knopf 1974. Marchetti introduced a number of documents and first-hand accounts from inside the CIA in their expansion upon Prouty’s work. ‘The Cult of Intelligence’ was the first book in American history to cause the US government to sue for prior restraint of publication. The agency was partially successful and large swathes of the original edition were blacked out at the order of courts buying into the CIA’s “National Security” claims. Years later, the book was updated with most of the redacted text restored.
Marchetti’s and Marks’ choice of a title could not have been more appropriate. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines cult as: a group (as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous. The CIA and US intelligence community meets all three criteria: coercive, insular and dangerous. The first chapter of ‘Cult of Intelligence’ explains why the authors refer to the “intelligence community” (and the Military Industrial Complex it services) as a cult. The following excerpts are from that chapter. See whether any of it rings true for you today.
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult – the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence – the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy…
…The cult is intent upon conducting the foreign affairs of the U.S. government without the awareness or participation of the people. It recognizes no role for a questioning legislature or an investigative press. Its adherents believe that only they have the right and the obligation to decide what is necessary to satisfy the national needs. Although it pursues outmoded international policies and unattainable ends, the cult of intelligence demands that it not be held accountable for its actions by the people it professes to serve. It is a privileged, as well as secret, charge. In their minds, those who belong to the cult of intelligence have been ordained, and their service is immune from public scrutiny.
The “clandestine mentality” is a mind-set that thrives on secrecy and deception. It encourages professional amorality – the belief that righteous goals can be achieved through the use of unprincipled and normally unacceptable means. Thus, the cult’s leaders must tenaciously guard their official actions from public view. To do otherwise would restrict their ability to act independently; it would permit the American people to pass judgment on not only the utility of their policies, but the ethics of those policies as well. With the cooperation of an acquiescent, ill-informed Congress, and the encouragement and assistance of a series of Presidents, the cult has built a wall of laws and executive orders around the CIA and itself, a wall that has blocked effective public scrutiny…
…In the field of classical espionage, the CIA’s Clandestine Services have been singularly unsuccessful in their attempts to penetrate or spy on the major targets…
…As the opportunities for covert action abroad dwindle and are thwarted, those with careers based on clandestine methods are increasingly tempted to turn their talents inward against the citizens of the very nation they profess to serve…
And so, as Noam Chomsky has ably demonstrated, elected federal officials from Congress to the White House continually operate in diametric opposition to the will of the American people who elect them.
This series is in the process of illustrating the why for the Cult of Intelligence’s launch of the great cult scare of the 70’s and 80’s. And it will demonstrate why the Cult specifically targeted Scientology for virtual annihilation as part of that campaign.
While we set the table, let’s add some perspective on the matter provided by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team) and Victor Marchetti (The Cult of Intelligence).
Mr. Marchetti:
During the period 1969-1972, while I was Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, it was my responsibility to read and evaluate all incoming intelligence reports from all sources, including the FBI, on a daily basis. In this capacity, I became aware of the intense interest of both the CIA and FBI in the Church of Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The files on Scientology were voluminous, and there were frequent inter-agency discussions and meetings on how to counter what was perceived as a growing ‘problem’ posed by the Church. Proposals included infiltration by agents, psychological operations to discredit Hubbard, and even legislative efforts to classify Scientology as a subversive organization. However, higher-level reviews often vetoed the more aggressive tactics, though some surveillance and monitoring continued. – U.S. District Court, D.C., Civ. No. 77-2076, filed Oct. 5, 1978
L. Fletcher Prouty testified similarly to a court Ontario, Canada:
It is not without significance that the affidavit of Fletcher Prouty, appearing in Volume 8A of the record at tab KK, makes it appear that he formed the conclusion, as a highly placed official of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, that since 1950 there has been a definite campaign of harassment against this organization (Scientology) for nearly thirty years, primarily by means of the dissemination of false and derogatory information around the world to create a climate in which adverse action would be taken against the Church and its members. – decision dated January 23, 1985, by Osler J. in the Ontario High Court of Justice
After his 1971 murder conviction and death sentence, Charles Manson was sent to the “Adjustment Center” at California state prison at San Quentin. The center is aptly named as it is intended to adjust the prisoner into docility and conformance. Federal District Judge Alphonso J. Zirpoli described it as follows: “Despite its euphemistic title, the Adjustment Center is not a treatment or rehabilitation unit. It is a punitive isolation facility designed to ‘adjust’ disruptive prisoners by breaking their will through prolonged solitary confinement.” – Toussaint v. McCarthy preliminary injunction hearing (N.D. Cal. 1973)
The MK Ultra program taught the CIA that the separation from humans and sensory deprivation of total isolation was the most effective way to achieve a broken will, (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klien, 2007 Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company.)
Manson proved a tough nut to crack at the Adjustment Center. He was kept in solitary confinement for almost a decade. He was injected with heavy psychiatric drugs periodically. (Eye of The Beholder, Carrie Leonetti, Southwest Law review)
Manson also spent time in the California state prison system’s medical facility at Vacaville for psychiatric work (Eye of the Beholder, ibid.) Vacaville was the site of James Hamilton’s MK Search Project 3 (MK Ultra successor), where he set up facilities to experiment with prisoner psychiatric patients in the late sixties through early seventies. That included specifically, “clinical testing of behavior control materials.” (page 215, In Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences, John Marks, W.W. Norton and Company 1979.) (See Jolly West Part IV for background of Hamilton and his pursuit of “obliteration of consciousness”)
Hamilton’s fellow MK Ultra/Search doctor Jolly West also had his fingers in Vacaville. According to journalist Alexander Cockburn’s The CIA’s House of Horrors:
The CIA funneled large grants to the University of Oklahoma, home to Dr. Louis “Jolly” West. West would later go on to head the Violence Project at UCLA, where he and Dr. James Hamilton, an OSS colleague of George White and a recipient of CIA largesse, performed psychological research involving behavior modifications on inmates at Vacaville state prison in northern California.
When West’s involvement with Vacaville began and when it ended is unclear – as are much of the activities of the career-CIA doctor’s movements. What we know for sure is that in 1973 West ignited a public uproar when it was discovered that he intended to experiment on the brains of Vacaville prisoners, including the use of psychosurgery and inserting electronic controls. see West at Vacaville. While the proposal was ultimately rejected, perhaps Mr. Cockburn – one of the last credible, old-school, non-programmed journalists of the late 20th century – had sources for his assertion that West indeed did get his fingers into the Vacaville mix.
On the heels of West’s brain-remote-control play, Manson checked in for a 7-month stint at the Vacaville prison medical center. Manson’s first stay would span March through October 1974 for more thorough mental adjustment (Daily Republic July 9, 2023). That was roughly three times the length of the typical Vacaville 90-day stopover. From at least that point forward the con man with hypnotic Svengali-like persuasive powers sufficient to create a cadre of MK-Ultra grade assassins, was a rambling incoherent mess. Jack Ruby redux? (See Jolly West Part III).
After years of systematic adjustment, they rolled out Manson for periodic nationally televised freak shows. The first prominent interviewer, NBC’s Tom Snyder, played the straight-guy act persistently trying to get a straight answer out of an incoherent rambling Manson. It, like all of the many repeat performances, played out like Jack Ruby’s show before the Warren Commission (see Jolly West Part III). One of the only meaningful, sincere-sounding quips from Manson, perhaps explaining his condition, apparently went unnoticed: Manson and the Nuthouse Treatment. No follow-up was forthcoming to that one from the incurious mainstream media.
For decades after the corporate media dosed us with periodic Charles Manson freak shows. It became almost a rite of passage for mainstream ‘journalists.’ So, after Snyder came Diane Sawyer, Charlie Rose, Geraldo Rivera, Ronald Reagan Jr., et al. The message was CIA project Chaos handy: beware of hippie, peacenik culture; and be terrified of ‘cults.’
“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – “Dr. West’s talk”, box 133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers
Jolly West goes West
In late Fall 1966, after he had conducted his sixth installment of handiwork on the mind and brain of Jack Ruby (see, Jolly West Part III), CIA MK Ultra contractor Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was beginning a new chapter in the mind control saga. According to Tom O’Neill’s Chaos*, at that time West was granted a ‘sabbatical’ from the School of Medicine Neuropsychiatric division at the University of Oklahoma. That school was headed by another CIA MK Ultra operator Dr. Stewart Wolf, who presumably signed off on the mission. West asserted that he was going to pursue a fellowship at another known MK Ultra laboratory, Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay area.
*Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Little Brown and Co. 2019. While delivering on the promise of its title, Chaos is also the most revealing work on CIA Mind Control (MK Ultra/MK Search) programs published in the past fifty years. This is the third and last article to summarize, then expand upon, discoveries first published in Mr. O’Neill’s book. Subsequent articles will further corroborate both O’Neill’s work and our narrative beginning with The Deep State and Scientology.
Documentation confirms at least seven MK Ultra subprojects were run out of Stanford, making it perhaps the central hub of CIA Mind Control experiments in academia during the fifties and sixties, see CIA Letter to Stanford. One of those programs, titled MK Ultra Subproject 2, stated these lofty objectives: “To study methods for the administration of drugs without the knowledge of the patient”, and, “To study the possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness.” see, Stanford MK Ultra subproject 2.
Another undocumented, but widely acknowledged and admitted, Stanford subproject was right up Jolly West’s expertise alley, involving the testing of LSD on human beings. That would be the 1959-1961 (and perhaps beyond) project which noted author Ken Kesey allegedly voluntarily participated in. Based out of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, Kesey tapped a long-continuing supply of LSD by partaking in the Stanford-CIA project. (West also listed on a 1990s CV, “Consultant in Psychiatry, Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital 1966-1967″, the very years subject of this article). While almost continuously high on CIA supplied LSD, Kesey turned his home into a psychedelic party site for influential Beat era poets, writers and artists. Dozens of influential hipsters were introduced to LSD there. Kesey ultimately took his LSD cult on the road under the title “The Merry Pranksters”. They would turn on thousands to LSD from coast to coast, and were integral in creating the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as ground zero of the hippie movement.
Kesey became the third CIA linked or sponsored “Johny Appleseed of LSD” to be launched across America to broadly promote and introduce the hallucinogen. The first was former OSS (CIA predecessor) Captain Al Hubbard who bought tens of thousands of LSD hits from then-sole manufacturer Sandoz in 1950 and spent the next decade travelling across the US attempting to dose as many influential people as possible. (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain 1985). The second was Timothy Leary who began dosing as a Harvard faculty member in the fifties, then toured the planet urging people to ‘turn on [to LSD], tune in, and drop out “. (ibid.) By July 1967 Time Magazine benighted Leary as “The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia.” Note, Al Hubbard had no relation to creator of Dianetics and founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. Ironically, however, federal agencies would later use the name similarity as a pretext to unlawfully stalk the latter. But, we’ll get to all that later.
Tom O’Neill reported in Chaos that while West claimed to be working on a Stanford fellowship in 1966 and 1967, the university had no record of it. I have since discovered that West testified under oath in Jack Ruby’s probate trial on 6 June,1967 that his then-current address was “the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.” (Page 153, Jack Ruby Probate Trial). That places the elusive West at the time, at the location, and working for the folks capable of creating a cult whose 1969 crime still affects the American collective psyche nearly six decades later.
The Human Experimental “Laboratory”
Later published papers by West described his 1966-1969 special operation as a study of hippies and their reactions under LSD and marijuana use.That latter date may seem a stretch to some MK ultra researchers. However, it is based on West’s own words in one of those papers. Published on Sept 6, 1968, in “Flight from Violence: Hippies and the Green Rebellion”, West asserted that “we studied the Green Rebellion (hippies) at first hand through September [1967] and, on a modified basis, we have been doing so ever since.” Keep this in mind when we introduce other participants in his San Francisco hijinks. West chose the epicenter of hippiedom (the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco) because he wanted to “study them in their natural habitat” (ibid), as if he were studying some lower form of life. He constructed what he called a “pad (apartment) as laboratory” from which to covertly observe them. (ibid)
As if creating a false cover, West’s papers emanating from the “pad” are bloviating affairs, full of general newsy cliches and random anecdotes with no sources cited. They do not contain a single, concrete observation from his “laboratory”, nor any finding which could possibly be construed as “scientific.” Which begs the question, what was Jolly West actually doing during those years?
The intrepid Tom O’Neill (Chaos) spotted the oddity and actually tracked down West’s files on the ‘study’, consisting mainly of the diaries of graduate students who were staked out at West’s “pad laboratory.” He also interviewed one of those project participants, forty years after the fact. What he found was stunning. The graduate student for nearly one half a century was continuing to ponder the same question, “where in the hell was Jolly West, and what was he up to?” The lab attendant noted that they simply opened their pad to hippie drifters who wanted to find a place to get high on dope and acid. And the students would observe them. Given no other instructions by West, no environmental stimuli, not even communication, there was virtually nothing to observe for months on end. They seldom saw West and never received a single bit of feedback on their months of notetaking. One student even wondered if the paid observers themselves were the subjects of West’s study, being covertly surveilled. (Chaos)
I have since found another monster clue as to where the elusive doctor West might have been spending a good portion of his time in San Francisco. Perhaps the only doctor who approached West’s epic volume of CIA Mind Control work was his opposite number at his then “fellowship”-sponsoring University, Stanford. That was Dr. James Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a Stanford-affiliated psychiatrist from 1949 through at least 1975. During West’s stint in San Francisco, Hamilton was executing MK Ultra sub project 140. He was busy poaching human Guinea pigs from St. Mary’s Memorial hospital (University of California, San Francisco Medical Center) and plying them with drugs in a private office nearby. Hamilton happened to have been the project leader of the other Stanford-based MK Ultra projects listed above, including the one trying to develop a means of “abolishing consciousness” altogether.
On top of that Hamilton had been the supervising psychiatrist for the CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax. That entailed setting up bordellos in San Francisco in the fifties and early sixties – also referred to as “pads” – where unsuspecting Johns were dosed with LSD and observed behind one way mirror windows tripping with prostitutes. So deep was the CIA’s trust for Hamilton that Sydney Gottlieb himself (Creator of MK Ultra, Head of CIA Technical Services) made a regular practice while in San Franisco of fornicating with as many of Hamilton’s Midnight Climax call girls as possible. (sources, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks 1979, Poisoner in Chief, Stephen Kinzer 2019, The CIA Reading Room and a variety of documents from sites across the web). Bookmark Dr. Hamilton, he will be a lynchpin in the article to follow this one.
Enter Charles Manson
In early 1967 Charles Mason was a career criminal who had been mostly in, and only sporadically out of, juvenile detention and federal prisons between ages of 15 and 32. He was released from Los Angeles’ Terminal Island federal correction facility in March of that year.
It was right on the cusp of San Francisco’s “Summer Of Love”, a time and destination (San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District) promoted by the mainstream media, led by Time Magazine (run by CIA friend and LSD recipient Henry Luce and his OSS/CIA-trained deputy C.D. Jackson); and leading CIA MK Ultra Mind Control LSD evangelists Timothy Leary from Harvard and Ken Kesey from Stanford. Time quoted a hip “Bishop” claiming Haight-Ashbury might be the site of the second coming, “The hippies are saying to the Church what the young Church said to the Jews: ‘You have had it.’”
Even MK Ultra stalwart Jolly West himself seemed to promote the LSD inspired hippies – despite having earlier predicted the possibility of the rise of LSD cults that would kill and then forget the crime (ala MK Ultra goals and Manson family reality). West would claim “the hippies seem to take literally the words of such teachers as Moses, Jesus and Gautama…Bishop Pike may have been correct when he likened the hippies to early Christians.” (Flight From Violence) It is remarkable how West promotes the Hippie drug culture when his project participants’ notes hold one thing in common: a plethora of observations of the rapid, and disgusting decline of Haight-Ashbury over a two-year period of Hippie “control.” (West archives box 118, folders 8-10)
Manson who reportedly did not even wish to leave prison, and thoroughly out of character, apparently heeded the calls to drop everything and migrate to Haight-Ashbury. So strong was the appeal that he blatantly violated his parole terms restricting him to Los Angles, and headed to the Bay area, guitar in hand.
When the parole violation was discovered, instead of hauling Manson back to prison (standard operating procedure), the US Parole office assigned Manson to a particularly suspicious parole officer in the Bay area. He was a criminologist named Roger Smith. O’Neill learned that Smith was running an experimental parole program that monitored its parolees. Smith had several dozen parolees on his roster when Manson showed up. However, he would soon have none, but for Manson himself. It was Smith who promoted Manson becoming a full time denizen of ground zero of the hippie movement, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He claimed LSD and Manson’s fledgling harem cult (The Manson family, consisting of a bevy of young female, druggie waifs who pledged allegiance to Charlie) somehow made the violence-prone Manson more mellow. Using that justification, Roger Smith did everything he could to encourage the lifestyle change; including breaking federal law on a serial basis to facilitate Manson. Quite the prescription from a federal parole officer (unlimited LSD, unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card and sex slavery cult creation). (Chaos)
So federally protected, despite numerous parole violations and fresh crimes, Manson would remain free to wreak havoc well into his cult’s fateful journey to Los Angeles in 1968 where a year later he would direct the commission of the mass murders that shocked the American psyche. (Chaos)
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC)
In early 1967 Dr. David E. Smith (no familial relation to Roger Smith) was a straight-laced toxicologist researching the effects of LSD and amphetamines on rats. He was finding that LSD would subdue the rodents while amphetamines would turn them into violent, ruthless killers, murdering and cannibalizing their own. Smith made those experiments at the same time and place that Dr. James Alexander Hamilton was running CIA MK Ultra subproject 140 operations (UCSF St. Mary’s Medical Center – all a stone’s throw from the center of the Haight-Ashbury district). (The CIA Doctors, Dr. Colin A. Ross, Manitou Communications 2006). In January of that year Smith would make a transformation as stark as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was thanks to the chemical he was studying in the lab. In January 1967, partially inspired by the mellow, LSD-tripping rats in his laboratory (literally stated in an interview) he dropped LSD for the first time in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park at the hippie Human Be-In rock concert. While listening to the likes of Timothy Leary and watching thousands similarly tripping, he had a revelation of sorts. He “wanted to become bohemian, to free himself of inhibitions.” And so, he decided to open what would soon become the epicenter of the hippie culture, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. (HAFMC)
At least that is what he wrote in his self-promotional book on the matter, Love Needs Care (David E. Smith and John Luce 1971). But years later, perhaps forgetful of the company line, David Smith told a journalist that his inspiration for opening the clinic in fact was precisely the same reason Jolly West came to San Francisco, the promise of experimenting on humans rather than lab animals. Eerily he spoke in the very human-degrading terms of West, “In the beginning my interest in the Haight was as a natural drug laboratory, a giant mouse cage.” (Frank Olsen, The Dark Side of the Summer of Love). That view was corroborated by the head of the Diggers (the volunteers who scraped up life necessities for visiting hippies so they could live free) Emmett Grogran. He wrote of HAFMC in his memoir, “Patients were treated as ‘research subjects’ and the facility itself was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency.” (Ringolevio, 1970, emphasis added)
Remarkably, parole officer Roger Smith would come to operate a federally funded Amphetamine Research Project out of the federally funded HAFMC. He, like David Smith, had previously issued a study acknowledging the powerful violence inducing effect of amphetamines.
And so Manson was federally mandated to regularly check in with this federal parole officer (cum amphetamine experimenter) at the clinic whose founder dubbed “a giant mouse cage, natural experimental laboratory.“ Manson and his family would regularly come to HAFMC for venereal disease treatment, or perhaps the occasional bad LSD trip rescue, sometimes to report in to his parole officer and even just to visit with the man he considered his guardian angel, Roger Smith. Smith earned the nickname amongst the HAFMC regulars as “The Friendly Fed.”
Tom O’Neill discovered that Jolly West would frequent the clinic at that very time, to “drum up hippie business” for his nearby federally funded “hippie crash pad laboratory.” While his own project personnel wallowed in mystery as to West’s whereabouts, he was busy tinkering with human minds at the “giant mouse case… natural drug laboratory” in of an office provided by human experimenter David Smith.
David Smith told O’Neill that “[West] studied people at our clinic” and “he recruited subjects from our clinic” but insisted he was kept entirely in the dark as to any details of West’s work. He claimed the only thing he knew about West’s background was that he had slayed an elephant with an overdose of LSD (See, Tusko tanked). Smith sought to distance himself from West in the interview and explained his ignorance by claiming “we were service at that time, not research.” Some service, to render your patients to unknown experiments by a man whose only claim to fame was drugging the mightiest earth-walking mammal to death.
While the Smiths both claimed to be in the dark as to West’s activities, as did West’s own project personnel, West himself left the secret hiding in plain sight. He wrote in a later study that he engaged in “transforming ‘bad trips’ into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.” (Flight From Violence) In his person diary which I located at the UCLA archives, West acknowledged ‘bad trips’ as the first and foremost mental health problem at the then-fledgling HFAMC: “For the most part, the problems seem to be related to the use, misuse, and abuse of drugs. LSD is a significant offender in this respect, contributing a substantial number of ‘bad trips’ to the total volume of business.” – Jolly West’s Haight-Ashbury project Diary June 24, 1967
TRANSORMING TRIPS and HYPNOTISM
Whatever West was doing in the “back rooms” of HAFM, he never committed it to paper. He even took measures to keep his own “crash pad laboratory” team in the dark. While many on the team noted West’s near continuous absence from the crash pad lab, one of them noted that West’s representative at the pad: “he discouraged anyone on the project from visiting it [HAFMC] or helping it or having anything to do with it.” Virtually, the only thing we know for certain about what Jolly West actually did in San Francisco during the years 1966 and 1968 when he was there is this admission, “transforming bad trips into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.” How exactly does one accomplish that? Consult anyone who ever had anything to do with turning potentially bad LSD trips into good trips, from doctors to psychiatrists to LSD gurus to social workers, you will find one, single common denominator: the use of the power of persuasion. You talk the person through it.
What particular power would West turn to? There is only one ‘therapeutic’ tool West ever boasted expertise in, and he did so repeatedly: hypnosis, the ultimate tool of persuasion. He considered himself a master hypnotist. It was that primary skill that he flouted to CIA MK Ultra chief Sidney Gottlieb that resulted in at least a decade of taxpayer dollars flowing to him to conduct mind control experiments, utilizing primarily hypnotism and drugs. (Jolly West I, II, and III). And just as west had used certain drugs with high levels of making patients suggestible on Jimmy Shaver (Jolly West Part II) and Jack Ruby (Jolly West Part III), West mentions favorably the use of chlorpromazine for ‘bad trips.’ (West diary) Chlorpromazine has been listed to this day in studies to numerous to recount as top of the list in terms drugs that create suggestibility.
Both Smiths are on record claiming Manson and his followers’ minds were thoroughly marinated with acid while they and West were routinely in the house (HAFMC). We know from both Smiths that Manson and his several followers were the only recurring and consistent HAFMC denizens (referred to as a fixture of the clinic) worthy of mention in their several hundred-page book (Love Needs Care) and many papers and articles they wrote on the clinic. The odds of West plucking one or more of the family (cult), and particularly Charlie who was attracted to hypnotism like positive charge to a negative terminal (see below), for his LSD trip readjustment expertise are outstanding. It was those overwhelming odds, even without noting the West admission we have here, that lead O’Neill and so many more since to suggest that perhaps West took the well-LSD-seasoned brain of Charles Manson and programmed it to kill, right in line with West’s 1953 promises to the CIA’s Gottlieb to create the Manchurian Candidate (Jolly West Parts I, II, and III).
O’Neill recounts in Chaos how he kept a quotation from Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book “Helter Skelter” taped above his computer. “The most puzzling question of all” about the Manson murders to Bugliosi was ‘how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers’…”it may be something that he learned from others.” Perhaps we should entertain another possible theory besides Manson being programmed to kill. That is Manson being trained to program to kill. That is, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) being hypnotized and programmed himself, Manson also did his own hypnotizing.
Some of the most convincing material for that theory in my view are contained in the end notes of Chaos. Two such notes are from page 369 where O’Neill conducts a side investigation into claims by LA hypnotist William Deanyer that Manson visited him for tips and fine-tuning of skills he already apparently possessed in the 68/69 period. Deanyer claimed the encounters to a Manson biographer (Ed Sanders, The Family), and Deanyer’s daughter corroborated them directly to O’Neill.
Others have also spoken of Manson’s long history of application of hypnosis. Actor Danny Trejo has said that Manson was a somewhat accomplished hypnotist as far back as 1961 where he encountered him in jail. He described Manson as a “small, scrawny, poor, bum.” Yet, he said Manson was so adept at hypnosis he could convince the prisoners that they were high on drugs; producing the same effect of drugs of choice on their minds. It exlained to Trejo how such a diminutive convict could survive so long in jail without protection. see, Trejo on Manson.
If hypnotism really was Manson’s forte and continuing trick of survival it answers Bugliosi’s haunting question as to how on earth he programmed others to kill. If you think it is far-fetched for West to believe a career criminal like Manson worthy of training or capable of mastering hypnosis, you might reconsider when you read West’s published words about the minds of accomplished, criminally-inclined hypnotists (quotations taken from Dangers of Hypnosis, Louis J. West, MD, and Gordan H. Deckert, MD, JAMA April 5, 1965):
1.
“We do know of sexual seductions that appear to have been achieved by hypnotic suggestion. For example, an ugly, uncouth janitor who had learned hypnosis (at an “Academy of Hypnotism”- fee, including lessons and certificate, $50), seduced several female tenants whom he initially hypnotized in “demonstrations.””
That would explain how the “small, scrawny, poor bum” could create a literal harem ½ his age who would perform orgies on demand and kill for him. Incidentally, Manson’s other alleged hypnotism instructor, William Deanyer, was indicted and tried in the fifties for sex slave trafficking for that very stunt (though saved by directed verdict from a Federal Judge, and perhaps by Deanyer’s continuing hypnotic influence over the victims) (Chaos).
2.
“Because of his ability to induce hypnosis and thereby influence others, the operator may become convinced that he is somehow superior to other people or that he enjoys powers beyond the scope of ordinary men.”
That would explain Manson’s and certainty that he was in fact the second coming of Jesus Christ as well as Satan. If Manson were also being hypnotized, it would be consistent with West’s pontifications about hippies being the new early Christians (a theme Manson incessantly riffed on post-summer of 67)
3.
As to Manson’s followers’ gravitational attraction to Manson:
“Hypnotized repeatedly as a subject in demonstrations, eventually she could not make the most trivial decisions without consulting the hypnotist, and when he moved to a city 1,500 miles away, she followed him leaving her family, friends, and job.”
4.
More on the formation of his Family (cult):
“Since World War II organized hypnosis has seen the insidious growth of cult-like conditions. If those who employ hypnosis succumb to this cult-forming temptation, the label “crackpots” may become appropriate.”
5.
Finally, on how Manson’ already antisocial character could be manipulated into a full blown psychotic personality by hypnosis applied to him:
“Upon hypnotic intervention the prominence of the neurotic (eg, hysterical, phobic, or compulsive) symptoms may yield, only to bring to the fore, in intensified form, the underlying schizophrenic psychopathology.”
According to West’s own words, a skilled hypnotist could create a split personality psychopath. West’s confidence in a practitioner’s ability to do just that later led to his help in forming a foundation dedicated to convincing the media and public that Multi-personality disorder (clearly a form of schizophrenia; though psychs sometimes argue otherwise) was predominantly an iatrogenic (doctor created) condition. Stay tuned for later article on the CIA’s False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Also, see Jolly West parts 1-3 for West’s claims of creating psychosis with relative ease.
If West were to create or exacerbate a condition of paranoia, it could become a permanent condition, according to West himself. He testified in the probate proceeding of Jack Ruby’s Will on the eve of the Summer of Love: “Paranoia is almost by definition incurable.” (testimony of Dr. Louis Jolyon West, March 27, 1967, pp. 181-182, ibid.). Across the spectrum of Manson literature, from absurd propaganda pieces like Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter to Tom O’neill’s meticulously documented history Chaos, one word is shared by nearly all in describing Manson’s state of mind, paranoid.
At the end of the day West considered himself above all else a master hypnotist. He lectured on the subject. In one of those talks he asserted the following:
“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – Dr. West’s talk, box 133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers
Granted, because of the suspicious lack of detail anyone seems to recall or to have committed to writing about the mysterious Dr. West’s activities a HAFMC, it is easy to speculate and attempt to fill the void. But, even assuming Manson was not a ticking time bomb created directly by West to explode a year or so later, one cannot ignore the two things held in common by the three federally funded experimenters who spent months under the same roof with Charlie Manson in 1967. David Smith, Roger Smith and Jolly West were all exploring and experimenting with the same chemicals (LSD, then amphetamines) that coursed through the veins of Manson and his sex/murder cult slaves. All three confirmed in writing that switching from LSD (for heightened suggestibility – perfect for hypnosis) to amphetamines created people capable of wanton, senseless and grisly violence. All three were with Manson in the critical period wherein the laws of supply and demand were manipulated to change the drugs of choice for Manson, his family and the entire US counterculture. The CIA’s fingerprints were all over that transition.
Summer of Love Becomes Summer of Chaos
It so happened that the Summer of 1967 also marked the season when the CIA was ordered by then President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson to flank the FBI’s efforts to roll back and demolish anti-war resistance. The peace movement was then seen as majorly driven by an LSD-soaked generation of counter-culturalists. Since the CIA had created that counterculture (wittingly or not), when the agency christened the new effort as “Operation Chaos”, it very aptly described what it’s previous decade of domestic meddling caused as well as what it would soon create even more of. Popularly dismissed as a discreet surveillance campaign focused on foreign connections to US civil rights and anti-war protest groups, serious students of the history of the CIA consider that pretext. After all, it took the literal break-in and theft of FBI documents several years later to learn that at that very same time J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were actively infiltrating those civilian groups, and intentionally creating conflict and strife within them (chaos); even to the point of encouraging and causing assassinations (See COINTELPRO ). To believe the CIA would be outdone by its comparatively straight-laced fellow agency to some is naïve. After all, it was the FBI’s failure to quash the counterculture through such tactics for several years that prompted the President to sic the CIA on it. In any event, chaos truly did exponentially increase from the moment of the inception of Operation Chaos.
Just as the LSD-inspired counterculture hit its apex of power and prestige in the summer of of 1967, a sea change occurred in the historically CIA-controlled drug influx into Haight-Ashbury (and ultimately the entire country).
As noted at the outset, the CIA had a remarkable run as the primary promoter and distributor of LSD across America for more than a decade. The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia Timothy Leary himself admitted during the peak of his fame, “The LSD movement was started by the CIA…I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.” (p 190, Poisoner In Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt 2019).
However, by the mid-sixties the CIA was up against a movement by a number of members of Congress who by then were flooded with constituents railing about the increasing numbers of runaways and delinquents LSD was creating. By April 1966, the primary manufacturer of LSD, Sandoz of Switzerland, announced a recall and halt to production in the face of the growing backlash. See e.g., New York Times April 15, 1966: Distributor of LSD Recalls All Supplies.
In the Times story, Sandoz refers to a growing black market, something the incurious newspaper does not elaborate on. That market was as much as cornered in the all-critical LSD-culture of California. One man produced nearly all of the West Coast’s LSD from 1965 into the 1967 Summer of Love. His name was Augustus Owsley Stanely III. In 1965 as LSD supply was becoming extremely thin, Oswald slithered up next to California’s LSD Johnny Appleseed Ken Kesey, supplying top quality LSD for his Merry Prankster ‘acid tests’, huge open parties with massive vats of Kool-aid spiked with LSD to introduce one and all (witting or unwitting) to turn on, tune in and drop out as an unthinking mob. Stanley toured with the Merry Pranksters and then for years with its rock entertainment drawing card, the Grateful Dead. In Time Magazine’s July, 7, 1967 ode to the Summer of Love it referred to Stanley as the “Henry Ford of LSD—the man who turned the psychedelic underground into a mass-production industry.”
Most have overlooked a glaring anomaly in Stanley’s history. We’ll examine it for reasons that will become obvious. Stanley was born into privilege, the grandson of a Kentucky U.S. Senator. By all accounts he was a precocious, if mischievous boy. In 1950, at the age of 15, Stanley purportedly voluntarily checked himself into St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. St. Elizabeth’s was still under the directorship of OSS/MK Ultra pioneer Dr. Zigmond Lebensohn at that time. (see, The Deep State and Scientology). While Lebansohn’s OSS (CIA predecessor) hypnotism and drug experiments began as early 1943, they are widely reported to have continued at St. Elizabeth’s well into the fifties. In fact, I discovered a document from UCLA archives showing Lebensohn collaborating with Jolly West as late as 1954 on an experiment entitled “Studies in Hypnosis” (see, Lebensohn). Stanley remained in “voluntary” mental hospital commitment for nearly a year and one half. He told his biographer it was really a great experience – he learned “self-control” through “hypnosis.” (Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Robert Greenfield, St Martins 2016). After a stint in the Air Force, Owsley took technical positions for military industrial complex collaborators and contractors Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Rocketdyne, all with no college degree, and only one semester of post-High School education.
Almost date-coincident with Time’s honoring his psychedelic achievements, Stanley suddenly ceased LSD production, thus cutting off the most reliable and pure source since Sandoz quit supplying it. Instead, he produced and boldly promoted a new drug, one that David Smith acknowledged marked the seminal turning point in the shifting of Haight-Ashbury as an Eden of free love and peace into the dirty, diseased, and very violent dangerous arm pit of San Francisco. Stanley’s new drug was named STP, after the fuel additive used by racecar driving teams. STP was marketed as a 72-hour LSD trip. 10 times the length of the typical trip because of one important ingredient, methamphetamines (popularly known then as ‘speed’). The drug that both Smiths had previously experimented with and acknowledged caused aggression and violence. Because of the suggestibility, group-think mentality of the drug-fueled culture, STP spread rapidly and wide.
West’s Haight-Ashbury project files indicate he was fully aware of the “experimental” nature of Owsley’s drug work and his/Grateful Dead’s distribution role. Here is the notation in his file of the debrief of an informant (including promise not to disclose):
“He sees Owsley as using the area on experimental grounds, for testing of drugs. He now says Owsley’s place is in L.A. not Los Altos. (with promise I would not reveal, he stated that the Grateful Dead distribute a great deal of acid for Owsley).” (Box 118, folder 9, West UCLA archives)
Even before the month of July 1967 had ended, the San Francisco Chronicle noted of STP in the Haight: “It turned love-ins into speed-ins.” While STP quickly earned a horrendous reputation because of the abhorrent experiences and behaviors associated with it, its introduction marked the beginning of a marked dearth of LSD and overabundance of addictive amphetamines coursing through the Haight, then all of California and the rest of the nation.
David Smith described the rapid decline evident in San Francisco in his book Love Needs Care: “The love philosophy was exploited, and the sense of community vanished during the summer of 1967, while those individuals who gave the district its illusive solidarity drifted or were driven out, to be replaced by others, interested primarily in speed.” The co-author of Smith’s book Love Needs Care, John Luce was more explicit: “The Summer of Love turned into a winter of wreckage, where psychedelic dreams curdled into heroin haze and hollow-eyed hustles, leaving behind not liberation but a ledger of lost souls and societal scars.”
As the Haight-Ashbury model decay spread across the country (including the transition from LSD to amphetamines) the hippie image would transform in American minds from harmless space cadets into cut-throat violent speed freaks. Chao-incarnate.
1968 – ACID HEADS TO SPEED FREAKS
Meanwhile, Manson’s federal protector and HAFMC anchor Roger Smith formally began receiving federal funds for a study he was conducting on amphetamines, Amphetamine Research Project (ARP) in the clinic. He tapped David Smith’s HAFMC administrator Alan J. Rose as his project assistant. Smith continued to facilitate Manson’s probation-violating treks across America and Mexico into 1968. When some of Manson’s girls were left behind, Alan Rose invited them to live in his home. Rose dropped LSD and engaged in orgies with the group. When several of them were arrested during a trip to Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, Rose was rushed there to assist in springing them from jail. Roger Smith personally took custody of and cared for Manson’s infant son for weeks, while he and Rose worked on freeing the child’s mother who was arrested in the affair. Roger used his authority as a federal parole officer to vouch for the women and under false pretenses pulled off what looked to be impossible, the premature release of the Manson cult members.
Rose continued living with the girls, doing drugs and taking sexual liberties with them after their release. When Manson established a base in the L.A. area, Rose physically led the girls in their return south to the Manson cult. He lived, took drugs and had sex with them and participated as a Manson-obeying member for another several months. Two things are crystal clear in Rose’s and Roger “Friendly Fed” Smith’s wake.
First, the ARP, and its two principle federally funded and empowered officers (Rose and Roger Smith) facilitated the freedom and creation of what would become the Manson family cult. Second, that creation would go from relatively peaceful to violent and deadly by transitioning to the very drug the ARP was studying the effects of, methamphetamines.
THE CRIME THAT CREATED CHAOS
The shift to speed began gradually but escalated right up to the Manson family’s infamous ritual murders of pregnant Hollywood star Sharon Tate and her several houseguests in early August 1969. That escalation is recounted by several Manson cult members in their memoirs and trial testimony. Significantly, Manson himself did not partake of speed, stating (unrefuted by family members) in a 1970 Rolling Stone Interview, “I don’t fuck with speed at all and I’ve never had a needle in my arm.” (Reference)
Roger Smith at the very least should have known where the Manson clan was headed. Just a couple months before the Manson carnage, Smith wrote in the following in the Journal of Psychodelic Drugs (Spring 1969):
“The paranoid speed freak is highly prone to violent behavior…Threats of mayhem and murder are common within speed groups, and many begin to collect guns and knives to make the threats more convincing.”
And that same knowledge ought to be attributed to West. More than a year into West’s Haight-Ashbury program one of his project members began a dual role, member of the ARP acting as its representative in West’s larger project. This is documented in this late June 1968 diary entry: “I will be a part of the project [ARP] and attend all meetings and clinical conferences. I will get subjects and follow them through their rel. to the project. Also, I will put in hours at the pad [West’s ‘crash pad laboratory’] as kind of the rep. of the project, when people who are subjects come here just to rap, etc.” – Box 118, Folder 10, page 62 Jolyon West papers, UCLA archives. This puts O’Neill’s Chaos interview with Roger Smith into an entirely new light. Smith went to great lengths to distance himself and his project from Jolly West.
In September 1970 Alan J. Rose finally got around to putting his name to something, a study on the Manson family, The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study (David E. Smith, M.D., and Alan J. Rose, M.A. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 3 (No. 1), pp. 115–119, Sept. 1970). It was most notable for its omissions. First, Love’s boss – Roger Smith – who directed the “study” was absent (even though there are reports Rose was living at Roger Smith’s home at the time of the report). Instead, HAFMC founder David E. Smith co-authored the report. Second, the name “Manson” is missing, though David Smith later confirmed it was about the Manson family. Third, it euphemizes by withholding the details of the cult’s infamous crimes. Finally, and most significantly, not a single mention is made of amphetamines, the fuel Manson lit his cult’s murderous fires with and which the cult began imbibing date coincident with the Amphetamines Research Project (in the person of Love himself) deeply embedding within it. Instead, it speaks only of LSD and marijuana use. Since David Smith has consistently advocated both LSD and marijuana – literally to this day – as passive, peace-enhancing drugs, the replacement of amphetamines with LSD and marijuana is less curious than it is suspicious.
In 2022 David Smith was interviewed by researcher Dan Storper about O’Neill’s Chaos and the suggestion that Roger Smith may have been riding shotgun for some CIA program to create a killer in Manson. David Smith’s response was telling: “I talked with Roger and he denied it. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.”
Roger Smith revealed later that somewhere along the line West’s primary interest went from LSD to amphetamines. He told O’Neill that he I had no idea that Jolly West was recruiting subjects for his LSD experiments in the same HAFMC that Smith operated his Manson contacts out of. But, he did say this about West “I got on this kind of professional circuit with psychiatrists and basic researchers who were looking at high dose amphetamine use and Jolly West was very involved in that.”
Right around the time of the Manson family murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her friends Jolly West moved to Los Angeles and began his twenty-year run as head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric department. O’Neill’s review of West’s papers indicated that West kept a collection of Manson trial press clippings, but was careful not to keep any notes. He also, very uncharacteristically, rarely commented on the murders, the trial or the cult even though the entire affair played out on his doorstep and grew out of his shared “mouse cage, laboratory” at the HAFMC. However, two psychiatrists under his department were involved in the trial offering their views on how the murderers ought be understood.
In 1970 by the time Manson hysteria became a national thing, David E. Smith offered words that perhaps reflect the fear Operation Chaos set out to create in the first place: “the place [Haight-Ashbury] is full of Charlie Mansons.” (Love Needs Care). In other words: America, be afraid; be very afraid.
The increasingly CIA-controlled mainstream, corporate media would beat that drum for decades to come, until today mere mention of the word “cult” engenders a visceral reaction to most Americans.
In spite of his fingerprints being all over the formation of the killer cult that created that domestic terror, Jolly West – in his inimitable style – soon strutted back into the limelight to capitalize on and exacerbate those fears for the rest of his days.
When you timeline the facts, often otherwise obscured truths emerge. That is why propagandists pay so much attention to confusing the critical factor of time. Accurate time sequence is the way we are going to approach the matter of some rather odd meddling that surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some new revelations emerge.
In February 1959 Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist and lawyer, invited his friend and colleague Jolly West to participate in a New Orleans seminar for Smith’s Law-Science Academy. The group was formed to test how far the boundaries of law could be stretched in freeing cold-blooded criminals into society. A ‘logical’ extension of the Military Industrial Mind Control complex aim of “infiltration of law.”
West dominated Smith’s agenda, making four of the eleven presentations given there. It was not surprising since both Smith and West share deep ties. They had extensive mutual MK Ultra and military psychiatric connections. For example, West associate and fellow MK Ultra contractor Dr. Stewart Wolf also attended the 1959 New Orleans conclave and had worked with Smith on legal cases. Wolf, like West, was mentored by confirmed MK Ultra experimenter and funder and personal friend of Alan Dulles at Cornell University medical center, Dr Harold Wolff. I obtained a stack of documents from the West personal archives that show Stewart Wolf working feverishly to establish West’s MK Ultra lab at University of Oklahoma at West’s behest in 1955. Even though Wolf was West’s titular superior (head of the school of medicine), and West was still in the throes of the Jimmy Shaver situation (see Jolly West Part II) and not yet working full time at the University, Wolf was head hunting for West’s MK Ultra doctor line-up, running each move by and taking direction from West.
Winston Smith, like West, was a proponent of plying uncooperative defendants with drugs and hypnosis to forcibly extract the “truth” out of them. The West, Wolf, Smith connections (and other military mind control complex ties) are thoroughly documented in an admirable piece of investigative journalism by Max Arvo in his three-part Jack Ruby series at Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment. For those wanting documentation beyond what we provide in this article, Arvo’s series is a virtual legal brief with a plethora of exhibits on much of the same ground we cover here.
On October 3,1963 Louis Jolyon West made the following pronunciamento to a meeting of the Mental Health Association of Oregon:
“Now we are at the dawning of a new era in the field of psychiatry because we are learning for the first time how to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”
The Oregon Journal reported that “Dr. West listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis and sleep deprivation as some of the things that psychiatrists were using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people…The most important contribution of [LSD] so far is in producing model mental illnesses, he believes.” (Oregon Journal October 3, 1963) West was publicly claiming to have made good on his 1953 promise to MK Ultra boss Sidney Gottlieb to create the means “for inducing in [subjects] specific mental disorders.” (see Jolly West Part I and Part II)
Fifty days later, on November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The farcical narrative the media was fed and dutifully and incessantly drilled into the public psyche included the ‘fact’ that the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a ‘lone nut.’ A person who up to that fatal day had never apparently been evaluated as insane was dubbed stark-staring mad and yet capable of pulling off a military grade, triangulated ambush on the President of the United States – all on his lonesome. The gaslighting had only just begun. (For a short primer on the absurdity of our mainstream conditioning on the incident see Oliver Stone’s JFK; or go further with Stone’s follow-up documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass; and/or take a deeper, documented dive at Kennedy and King, where Arvo’s series is posted.)
The November 22/23 1963 several-hour initial Lee Harvey Oswald interrogation – sans lawyer for the accused – resulted in nothing but denials from Oswald and the remarkably resolute sounding declaration that he’d been designated and set up as the “patsy” for the biggest crime of the 20th Century. Despite being the most important interrogation in American history, no recording of the interrogation ever saw the light of day. Some have ventured that Oswald was a botched product of MK Ultra Mind Control – programmed to believe he had committed the crime. A failure because instead of dutifully copping to the crime, he retained enough bearings to realize he hadn’t had done it. We are not going there because the best potential evidence of Oswald’s real provenance would soon disappear, forever.
On November 24, less than 48 hours after his arrest, the most important prisoner in the history of the United States of America, Oswald, was shot down on live television by one Jack Rubenstein, better known as Jack Ruby, a mob and intelligence community connected strip club owner in Dallas. Seemingly a desperate act following 36 hours of futile attempts to make Oswald incriminate himself. As much as the world craved answers out of Lee Harvey Oswald, it shifted its attention toward Ruby in hopes of getting closer to the truth.
Within 3 days, after many machinations involving Ruby’s brother being led around by mob and media connected intelligence types, San Francisco’s Melvin Belli was announced as counsel for Ruby. In keeping with the sea of contradictions the JFK assassination case served up, Belli was not even a criminal lawyer. Instead, he was a high-profile, ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, evidenced by his sobriquet “the king of torts.”
It just so happens that Melvin Belli was good friends with a local Dallas lawyer named Joe Tonahill, who was immediately brought on as local counsel. It also just so happened that Belli and Tonahill were close friends and associates of Jolly West colleague Hubert Winston Smith of Law-Science Academy fame and also a professor at University of Texas.
Two more peculiar events occurred before the first day of December 1963 even arrived.
First, two days after the Belli dog and pony show (announcing to the media the Texas arrival of the king of torts), Jolly West held one of his own. He announced to United Press International that a panel of ten “nationally known psychiatrists” had agreed to serve as “friends of the court” to “examine Ruby on an impartial basis.” West claimed he was put up to the caper by one Charles W. Webster, professor of criminal law at Southern Methodist University (See, West Announces Panel). One little problem, Webster said just the reverse. It was the self-promoting West who first came to Webster to be a local authority tag to help West wheedle his way into visit Mr. Ruby (see Webster discredits West). West went to his grave thirty-six years later never disclosing who actually put him up to pursuing Ruby. By the end of this article, I reckon you’ll be able to make a relatively educated guess on who that was. Likewise, the ten alleged nationally known experts were never identified. Yet, before the Grand Jury had even decided on the prima facie case against Ruby, West infiltrated the court and asked presiding judge Joe Brown to set West loose on Ruby. Brown rejected the move.
The second strange event occurred concurrently to West’s hijinks. His drug-hypnosis proponent friend Hubert Winston Smith was instantly tapped by his friends Belli and Tonahill to create an “insanity defense” for Ruby. By the time Smith was flat-out establishing the theory and assembling the team of psychiatrists who would dutifully testify to its veracity, the only psychiatrist to have examined Ruby, Dr. John T. Holbrook, found on 25 November that Ruby was “clinically and legally sane.” Holbrook would conduct subsequent examinations on Dec 4 1963 and January 27-29 1964 making essentially the same finding.
In fact, so apparently lucid was Mr. Ruby that by the time of trial, Smith’s own panel of three hand selected and coached psychiatrists had to agree that Ruby at that time was clearly ‘sane.’ So, reminiscent of the strange West affair involving Jimmy Shaver in 1954 (see, Jolly West Part II) the defense became that Ruby was “temporarily insane” at the time of the killing of Oswald, but apparently had regained his senses once the terrible deed was done. The jury thoroughly rejected the psych double-talk and by March 14,1964 Jack Ruby was sentenced to die by the electric chair.
If you study the case in any depth, you will soon realize there is next to no probability that Ruby could have pulled off the execution alone. A known mobster walking deep into a police station to stick a gun in the belly of the most guarded prisoner and valued potential witness in the history of the United States of America? The official motive repeated ad nauseum by the media was patently absurd on its face: “Ruby was so emotionally upset by Kennedy’s assassination he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to go through a trial.” Right, from a venereal disease wracked underworld figure with CIA and mob connections, both of which wanted Kennedy dead.
Predictably, Ruby fired Belli. He then formally hired the psychiatrist/lawyer who bungled his insanity defense; due no doubt to the facileness with which Smith threw his own hand-picked and recruited psychiatrists under the bus, sharply criticizing the performance of all of them. Smith blatantly lied to the court, claiming he had not seen the reports of the trial psychiatrists he had himself assembled and coached. In perhaps a Freudian slip, reminiscent of West’s diabolical work on “behalf of” Jimmy Shaver (see Jolly West part II), Smith vowed to use hypnosis and drugs to “get the truth out of Ruby.” Had this come from the mouth of the prosecutor that is one thing, but Winston was the supposed defense lawyer.
So, let us say that you promised the sure-fire insanity defense, it backfired, and now whatever conglomerate (organized crime, CIA, or combination of both) is dependent upon Ruby’s silence and/or discrediting is demanding results, or else. In order to manufacture insanity, who you gonna call?
Operation Mind Control Fixer
Smith’s first action was to recruit his friend and colleague Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West onto team Ruby. Smith moved the court for permission to urgently have Ruby’s mental state examined anew. According to West’s later report on the examination, he discussed with Smith in advance using “Hypnosis and intravenous sodium pentothal were included among possible techniques to provide further information concerning Mr. Ruby’s state of mind at the time he shot Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 November 1963.” It seems, Jack Ruby was in for the Jimmy Shaver treatment – see Jolly West Part II. By late April Smith had obtained court clearance for West to visit and “examine” Ruby.
Before we proceed, let’s review the Jack Ruby psychiatric scorecard up to the day West entered the scene. Five psychiatrists, four of them for the defense, had found Ruby to be compos mentis in seven different reports to the court. None, zero, nada, zilch had found Ruby to be non compos mentis. (Chaos, chapter 11 and endnotes, Tom O’Neill, and Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment)
Only on the day Jolly West – master hypnotist, LSD experimenter, and self-proclaimed insanity-producing wonder – met Jack Ruby did all of that change, forever. As was the hambone’s wont, West immediately announced to as many media members as he and Smith could muster that Jack Ruby was at that moment “obviously psychotic”, suffering from “auditory and visual hallucinations.” West found further “corroboration” for his insanity finding: Ruby did not trust West and did not want to be admitted into a mental hospital saying he felt safer in jail. In other words, that he wouldn’t submit to institutionalization under the grand master of MK Ultra Mind Control was proof the man was insane. (see West’s 29 April 1964 report)
West told the media that if Ruby was not at once committed to a hospital he would become “hopelessly insane.” Get it? Incurable. Yet, the very next day, West said Ruby seemed to have regained his wits. An apparent less-than-24-hour psychotic break. Max Arvos made a well-reasoned case that Ruby might have been plied with LSD to create “insanity”, just as West promised he could do less than two months earlier. Arvos noted that Ruby’s breaks with reality – according to West’s knee jerk admission – seemed to last about the average amount of time of an LSD trip (8-24 hours), not the expected weeks to months that a normative psychotic break would last. Indeed, it seems Ruby went in and out of psychosis at the flip of a switch until the day he died. And the only common denominator in Ruby’s orbit during that entire time was Dr. Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West. All of the other more than half dozen psychiatrists involved in the case came and left; only West remained, in spite of Ruby’s consistently expressed horror at his presence. In spite of the one-time slip up immediately stating Ruby snapped out of it the next day, West would spend the rest of Ruby’s life – and beyond – stalking him and continuously asserting the man’s permanent departure from reality.
In either event, the judge was not impressed by West’s April 29, 1964 report and Smith’s attempt to have Ruby committed to a mental hospital where West could have his way with Ruby full time. Ruby remained jailed pending his appeal.
Warren Commission Cover-up
Over the next two months Ruby’s sister Eva Grant negotiated on Ruby’s behalf to have him testify before the Warren Commission, formed to be the final-word investigative body on the JFK assassination. The Commission was infamously corrupt, being effectively controlled by member Allen Dulles, the bitter JFK-fired former head of CIA who created MK Ultra and its predecessors Operations Artichoke and Bluebird. As such it was the wolf guarding the hen house, suspect number one left in charge of the crime enquiry. Grant’s and Ruby’s actions were vigorously opposed by Smith and the rest of the legal team. In fact, just as a deal was finally struck with the commission, less than a week before Ruby’s appearance, Smith suddenly resigned as counsel, claiming financial hardship. (In fact, Smith had been fired by University of Texas; but soon after he was magically swept off his feet and ushered to University Oklahoma for a position his partner in crime Jolly West had arranged).
The full transcript of the Warren Commission’s examination of Ruby reads like lawyers interrogating a person fully in the throes of an amphetamine-laced LSD*(see endnote) trip (see Ruby’s Warren Commission testimony). For several minutes at a time Ruby would appear lucid, reciting details with incredible precision. The moment Ruby was asked questions that got him off what sounded like an automatic, amphetamine-driven narrative, Ruby would flip into delusory rantings about a real time extermination against Jews that was going on across the United States. Warren himself seemed flummoxed, several times reassuring Ruby that he was perfectly sane; only to have Ruby then take off on another flite of rambling fantasy. The one constancy with Ruby during the testimony was his repeated request to be taken to Washington under special protection so that he could in safety tell the entire story of how he came to gun down Oswald. The request was repeatedly denied as if that were some psychotic rambling despite Warren stating on the record, “you are speaking very, very rationally, and I am really surprised that you can remember as much as you have remembered up to the present time”, and “There are many witnesses whose memory has not been as good as yours. I tell you that, honestly.”
Significantly, Warren and the other Commission members were so disinterested in investigating or even asking rational follow ups they entirely ignored this whopping admission by Ruby:
Ruby: “Mr. Belli and I decided–oh yes, when I went to say that I wanted to get on the stand and tell the truth of what happened that morning, he said, ‘Jack, when they get you on the stand, you are actually speaking of a premeditated crime that you involved yourself in.’”
That statement by Ruby utterly discredits the central official line we have been force fed and choked on for 61 years since. That is the lie that Ruby committed a crime of passion with no sign or evidence of pre-meditation. The prosecution did not even plead a premeditated murder. Yet, Ruby admitted to Warren’s face that his own lawyer knew and Ruby did not correct him that the killing of Oswald was his own words, “pre-meditated”, in other words planned in advance, with malice aforethought.
CIA Shrinks Stalk the Warren Commission
Despite CIA connected operatives’ failure to have Ruby pronounced insane by the Dallas court, they doubled down in riding shotgun for the agency with the Warren Commission.
First, Jolly West, sent a letter dated June 23, 1964 directly to the head of the Commission, Chief Justice Warren about the time the Commission’s evidence intake was in its wrap-up stage. West offered his unsolicited opinion on Ruby’s motivation for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He touted his exclusive expertise having personally examined Ruby, not mentioning that the Dallas judge and juries considering Ruby’s competence to participate in his own defense utterly rejected West. West proffered that the man he diagnosed two months earlier as “positively insane” had an actual reason for killing Oswald. West wrote that the motive was “wanting to prove that the Jews – through himself – loved their President and were not cowards.” Notwithstanding the ham-fisted anti-semitic nature of the evaluation (implying Jews are cowards and unloyal to America), West also failed to mention that according to his own six-page detailed report of examination of Ruby, not once did Ruby utter or even hint of any such motivation. It was purely an invention out of the dark mind of the Black Sorcerer’s apprentice. (Chaos, Chapter 11 and endnotes)
Second, West’s original CIA MK Ultra mentor Donald W. Hastings (see Hastings I, and Jolly West Pt II) was corresponding with Warren Commission de facto chief investigator, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, through 1964 and 1965. While the content is not known, toward the end of their pen pal relationship, Hasting published what he had apparently been feverishly working on in 1964 and 1965: a four-part series titled “The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination.” In it, Hastings obviously with zero examination and zero first hand-evidence offered up with certainty the state of mind of Lee Harvey Oswald:
“…[T]here is not, in my opinion, any reasonable doubt that the assassin had paranoid schizophrenia.” A ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard criminal conviction without the need for any messy trial, let alone psychiatric examination.
On the other hand, in the very same paper, Hastings offers another absolutely contradictory ‘out’ for the Commission, presuming Oswald was found to have acted ‘rationally’: “It is possible that Oswald still clung to the hope that by silence and denial he might be freed and be allowed to go to Russia, this time as a person of importance who would receive a hero’s welcome.”
Was it coincidence that two long-related CIA MK Ultra contractors – while under CIA contract – were working on and around the Warren Commission without identifying themselves as affiliated with the agency whose head (Dulles was known to have effectively run the CIA for many years after his JFK firing) should rightly have been suspect number one? (re Dulles continuing de facto leadership role, see e.g. The Devil’s Chessboard, Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, HarperCollins 2015) Was it coincidence that one-time MK Ultra mentor (Hastings) and his MK Ultra novitiate (West), both then-current MK Ultra contractors both created out of whole cloth “insanity” verdicts on both central players in the JFK assassination? Recently discovered documents cement the Hastings/West connection going back to 1948 (Hastings/West I), and show West in 1951 reporting to Hastings on their mutual MK Ultra associates at Cornell, including Allen Dulles’ personal friend Dr. Harold Wolff, and West’s 1950s/1960’s titular boss at University of Oklahoma, Dr. Stewart Wolf (Hastings/West II).
West Stalks Ruby to the Grave and beyond
Despite West’s best efforts, no judge nor jury would ever come to believe West’s assertion that Ruby belonged in an institution under West’s ‘care.’ While Ruby’s appeal was pending in 1966 the Texas Criminal Court of Appeal ordered the trial court to hold a jury trial on the sole issue of Ruby’s sanity. It seems there was some controversy on whom Ruby actually wished to serve as his counsel; the Court wanted to know whether Ruby was capable of directing his own defense before proceeding. While the lawyers came and went, Joe Tonahill (friend and confidante of Hubert Winston Smith) was still standing at the June 13, 1966 sanity trial, with a number of other lawyers also purportedly speaking on behalf of Ruby. While the hearing was held for purposes of ensuring Ruby’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel of his choice, the lawyers claimed the trial was a violation of Ruby’s constitutional rights. They attempted to keep Ruby out of the court room and while he was out of the court room argued that Ruby be censored from speaking. They refused to participate in protest while making a slew of continuing objections. The morning session of the transcript through page 29 reads as if the lawyers themselves had their own sanity issues. (June 13, 1966 Ruby sanity trial transcript)
In the afternoon session, several witnesses testified to months and months of apparent lucid, sane conduct on the part of Ruby in prison (pages 30-67 of transcript). Finally, over the objections of his own lawyers, Ruby himself demanded to address the jury to avoid being placed under the control of the likes of West. He gave a short statement attesting to his own sanity (page 68 transcript). He stated “I never did try to make anyone believe that I was of unsound mind. I don’t know where that originated from or who conspired to do that without my full mental capacity and agreeing with this…”
After listening to the witnesses and Ruby himself, the jury ruled that Ruby was in fact sane.
But that did not stop West. Notwithstanding Ruby’s distaste for West, he periodically weaseled his way into Ruby’s cell to pronounce him non compos mentis. Handy work against a patient who despises you and won’t speak to you. There is no evidence any other psychiatrist had a say about the psychiatric drugs Ruby would regularly consume throughout his nearly 3-year stint in prison. But, there is ample evidence he did consume such concoctions (his sister referring to them as ‘tranquilizers’). And, it is a fact that West was the only psychiatrist who remained connected to the case during that that entire period (none others lasting more than a few months). West’s pursuit of Ruby was dogged. According to his own testimony, West examined Ruby on six separate occasions over two years.
West continued to pursue Ruby even after his death. He testified at the probate trial of Ruby’s Estate on March 27, 1967 (transcript of proceedings). As ever West asserted that Ruby was insane at the time he executed a jailhouse Last Will in 1966. Even though the date to which West assigned Ruby’s insanity occurred a year after West had last ‘examined’ him, he testified with arrogant certainty of his findings. The court rendered a judgment that never adjudicated the issue of Ruby’s 1966 sanity. But, West had done his duty beyond the bitter end.
Mission accomplished, I suppose. The insane label seemed to stick forever in spite of repeated failures to get a court to agree; perhaps just in case some hidden Ruby real confession ever surfaced.
Epilogue
Max Arvos discovered the appropriate bookend to accompany this story’s beginning which was West’s overt claim of his ability to create insanity with LSD with relative ease: “During a June 1967 discussion between defense lawyer Phil Burleson and prosecution lawyer Bill Alexander, Alexander stated that: when West first testified on Jack Ruby’s mental condition, in 1964, (according to Alexander) he said that Jack needed treatment for what Alexander thinks is just “death row psychosis” and fairly normal, and suggested that he be treated with LSD (then in an experimental stage).” – ‘Notes on Burleson-Alexander Panel Discussion’, Radio-Television News Directors Association, WKY Studios, Oklahoma City, June 3, 1967. Notes by Elizabeth Price. Document in West’s UCLA papers, Box 164, Folder 3, p.1.
*fn The significance of LSD mixed with amphetamines will come into sharp focus on a later installment of this series: Jolly West and Charles Manson
Before we examine Jolly West’s role in the cover up of the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, let’s finish some undone business.
We’ll begin with West’s bold claims to CIA MK Ultra boss Sydney Gottlieb made in his 1956 Studies of Dissociated States and Report on Research In Hypnosis. First, West includes in the former the definition of dissociated states “fugues, amnesias, somnambulisms, and multiple personalities.” We’ll focus on fugues because as you can see it is the precise goal of the MK Ultra program (see The Deep State and Scientology, The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard).
West goes on to state: “In fact, hypnosis may be considered to be a pure-culture, laboratory-controlled dissociative reaction. Of the entire phenomenology of the various states described above, there is not one single manifestation which cannot be produced experimentally in the hypnotic subject.”
Further in West’s accompanying “Report on Research in Hypnosis” he reports (on page 7), with no caveats:
“Current experiments indicate that false memories may successfully be inserted and true memories removed in suitable subjects. In other words it has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”
You might be wondering “if Jolly West put in writing to the head of CIA Clandestine Operations that the above MK ultra mind control techniques were proven ‘successfully’, where is the evidence of that capability?” That evidence is not in the document where the claim is made. It is not in the papers of Jolly West curated by UCLA. Nor is it with the CIA, unless they have it buried deep beneath the earth behind impenetrable barriers. The CIA to this day refuses to even acknowledge West was their boy, even though documentation of that being the case has been published far and wide.
There must have been something to West’s claim, since as a result of the report, the CIA officially continued to fund West for another ten years (thirty years if you include the CIA fronts that funded subsequent West-led groups, such as American Family Foundation, AFF).
There may be a clue in the one and only event where documentation exists for what Jolly West actually did on this earth between the years 1954 and 1956.
Author Tom O’Neill was the first to discover the documents above and the incident we are about to explore. He covered it in some detail in his classic CHAOS: CHARLES MANSON, the CIA and the SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES, Little Brown 2019. Mr. O’Neill did not suggest that what follows may have served as West’s “proof” that MK Ultra worked. But, if one takes O’Neill’s extensive research, recounts it in chronological order, investigates and adds new relevant facts, an interesting picture emerges. It might suggest that this case fits the bill as the “proof” West relied upon in making the above sweeping claims of MK Ultra success (at least in the minds of West and Gottlieb, who arranged a least another decade of CIA funding because of West’s accomplishments).
At the time of the incident concerned Jolly West was one year into his independent MK Ultra contractual relationship with the CIA. The event in focus concluded shortly (perhaps as soon as a day) before West announced “mission accomplished” to Gottlieb two years later.
State of Texas vs. Jimmy Shaver
It was the bizarre matter of Jimmy Shaver. Very little was known about Shaver’s previous history other than he’d been divorced, had re-married, and had two kids. He was an airman at West’s Lackland Airforce base in San Antonio Texas. He was an instructor for dozens of men. He had no criminal record, no history of violence and was never considered mentally ill. He was, however, recommended for experimental treatment for migraine headaches at Lackland’ medical facility where the likes of West were experimenting. He fit two of Jolly West’s criterion for human guinea pig status: “airmen” and “patients” (see paragraph E “Subjects” of the attached page 3 of West’s June 11, 1953 proposal letter to MK Ultra Head Sidney Gottlieb.
On the night (early morning hours) of July 4, 1954 a three-year old girl was found raped and brutally murdered in a gravel pit near a tavern in San Antonio. According to the El Paso Herald-Post, the pit was located “just outside the wire fence of the Lackland Air Force Base.” (close to Jolyon West’s office and lab at the base). Shortly afterward Shaver emerged from the brush near the pit, sweating, breathing heavily, with scratches across his upper body. He was arrested. Witnesses said Shaver seemed “trancelike” and he asked “what is going on here?” as if he were genuinely in the dark. There was no indication Shaver had made any attempt to escape. Instead, he was wandering around in an apparent daze. He claimed to have no knowledge about the crime.
Through hours of interrogation at the local jail, Shaver maintained his innocence. Finally, mid-morning in apparent resignation he signed a confession. It only lasted for a few hours. In the afternoon, Shaver signed another confession that cancelled the first. In relevant part it stated, “If she was raped and she is dead then I must be responsible since I was the one who picked her up and put her in my car.” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram 30 Sept 1954). Quite the subjunctive case for ‘proof’ beyond a reasonable doubt. Significantly, O’Neill learned from a West associate that West had somehow inserted himself into the situation the very night of the murder, though the extent of his involvement was never disclosed.
Four days after the questionable confession Shaver told a reporter for the Austin American, “I guess I’m guilty, but I just can’t see me doing something like that…I’ve always been a religious man. I’ve always tried to be good. I don’t know what happened.” Again, he asserted that he remembered nothing about the murder. (Austin American article)
Shaver’s court-appointed attorneys moved the court to have Shaver declared insane and incapable of standing trial. The motion was tried before a jury. At first it seemed that Shaver’ motion would succeed. After all, according to the 22 Sept 1954 edition of the Brownsville Herald, “Three Air Force psychiatrists testified Shaver was insane at the time of the crime and is insane now.”
But, the jury ruled Shaver was capable of standing trial. The Brownsville Herald reported on 24 Sept 1954 that when the jury read the verdict, Shaver’s mother Mrs. E. McGhee immediately had a heart attack and collapsed to the courtroom floor. (Brownsville Herald, attached)
With three military psychiatrists attesting to Shaver’s insanity, he still had a fighting chance in trial and on appeal.
Enter the Black Sorcerer’s apprentice, Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West took it upon himself all at once to a) become Jimmy’s doctor and treat him, b) forward his MK Ultra experimentation by plying Jimmy with drugs and hypnotism, and c) serve as the critical link on the defense team, the lead psychiatric expert witness in trial. A conflict of interest ridden mix that only an accomplished sociopath could orchestrate.
West testified how through use of sodium amytal and hypnosis he had put Shaver into a hypnotic state. It was only in that artificially induced trance state that Shaver admitted to the crime. Realize, Shaver since the day after his possibly coerced, and subjunctive-laced confession never relented from the position that he had no recollection of the crime and was flummoxed by what had happened (until the day he died). Only his own psychiatrist, putatively testifying on his behalf, presented the evidence of admitted guilt required to send him to the electric chair. According to O’Neill who reviewed the original trial transcripts, “West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other.” To add additional grounds for sentencing his patient/client to death, West testified that Jimmy Shaver though temporarily insane when he allegedly did the dirty deed, was now “sane.”
In one go West managed to violate the Nuremburg Code against human experimentation, violate the Hippocratic Oath by harming his own patient (in fact having him sentenced to the death), violate doctor patient-privilege, and probably violate attorney work-product privilege.
Any other medical professional who pulled such a stunt would promptly lose his license for life. He’d probably also be sued so royally as to have his wages garnished for the rest of his life to pay the judgement. Not so for favored and valued CIA contractors. They, like West, wind up living privileged and honorific-filled lives in exchange for such skullduggery.
Tom O’Neill hunted down transcripts of West’s drug/hypnosis confession session. The passages he provided in CHAOS demonstrate West leading and encouraging Shaver to the point of possibly implanting the confession in Shaver’s head. Initially Shaver resisted.
Example:
West: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”
Shaver: “I never did take her clothes off.”
The critical middle 1/3rd of the interview was not recorded – the period in which apparently Shaver’s resistance was worn down. The final segment begins with this narration: “Shaver is crying. He’s been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.” That Shaver caved to West’s suggested confession while under hypnosis and sodium amytal and repeated leading questions is no surprise today. That is because it is accepted science that both hypnosis and sodium amytal create extreme suggestibility, particularly when combined. But, further research found that Jolly West already knew that fact and worse about combining hypnosis with sodium amytal. Eight years earlier he wrote the following in his April 1948 paper “Hypnosis In psychotherapy”: “[Hersley] investigated nebutal, sodium amytal, and sodium pentothal, and believes the barbiturates act specifically on the hypothalamic region…he was able to establish good hypnotic rapport with 18 of 20 nurses, and produce hypnotic phenomena (catalepsy, hallucinations, hyperamnesia, etc.) in many.” He must have remembered. After all, his first MK Ultra mentor Dr. William Donald Hastings of University of Minnesota sent this little note to his prize student in response that very paper:
But West concealed that fact from the court, instead passing off his implanted confession as “more valid than any other.” As the MK Ultra documents we’ve reviewed demonstrate West and his CIA bosses were never after the truth, but instead were intent on creating false memories, fugue states, and amnesia.
Did West program Shaver from the get-go to commit murder and forget it? Was Shaver an MK Ultra experiment gone wrong that required implanting a confession to discredit and silence him? Did West simply bumble in and destroy Shaver’s defenses out of his signature brand of vanity mixed with incompetence? We apparently can never know.
Leaving no stone unturned, O’Neill investigated the “experimental treatments” that Shaver apparently received at the Lackland Air Force base medical facility. He requested the medical records for Jimmy Shaver. He was informed by Lackland that all medical records for 1954 were intact with one exception: those for last names beginning between “Sa” and St” went missing.
Whether programming a killer or implanting a confession, both would be employing the very means and ends West vowed in writing to his CIA boss Sydney Gottlieb to perform the year before. (see, Jolly West Part One)
Predictably, Shaver was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Twice. He appealed the first verdict/sentence on a juror bias claim, won that appeal and was tried a second time. The day he was sentenced a second time to the electric chair sealed his fate forever. March 31, 1956.
According to O’Neill’s best estimate, West’s triumphant “mission accomplished” claim (made in the undated documents referenced above) to Gottlieb was rendered in or about “April 1956.”
I am not claiming that West waited until the very month, perhaps even the very day, for Shaver’s fate to be sealed (dead men can’t tell tales) before claiming success at MK Ultra goals. But, looking at the sequence of things, one could come away with that impression.
While awaiting his fate on death row, Shaver was asked by an Associated Press reporter if he remembered anything on the night the little girl was killed. He said, “I just can’t recall a thing except that I remember riding in the back seat of the car.” He seemed at ease, adding “I think it’s better for me to die for something that I didn’t do than to die for something I did. I don’t have blood on my hands and I praise God for that.” (Associated Press, published in Corpus Christi Caller Times)
Jimmy Shaver, of conscious mind (not in West’s drug and hypnosis induced trance state), insisted upon his innocence until his death by electrocution.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Charles Baudelaire
It has been remarked that the most difficult thing for humans to face is evil. Rather than confront it for what it is, people reflexively attempt to rationalize it. That weakness allows the truly sociopathic to survive and even to run roughshod over society.
When you take off the blinders and view what is behind the rhetoric, the propaganda, and the establishment narratives implanted in our minds you sometimes find that what you thought was benevolent and helpful is in fact rotten and pernicious.
Let’s take a break from the Scientology angle for a moment and review what we’ve learned in articles on this blog since Feb 28, 2025.
The deans of American psychiatry and psychology are found to be involved with and supportive of “doctors” who systematically tortured human guinea pigs (ala Nazi concentration camps under the direction of Josef Mengele). This was done in pursuit of creating deployable agents to conduct political assassinations, and to forget they committed the crimes and who directed them to commit them. As we will see, the research was also utilized to run psychological operations (psy ops) on the American public to make it more compliant with plutocratic wishes.
How could the very people who influenced and advised the leaders who brought this society to where it is today have possibly been involved in such crimes against humanity? When you first answer the following question, it becomes more understandable: Where exactly is this country mentally, morally and spiritually? The areas that fall under the effective guidance and control of the mental health industry, funded by taxpayer trillions since 1950 to steer society into peaceful, prosperous productivity. I need not say more about the results of those efforts. Unless you are severely mentally impaired, you are aware that precisely the opposite of the 3 p’s came to be. Lawless criminality, rampant mental derangement, continuous mass shootings, organized political violence, all while the future economic prospects for our youth are worse than at any time in American history. For the first time ever, generations coming to maturity will NOT have a shot at being better off than their parents.
But, then you might say “well, there’s lots of reasons other than the mental health monopoly. Like, how about the military-industrial complex, how about deterioration of our schools, how about perversions of the law and medicine? How about the economic engines fueling one undeniably corrosive factor, ‘Globalism’?”
The answer may lie with a troika that formed during World War II whose stated intent was to infiltrate and control every one of the institutions responsible for each of the societal ills listed above. Its aim was literally to control the way the leadership of those institutions thought.
The mind controlling troika consisted of brigadier generals from the US, Canada and England. Military generals who were also the leading international lights of psychiatry – Brock Chisholm of Canada, John Rawlings Rees of England, and the U.S.’ very own William Menninger.
The three psych-generals collaborated with one another from the early 1940s until the end of their lives. Together they formed the World Health Organization (WHO) and installed one of their own, brigadier general Chisholm, as its first President where he reigned during all of the lynchpin, post war years 1948-1953. Realize, this was not simply “mental health”; the head shrinks took over ALL of health on a global scale.
The troika then formed the World Federation of Mental Health, installing brigadier general Rees as President in 1948. That year they also installed brigadier general Menninger as head of the American Psychiatric Association. An effective military junta seized control of matters of health and mental health across the western world. Based on these facts alone, is it any wonder that the Military Industrial Complex has utterly conquered American hearts and minds from coast to coast?
First Rees called for infiltrating all levels of education:
We must aim to make it [psychiatric world views] permeate every educational activity in our national life: primary, secondary, university and technical education are all concerned with varying stages in the development of the child and the adolescent. Those who provide the education, the principles upon which they work, and the people upon whom they work, must all be objects of our interest. For education that ignores the commonsense principles that have been more clearly evolved of recent years is likely to be of indifferent quality.
Then he widens the net to “infiltrate…public life, politics and industry”:
Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.
Especially since the last world war we have done much to infiltrate the various social organizations throughout the country, and in their work and in their point of view one can see clearly how the principles for which this society and others stood in the past have become accepted as part of the ordinary working plan of these various bodies. That is as it should be, and while we can take heart from this we must be healthily discontented and realize that there is still more work to be done along this line.
Rees claimed they had already laid “useful attack” upon, among others, “the teaching profession and the Church” and called for deeper infiltration of “law and medicine”:
Similarly, we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine. Anyone whose memory goes back for even a dozen years can realize how big a change has been effected in the outlook of professional people, while certainly anyone with vision can see how much still remains to be done.
Rees urged psychiatrists use totalitarian communist methods of infiltrating society and advises fraud to cover up its eugenicist aims (covering up its ‘Mental Hygiene’ origins with the more palatable Mmental Health’ label):
If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity. By that I mean that we cannot help so effectively if speaking for a National Council or any other body as we can when we make a more subtle approach adapted to the particular circumstances of the moment. It really wouldn’t matter if no one ever heard of this Council again provided that the work was done. Let us all, therefore, very secretly be “fifth columnists”.
I doubt the wisdom of a direct attack upon the existing state of affairs; even though there is a war on, that would still raise opposition, whereas the more insidious approach of suggesting that something better is needed—’why shouldn’t we try so and so’—is more likely to succeed. The evolutionary process is essentially British, and I think that we should make it a fundamental in our propaganda plan.
Here again we had probably better be secretive and not mention the Council or any other body, but simply write or speak as individuals. Don’t let us mention Mental Hygiene (with capital letters), though we can safely write in terms of mental health and common sense. When we do write it is important to remember that the understatement of a case is much more likely to be effective than its overstatement.
That this military/psychiatric cabal talk was not simply a one-off, aberrant product of an LSD trip is evidenced by the founding President of the World Health Organization (WHO), fellow brigadier general Brock Chisholm’s follow up address.
The Eradication of the Concept of Right and Wrong
Given at U.S. Department of Interior 23 October 1945, Chisholm titled his speech “The Re-establishment of Peacetime Society.” The address was sponsored and attended by two prominent, high-level American leaders of Reis’ targeted classes for infiltration (politics and law). They were Vice President of the United States of America Henry A. Wallace, and Interior Secretary (and future Supreme Court Justice) Abe Fortas. Chisolm did not simply outline the future of mental health, but the future of all of society shaped by the controlling hand of psychiatry. Keep in mind, World War II had ended less than two months prior to this address.
First, the primary and ultimate goal of the “eradication of the concept of right and wrong” is spelled out emphatically:
The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for the faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all psychotherapy…
…The pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos…
…The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely…
Those who advocate the teaching of right and wrong – which virtually every law-abiding citizen of the world considers the first duty of responsible parents – are belittled as the neuroses of the “immature, the inferior, the guilty”:
…This bugbear (criticism or eradicating right and wrong) has no basis in fact whatever. We all recognize these reactions as those of the immature, the inferior, the guilty, which are not found in the mature, integrated personality…
…If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility…
Now that annoying conscience feeding distractions such as morality, ethics and religion are eliminated, Chisholm declares global “annihilation” of nations and nuclear proliferation not only sane, but vital. Realize, this pronunciamento is given less than three months after the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, from the top psychiatrist on the planet no less:
…The people who definitely do not want to fight any more wars must promise annihilation to any nation which starts to fight and must be prepared immediately and ruthlessly to carry out that promise without parley or negotiation. This involves the continual upkeep of widely dispersed atomic rocket stations covering the whole world and a continual high pressure research program to discover ever more efficient methods of killing to keep ahead of any possible competition…
To achieve his aims, Chisholm promotes taking the rearing and education of children out of the hands of parents and putting it firmly in the hands of state teachers whom he finds to be tractable to following his “totalitarian” ways and means:
…The most important thing in the world today is the bringing up of children. It is not a job for economic or emotional misfits, for frightened, inferiority-ridden men and women seeking a safe, respectable and quickly attainable social and emotional status, nor for girls filling their time before marriage. Fortunately there are recent signs of intellectual stirrings amongst teachers which give some hope…
And once that control is established, Chisholm suggests standard education be replaced with “psychopathology.” Ever wonder how reading, writing, arithmetic, and the difference between right and wrong were driven out of the classroom? Or how social engineering in publics got started and carried out? Wonder no more:
…Can such a program of re-education or of a new kind of education be charted? I would not presume to go so far, except to suggest that psychopathology, the sciences of living, should be made available to all children and primary and secondary schools, while the study of such things as trigonometry, Latin, religious and others of special concern should be left to universities…
If you take a long hard look at this, the World Health Organization’s and the World Federation of Mental Health’s post-World War II agenda was pretty effectively carried out. And you would be hard-pressed to find a single current societal ill that cannot be traced directly to that handiwork. Perhaps, with the possible exception of drugs. But, they got around to that, and we’ll get around to documenting it.
If there is any doubt about the types of politics this approach embraces consider this fact. Chisholm’s comrade and infamous Soviet spy Alger Hiss agreed wholeheartedly with the aims of this lecture and publication. In 1948, Hiss published Chisholm’s message on mental health in his socialist journal, International Conciliation; along with an introduction promoting it.
What we are witnessing here is a specious affliction on the psyche of western civilization. A form of mind control has been and is being applied to all levels of society. By their own words, the operators are acting as ‘fifth columnists’ trying to do the work of ‘totalitarians.’ Perhaps we’ve been wrong to focus on a ‘deep state’, ‘national security state’ or ‘d.c. blob.’ Perhaps it more closely resembles a Military Industrial Mind Control operation.
Real Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and other genuine peace seekers remaining in this country are perplexed with the bipartisan worship of violence and war in America. They ought realize that our increasing lust for death will likely never abate until such time that we recognize its sources and their once overt admission that it was their very aim from the outset. Perhaps this is wishful thinking since that very admission also contained the conclusion that “the church” was their first and easiest target for “infiltration.”
The rudiments bear repetition. It does not get any more Orwellian than this (War is Peace). We were told by the original President of the World Health Organization that the formula for “The Re-establishment of Peacetime Society” was total war carried out “ruthlessly” and “without parley or negotiation”:
…”The people who definitely do not want to fight any more wars must promise annihilation to any nation which starts to fight and must be prepared immediately and ruthlessly to carry out that promise without parley or negotiation. This involves the continual upkeep of widely dispersed atomic rocket stations covering the whole world and a continual high pressure research program to discover ever more efficient methods of killing to keep ahead of any possible competition”…
The investigation into Jolly West’s hijinks (see reference articles linked above) keeps unearthing new prominent psychiatrists and psychologists and tying them to the CIA’s MK Ultra Mind Control experiments. A newly discovered document exposing another prominent MK Ultra klan member is published here for the first time anywhere.
It concerns the world-famous Menninger Clinic. The outfit’s founders, brothers Karl and William Menninger, were psychiatrists who worked hard to publicly position themselves as more ‘humane’ than typical state institutions. While they probably delivered hundreds if not thousands of mind-disabling ECT (Electro Convulsive Shock) “treatments” they somehow managed to create a public image of being more interested in the gentler psychoanalytical approach to the problems of the human mind.
However, our newly discovered document ties William Menninger (head US Army psychiatrist during WWII) smack dab in the middle of an MK Ultra triangle with Dr. Sidney Gottleib (MK Ultra head) and Jolly West (Gottlieb’s star experimenter). To fully appreciate the significance of the connection, recall then-Air Force-major Jolly West’s 11 June 1953 plea to MK Ultra head Gottlieb to pave the way for West to land as head shrink of a major civilian university. He couched the demand in the context of needing to evade pesky Air Force superiors from interrupting his human guinea pig mind experiments. Here is the final page of that letter with the relevant portion highlighted: West letter to Gottlieb.
Now, review Gottlieb’s 2 July 1953 reply and promise to bring all pressure to bear upon the Air Force to make that possible, (see highlighted portions, recalling that Sherman C. Grifford is Gottlieb’s espionage cover name), 2 July 1953 Gottlieb letter to West.
Note, Gottlieb was then banking on MK Ultra doc Donald W. Hastings(Head US Air Force psychiatrist during WWII) to come through for Jolly with “clout.”
Now have a look at the newly discovered May 10, 1954 letter from William Menninger to his apparent pal, the Assistant Secretary for Air at the Pentagon, Menninger letter. Menninger urges that his friend facilitate Jolly West receiving the ideal MK Ultra position he sought in his 11 June, 1953 report and recommendations to Sidney Gottleib. Menninger personally vouches for the integrity of West attesting:
“I know Major West from several contacts with him and he is a very outstanding fellow.”
As noted in previous posts, by this time on West’s timeline, Jolly has never held a civilian job, and never worked one minute outside of proven MK Ultra laboratories (Air Force, University of Minnesota under MK Ultra operator Hastings, and Cornell University under MK Ultra operator Harold Wolff). Menninger is fronting for a literal creation of MK Ultra and its predecessors (Operation Bluebird, Operation Artichoke, etc).
It is noteworthy that this is precisely the kind of clout Gottlieb wished to obtain from Dr. Donald W. Hastings in his July 1953 letter to West (above). Apparently, Hastings did not come through as 10 months later Menninger is bringing his own, apparently larger, clout to bear. That Menninger was successful was memorialized in a letter from Gottlieb to West two months after Menninger stepped in (Gottlieb/West letter of September 16, 1954). More than a year after promising to go to bat for West, and less than two months after Menninger goes to bat for West, Gottlieb exclaims:
“Congratulations on your appointment at the University.”
That would be the University of Oklahoma just as Dr. Menninger specified. West would carry out MK Ultra Experiments there for more than a decade, the entire time hiding the fact from the university’s administration.
Predictably, William Menninger is not only an MK Ultra insider, but an original attacker of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics. Probably not coincidentally, he appears in the very same Minneapolis Star syndicated article where his MK Ultra brethren Dr. Donald W. Hastings first took shots at Dianetics. The big boys of mental health (MK Ultra bros) of the time were ganging up on L. Ron Hubbard in an organized fashion under the headline “Future Hazy for Dianetics as Foes Rally”:
But, this wasn’t Menninger’s first shot at L. Ron Hubbard. Menninger had previously sounded off within months of the initial May 1950 Dianetics release the year before, see Sep 9, 1950 edition LA Daily News.
Introduced as another past president of the APA, the corporate media hails Menninger as the “Shakespeare” of psychiatry. Menninger lambasts Hubbard for coining “some new terminology and disregard[ing] all the psychological theories and observations that have been so extensively studied by so many people.” Menninger’s language make it sound as if he hadn’t even read Dianetics himself before passing judgement, “my impression is…”. With what we’ve learned thus far in the present series (and what we will learn below) Menninger’s critique might have more fittingly been received as a badge of honor. In fact, the attack is telling in another important way.
As noted above, the Menningers positioned themselves with the gentler psychiatric arts such as psychoanalysis. In fact, William Menninger was the leading US proponent of Freudian psychoanalysis at the time. But, not just any old Freudian analysis. He embraced literal Freud, including significantly Freud’s eschewing of his original ‘seduction theory.’ That was, the not uncommon (particularly among the rich and famous) occurrence of adults seducing minor children for pedophilic sexual gratification. Freud originally called such adult seduction of children “seduction theory.” One hundred years later, psychoanalyst, archivist and author Jeffrey Masson documented (through Freud’s own files) that Freud ditched the ‘seduction theory’ because of the pressure he received from the many pedophiles among his clientele and supporters (see, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory)*. In other words, pedophilia was common among the leaders of 19th Century Europe (as it was common among US leaders of the 50’s until today, as apparently it is with any empire on the decline). And Freud’s patrons let him know about it. So, Freud decided memory can be a fickle thing; and when it implicates pedophiles it is downright unreliable. There went ‘seduction theory’ into the shredder. Childhood memories of sexual abuse at the hands of an adult were recategorized as delusions.**
For a broader perspective on how Freud ties into mind control operations, I recommend you watch the timeless BBC documentary series The Century Self, here. You will learn that Menninger’s promotion of Freud in the U.S. was integral to larger mind control operations that the American aristocracy (including the CIA) were running coincident with MK Ultra. That program had to do with applying Freudian principles to manipulate and control the masses. Cooperating psychiatrists and psychologists infiltrated academia, media, and government and used them to run psy-ops to neutralize and enervate the American public.
During the 1940’s through 1960’s, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (the founder of American propaganda, euphemistically relabeled “public relations”) worked directly with industry, wall street, the military and intelligence on controlling American minds en masse. The aim was to convert Americans from citizens (who insist upon participation in decision making) into Godless consumers (only interested in physical and personal psychological gratification) who would be controlled by address to their base, materialist (Freudian) instincts.
At the same time Freud’s daughter Ana travelled across America promoting vast expansion of Freudian psychological services to the public; with the stated intent of controlling the masses by suppressing their alleged omnipresent, hidden, evil intentions (man is basically evil theory). The first targets were the leaders of government, industry, finance, media and academia (the aristocracy and its order keepers). They flocked to psychoanalysts’ couches from coast to coast, paying top fees while pouring billions into psych coffers for ways and means to control and profit from the citizens turned consumers.
The Shakespeare of Psychiatry was critical to this effort. William Menninger and his brother Karl rolled out the American red carpet for Ana Freud. William went so far in supporting her cause that he volunteered to lend his prestigious name to the American Psychoanalytic Association, serving as president from 1947 to 1949 while concurrently serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association. The Menninger clinic went on to become a leading center for psychoanalytic treatment and training in the United States.
It is here where the lines of demarcation between Dianetics/Scientology and organized Psychiatry/Psychology became clear and stark. So as not to fall into the trap of overgeneralization, I am going to make a distinction between innocent mental practitioners of the mind who were and are in it for the primary purpose of helping others, and on the other hand those utilizing knowledge of the mind for profit and power. The latter happens to include pretty much the entire leadership structure of the bastions of the Mental Hygiene (originally an offshoot of Eugenics) industry which rebranded itself after World War II was “Mental Health.” I’ll refer to those profit/power motivated ‘leaders’ as the Mental Health Mafia.
There are three facts about the matter that cannot be refuted. You can argue till you turn purple about the background of L. Ron Hubbard and the ultimate worth of his Dianetics and Scientology vs. the background of the MK Ultra headed Mental Health Mafia. No matter what the outcome of that debate, the three facts remain unalterable.
First, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was on bestseller lists throughout the country in 1950 and 1951, causing a visceral reaction from the mental health monopoly. (A fact that lends more credence and weight to the first two posts in this series, The Deep State and Scientology, and The CIA vs L. Ron Hubbard)
Second, Dianetics held that you don’t have to be part of the aristocracy to address and attempt to better the mind. Any two people could pick up a copy of Dianetics and within days begin that journey. That fact combined with the bestseller status of Dianetics was the largest monetary threat (percentage-wise) to the mental health mafia in the history of their monopoly. That is taking out of the equation the mental health mafia’s first natural enemy, religion in general and in the United States and Europe particularly, Christianity.
Third, Dianetics said ‘no memory is out of bounds’; you want to confront each and every demon from your past that is holding you back in the present. This was in direct conflict with the Freudian theory being forced upon the country from the top down which explicitly mandated that some memories are verboten; most particularly those memories that might implicate rich, fat bastard pedophiles. Or perhaps CIA mind control operations.
Now consider these facts. Virtually all of the very best psychiatrists, including virtually every President of the APA from the late forties to the late fifties, had direct ties to, or were complicit with, CIA MK Ultra Mind Control experimentations. And as we have demonstrated, the first and foremost goal of MK Ultra was the creation of amnesia for purposes of control.
As we will see this literally turned into a struggle across America between freedom of thought on the one hand and thought control on the other. An epic war that rages to this day and involves each and every one of us.
Notes:
*The Mental Health Mafia’s subsequent organized attack upon and cancellation of Jeffrey Masson is another epic worthy of a feature length motion picture.
**Stay tuned for later articles on how organized ‘mental health’ resurrected and reinforced pedophile defenses, winning over all of academia and corporate media in the 1990’s. Among the prominent villains of that story is none other than Jolly West.
One of America’s brainiest and wealthiest technologists recently came to a rather startling conclusion about what is wrong with the country and the world.
Elon Musk:
🚨ELON MUSK: "If you take away religion, I think you get something in its place which is worse than what was there before. You get something destructive like the woke mind virus taking the place of religion. You get dystopian de facto religions that are self destructive.
Lost in all of the materialist chatter distraction that pollutes all of MEDIA and MOST of the internet was the true measure of the man Charlie Kirk. As noted in Trump is on a Slippery Slope even Charlie’s supposed MAGA friends sorely misrepresented him and his intentions in the rush to use his death to forward their own aims.
Tucker Carlson’s 35-minute remembrance of Mr. Kirk is the most accurate and appropriate representation of the man and his work that I have found. It also happens to be one of the wisest addresses I have seen from a public figure for as long as I can recall. Here it is:
Suddenly, the fate of RFK Jr and his mission to improve US health against the weight of the Big Pharma/Health Care cartel is all that stands between Trump and overall failure in his second term.
As noted in the post referenced, Trump already alienated perhaps a 15% of his base with his choosing the D.C. Beltway Debt Machine Industry over Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
He alienated another 10% (allowing for overlap with the Musk contingent) by effectively abandoning Make America Great Again in favor of Make Israel Our Master. That would include his ham-fisted cover up of Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein’s files, his green lighting of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, and now his desecrating the grave of Charlie Kirk with Bibi Netanyahu supplied images. Perhaps more devastating to our nation is Trump’s attempting to push through legislation that would punish Americans and foreigners who participate in boycotts of Israel over its apartheid and genocide policies. Clearly, censorious actions anathema to the First Amendment rights to not only speech but to association (See the constitutional right to boycott, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., United States Supreme Court 458 U.S. 886 (1982)).
Trump alienated another 10% (allowing for overlap with the above two contingents) with his kow-towing to the Military-Industrial Complex and EU’s simp leadership fraternity to abdicate responsibility for ending the Ukraine war.
He had already achieved some 25% of his base seriously alienated when he drove the latest nail into his movement’s figurative coffin.
I watched real time how roughly 50% of Trump’s supporters expressed on social media that Pam Bondi’s head would be made to roll by Trump when he saw what a dog’s breakfast she made by a) promising to release the Epstein files, followed by b) claiming the files did not exist. I also watched a lower percentage of them let it go when Trump doubled down on Bondi’s fraud.
Today, I believe we are down to Trump’s last stand being Bobby Kennedy turning the Departments of Health and Human Services inside out. It began this morning when we witnessed Pam Bondi’s second major bone-headed foot bullet. She promised to hunt down and prosecute ‘hate speech’, a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment and patent censorship:
What is so telling in terms of the depth or her, and as we shall see Trump’s, lack of awareness is that she is invoking the name of Charlie Kirk in order to do so. Here is what Kirk said about prosecuting “hate speech”:
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Again, X was lit up with people predicting Trump removing Bondi as attorney general for such insanity. But, by now Trump’s response ought to have been predictable. It couldn’t be more constitution-blind and self-absorbed:
President Trump suggested today that media outlets are engaging in “hate speech” by being “unfair” to him and “maybe” should be prosecuted.
Trump’s statement demonstrates the inherent danger of “hate speech” laws: Those in power will always weaponize them to silence dissent. pic.twitter.com/Zs6OV05aXs
Perhaps he’s headed the route Biden went, slowly slipping into darkness? Whatever the cause, Trump either wakes up and reverses course fast or MAGA is headed down a slippery slope of no return.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 
