When Darrell Brooks barreled through a Christmas parade on November 21, 2021, which killed six and injured over 62 people, many in the public, especially on the conservative side of politics, were quick to want to discuss Mr. Brook’s race. This is easy to understand simply because the tragedy happened just a few days after the non-guilty verdict of Kyle Rittenhouse regarding his debacle in Kenosha, Wisconsin at a BLM protest and riot.
Regardless, a week or so later, after the Waukesha Attack and the Rittenhouse Incident, a fifteen-year-old kid from Oxford, Michigan went into his high school, shot 30 rounds, killed four students, and wounded six students. The media never mentioned the shooter’s race (Ethan Crumbley), like how the media didn’t jump on Darrell Brook’s race. Why? If the conservative claim that the MSM (mainstream media) was trying to cover up Darrell Brook’s race were true but wanted to blame white people for everything, then why didn’t CNN or MSNBC immediately release a headline saying, “White Teen of MAGA Family in Michigan Murders Four and Injures Six”? Maybe it is because media, even though it is a business, does still have a level of reporting ethics and integrity guidelines. Even if they have a near monopoly on information, they still must compete and reputation is everything (for example, look how CNN just fired Chris Cuomo, or the NY Times fired Jayson Blair, etc).
This hatred for the “mainstream media” comes from a place in people who want something to objectively blame as being the problem, where the actual problems are outside of the media, i.e., in the material world, within structures, within history, etc. Can media have an effect and steer our minds? Of course, but at the end of the day, they’re just reporting news. So, you can’t just blame media, but really the failures of systems and society at large which creates the stories media talks about. Media is to blame but it’s not the thing to explicitly blame, when really the culprit is the failure of society itself.
It’s easy to blame the media for everything and this is something I do or have done before, so I can admit it. But the news still shows the news, and it serves a purpose. For example, local news stations, which are often affiliated with larger companies, e.g., you might have Fox 5 or 8 or 12 in in your local city which is an affiliate of the larger Fox News umbrella, or CBS this or that, but these local affiliates do show crimes regardless of race. I see criminals of all races on my local news affiliate stations, but these affiliate stations are a part of the mainstream media.
The reason race wasn’t as central immediately to the Oxford and Waukesha cases, in my opinion, is because the Oxford HS shooting and the Waukesha Incident were explicit and undeniable crimes, whereas the Rittenhouse Incident was ambiguous and ambiguity leads to conservation, which leads to easy story lines, commercial breaks for advertisers, conversations, panel expert guests spanning criminal justice experts or college professors on race, opinion pieces, etc.
Oxford and Waukesha were explicit crimes, where both suspects were quickly jailed and charged. Depending on type of crime and the effects those crimes could have on the public, there’s different levels of reporting practices regarding victims. For example, in a terrorism case, I’m sure the reporting practices are much different as to not create a copycat situation, or in the case of mass shootings (which could be argued as being terrorism depending on who is overseeing the case), the victims are often protected while the investigation commences.
The Rittenhouse Incident was different and focused on race because the situation was ambiguous, i.e., a gray zone, and many suspected that he would be acquitted based on his race. There was no chance of acquittal relating to Darrell Brooks. To reiterate, the Oxford and Waukesha cases were explicit crimes, whereas Rittenhouse was an ambiguous case where it tapped more into the conversation around race, criminal justice, the incongruity in sentencing laws, etc.
Think about this way. People brought up race regarding Rittenhouse because there was a chance he would walk, whereas what’s the point in making race central to the Waukesha or Oxford HS situations when there’s no chance the criminals will walk? It’s not like Mr. Brooks is being treated any better because he’s black, when really, he’s now going to facing multiple life sentences and will be found guilty. The fact that Rittenhouse received the appearance of preferential treatment from the judicial system and from supporters in the “MAGA verse” (going so far as crowdfunding a Go Fund Me account) was a sign that his race would play a role in his eventual acquittal.
There is no question as to whether Darrell Brooks and Ethan Crombley belong in jail, because their acts transcend our racial conversation and there’s no doubt that they committed those crimes with inherent criminal motives, whereas the Rittenhouse Incident was a grey zone situation more in alignment with a larger socio-political and racial conversation.
The Oxford and Waukesha Cases being actual crimes without a reasonable doubt didn’t need to be about race because race wasn’t necessarily central, based on what we know, and even if they were, to varying degrees, the sad truth regardless is people are dead because of explicit actions, even if race has nothing to do with the events. Rittenhouse was more of a symbolic figure in a larger cultural debate, hence why race was central to debate. Rittenhouse was about stand-your-ground, gun rights, self-defense, reactionary movements to Black Lives Matters such as Blue Lives Matters or All Lives Matters, Trumpism, etc. Rittenhouse happened to be the focal point of a lot of variable or aesthetics, hence the discussion around him was very verbose, complex, etc., i.e., everyone had an opinion on Rittenhouse that spanned spectrums whereas the other two events, it’s clear cut that both criminals are criminals.
White conservatives and pundits such as Candace Owens (who stated that black people are the most murderous group) or Steve Crowder, rushed to try to bring up the “double standard” of the mainstream media, insinuating that the media is against white people, despite the fact media is still controlled majority wise by white people.
What conservatives hate is that their traditional “mind control” operation over the majority isn’t as strong as it used to be, so they must revert to intensity, straw men, poor comparisons, conspiracy theory, a total disregard of nuance, context, or the fact that residual effects of history still haunt us, etc., to keep the status quote.
Conservatives are constantly trying to seek contrarian “gotcha moments” to appear as if they’re wanting fairness or equity, but really this method is an attempt at reversing any progressive gains the public has adopted, such as being more aware of concepts such as white supremacy or privilege. Basically, they don’t want to advance any conversation, if that advancement means a detriment to their base of power.
Conservatives want to reinforce the traditional narrative of black criminality as a social trend, but when attempts at doing the same towards white America comes, they become super defensive. I like to say, that traditionally the crimes of minorities are always collectivized, whereas the crimes of the white majority are often individualized, e.g., a lone wolf white supremacist, etc. Black people are “criminals” overall, but white people are “bad actors”. The crimes of minorities are allowed to be acknowledged to further stigmatize these groups, but crimes relating to white people could be argued as being selected out as being “bad apples” and not indicative of a larger systemic issue or cultural issue.
In other words, the tides were slowly reversing to how we view race, sociology, crime studies, etc., where it’s not just minorities under the clinical gaze, but now white America is too, and white America since the introduction of social justice, critical theory, etc., in many ways has shown levels of…fragility. Their goal is to constantly try to debunk any progressive claims largely since conservatives represent the status quo, i.e., hierarchy, majority rule (even, the possibility of minority rule by the majority since they fear “losing numbers”), wealth hording, and the disciplinary violence of the state be it police worship, or unilaterally trying to own the romanticism and sacrifice of the military, etc.
Put it this way.
I am black. I grew up my whole life with the weight of America’s perception of black people bearing down on me, even though I wasn’t a criminal or a “thug”, but people associated me with that simply because I was black. Now that the roles slightly reversed, well…welcome to my world.
The purpose
of this paper is to A) show the important Defense Industry angle to Katie Hill’s
district. The district she represented is a major player regarding the Military
Complex and this district was recently held by an ardent Trump supporter. Katie
winning that seat probably gave the Trump Administration (and, possibly even
the neoliberal side of the DNC that supports war) and the Defense Lobby a
person who wouldn’t simply vote for pro-military legislation for the sake of
doing so, even though Katie Hill has voted for pro-military and veteran legislation.
Katie Hill also voted against sending military arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE
which brings to light Jared Kushner, the supposed Peace Plan, Donald Trump, and
even Jamal Khashoggi, and B) to show the socio-political climate of the
Antelope Valley in her district which has a history of drugs, white nationalist
gangs, and is very sensitive to Recessions, meaning there’s a higher risk of
right-wing reactionary politics.
With Katie
Hill out of office, Johnson (2019) of The Hill, stated, “California Gov. Gavin
Newsom (D) on Friday set the date for the special election to decide who will
replace former Rep. Katie Hill (D), who announced her resignation last month amid
allegations she had affairs with campaign and congressional staffers. The
special election for the 25th Congressional District seat will take
place March 3, and if no candidate wins the majority, then a run-off will be
held on May 12, the governor’s office said.”
Regarding the
upcoming election, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks is running, well,
possibly. According to Martin (2019), “The race to replace Katie Hill in
California’s 25th District keeps getting wilder, Cenk Uygur, a
former MSNBC personality and found of The Young Turks, a progressive
activism website, has announced his intent to run for the seat.” Further,
Martin (2019) states, “And while he’s clearly fired up, there might a couple of
things standing in his way. For one, he doesn’t live in or have any apparent
connection to the 25th. Uygur resides in West L.A. and, when asked
about the issue, responded, “People are obsessed with geography over the
issues.”” The article by Martin (2019) also discusses Cenk’s past comments
regarding women, which will certainly hound him, either with the right-wing calling
hypocrisy for the left being wishy-washy on the issue when its politically
convenient, or, he’ll meet stiff resistance from women voters, or, it won’t be
an issue because he said these comments so long ago and his platform has stood
up for women and advocated for progressive causes.
Regardless, the 25th District is also important for the Military and Aerospace Industry with Lockheed Martin having a facility in Palmdale, AeroVironment in Simi Valley, etc. The overall Southern California area has Edwards AFB; Vandenberg AFB under the Space Command and thus NASA; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ; March Air Force Base (defunct); Los Angeles Air Force Base which houses the Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile System Center; Fort MacArthur in the San Pedro district of LA which still falls under LA AFB; Camp Pendleton; the Pomona Colleges and Caltech as far as research is concerned; The Aerospace Corporation, and all the major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, BAE Systems, ViaSat, Airbus, etc.
Katie had
a hard job to balance. She had to actively support a vital economic engine for
her region, despite the New Left constantly attacking the Military Complex,
yet, she had to vote in a way that morally aligned that support for the
military with progressive ideology. Essentially, you can be a leftist or
liberal and support the military, despite the perception in the media that the
left hates the military and the right-wing is military obsessed. There is a
vast spectrum regarding this matter. There’s plenty of Democrats or Leftist in
the United States military and I can attest to that because I served myself
(honorable discharge), but I also grew up in the US Army during my father’s twenty-three-year
Army career.
Further,
you have to realize the “Military Complex” isn’t purely mega-corporations hated
by the political-left but it’s a web or ecosystem comprising an array of
federally recognized small businesses spanning categories such as Woman-Owned
Small Businesses, Service Disabled Veteran Small businesses, Minority-owned
etc. It involves politicians who want to help their districts get jobs, NAICS
codes, General Service Administration schedules, federal research grants with
universities, etc. Federal contracting is universe of its own. Besides the
major prime-contractors such as Boeing, you have smaller suppliers provide
everything from specialty parts, composite moldings, scientific testing, clothing,
food services, cleaning services, IT help, and the furnishing of commercial-off-the-shelf
items such as office supplies, computers, and construction services to facilities.
So, the
military-complex employs more people than the general public understands and it’s
not all some boogeyman evil Robocop corporation. A small mom and pop shop in
Anaheim might win an award to deliver printers to some A.B.C.X.Y.G office in a government
facility, or a furniture store in a predominately minority HUB zone (opportunity
zone) might win an award to furnish a command posts’ briefing room or install
lights at your local US Postal Office. Contracting, even that not relating to
the military (all government agencies require contracting, i.e., people who
spend money and issue service contracts), and the Military Complex essentially beefs
up the American economy with direct suppliers in supply-chains or
contract-by-contract awards to small-to-medium size businesses all over the country
who are praying they get a phone call for a chance to submit proposals for a
federal, state, or local project.
She
unseated Steve Knight who is an 18 year LAPD veteran who oversaw a program
called CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) which one could
contrast to Katie’s participation in PATH (People Assisting the Homeless),
served in the US Army, was born in Palmdale and attended Palmdale High School,
and while in the House he served on the Committee on Armed Services
(Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Lanced Forces and Subcommittee on Sea-power
and Projection Forces); Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (Subcommittee
on Energy as Vice Chair, Subcommittee on Space, and Subcommittee on
Contracting and Workforce as Chair,
and Subcommittee on Investigations, Oversight, and Regulations).
According
to infographic developed by Bycotte & Silver (2019) Knight voted for Trump’s
policies 99% of the time and was the seventh most partisan Trump supporter in
the House.
Katie Hill
despite being on the opposite side of the political spectrum, did serve on the
Committee on Armed Services (as well as the same subcommittees as Knight) and
on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The difference is that
Katie served on the Committee on Oversight and Reform as Vice Chair and served under
its subcommittees of Economic and Consumer Policy and the United States House
Oversight Subcommittee on Environment. The Oversight committee is the committee
looking into Trump. As far as Caucus Membership she was on the LGBT Equality Caucus,
Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the New Democrat Coalition.
Knight sat
on the House Aerospace Caucus, Climate Solutions Caucus, Alzheimer Disease Task
Force, Republican Law Enforcement Task Force, Congressional Lupus Caucus,
Congressional Military Family Caucus, NASA Caucus, Congressional Unmanned Systems
Caucus, etc. Despite both Katie and Steve being in different parties, their
Congressional committee and caucus memberships seem aligned in many ways with
the district they represent, but then differ in certain ways based on their party
affiliation.
Both Hill
and Knight represent areas that value veterans, relies on the defense &
aerospace industry or contracting for employment, but there’s an array of
social issues from being tough on crime and California’s affordable housing
crisis. The district is effectively a swing district with an arguably diverse
population where voters seem issue-based despite standard-political affiliations.
People will vote outside of party lines if a certain issue is relevant. Do you
want to lose your job if federal money dries up or a recession happens? Or, do
you want to lose your house if housing prices keep soaring? These are two major
issues effecting Katie Hill’s area.
With the
military-complex being important in this case and Knight losing to Hill…is it
possible that the revenge porn leak was partially inspired to get her out of
power and to help Knight comeback so the GOP could have a die-hard Pro-Trump
voter to vote for defense spending bills? Not to mention, hedging the House which
is responsible for drafting articles of impeachment. There’s no proof of that a
foreign power hacked her husband or he was conned based on anger in leaking her
photos, but Katie probably angered a lot of people by voting against arms sales
to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It’s not even out of the question to think that
the pro-Israel lobby could’ve thrown her under the bus, considering Jared Kushner
and Israel are allies to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So, with Katie Hill voting
in favor to combat issues such as antisemitism, she could’ve been betrayed for
going against a larger geopolitical game with Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Let’s look
at a few of Katie Hill’s votes regarding the military and security while in the
House and I got her voting record from Vote Smart (2019) [Note: See Reference
Section]:
She voted
(Yes) to the National Defense Authorization Act on 7/12/2019
She voted (Yes)
to Never Forget the Heroes: Permanent Authorization of the September 11th
Victim Compensation Fund Act on 7/12/2019
She voted (Yes)
to the NATO Support Act of 01/22/2019
Yet, she
may have angered certain lobbies by voting (Yes) to
S J Res
38 – A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval of the proposed
export to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of certain defense
articles and services on 7/17/2019, and,
S J Res 37 – A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval of
the proposed export to the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of France of certain
defense articles and services on 7/17/2019.
So, think
about that…she did her job in supporting US patriots and veterans but also
supported NATO, yet, she went against Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These countries
are very close to Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. So, Katie unseated Knight and
she voted against two of Donald Trump’s key allies as the chaotic unfolding situation
in the Middle East gets worst. Remember the controversy with Trump and the murder
to Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia? Or, Erik Prince of Blackwater being called
out for having a meeting in the Seychelles with representatives from the UAE on
behalf of Trump? Remember Jared Kushner’s supposed Middle East Peace Plan. If
this is the case, there’s a higher level of political intrigue, but also
betrayal, considering Katie also voted from pro-Israel, Anti-Defamation League,
and AIPAC backed legislation denouncing Antisemitism.
Further,
keeping this voting record in mind, considering she voted against an arms-sales
to Trump and Kushner allies, Saudi Arabia and UAE, she was also on the “Trump
Watchdog” committee, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In
a paper from her hometown of Santa Clarita, Painter (2019), stated, “Hill sits
on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which, according to
the representative, has launched multiple investigations into the president’s
administration on issues that were not fully examined in the Mueller report,
including White House security clearance policies, family separations at the
southern border and alleged sharing of nuclear information with Saudi
Arabia.”
“There’s
so many issues that we’ve got to continue our investigations on and it’s just
not related to the Mueller report,” she said (Painter, 2019).
Katie Hill
even on her Twitter account on February 19, 2019 at 9:13 AM and mentioned the
previous of possible national security by the Trump Administration with Saudi
Arabia.
Let’s get
to the point.
I don’t
really want to focus on her personal relationship with her husband because it’s
not my business. I really don’t know what to make of it or say about her
personal life. My focus in this paper is A) The Military Complex Angle and B)
An understanding of her mysterious “tattoo”, which doesn’t necessarily
implicate Kate Hill with white supremacy, since I’ve heard or read no
explanation from her, but the possibility that her tattoo is an Iron Cross, sheds
light on the economic and racial situation of the Antelope Valley.
On a
positive note, in a brilliant campaign, Katie was able to modify the sense of
patriotism people in her district expect and which she believes in, but with
progressive ideology more in alignment with what we see in an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She won.
Katie Hill
represented the 25th District of California which encompasses the cities/towns/Census-Designed
places of Santa Clarita, Simi Valley, Palmdale, Lancaster, and the northern
part of the San Fernando Valley. The median income is $76,866 according to a
basic Google Search, which looks good on paper, but for California standards
that probably puts you in the dead-middle middle-class, so I am assuming this area
is mostly exurban, not suburban in the traditional sense, of working commuter
families. She was a part of the Blue Wave, predominately female revolution of
newly elected politicians in the wake of events such as Donald Trump’s
election, the MeToo movement, Stormy Daniel’s circus events, and the controversial
Ford vs. Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings.
But let’s get this next question out of the way before is Katie Hill a Nazi?
I would say… No. Why? She voted for House Resolution
489 – Condemning President Trump’s Racist Comments Directed at Members of
Congress on 7/16/2019.
She voted for House
Resolution 312 – Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act. She voted H.R 1585 – Violence
Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019 on 4/4/2019. She voted for House Resolution
183 – Condemning Antisemitism as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the
values and aspirations that define the people of the United States and
condemning anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities as hateful
expressions of intolerance that are contrary to the values and aspirations of
the United States on 03/07/2019. She voted for H.Res.124 – Expressing opposition to
banning service in the Armed Forces by openly transgender individuals.
And…She voted (Yes) to House Resolution 41 –
Rejecting White Nationalism and White Supremacy – National Key Vote on 1/15/2019.
After her
nude photos were leaked in what has been called revenge porn, which I do believe,
it was revealed she had an Iron Cross tattoo. To my knowledge Katie Hill hasn’t
explained the tattoo. From my view it could be some sort of Nazi symbol, which
will be discussed down below, or it could be something akin to “Hot Topic,
angry Avril Lavigne teenage girl” tattoo of Independent Trucks company. Yet,
her current voting record refutes any claim that she is a Nazi.
Katie grew
up in Santa Clarita, which was ranked by Money Magazine in 2006 as the 18th
best place to live on their list out of 100 cities/towns. The area also voted
for Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite traditionally being Republican, and in
2016, 6.14% voted for Third Party candidates, which reflects a historical
trend, since in 1992, 29.18% voted Third Party and in 1993, 13.24% voted Third Party.
So the area is very prone to swings it seems, though traditionally its
conservative, and I would assume the third-party vote comes a sense of populist
ideology such as that of Ross Perot in 1992, or libertarian based politics
considering the areas rancher and rural heritage. Santa Clarita is an
agglomeration of four former rural towns, with Saugus being one of them, and this
is where Katie went to high school. She also comes from an education family,
where here grandfather was a Political Science professor at UCLA, her grandmother
was educated as an Anthropologist, and her father was a police-lieutenant with
a degree from Katie’s alma mater of Cal-State Northridge with Organizational
System Management (Herstein, 2018).
However, the
issue is that the nearby Antelope Valley and areas like Lancaster were known
for having Neo-Nazi elements going back way before the 2000s but was increased after
2000 during the Financial Crisis where many California cities faced bankruptcy
while the State Government was in economic disarray. The desert towns outside
of Los Angeles that were predominately working-class white based on California’s
often unspoken history of racist laws and segregation, where blue collar white communities
despite being die-hard Republicans and unrepentant followers of the LAPD (such
as during the Rodney King Trials and acquittal of white officers) had biker
gangs, Neo Nazis, meth labs, etc.
Finnegan
(1997) of The New Yorker, published an article titled: The Unwanted:
In a Los Angeles suburb where schools and parents faltered, the American Dream
was replaced by drugs, neo-Nazism, and despair. The Hardest hit were Mindy
Turner and her friends. The piece details the life of Mindy Turner of the Antelope
Valley, who lived in a working-class blue-collar home in Lancaster, but by the
ninth grade was a Nazi, meth addicted, sexually active (with much older men),
and became a “skin bitch” (per the article) of the Nazi Low Rider gang of
Lancaster. Eventually, with the help of her mother she was able to breakaway,
but the Nazi group wasn’t letting her go. “The N.L.R.s were into tattoos: swastikas,
skulls, Iron Crosses, lighting bolts – through lightening bolts were permitted
to be worn only by those who had killed a black person” (Finnegan, 1997, para.
16)
“In 1980,
the combined population of Lancaster and Palmdale, the Valley’s two main
cities, was sixty thousand. By 1994, their combined population was two hundred
and twenty-two thousand, and today estimates of the Valley’s total population
range as high as four hundred thousand. This hyper-expansion was first sparked
by housing prices in Los Angeles and its nearer suburbs, which soared during
the nineteen-eighties, and by white flight from an increasingly Latino and
Asian city. The Antelope Valley had been considered too remote for commuters,
but the completion of the Antelope Freeway, snaking over the San Gabriel
Mountains, helped change that.” (para. 2). Finnegan (1997), also stated, “Then,
in the 1990s, the Southern California economy, staggered by cutbacks in the
aerospace and defense industries, fell into a deep recession” (para. 3); “In
the Antelope Valley, abandoned housing tracts began to dot the subdivided
desert. Boarded-up shopping centers and bankrupt school districts followed,
along with a wave of personal financial disasters so severe that USA Today
dubbed Palmdale “the foreclosure capital of California”” (para. 3); “For anyone
who has spent time there lately, this is a scary thought – if only because
growing up these days in the Antelope Valley seems to be, for many kids, a
pretty harrowing, dispiriting affairs” (para. 5); “…the Valley’s supersonic
growth has led to overcrowded, often chaotic schools; according to the high-school
district’s superintendent, nearly forty-five percent of the entering students do
not finish their class”; “The teen pregnancy rate is alarmingly high” (para.
5), and “A sheriff’s-department spokesman in Lancaster estimated that fully half
the Valley’s children are unsupervised after school. He also said that there
are now, not coincidentally, more than two hundred youth gangs represented in
the Valley” (para. 5).
“There was
a street war raging in Lancaster between white-supremacist skinhead gang known
as the Nazi Low Riders and a rival gang of antiracist skinheads who called themselves
the Sharps” (Finnegan, 1997, para. 6).
These
economic factors compounded by the nativism mixed with demographic changes from
immigration, and the general racist backlash against President Obama in
right-wing circles, made working class areas prime targets for increases in hate
groups. Many African Americans for example facing gentrification found themselves
migrating to more affordable areas such as the Inland Empire and Antelope Valley,
just to find themselves targeted by hate crimes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Maybe,
Katie before she became her current progressive self, was hanging out with the
wrong crowd (or, the wrong boyfriend), or maybe the tattoo is ironic, or as I
said previously, something more aligned to extreme sports like skateboarding
with companies like Independent Trucks. Yet, let’s say that Kate was hanging
out with the wrong crowds being a rebellious young woman getting tattoos, etc.
If a
former Nazi past is true, maybe this a type of American History X situation? A
person who was born into a privileged-class of people, despite the reality that
many are not privileged within this class, and as she grew into herself, she
refuted any association with her former beliefs/friends and became an advocate for
the LGBTQ community, minorities, veterans, Indigenous First Peoples – Native Americans,
and immigrants. Maybe, I don’t know.
When
dealing with politics you’re not sure where the daggers are coming from and
despite Katie being young, she held a quite powerful and important district.
Katie Hill
is from my generation. We’re the same age, 32, who grew up in the Bart Simpson,
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, TGIF, MTV (when they played music videos), summer
Hollywood blockbuster nineteen-nineties, but came of age during the War on Terrorism
where Myspace was actually popular, had rap music blasting, saw hyper-sexualized
pop stars and pornography, listened to death growl screamo or emo or metalcore
or hardcore, the list goes on.
All of
this before the election of Barack Obama, yet after his election we then
experienced our free twenties as underemployed college-graduates in the service-sector
in a county which A) felt like we were making progress as far as rights and
culture was very engaging and experimental, but B) we saw the birth of a type
of “postmodern”, super-intense, conspiracy-based conservatism under the likes
of people such as Alex Jones, whom in another light, sounds like the voice from
Hotel Rwanda urging Hutus to pick up machetes.
Like
Katie, myself and people of our generation sort of grew up on the lightspeed trajectory
of post-MLK racial harmony, unfettered globalist capitalism, mega media conglomerates
creating culture, but also experienced growing pains in a nation still
organized around what is effectively our post-colonial racial-caste system, which
still annoyingly dictates the masses for politics, marketing, sales,
advertising, box-office ticket sales, etc.
We’re a
generation of postmodern kids where cultures merged into new aesthetics. We’re baby
Gen X who are now adults entering managerial and leadership positions, tired
and hyperaware of the latent defects within the psychology of the United States
despite being the target of “Millennial Studies” in click-bait online articles
for Baby Boomers who don’t retire since they have no pensions and fear losing
all their money in their 401ks if the economy tanks.
Katie is
white. I am black. Who cares? Yet, like many minorities who climbed up the
economic ladder from the 1970s to now, and found ourselves in suburbia, my
racial engagement with different races was A) not a problem at all 95% of the
time – I considered my white friends as family, but B) I still witnessed the
sociological vestiges of white supremacy such as a caricature view to
minorities with minorities being the boogeyman on the late night news, feeling
in between a rock and a hard place as I juggled whether to ace the SAT or to
emulate black celebrities on TV or in rap videos, and witnessing the eye-balls
follow people who were in interracial relationships where women were not only
slut-shamed but also the target of passive racism.
However,
being in my thirties, I actually see the younger generations as way more
progressive, open-minded, and post-racial while still being sensitive to racial
issues and conversations (more willing to listen than to deflect claims of
racism or sexism), more so, than mine and Katie’s generation. When I look at younger
generations, I’m shocked how much more “woke” they are compared to mine and we’re
not that far away from each other in age.
However,
with the rise of Donald Trump and the Alt-Right ecosystem of outlets such as
YouTube or BitChute (though it’s painful, we must support free speech), it
seems that there might be a regression in progress, with young, curious, and existential
minds going down the rabbit hole to find purpose but then find themselves in
the far-right, first with Jordan B. Petersen maybe via the Joe Rogan Podcast
which features members of the Intellectual Dark Web such as Sam Harris brining
back notions of racial IQ levels, then Stefan Molyneaux or Lauren Southern,
then they’re gone.
So, a part
of me, being the black kid in school, had a sense of possible understanding to
who Katie is and where she comes from. Instead of judging at first glance, I
try to visualize a young, insecure, confused girl in a toxic environment such
as public school who may have projected hate as a form of defense, but she was
really…scared. All teens are a little scared. People can change and when you’re
young and stupid, you’re insecure and afraid. She may be the casualty of an unspoken
racially segregated high school inflicted with juvenile tribalism, where white
teenagers who are educated to feel responsible for the past, get fed up, and
violently reject it. They may actually accept the fact that white supremacy
exists, but then they may have bad encounters with people of different races
who effectively bully them. For all I know, Katie could be a suburban white
girl, from a racially segregated education system with plenty of socio-economic
problems, who grew up conservative, and by proxy gravitated towards white
cliques who felt they needed to group up like we’re living in a prison system,
and was exposed to Nazi-like ideas. Maybe they came to her and that was all she
had being a young, scared, body conscious female in an American public school
which can at times resemble a Corrections Facility.
It is not
uncommon to see a type of “white rights” response by white people who see
minorities getting rights and some minorities might target white people or
whites might be “clowned on”. It’s complicated. I’ve witnessed it myself as a
black man, while I’ve also experienced racism myself. We live in a country
where racism is real in both overt and covert ways, yet, white people carry the
target of being the symbol of hate, so anyone not white might agree on one
thing…white people are the racist. This is probably frustrating for many white youths
and the decent into racism isn’t simply from home or friends, but from a sense
of frustration of not being judged on actions but being judged on their race. The
truth about America is that anyone can be the victim of racism, so to get over
racism we must acknowledge that and defend people. If black kids are bullying a
white kid, then its up to black kids to stand up for that white kid. If white
kids are saying racist things to a black kid, then it is up to white kids to
stand up for that black kid. You can insert any race you want, since racism isn’t
restricted to the standard notions of black and white.
This is a country
where even people of color are being encouraged to enter racial-safe spaces, to
perceive most of their reality with race at the center, and to essentially be
paranoid while they constantly scan for microaggressions. To relate this to
Katie being caught with a bong, this racial climate on college campuses reminds
me of the class-scene from the film How High with Redman and Method Man,
where a white professor eggs on his students of color to attack him, while the
professor belittles the black students who simply…go to class. However, we live
in a nation where we have a President who dog-whistles to actual racists. To
me, both sides are in complete LaLa land.
Even for
an older Millennial like myself this intersectional racial climate was
confusing, not because I don’t see value in this framework, but rather it often
denies all the positive racial harmony that many Americans grew up with. It
seems very clinical and intellectual over humanist and connecting. A lazy
solution. Race relations in the United States went slightly in reverse because
of the traditional political-right with its covert John Birch Society antics
posited on denialism and willful ignorance, but also the political-left which
has employed a coalition-revolt campaign which tends to treat groups as militaristic
battalions, commanded by unelected political pundits – tip toe, stay in line, everyone
in your unit act the same…
However,
identity-politics and intersectionality from the standpoint of analysis is a
powerful and important tool but the issue is the scope of how much we use it.
The collateral damage that can happen. It could be said that if we were to
objectively stand back and analyze both sides, is that we’d probably see we’re
living in a perverted rigged system of color-based dialectics. A confusing sociological
experiment bent on tension under the auspices of conservatism or liberalism. Yet,
there is a true, harsh, reality to these issues, so we must acknowledge them,
but we probably should rethink about how we’re combating racism so it’s
inclusive to those who feel historically linked to its reason for existing. The
Democrats have an election to win in 2020, don’t they?
Katie Hill’s
mysterious “Iron Cross” tattoo insinuates a world which has lost context, forgiveness
if guilty, and understanding. Wasn’t Malcom X nothing more than a petty
criminal before he became the activist we remember today? I’m sure many gangbangers
and Aryan Brotherhood followers have left the corrections system and refuted
their former lives, despite having scars such as tattoos, which painfully
reminds them of who they were, and in certain cases, I would assume people have
these tattoos as a reminder of who they aren’t anymore (considering tattoo laser
removal surgery is expensive). There’s not a fixed rubric or lexicon when it
comes to context. It’s a delicate process of fact-finding, gauging recent
behaviors, etc. Further, peoples’ reactions to Katie Hill represents a type of subconscious
vengeance where people are happy Katie got canned because it kicked down the “high
horse” morality of feminism (as far as perception goes) and the political left.
Because of these social factors, the actual context and hard facts of the Hill
case have been buried under perception, political vengeance, etc.
Yet, Katie
is a progressive, leftist, pro-feminist, pro-LGBTQ(IA) female, who lived with a
woman of color while in Congress (Lauren Underwood), actively supported
Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and The Squad, stood up for immigrants, voted against
White Nationalism and Antisemitism, and became a vocal anti-Trump advocate.
What we can learn from all of this, if let’s say the Nazi accusations are true,
is that people…can change.
Finnegan,
W. (2019, February 28). THE UNWANTED: In a Los Angeles suburb where schools and
parents faltered, the American Dream was replaced by drugs, neo-Nazism, and
despair. The hardest hit were Mindy Turner and her friends. Retrieved November
24, 2019, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/12/01/the-unwanted.
American soldiers fighting for colonial conquest in the Philippines in the early twentieth century from the Library of Congress. This paper goes into detail about how the Las Vegas Shooter’s Filipino connection unveiled – either directly or coincidentally – a real past and present involving black market and government sanctioned gun-trafficking; paramilitary operations regarding the Global War on Terrorism; sex trafficking, and psychological operations.
Abstract: The Las Vegas Shooter had wired money to The Philippines before he conducted one of the largest, if not the largest, mass shooting in modern US history. However, the legacy media isn’t doing as good of a job that it can when it comes to linking dots relating to the island nation of The Philippines. The Philippines has a brutal history of colonization but is also in important regional hub for American defense policy. The island is also notorious for human trafficking and has played a major role in American “Hearts and Minds” psychological operations with revelations regarding the MKUltra Project.
The Las Vegas Shooting unveiled a real-world struggle where the Philippines is in the cross-hairs. FBI, ATF, Homeland Security, DOJ regarding guns; DOD regarding counter-terrorism; a Jihadist cell in which the now deceased founder was technically on the side of the US during the Soviet-Afghan War; Chabad missionaries and increased US and Israeli cooperation.
Keywords: Philippines, Noahide, Terrorism, Abu Sayyaf, Psy Ops, Psychological Operations, US Special Forces, Las Vegas, Israel, Guns, USA, ATF, FBI, Homeland Security, Trump, etc.
Table of Contents:
Trump and The Philippines
A History of Gun Smuggling
The Las Vegas shooter’s Filipino connection
Chabad, Noahide, and The Philippines (also, a History of Bondage)
Islamic Terrorism, US Counter-terrorism
Psy-Ops, Vampires, and the works of OSS CIA Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale
The Black Dahlia & The Philippines
MK-Ultra in The Philippines
The Curious Case of Candy Jones, The FBI and Hypnosis?
1. Trump and The Philippines: After the events of the Las Vegas Shooting which occurred on October 1, 2017 it didn’t seem as if the mainstream media or the alternative media were digging into the Filipino connection regarding the massacre. The simple fact that Marilou Danley is from the Philippines and was there during the shooting, seems that more questions regarding the Philippines would’ve arisen. Shortly after the Las Vegas shooting, President Donald Trump visited The Philippines to discuss security and drug enforcement with President Rodrigo Duterte, whom, according to Reuters (2017), “Duterte is known for his often profanity-laden tirades against the United States, chiding Washington for treating the Philippines “like a dog,” despite the two nations’ longstanding relationship. The Philippines’ leader announced his “separation” from the United States during a visit to Beijing a year ago, declaring he had realigned with China as the two agreed to resolve their South China Sea dispute through talks.”
However, in an official press release from The White House regarding Trump and Philippines and his trip to the island nation, it was stated the vast scope of US taxpayer money going to the Philippines.
There was $85 million in counterterrorism-related equipment, training, and support to the armed forces of the Philippines; President Trump announced an additional $14.3 million for the community of Marawi City to address the humanitarian needs of 360,000 displaced persons; the two leaders noted that the United States has provided approximately $65 million to enhance the Philippines’ maritime security capabilities; President Trump announced $2 million to support drug demand reduction programs in the Philippines, and President Duterte thanked President Trump for the delivery of more than $1 billion in United States foreign assistance to the Philippines over the past eight years (White House.gov, 2017).
Further, there’s gambling and casino links between the Vegas and the Philippines. Donald Trump has a Trump Tower Manila. Trump is also very popular in the Philippines.
Higgeibottom (2019) states, “As once-close allies show dismay at Trump’s presidency, the Philippines has held true. In fact, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center poll of 25 nations… Donald Trump is trusted by 78% of Filipinos – a higher proportion than any other country. That means Filipinos trust the U.S. president more than Americans do. Only 55 percent of Americans this year said they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust and confidence in their leaders, according to Gallup. And that’s at a 10-year high. Meanwhile, 69 percent of Israelis, 28 percent of Britons and only 9 percent of French people had confidence in the U.S. president, according to Pew’s report.”
Yet, Higginbottom (2019) does state, “Trump doesn’t get all the diplomatic credit here. Filipinos have long looked on their former colonizers favorably. Richard Heydarian, author of The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt Against Elite Democracy, sees it as a sort of “”collective amnesia” from a bloody past with Americans.” Lastly, Higginbottom (2019) states, “But after the U.S. foiled the revolution, it governed with a relatively soft hand compared to the Spanish. The U.S. left — in relative terms, of course — possibly the most “benign imperial legacy in Asia,” explains Heydarian. Educational opportunities increased with American-funded programs. And the country was protected militarily from others in the region. “The U.S. is broadly seen as a knight in shining armor” to Filipinos, Heydarian says.”
I believe the Las Vegas shooting inadvertently unveiled a larger “deep-state” struggle regarding the importance of the Philippines to the USA where legal and illegal gun sales are common. Where the state and black-markets (including the illegal sex industry and gambling) meet in overt and covert operations to balance power in The Philippines. The fact that Jihadist terror is a real thing on the island nation means the USA has justification for a presence there in a kind of “you need us” mentality, but this justification is part of a larger DOD strategy regarding China. Controlling and co-opting black markets is vital for the intelligence, and there’s a chance that the Las Vegas shooter, or at least his girlfriend were somehow connected, even if they were low hanging fruit.
2. A History of Gun Smuggling: There’s an extensive history regarding arms trafficking between the United States and the Philippines, but there’s evidence of arms dealing revolving around Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, thus bringing the Las Vegas Shooting into mind.
In a New York Times archive piece from the Cold War, Gerth (1985) states, “George A. Rodriguez, an official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who until recently headed its program to combat international trafficking in arms, said: ”The recent trend is an increase in international arms trafficking to the Philippines. It involves Filipinos in the United States, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Reno, Las Vegas and Chicago.””
The article by Gerth (1985) details how the Philippines at that time saw a rise in private armies under President Ferdinand E. Marcos and mentioned an American official who stated he wanted to remain unidentified. The unnamed American official stated the private armies were being trained in special warfare tactics. The article by Gerth (1985) also references James A. Kelly, who served under Ronald Reagan’s anti-communism presidency as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (East Asia and Pacific.).
Kelly was concerned of the role that private armies would play in the country’s stability having feared coups and turf wars. George A. Rodriguez, in the article by Gerth (1985), stated, “”Some of it is random, but several of the investigations involve money people. One of the guys getting guns is a leading industrialist in the Philippines who is very close to Marcos.”
“Philippine military officers are
also reported to be implicated. A Justice Department official said
American-based Filipinos were involved in smuggling M-16’s to Philippine
military officials.” (Gerth, 1985).
“A Filipino businessman in
California said he had been asked by a member of the President’s palace guard
to send guns to Manila hidden in a golf bag. The businessman, who asked not to
be identified, also said a Philippine military official had used a private
detective agency in the United States as a front to buy guns legitimately.”
(Gerth, 1985).
In 2011 or 2012, the Justice Department issued a press release, 12-027, under its Criminal Division Component, stating that three Filipino nationals were arrested for trafficking assault rifles into the United States.
According to the Department of Justice. According to the United States Justice Department (2014), “Three Philippine nationals have been arrested on charges of violating the Arms Export Control Act, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. of the Central District of California and Steven M. Martinez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.” According to the complaint, the case is part of an FBI investigation of transnational Asian organized crime groups involved in the illicit trafficking of firearms (United States Justice Department, 2014). Lastly, the United States Justice Department (2014), stated, “– items specifically designed, developed, configured, adapted or modified for military application – into the United States from the Republic of the Philippines, including 12 fully automatic Bushmaster M-4 .223 caliber rifles, a .50 caliber sniper rifle, an M14 7.62mm assault rifle, a single-shot grenade launcher, a rocket propelled grenade (RPG-7) launcher, a mortar launcher, an AK-47 rifle and ballistic vests. None of the defendants had a license to import these items into the United States.”The three men in the DOJ bust were Sergio Santiago de Leon Syjuco, aka “Yogi,” 25, of Muntinlupa City, Philippines; Cesar Paolo Inciong Ubaldo, aka “Arvi,” 26, of Paranaque City, Philippines; and Arjyl Revereza, 25, of Manila, Philippines.”
However, a counter accusation was made against the FBI involving possible unethical tactics involved in the bust.
According to Pimentel (2013), “Defense attorneys had feverishly asked the judge to dismiss the case arguing the undercover FBI agent engaged in “outrageous government misconduct” and entrapped their client. Federal Deputy Public Investigator Richard Goff traveled to Manila and found: “On several occasions, the undercover agent invited [the defendants] to …brothels in and around Manila in order to reward them for their efforts and encourage them to continue looking for weapons. [The undercover agent] ordered prostitutes and paid for himself and others to have sex with the prostitutes.” Court documents show the place the deals were being conducted in was at brothel houses Air Force One and Area 51, which was later raided by the Philippine government where they found underage prostitutes. The FBI agent had sought $15,000 in reimbursement related to the investigation.”
The quote by Pimentel (2013) is backed by Sullivan (2018), who stated, “Several FBI employees have been recalled from cities across Asia in recent months while the Justice Department’s inspector general examines allegations related to parties and interactions with prostitutes, The Wall Street Journal reports.” Further, Sullivan (2018) states, “Although the vast majority of the FBI’s approximately 36,000 employees are based in the United States, the bureau maintains a large presence of special agents and support staff in embassies across the world who work with foreign law enforcement agencies on matters of mutual interest. These permanently assigned international personnel are augmented by FBI global response teams based in the United States, which frequently deploy overseas to conduct investigations.”
To keep the FBI in mind involving the previous quotes surrounding guns and prostitution, lets add gambling to the mix to show the scope of the FBI in the Philippines.
Reuters (2013) stated, “The FBI sent agents to Manila as part of a probe into millions of dollars of payments made by Universal Entertainment Corp to a government consultant in relation to the firm’s casino project on Manila Bay, the Philippine gaming regulator said.” Further, regarding this FBI probe into Manila based gambling operations which also included the Nevada Gaming Control Board, Reuters (2013), stated, “Reuters was the first to report in mid-November on the money transfers totaling $40 million to Rodolfo Soriano, an aide of Naguiat’s predecessor Efraim Genuino. The payments were made in 2010 when Universal was lobbying for concessions from the government for its casino project.
Back to guns…
In a separate case, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (2016) stated, “A Long Beach woman and her son have been named in federal grand jury indictments that charge them with illegally shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of firearms parts and ammunition to their native Philippines – munitions that were concealed in shipments they falsely claimed to be household goods.” The press release by ICE details how Marlou Mendoza, 60, and Mark Louis Mendoza, 30, were given indictments by a grand jury and Ms. Mendoza was arrested at LAX airport, but her son in 2016 remained at large. Eerily similar to the money wire-transfer in the Las Vegas shooting case between the United States and The Philippines, it was stated, “The money laundering charge against Mark Mendoza alleges that during the first six months of 2011, he transferred more than $650,000 in proceeds generated by the illegal ammunition exports from an account in the Philippines to a money remitter in Los Angeles.” (Immigrant & Customs Enforcement, 2016).
“Mark Mendoza, who was the president of a “tools and equipments” company known as Last Resort Armaments, ordered more than $100,000 worth of ammunition and firearms accessories, much of which was delivered to his parent’s Long Beach residence over a six-month period in 2011. The items Mark Mendoza ordered included parts for M-16 and AR-15-type rifles, which are listed as defense articles on the United States Munitions List. Pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act, items on the Munitions List may not be shipped to the Philippines without an export license issued by the Department of State.” (Immigration & Customs Enforcement, 2016).
Relating to the task-force that pursued the Mendoza’s, according to Immigration & Customs Enforcement (2016), “A Joint probe by HSI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that began in 2011 after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers uncovered a cache of ammunition and firearms parts in an outbound crate being shipped by Marlou Mendoza that had falsely been declared to be household effects. In July 2011, CBP and the Philippine Bureau of Customs (BOC) intercepted and seized three separate shipments from Last Resort Armaments containing approximately 180,000 rounds of .22-caliber ammunition, and more than three dozen receivers for AR-15 and M-16 assault rifles. In November 2012, specials agents with HSI and ATF special agents executed a search warrant at a location associated with Last Resort Armaments, seizing more than 120,000 rounds of .22-caliber ammunition, along with AR-15 trigger assemblies, magazines, sights and rifle barrels.”
The United States Embassy in the Philippines in a press release detailed the gun-trafficking arrests of Elizabeth Grino and Ronie Velasco within the Philippines through coordinated efforts by the Philippine National Police, US Homeland Security, ICE, and the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm bureau (ATF). According to the press release, “Grino and Velasco were caught during a buy bust operation in Makati City on June 8, 2017 after a number of illegal sales of the Glock fully automatic firearms selector switches (SEARS) to buyers in the United States. They were arrested for violation of the Philippine Republic Act (RA) 10591, Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act, a no-bail offense. PNP, ATF, and HSI Manila are working together to have charges filed against the two, who are representing Royal City Tactical, for the manufacturing and shipping of the Glock fully automatic SEARS to the U.S.” (U.S. Embassy Manila, 2017).
So, think about all of this… These ICE, FBI, and DOJ cases happened before the shooting, with the US Embassy releasing information on US-Filipino gun sales in 2017, a few months before the shooting – a shooting where a Filipino woman that dated Stephen Paddock had received a large sum of money via international wire-transfer from a man with a large cache of guns.
3. The Las Vegas Shooter’s Filipino Connection: It’s important to know that Marilou Danley has Australian citizenship but was living in the United States. She still resides in the US in Los Angeles in a home worth over $2.3 million dollars (Radar Online, 2019). Elton-Pym (2017) stated that she was reportedly in the Philippines at the time of the attack, but some of her personal ID may have been used to book Mr. Paddock’s Vegas hotel room.
All we really know about Stephen Paddock is he was a gambler, maybe with a drinking problem, lost a slip-and-fall lawsuit against the Cosmopolitan casino, had a pilot’s license, had a computer with no hard-drive in his hotel room, had a few professional jobs but made millions in real-estate, had a father with a criminal history, was a germophobic, and according to Ms. Dailey in an article by Mitchell (2018) became interested in guns (which she stated was a hobby), became distant where the relationship lost intimacy, but Paddock was constantly looking out of windows.
““Danley, according to police, said during their early September stay at the Mandalay Bay Paddock was “behaving strangely” and looking out the windows toward the Las Vegas Village venue where the three-day concert would be held later in the month. “The two were staying in room 60-235 and she observed Paddock constantly looking out the windows of the room which overlooked the Las Vegas Village venue,” the report states. “Paddock would move from window to window looking at the site from different angles.”” (Mitchell, 2018)
However, something more disturbing probably led Mr. Paddock’s paranoia. According to Mitchell (2018), “Computer forensic analysis of Paddock’s Dell laptop “revealed numerous internet searches for open air venues” and “several hundred images of child pornography”. On top of this disturbing revelation, lastly, Mitchell (2018) stated that Investigators also found Paddock “was indebted to no one and in fact paid all his gambling debts off prior to the shooting.”
According to Jason Silverstein (2018) of Newsweek, “The documents reveal Danley told investigators they would likely find her fingerprints on Paddock’s ammo once they looked into it — which turned out to be true. She also said she sometimes helped with loading the magazines for some of his weapons. It was not clear from the documents why exactly Danley was handling the weapons or if she did anything else with them.”
“The records also show Paddock purchased most of his guns and ammo online in the 12 months leading up to the attack, and that he used anonymous communication tools and destroyed some of his digital footprints. Investigators found three cell phones in Paddock’s Mandalay Bay hotel suite. One was locked, and an FBI agent wrote that this phone was likely the one that would contain “any information related to a potential conspiracy.” Authorities previously revealed that they also found a laptop with no hard drive in the room.” (Silverstein, 2018).
According to Winter, Dienst, Williams & Blankstein (2017), “Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock wired $100,000 to an account in his live-in girlfriend’s home country, the Philippines, in the week before he unleashed the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, according to multiple senior law enforcement officials.”
“Danley, 62, who had traveled to Hong Kong on Sept. 25, could fill in some of the blanks after returning to the United States on Wednesday, the officials said. She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport escorted by FBI agents late Tuesday; multiple law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation said.” (Winter, Dienst, Williams, & Blankstein, 2017).
“There were 16 Currency Transaction Reports, or CTRs, filed for Paddock in recent weeks. The Treasury Department and the IRS mandate that casinos file the reports for “each transaction in currency involving cash-in and cash-out of more than $10,000 in a gaming day.” (Winter, Dienst, Williams, & Blankstein, 2017).
The piece by Winter et al. (2017), however, paints Steve Paddock, the shooter, as a high-stakes gambler, who claimed to have been injured in a slip at a Casino and he sued the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Paddock was also Seven Stars Tier Status holder which is a premier package for high-roller gamblers. Yet, after the slip incident, and with Paddock losing his lawsuit, it seems something happened, and then he did the shooting.
However, there’s still a lot of shade around this, but the fact that his girlfriend was in the Philippines, doesn’t implicate her to some larger international conspiracy, but rather sheds light on the Philippines as is, which is actually the focal point of issues such as Terrorism, guns sales, human trafficking, and having a long history of US Special Operations which involves Psychological Warfare campaigns.
According to Herbets (2018) on October 1, 2018 a judge had ordered the release of 300 pages of FBI documents relating to the shooting and it shed light on the probable cause the FBI had which was Paddock’s emails.
“According to one of many requests for access into shooter Stephen Paddock’s email account, investigators found that he may have been emailing himself cryptic messages.” (Herbert, 2018).
Paddock was having email correspondence with email addresses, centralpark1@live.com and centralpark4804@gmail.com. Yet, Herbets (2018) states, “The FBI states Paddock was once the manager of an apartment complex in Reno called Central Park.Girlfriend”
Regarding Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands and a major Trump donors, there’s not much of a connection to The Las Vegas Shooter, despite Adelson owning hotels in Vegas which are the Venetian and Sands. The only suspicious thing one could draw is the fact that security in Las Vegas could be argued as equivalent to its own surveillance state, there’s a culture of “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas”, and Adelson is a die-hard Zionist and many have said that his ideas are directly influencing Trump’s Middle East Policy such as the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Further, due to Sheldon Adelson as a Zionist who backs Trump links him to the Chabad community of Judaism, which has large missionaries in The Philippines.
Two of the hotels related to Paddock are Caesar’s and the Cosmopolitan.
Caesars Entertainment Corporations is partially owned Apollo Management Group, TPG Capital, Paulson & Co, but also by Carl Icahn. Icahn served as Donald Trump’s special economic adviser on financial regulation. Reuters (2016) said, “Trump and Icahn share some history in the casino business. Icahn this year helped shutter the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resorts in Atlantic City, two years after buying it out of bankruptcy. The casino was once a prized part of Trump’s empire.”.
The Cosmopolitan Hotel is owned by Blackstone Group and under CEO and co-founder Steve Schwarzman, which is one of the, if not the largest hedge fund in the world with over 500 Billion in Assets Under Management (AUM). Arnsdorf, Dawsey, Goldmacher, & Debenedetti (2017) of Politico stated, “Billionaire investor Steve Schwarzman’s newfound status as a trusted outside adviser for President Donald Trump has created blurred lines in which the Blackstone CEO is offering guidance on policies that could boost the fortunes of his company and his personal wealth.”
As far as the Mandalay Resort where Paddock conducted the shooting, according to an SEC (2017) report, it is owned by MGM Resorts International which is owned 16.1% by Tracinda, a private equity group, and T. Rowe & Price 13.9%.
So, Steve Paddock, the Las Vegas Shooter, has connections to two property held by advisers with links to Donald Trump, although the shooting itself happened to at a hotel owned by MGM Resorts which is partially owned by Tracinda and T. Rowe & Price.
4. Chabad, Noahides, & The Philippines: The Philippines is home to about 20,000 Noahide religious followers. Noahide is essentially a “gentile” worship of Israel and practicing of Judaism without Gentiles allowed to be Jewish. The Chabad Lubavitch community, which Jared Kushner has ties to, has a section on their webpage dedicated to The Philippines (https://chabad.ph/noahides/). According to a Haaretz op-ed, tilted, The Messianic Zionist Religion Whose Believers Worship Judaism (But Can’t Practice It), by Ofri Ilany on 9/12,2018. “Cooperation between Israel and the Philippines is constantly growing, and this week reached new heights with the visit to Israel of the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte. The Philippines are a key arena of Chabad activity, and one of the primary venues where the new religion is being disseminated. There are four Chabad centers in the country, and in addition to assisting Jews, they support 10 Noahide houses of prayer. The Hasidic emissaries view the Philippines community as the model for Noahide communities in other countries.” (Ilany, 2018).
“Last month, Nova Religio, a journal devoted to emergent and alternative religions, published an article by Rachel Z. Feldman, assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, in Pennsylvania, titled “The Children of Noah: Has Messianic Zionism Created a New World Religion?” In the summer of 2017, Feldman visited Noahide communities on the Filipino island of Cebu, which are supervised by Chabad rabbis. Like most Noahides around the world, the members of the Cebu community came mostly from Protestant churches but had abandoned their belief in the New Testament.” (Ilany, 2018).
“One of the groups Feldman observed lives in a mountainous, “financially challenged” rural region. In the past its members were cave dwellers who belonged to a Sabbath-observing church called Sacred Name Believers. Their leader is the Noahide preacher Emmanuel Villegas. For years he visited poor communities on various islands and converted them to the Children of Noah. He called on them to renounce Christianity and to burn their holy books – though not before cutting out the Tetragrammaton (God’s Hebrew name) from the texts.” (Ilany, 2018).
The relationship of the Philippines to Israel is deeper considering many Filipino workers do domestic work in Israel. Yet, many Filipino workers risk deportation in a nationalistic Zionist Israel. Eloise Blondiau (2016) of American Magazine, published an article titled, Filipino workers spend decades caring for Israeli families. Now they risk deportation for having children. Filipino workers spend decades caring for Israeli families. Now they risk deportation for having children (Blondiau, 2016). According to Blondiau (2016), “Despite these deep connections to Israeli society, Ms. Franco’s future in the officially Jewish state is at risk, even despite becoming a mother to a child born in Israel. This child, Yael, now 12, identifies as Israeli. Yael says she feels more Israeli than Filipino. Hebrew is her first language, and she has never left Israel.”
So where is Ms. France and her child supposed to go? Back to a county riddled with Islamic terrorism and on the radar of Jewish Noahide missionaries but also the United States military. Religious people in the Philippines being indoctrinated by Chabad ideology, despite the fact many Filipinos are engaged in international domestic work, but Filipinos are being rejected in Israel.
“The Israeli government has deported undocumented babies and young children for decades. The mothers could choose either to leave with their children—in which case they would lose their visas—or send the children home to live with relatives. Until recently, in something of a compromise, authorities allowed undocumented children who were enrolled in school to stay in the country. After a plan to deport school-going children in 2008 was later abandoned in response to a public outcry; for example, 800 children of migrant workers were granted amnesty.” (Blondiau, 2016)
“Last year, however, immigration officials began to detain Filipino mothers and ask them to sign documents that said they would be deported with their children by the end of this summer.” (Blondiau, 2016)
Considering the Chabad community is Orthodox and practices the Talmud, but is also operating in a nation such as The Philippines which was a large human and sex trafficking issue, on top of the fact that many Filipinos (who identify as religious) are sent abroad to due domestic duties in Israel (despite their treatment regarding deportation), it brings to light the practice of Child Marriage in regards to the abuse of minors.
Far away from The Philippines in the US state of New Jersey, a bill was sent to the State Legislature to block the practice of child marriage, or any marriage under the age of eighteen years old. According to JTA and Ben Sales (2018), “Jewish activists are driving both sides of the debate. The main group lobbying for the bill is Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that opposes underage marriage. The group’s founder, Fraidy Reiss, who grew up Haredi, says child marriage, primarily of girls to older men, is an abusive practice that can damage children emotionally and physically.”
Further, the JTA and Sales (2018), stated, “Agudath Israel of America, the national Haredi organization, says it supports the bill but that its provisions are too strict. Citing child marriages that take place in observant Jewish communities, it wants to see an exemption made for older teenagers who want to wed.”
The article in Haaretz however doesn’t deal with more age extreme cases and dealt mostly with marriages of 15-17. The articles also stated, “If the bill passes, it would make New Jersey only the second state in the country to ban child marriage. Delaware banned the practice earlier this year.” (JTA & Sales, 2018). This means underage marriage laws are more common in the US than we realize. A sort of “Blue Law” leftover from older times were such marriages were more common.
A History of Colonialism and Bondage.
The Philippines was first owned by the Spanish Empire under brutal control but was later acquired by the Americans in the American victory in the Spanish American war.
According to History Channel (2010) Emilio Aguinaldo and members of the Katipunan, a secret revolutionary society launched independence in the eighteen nineties. After the Americans beat the Spanish, the Americans annexed the nation which led to a Filipino resistance against the Americans, however, this was suppressed by a growing presence of American troops which topped around 65,000.
The History Channel (2010) article also refers to what could be called ethnic cleansing in the Philippines. “In an infamous episode, U.S. forces on the island of Samar retaliated against the massacre of a U.S. garrison by killing all men on the island above the age of 10. Many women and young children were also butchered. General Jacob Smith, who directed the atrocities, was court-martialed and forced to retire for turning Samar, in his words, into a “howling wilderness.”
More than 4,000 Americans perished suppressing the Philippines–more than 10 times the number killed in the Spanish-American War. More than 20,000 Filipino insurgents were killed, and an unknown number of civilians perished. (History Channel, 2010)
In 1935, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was established with U.S. approval, and Manuel Quezon was elected the country’s first president. On July 4, 1946, full independence was granted to the Republic of the Philippines by the United States. (History Channel, 2010)
Today many Americans are of Filipino heritage, have a served is the United States military, and up until full independence to my knowledge had the same passport rights as any other American overseas territory, i.e., Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.
Yet, sexual abuse has gripped the country’s history and present. According to the Associated Press (2018), “Women’s group asked the Philippine president on Thursday to oppose any request by Japan to remove a newly erected statue honoring women who were forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War II. The Gabriela women’s group said President Rodrigo Duterte should instead demand an official apology and compensation for Filipino women who were “conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army to serve as wartime sex slaves.”
Not only is sex trafficking big in the Philippines, like that of exposes on Indonesia, the land is also notorious for organ trafficking, which to me recalls Israel’s need for organ donors. So, we have Chabad in The Philippines teaching a religion of Israel state-worship, but Israel has an organ-donor need and The Philippines is known for illegal organ dealing.
According to The Week (2009), “Brooklyn Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum was arrested for “trafficking in human body parts,” said Sally Satel in The Wall Street Journal, as part of an FBI corruption dragnet targeting 44 New Jersey–area officials and rabbis.”
Further, according to Cook (2008), “Organ trafficking, say Filipino kidney specialists. In some desperately poor communities, many men have sold their kidneys to make a bit of cash, even though post-surgical care is rare. In Basesco, on Manila Bay, about 3,000 of the slum’s 50,000 inhabitants are reported to have sold a kidney — but not to other Filipinos, for few can afford a US$17,000transplant operation. Despite a government-imposed cap which restricts the number of transplants to foreigners to 10% of the total, wealthy foreigners, many from the Middle East are the chief beneficiaries.”
Lastly, Klein (2018), “Israel has become increasingly involved in the world transplantation industry in the last decade. This comes a few years after India, which until the 1990s was the global center of the organ trade, enacted legislation prohibiting transplants using organs acquired from living people.”, and, “The illegal transplantation industry has continued to flourish globally in recent years, the European Parliament notes, but the place of Israel – along with the Philippines and Pakistan – as hubs of the organ trade has been taken by new countries, among them Costa Rica, Colombia, Vietnam, Lebanon and Egypt.” (Klein, 2018).
5. Islamic Terrorism, US Counter-terrorism: The Philippines has a Jihadist Islamic Terrorist element, as well as being the the home to large sects of radical Noahide sects, despite the nation being predominately Roman Catholic. The county is also involved in US Special Operations against Terrorism. So, we have the US military, Israel, Jihadist, and zealot Noahide “Christian” communities, all bubbling on the island nation comprised of dozens of islands but also has a brutal history of colonialization and of human/sex trafficking.
According to Stentiford (2018), “Specifically, the US effort in the southern Philippines was a complex generational effort that, viewed over the long term, was remarkably successful in achieving US strategic goals in the region. Operation Enduring Freedom–Philippines (OEF-P)—as the US involvement in the southern Philippines was dubbed—was quite different from its counterpart in Afghanistan. Rather than a dramatic battle against terrorists and the establishment of a new government, OEF-P became, for the Americans, a largely steady-state application of multiple US government resources to fundamentally alter the relationship between the Philippine government and security forces and the people of the southern Philippines in support of American and Philippine strategic goals. (p. 1)
Further, Stentiford (2018) states, “The US military made the first tentative steps toward returning to the Philippines in March 2001—six months prior to the 9/11 attacks—to address a very specific strategic problem. Much of southern Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago had effectively become what political scientists call “ungoverned space.”
Lastly, Stentiford (2018) states, “What became Operation Enduring Freedom–Philippines began following 9/11 in 2002, when the United States sought to open a second front in the larger war against Islamic terrorist networks by engaging al Qaeda-linked organizations such as the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and Jemaah Islamiya (JI), organizations that were taking advantage of the relatively ungoverned space in southern Mindanao and in the Sulu Archipelago.3 In this sovereignty vacuum, violent terrorist groups such as JI and the ASG were able to operate with impunity. One catalyst for US forces to enter the region was the kidnapping of an American missionary couple who were taken, along with others, from the Philippine island of Palawan on 27 May 2001 and brought to the region. Initially employing Task Force 510, and later Joint Special Operations Task Force–Philippines (JSOTF-P), the United States worked to increase the capability of the Philippine security forces (including both the armed forces and later the Philippine National Police) to defeat ASG and JI.” (p. 2).
According Kyle Rempfer (2019), a staff reporter for Military Times whom previously served an enlistment in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and his reporting focuses on the Department of the Army, stated that “The United States wants to be the preferred military partner for the countries surrounding China, and the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group has been working that angle for decades.”
“Around 2001, 1st Group soldiers began training Philippine Rangers who would eventually form the Light Reaction Regiment, the Philippine Army’s premier counterterrorism and special mission unit. That force saw early action in the mid-2000s against the Abu Sayyaf terror group on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Later, they proved pivotal in the campaign to uproot the Islamic State during the 2017 Battle of Marawi” (Rempfer, 2019).
Seth Robson (2019) of Stars and Stripes, in his piece titled, US plans new anti-terrorism training centers for Southeast Asia, East Africa, details how the US State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program (ATA) is funding Regional Training Centers (RTCs) in Asia to fight militant groups such as ISIS.
“Southeast Asia has been plagued by terrorism for decades. From 2002 to 2015, hundreds of U.S. special operations troops assisted the Philippine armed forces with training and surveillance through the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines.” (Robson, 2019).
“At its high-water mark, in 2010, the task force included about 600 special operators working out of Camp Navarro in Zamboanga city on the island of Mindanao.” (Robson, 2019). This supported by Stentiford (2018) who states, “The main support and coordination for OEF-P had been based at either Camp Navarro, in Zamboanga City, or at Camp Aguinaldo, in Metro Manila. The number of troops fluctuated during the first years from lows of around 50 to a high of around 1,200 Americans. About half were in staff and support roles at Andrews Air Force Base, Camp Navarro in Zamboanga, or Camp Aguinaldo near Manila. The remainder of the forces were distributed mainly in team houses, normally co-located on Philippine military posts and camps, scattered from Davao to Tawi Tawi.” (p. 2-3).
“However, U.S. forces can operate facilities on Philippine bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, and U.S. personnel often visit military bases in places such as Zamboanga, Sulu and Palawan, according to Patricio Abinales, a Philippines expert at the University of Hawaii, ‘I’m sure they are not just there for some light training’ he said.” (Robson, 2019).
One terrorist group in The Philippines is Abu Sayaff, which according to the BBC Monitoring (2016), “It broke from the broader Moro National Liberation Front in 1991 because it disagreed with the MNLF’s policy of pursuing autonomy and wanted to establish an independent Islamic state”, and, “Its founder, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, was an Islamic preacher who fought in the Soviet-Afghan war, where he is said to have met Osama Bin Laden and been inspired by him. Al-Qaeda provided the group with funding and training when it was initially set up. After Janjalani died, the group split into two main networks whose leaders were then killed in 2006 to 2007. Since then, Abu Sayyaf has operated as a collection of factions that work with each other through kinship or personal ties, but which also occasionally compete against each other.” (BBC, 2016).
Think about that, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, was a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan Conflict which means he was on the side of American interests during the Cold War and received some type of training or arms, even if by proxy, from the Pentagon. So, we have a terror group founded by a veteran of the American-side of the Soviet-Afghan conflict, same as Osama Bin Laden, who set up terrorist cells conveniently in The Philippines, which is an area that is of vital US defense policy in evermore growing tensions of the USA versus China. Terrorism thus serves as a justification and smokescreen, for the superpowers for exercise fore indirectly. For example, if these terrorist cells weren’t in the Philippines and people noticed growing US military operations, it would stir suspicion of direct war or conflict between China and the USA.
Rommel C. Banlaoi (2010), the Executive Director of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, an independent think-tank, in an article published for the West Point Combating Terror Center, stated, “The ASG is a symbol of the complexities of armed violence in the southern Philippines that interact with issues of banditry, terrorism, rebellion, separatism, clan conflict, ethnic conflict and warlordism. The continuous entry of foreign jihadists to the southern Philippines only compounds these issues, as radical foreigners subvert the minds of the locals, imbuing them with a violent Islamist ideology. Moreover, they also train local fighters in sophisticated bomb-making skills. Only effective governance can limit ethnic conflict, banditry and rebellion.”.
So, we have a shooter in Las Vegas with a shadowy Filipino girlfriend… Who was in the Philippines during the shooting… Changed her social medial profile information before the shooting… Admitted to having her prints on the ammunition… The Philippines is known for gun trafficking and the prostitution of minors… The FBI has been under scrutiny for accusations of procuring prostitutes that were minors in illegal gun sting-operations, but the agency has also been accused of having agents engaging in Asian prostitution… The Vegas Shooter had pornography featuring minors on one of his computers and there was missing hard drive from that computer or one of his other computers… He had a pilot’s license… His girlfriend worked in a casino… The FBI and Nevada Gaming Control Board investigated direct-payments from a major Japanese casino-machine vendor with Filipino government officials… Trump has a hotel in Manila… Chabad is a large community in the Philippines… Sheldon Adelson, known as The Kingmaker, is heavy-hitter in Las Vegas… The Philippines is an important strategic location for the USA against China with Duterte serving as a kind of Turkey’s relation to the USA and Russia in a region where Duterte can ride the fence… There are jihadist elements in the Philippines… In the early nineteen-fifties,
6. Psy-Ops, Vampires, and the works of OSS CIA Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale: Major General Edward G. Lansdale was sent to the Philippines to conduct psychological operations. He was educated at the UCLA and was in publishing before joining the US Army which still then held the Air Corps before it was spun off into the independent United States Air Force. Another person attached to UCLA was Dr. William S. Kroger who was a pioneer in hypnosis and will be discussed later.
“Edward Lansdale was a California advertising man who joined the fledgling Office of Strategic Services during the World War II, later going on to become a CIA officer and U.S. Air Force major general.” (Malkasian, 2018). He was one of the fathers of Psychological Operations within the US military and applied concepts learned in advertising with an anthropological approach of understanding a population’s customs. By studying a group’s culture, the United States military was able to “Weaponize Anthropology”, which was has been discussed in published books such as Weaponizing Anthropology by Dr. David Price.
According to the United States Air Force’s (n.d.) Biography section, “In 1950, at the personal request of President Elpidio Quirino, he was transferred to Joint United States Military Assistance Group, Philippines, to advise the intelligence services of the Armed Forces of the Philippines which were then meeting a serious threat to national security by the Communist Huks. Ramon Magsaysay had just been appointed secretary of national defense and Lansdale was made liaison officer to Secretary Magsaysay for JUSMAG. The two became intimate friends, frequently visiting the combat areas together. Lansdale helped the Philippine Armed Forces develop psychological operations, civic actions, and the rehabilitation of Huk prisoners in projects such as EDCOR. He was given a temporary promotion to colonel in 1951”.
“He was an assistant for special operations to secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara during the early years of the Kennedy administration when vital decisions were being made to commit U.S. support to the Saigon government in fighting the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.” (Barnes, 1987).
“He was the prototype for Col. Edwin Barnum Hillendale in “The Ugly American,” the novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick about a harmonica-playing American officer who went into the rural areas of the Philippines and persuaded the peasants to oppose communism. He also was the prototype for “The Quiet American,” the naive U.S. official in the novel by Graham Greene who believed the United States could defeat communism in South Vietnam by instilling a sense of Town Hall democracy in the rural population.” (Barnes, 1987).
“He was an early proponent of psychological warfare, a concept he first put to use against the Hukbalalhap in the Philippines. In one such operation there, government psychological warfare squads, playing on a superstitious dread of vampires in the countryside, spread rumors that a vampire lived on a hill where the Hukbalalhap were based. Two nights later, the government squad seized the last man from a night rebel patrol, punctured his neck with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and then put the corpse back on the trail. The insurgents fled the region.” (Barnes, 1987).
Lansdale was brought to the Philippines by the Military Assistance Group, which is a designation for United States military advisers sent to other countries to assist in the training of conventional armed forces and facilitate military aid.
Such Military Assistance Groups would also play a role in the Vietnam War serving a lynchpin or crux between the Central Intelligence Agency and Combatant Commanders of the various service branches. Essentially, the MAG or MAAG (Military Assistance and Advisory Groups) distilled policy that service branches would conduct with many of these operations relating to “Hearts and Minds” campaigns on the surface but also psychological terror operations including Phoenix Program Kill Brigades. On a random note, Tiger Wood’s dad was a member of the Military Assistance Group while in Vietnam, an alumnus of the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a member of the US Army Airborne based out of Fort Bragg. Earl Woods would later make a living in the Southern California Defense sector, but his son, would go to play golf at Stanford University, which was connections, oddly to Esalen Institute founder Mike Murphy, who was an advocate of the Human Potential Movement which is related to Transhumanist Movement based out of universities such as The New School in New York City , the early psychadelia community (recreational drug usage such as with LSD), and he authored the book Golf in the Kingdom.
Michael Murphy himself was military connected, earning his B.A. in psychology in 1952 from Stanford University. After graduation, he was drafted by the US Army and spent two years stationed in Puerto Rico as a psychologist
Back to Earl Woods, the US Army Airborne under US Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg falls under the United States Special Operations Command based out of MacDill AFB near Tampa, FL. Fort Bragg is home to the JFK Special Warfare Center where courses in psychological operations are also taught. One unit that falls under the US Army’s Special Operations Command out of Fort Bragg, NC is the USAF 193rd Special Operations Wing based of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. The mission of this unit is to Broadcast radio/TV to target populations, jamming, etc., but messages are created back at the 4th Psy Group at Fort Bragg.
7. Black Dahlia & The Philippines: George Hodel, the suspected Black Dahlia Murderer, fled to the Philippines and eventually took a Filipino wife. Also spent time in China. Mr. Hodel was born in Pasadena, California, and was of Russian-Jewish descent, and was a medical doctor who left Caltech after a sexual sandal but later gained his medical degree from UC Berkley and the University of San Francisco. In his mid-years he was involved in the Hollywood party scene where his medical skills would come in handy including performing abortions. He was interested in S&M and surrealist art and was friends of artist Man Ray (also of Russian Jewish descent), whose art piece, The Minotaur, would be the same as Elizabeth Short’s mutilated body.
8. MK-Ultra & The Philippines: MKUltra program was created by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (now called the Directorate of Science & Technology) and the United States Army Biological Warfare Center. According to a National Public Radio interview by Terry Gross (2019), with journalist Stephen Kinzer, on Kinzer’s research into the MKUltra Program – particularly that of chemist Sidney Gottlieb, it was stated, “Some of Gottlieb’s experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer’s research.”
9. The Curious Case of Candy Jones, The FBI and Hypnosis?: Pin-Up model, Candy Jones, while one a USO morale tour in the Philippines, claimed she was mind-controlled while there. Despite Ms. Jones, coming off as a caricature and being seen a “quack” , the revelation that she was possibly hypnotized or at least examined by a Dr. William S. Kroger of UCLA, who was a pioneer in hypnosis is plausible because he was a gynecologist with hypnotherapy credentials. However, this claim was made by a Mr. Michael Cannon, who seems to be involved your typical far-right conspiracy circles, being attached to The Constitution Society. Mr. Cannon aside, when I follow up on the lead, I do find interesting information on William S. Kroger who was a gynecologist and trained hypnotherapist. Yet, we should take her accusation seriously. She said she was practiced on without her consent.
It sounds strange to say words such as mind-control, but it’s not that far fetched to think that people wanted to attempt to experiment if it were possible, particularly for interrogation techniques or the training of military troops to stay calm under severe duress. We must remember that MKUltra was real, and not simply a moniker in conspiracy culture circles. Dr. Kroger was a real person who is published in the field of hypnosis and educated at a prominent university.
Yet, William S. Kroger seems have lived a life of esteem and was given a kind obituary by the Los Angeles Times in 1995. According to Myrna Oliver (1995) of The Los Angeles Times, “The author of a dozen medical textbooks, Kroger began experimenting with hypnotism in 1930 and taught more than 100,000 physicians to use the 4,000-year-old technique as the least intrusive method of dealing with such areas of medicine as childbirth and chronic pain. The American Medical Assn. finally approved the use of hypnotism in 1958.”
Further, Oliver (1995), stated, “Kroger was often consulted about uses of hypnotism in fields other than medicine, notably interviewing crime victims or witnesses. In 1977, the FBI asked him to question the school bus driver who was kidnapped with his 26 young passengers in Chowchilla, Calif. Under Kroger’s hypnosis, driver Frank Ray was able to recall all but one digit of the license plate of the kidnappers’ van, greatly assisting in tracking them down. The psychiatrist trained FBI agents in hypnosis techniques and assisted them in solving about 30 homicide and other cases using age regression, time distortion and imagery to interview hypnotized witnesses. He was also a consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department and law enforcement agencies around the country.”
An interesting reference to Dr. W.S. Kroger appears in the reference section of
So, even though Candy Jones herself may not have been credible to many, the fact that a doctor linked to her claim was actively consulting the FBI in real-life, shows there’s an overlap between alternate forms of medicine and psychoanalysis with the state. If hypnosis was used by the FBI it isn’t a stretch it could be used for military purposes or intelligence reasons.
However, theirs is a possible link to Candy Jones and William S. Kroger considering A) he was medical professional with hypnosis expertise which he conducted and published at reputable universities such as Northwestern, UCLA, etc., and B) A lot of his work dealt with Gynecology – hence, there’s a plausible reason for him to have seen Ms. Jones if she was experiencing female related health issues.
Searching William S. Kroger and Philippines as words in a standard Google Search, I came upon Dr. Kroger in a reference section of the book by Foss, Foss & Domenico (2013), detailing biases against women in regards to gender identity, titled, Gender Stories: Negotiating Identity in a Binary World, in which is Foss, Foss & Domenico (2013) references Eduard Eichner’s (1962), “The Premenstrual Tension Syndrome – Fact or Fancy?” in Psychosomatic Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Endocrinology, edited by William S. Kroger (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1962), p 319.
Foss, Foss, & Domenico (2018), states, “After Dalton named PMS a medical disorder, the diagnosis became popular with physicians and researchers alike to the point that many came to believe that all women suffer from PMS. Physician Eduard Eichner studying what he called premenstrual tension syndrome (PTS), summarized this belief: There is ample evidence that woman in general…experience symptoms of premenstrual tension. Many are not aware they suffer, but their coworkers know and often feel the full effects of irritability and irascibility manifested by the patient. Interpersonal relations are frequently inharmonious, and many domestic tragedies results from PTS” (p. 94).
George Hodel was born October 1, 1907 in LA and died May 16, 1999 in San Francisco. Edward G. Lansdale was born February 6, 1908 in Detroit but grew up in the LA area and died February 23, 1987 in McLean, VA. Both George Hodel and Edward Lansdale spent time in the Philippines in the 1950s. Edward Lansdale before he joined the military was a Los Angeles-area Advertising man that was educated at UCLA. But noted Hypnotherapist William S. Kroger was clinical professor of anesthesiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. However, I’m not making a direct link here, yet, both men’s names will appear in this report with Lansdale having physically served in The Philippines, whereas Kroger, or at least an associate or someone with an interests in his workers, was rumored to have been in The Philippines.
Mitchell Research Group 