The USA by a slim margin votes for Fascism, Rascism, Mysogeny, Hate.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Big Beautiful Disaster
While Trump and Musk hurl insults, democracy dies in the background; this is your wake-up call to stop watching the circus and start fighting for your country.
MeidasTouch Network and Michael Cohen
Jun 7


 

Guest article by Michael Cohen
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Let me tell you something: watching Elon Musk and Donald Trump go at each other is like watching two bloated hyenas fight over a carcass they both dragged into the dust. It’s grotesque, pathetic, and above all, dangerous. You’ve got Trump, the orange autocrat, flailing on Truth Social like a man with too many cheeseburgers and not enough attention. And Elon? A once-lauded innovator now reduced to a dopamine junkie chasing MAGA clout on a platform he ruined just to feel powerful.
And the American people? We’re the saps watching it like it’s must-see TV while the house burns down around us.
This feud isn’t about ideas. It’s not about policy. It’s a battle of malignant narcissism, a grudge match between two egos too big to share the same spotlight. But here’s the real kicker: this public pissing contest is a smokescreen. A distraction. And it’s working. While the media devours every insult and meme like it’s the Zapruder film, the real crimes against democracy are happening in broad daylight—and barely anyone’s paying attention.
Take the migrants. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have gone missing. We’re talking about human beings—some fleeing violence, some seeking asylum, others simply trying to survive. Families torn apart by a deportation policy so cruel it would make the architects of ICE under Trump blush. We’ve got people being dumped in war zones, children vanishing from shelters, and not a whisper of outrage on cable news. Why? Because Musk tweeted an Epstein meme and Trump called him a “broken puppet.”
And let’s not forget the foreign students—kids who believed in the American dream, who came here legally, studied hard, paid tuition, contributed to our economy. Now they’re being rounded up, detained, and expelled. No hearings. No dignity. Just cold, bureaucratic erasure. We’re not just deporting individuals; we’re exporting our own credibility. And for what? To feed a nationalist fantasy that even the GOP can’t explain without tying itself in knots.
Meanwhile, Trump’s latest legislative monstrosity—the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—is a disaster so staggering, even his own allies are sprinting away from it like it’s radioactive. A grotesque buffet of tax giveaways, deregulation, and culture war red meat wrapped in the flag and stamped with “Made in America,” while being written by lobbyists in Qatar and Beijing. It’s a joke. Except the punchline is our future.
Rand Paul calls it a ticking debt bomb. Josh Hawley says it screws working families. And Marjorie Taylor Greene—yes, that Marjorie—called it “a fraud dressed as patriotism.” When the Queen of Conspiracies is suddenly the adult in the room, you know we’re in deep shit.
But instead of examining the implications of all this legislative vandalism, the press is breathlessly tracking Trump and Musk like it’s the Super Bowl of sociopaths. Who tweeted what. Who unfollowed whom. Who’s threatening subpoenas and who’s promising revenge. It’s all noise—weaponized noise—designed to drown out the slow-motion destruction of our democratic institutions.
This isn’t a feud. It’s theater. A stage play in which the two leads hate each other, while the curtain hides the real show: courts stacked with extremists, civil rights gutted by judicial fiat, statehouses passing bills that criminalize dissent, ban books, and rewrite history. It’s Orwell with better marketing.
Our democracy isn’t being stolen in the dead of night; it’s being stripped for parts in front of a cheering crowd at a Bravo Housewives Reunion.
And here’s the worst part: we’re complicit if we keep watching. Every second we waste on Musk’s latest grievance or Trump’s endless persecution complex is a second we’re not fighting for justice, truth, or the survival of our republic.
I know Trump. I know how he thinks. He doesn’t fear Elon Musk. He doesn’t fear the law. He fears irrelevance. He fears being outshined. That’s why this feud is happening. It’s not political; it’s primal. And Elon? He doesn’t care about democracy. He cares about dominance. Twitter. AI. Space. It’s all just a means to feed the ego. These aren’t public servants. They’re gladiators in a colosseum they built to distract you while they rob you blind.
So no, we can’t afford to sit back and treat this Musk vs. Trump slap-fight like it’s WrestleMania. Because while they play heel and face, the American experiment is being dismantled brick by brick.
And if we don’t wake the hell up, we won’t just lose the thread—we’ll lose the whole damn plot.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Trump, Epstein and the Deep State
The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files and videos is done not only to protect Trump, but the ruling class. They all belong to the same club.
Chris Hedges
Jul 12

 


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American Satyricon - by Mr. Fish

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The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of, and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure.
The list of those who were in Epstein’s orbit is a who’s who of the rich and famous. They include not only Trump, but Bill Clinton, who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director Bill Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who reveled in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.
They also include law firms and high-priced attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, private investigators, personal assistants, publicists, servants and drivers. They include the numerous procurers and pimps, including Epstein’s girlfriend and daughter of Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell. They include the media and politicians who ruthlessly discredited and silenced the victims, and strong armed anyone, including a handful of intrepid reporters, seeking to expose Epstein’s crimes and circle of accomplices.
There is a lot that remains hidden. But there are some things we know. Epstein installed hidden cameras in his opulent residences and on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, to capture his high-powered friends engaging in sexual romps and abuse of teenage and underage girls and boys. The recordings were blackmail gold. Were they part of an intelligence operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad? Or were they used to ensure that Epstein had a steady source of investors who funneled him millions of dollars to avoid being outed? Or were they used for both? He shuttled underage girls between New York and Palm Beach on his private jet the Lolita Express, which was allegedly outfitted with a bed for group sex. His coterie of famous friends, including Clinton and Trump, are recorded as traveling on the jet numerous tiomes on released flight logs, although many other flight logs have disappeared.
Epstein’s videos are in the vaults of the FBI, along with detailed evidence that would rip back the veil on the sexual proclivities and callousness of the powerful. I doubt there is a client list, as Attorney General Pam Bondi claims. There is also no single Epstein file. The investigative material amassed on Epstein fills many, many boxes, which would bury Bondi’s desk and probably, if collected in one room, dominate most of the space in her office.
Did Epstein commit suicide, as the official autopsy report claims, by hanging himself in his jail cell on August 10, 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City? Or was he murdered? Since the cameras recording activity in his cell the night were not functional, we do not know. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother, who served as the chief medical examiner for New York City and who was present at the autopsy, said he believes Epstein's autopsy suggests homicide.
The Epstein case is important because it implodes the fiction of deep divisions between Democrats, who had no more interest in releasing the Epstein files than Trump, and the Republicans. They belong to the same club. It exposes how the courts and law enforcement agencies collude to shield powerful figures who engage in crimes. It lays bare the depravity of our exhibitionist ruling class, accountable to no one, free to violate, plunder, loot and prey on the weak and the vulnerable. It is the tawdry record of our oligarchic masters, those who lack the capacity for shame or guilt, whether dressed up as Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
This class of ruling parasites was parodied in the first-century satirical novel “Satyricon” by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, written during the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. As in Satyricon, Epstein’s circle was dominated by pseudointellectuals, pretentious buffoons, grifters, con artists, petty criminals, the insatiable rich and the sexually depraved. Epstein and his inner circle routinely engaged in sexual perversions of Petronian proportions, as The Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown, whose dogged reporting was largely responsible for reopening the federal investigation in Epstein and Maxwell, documents in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”
As Brown writes, in 2016 an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym “Kate Johnson,” filed a civil complaint in a federal court in California alleging she was raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period, from June to September 1994.
“I loudly pleaded with Trump to stop,” she said in the lawsuit about being raped. “Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.”
Brown continues:

Johnson said that Epstein invited her to a series of ‘underage sex parties’ at his New York mansion where she met Trump. Enticed by promises of money and modeling opportunities, Johnson said she was forced to have sex with Trump several times, including once with another girl, twelve years old, whom she labeled ‘Marie Doe.’
Trump demanded oral sex, the lawsuit said, and afterward he “pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the ‘poor’ quality of the sexual performance,” according to the lawsuit, filed April 26 in U.S. District Court in Central California.
Afterward, when Epstein learned that Trump had taken Johnson’s virginity, Epstein allegedly ‘attempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,’ angry he had not been the one to take her virginity. Johnson claimed that both men threatened to harm her, and her family if she ever revealed what had happened.

The lawsuit states that Trump did not take part in Epstein’s orgies but liked to watch, often while the thirteen-year-old “Kate Johnson” gave him a hand job.
It appears Trump was able to quash the lawsuit by buying her silence. She has since disappeared.
In 2008, Alex Acosta, who at the time was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, negotiated a plea deal for Epstein. The deal granted immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein, four named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” The agreement shut down the FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful figures who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes. It halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. Trump, in what many consider an act of gratitude, appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor in his first term.

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Trump contemplated pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell after she was arrested in July 2020, fearing she would reveal details of his decades-long friendship with Epstein, according to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In July 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
“Jeffrey Epstein’s closest relationship in life was with Donald Trump…these were two guys joined at the hip for a good 15 years. They did everything together,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast. “And this is from sharing, pursuing women, hunting women, sharing at least one girlfriend for at least a year in this kind of rich-guy relationship with each other’s planes, to Epstein advising Trump on how to cheat on his taxes.”
The legal anomalies, including the disappearance of massive amounts of evidence incriminating Epstein, saw Epstein avoid federal sex-trafficking charges in 2007, when his attorneys negotiated the secret plea deal with Acosta. He was able to plead guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.
The prominent men accused of engaging in Epstein’s carnival of pedophilia, including Epstein’s attorney Dershowitz, viciously threaten anyone who seeks to expose them. Dershowitz, for example, claims that an investigation which he has refused to make public, by the former FBI director Louis Freeh, proves he had never had sex with Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked at 17 to Prince Andrew. Giuffre, one of the few victims to publicly take on her abusers, said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among Epstein and Maxwell’s friends, until at the age of 19 when she escaped. She “committed suicide” in April 2025. Dershowitz has sent repeated threats to Brown and her editors at The Miami Herald.
Brown continues:

[Dershowitz] kept referring to information that was contained in sealed documents. He accused the newspaper of not reporting “facts” that he said were in those sealed documents. The truth is, I tried to explain, newspapers just can’t write about things because Alan Dershowitz says they exist. We need to see them. We need to verify them. Then, because I said “show me the material,” he publicly accused me of committing a criminal act by asking him to produce documents that were under court seal.
This is the way Dershowitz operates.
What disturbs me the most about Dershowitz is the way that the media, with few exceptions, fails to critically challenge him. Journalists fact-checked Donald Trump and others in his administration almost every day, yet, for the most part, the media seems to give Dershowitz a pass on the Epstein story.
In 2015, when Giuffre’s allegations first became public, Dershowitz went on every television program imaginable swearing, among other things, that Epstein’s plane logs would exonerate him. “How do you know that?” he was asked.
He replied that he was never on Epstein’s plane during the time that Virginia was involved with Epstein.
But if the media had checked, they could have learned that he was indeed a passenger on the plane during that time period, according to the logs.
Then he testified, in a sworn deposition, that he never went on any plane trips without his wife. But he was listed on those passage manifests as traveling multiple times without his wife. During at least one trip, he was on the plane with a model named Tatiana.

Epstein donated money to Harvard and was made a visiting fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, although he had no academic qualifications in the field. He was given a key card and pass code, as well as an office in the building that housed Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He referred to himself in his press releases as “Science Philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Education activist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Evolutionary Jeffrey Epstein,” “Science patron Jeffrey Epstein” and “Maverick hedge funder Jeffrey Epstein.”
Epstein, replicating the pretensions and vacuity of the characters who were parodied in the “Dinner with Trimalchio” chapter of Satyricon, organized elaborate dinner gatherings for his billionaire friends, including Elon Musk, Salar Kamangar and Jeff Bezos. He dreamed up bizarre schemes of social engineering, including a plan to seed the human species with his own DNA by creating a baby compound at his sprawling ranch in New Mexico.
“Epstein was also obsessed with cryonics, the transhumanist philosophy whose followers believe that people can be replicated or brought back to life after they are frozen,” Brown writes. “Epstein apparently told some of the members of his scientific circle that he wanted to inseminate women with his sperm for them to give birth to his babies, and that he wanted his head and his penis frozen.”
The Epstein story is a window into the moral bankruptcy, hedonism and greed of the ruling class. This crosses political lines. It is the common denominator between Democratic politicians, such as Bill Clinton, philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, the billionaire class, and Trump. They are one class of predators and grifters. It is not only girls and women they exploit, but all of us.

[Peter Lemkin]

Saboteurs working for U.S. intelligence agencies created violent cult-like groups in the 1970s, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which helped marginalize the political left
[This article follows CovertAction Magazine’s efforts to inform younger generations on the sordid history of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies.—Editors]
Today’s bleak political landscape, with two essentially right-wing parties and no effective political opposition, has its roots in the McCarthy-era and Cold War FBI counter-intelligence operations (COINTELPRO) whose purpose was to infiltrate and destroy the political left.
One of the tactics adopted under COINTELPRO was to infiltrate left-wing parties and groups—like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—in order to foment divisions within them and internecine conflict.
Agent provocateurs were planted who would adopt extremist positions and promote violent and counter-productive protest activities or initiatives that would alienate the public and destroy the credibility of legitimate protest movements.
Further, U.S. intelligence agencies created violent cult-like groups that adopted leftist rhetoric while carrying out criminal activities in order to further provide the state with a pretext to expand police powers.
Brad Schreiber’s book, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA offers important insights into the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical California-based group in the 1970s which kidnapped Patty Hearst, heiress of the wealthy Hearst family, and went on a crime spree that helped to turn off the public from left-wing causes.
[Source: bol.com]
Schreiber shows that the founder of the SLA, Donald DeFreeze (aka Field Marshal Cinque[1]), was a government agent who had been subjected to behavior modification and programming under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA at the California medical facility at Vacaville in the 1970s.[2]
Receiving funds from the CIA’s Operation Chaos, an illegal domestic spying operation, and the Stanford Research Institute (which was CIA connected), Vacaville was a veritable “house of horrors.” Psychosurgeries, electroshock and lobotomies were performed and the CIA carried out medical experiments with drugs on inmates and placed them for periods in isolation.[3]
A petty criminal from Cleveland, Ohio, who had abandoned his wife and six children, DeFreeze was placed in Vacaville after having served as a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) informant. Recruited by LAPD “red squad” officer Ronald G. Farwell, DeFreeze’s job had been to sell guns to the Black Panthers in order to set them up for arrest and to fuel violence among different factions of the Panthers.[4]
While at Vacaville, DeFreeze was befriended by Colston Westbrook, an African-American linguist who oversaw the Black Cultural Association (BCA) at the prison, a cover for an experimental project to explore the extent to which unstable or susceptible prisoners could be controlled for the purpose of infiltration of Bay Area radical groups.[5]
Westbrook was officially named “outside guest coordinator” of the BCA and his cover was as a teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley’s Afro-American Studies Department specializing in Black linguistics.[6]
Donald DeFreeze [Source: wikiwand.com]
Colston Westbrook [Source: aaregistry.com]
Prior to his work in the California prison system, Westbrook had been an adviser to the Korean CIA and worked in Vietnam during the war for Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), a private contracting firm that provided cover for the CIA’s Phoenix Program.[7]
The latter was an intelligence operation by which the CIA identified “subversives” and worked with local intelligence agents to kidnap, arrest, torture and often kill them.[8]
The behavior modification programs at Vacaville were supported by California Governor Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of Health, Dr. Earl Brian, and counter-insurgency adviser William Herrmann, who were intent on destroying the 1960s-era protest movements and New Left and conceived of mind-control initiatives as a mechanism of social control.[9]
[Source: wsj.com]
Both Brian and Herrmann, a psychological operations expert in Vietnam and Cambodia who crossed paths in Indochina with Westbrook and then enlisted him to work at Vacaville, had CIA connections.
Brian set up a company that stole sophisticated computer software from a private company, INSLAW, that was used by the CIA for surveillance and money-laundering purposes. He was also with Herrmann a key figure in the “October Surprise,” an illegal operation to subvert the hostage negotiations of the Carter administration to help Reagan get elected president in 1980.[10]
Dr. Earl Brian [Source: thrfuneralhome.com]
William Herrmann [Source: legacy.com]
In return for his collaboration with Westbrook, DeFreeze received special privileges at Vacaville, including conjugal visits, even though he was not married.[11]
One of the women who visited him was Patty Hearst, whose grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, had been a media mogul known for promotion of yellow journalism in support of foreign wars.
William Randolph Hearst [Source: hearstfdn.org]
Officially, the BCA had existed to allow Black prisoners to air their frustration with sympathetic young whites, though the interchange with white leftists enabled Westbrook and his guinea pig, DeFreeze, to establish contacts with them with the secret intention of manipulating them and recruiting them into the SLA.[12]
What horrors have gone on there? [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Many of the white leftists allowed in were Maoists and former members of the radical Venceremos organization, which supported the Cuban Revolution. Willie Wolfe, a founder of the SLA, became invested in the BCA while writing a term paper on it for an Afro-American Studies class at UC Berkeley that was taught by Westbrook.
Willie Wolfe [Source: alchetron.com]
DeFreeze was never himself radical politically, but an opportunist who, in researcher Mae Brussell’s words, was “mechanized and roboticized by the CIA and other agencies.”[13]
DeFreeze told a fellow inmate of his plan for when he was released from prison, to “get a revolutionary group to kidnap some rich person…hold the person tied up in a dark place, keep him/her frightened and in fear for his/her life, then give him some mescaline and other drugs, and the person would become a robot and do anything he/she was asked to do—including killing others.”[14]
This is basically what he did with the SLA and Patty Hearst, though Hearst never killed anyone. Schreiber points out that the way DeFreeze treated Hearst was what he had learned from his experience at Vacaville. The approach was to use isolation, psychological threats, physical abuse, and alleged dosing of Hearst with hallucinogenic drugs to program and brainwash her.[15]
Poster issued by the Symbionese Liberation Army showing Patricia “Patty” Hearst, as “Tania,” holding a machine gun. [Source: apnews.com]
The SLA emerged at a time when the 1960s movements were on the wane because of the ending of the Vietnam War. The main student-based anti-war organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had already splintered after its name was appropriated by the violent Weather Underground faction.
Weather Underground set to cause mayhem in the streets of Chicago during “Days of Rage,” in 1969. [Source: vox.com]
Many Bay Area leftists sensed that DeFreeze was a provocateur because he “came on too heavy,” according to Schreiber.[16]
The SLA never adopted any constructive programs for social change or tried to build a base among the masses. Instead they would rob local businesses they accused of supporting “fascist” governments like Portugal, South Africa, Chile and Israel, and disseminated radical literature and communiqués, which used slang like “pigs” [euphemism for cops].[17]
1974 FBI wanted poster featuring SLA members and Patty Hearst. [Source: nypost.com]
On November 6, 1973, SLA members assassinated Dr. Marcus Foster, the African-American superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District, and shot and badly wounded Robert Blackburn, his white deputy superintendent.[18]
In a communiqué, the SLA accused Dr. Foster of trying to create a political police force in Oakland schools, of compiling bio-dossiers through a youth identification program, and of building files for a computer database.
Schreiber says that these accusations were patently false and that Foster was a good man who had taken bold steps to improve the education of non-white children, not deprive them of their privacy or rights.
Backing away from an ID card program, he had responded to violence in the schools by working to try to integrate police, and the juvenile court system, and by hiring “peace officers” and “safety coordinators in select schools” in a plan that had wide community approval.[19]
The SLA’s Foster communiqué released after his killing included the false claim that Foster and Blackburn represented “the rich ruling class and big business and not the children and youth of our community.”[20]
According to Schreiber, Westbrook had fed misinformation to DeFreeze about Foster and convinced SLA members that Foster was intent on increasing police and surveillance powers over students and criminalizing Black youth.[21]
Marcus Foster with school children in Oakland. [Source: edsource.org]
Westbrook was ultimately the mastermind of Foster’s brutal murder, whose intent was to discredit the Bay Area left by associating it with a heinous act.
The editors of the Bay Area countercultural Ramparts magazine put into print what many radicals were privately saying, namely “the act itself [Foster murder] was so brutal, so morally unjustifiable, and so politically incomprehensible that most Bay Area radicals assumed the SLA to be a cover for some right-wing or police group.”[22] Which indeed it was.
After Patty Hearst was kidnapped, the SLA got her father, William Randolph Hearst Jr.,[23] to donate several million dollars to help feed the poor in a publicity stunt that burnished the SLA’s reputation as a “Robin Hood.”[24]
Hearst was brainwashed into participating in a bank robbery at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco and other criminal acts with SLA members, some of whom she claimed raped her while she was in captivity. During this latter period, Hearst took on the nom de guerre “Tania” after the nickname for Tamara Bunke, an Argentine-born East German revolutionary and Che Guevara’s lover, and boasted about being an “urban guerrilla.”
In 1976, Hearst was convicted in federal court on bank robbery charges and sentenced to 35 years in prison, though her sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter, and she was pardoned by Bill Clinton.[25] Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton pronounced Hearst a “classic case which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war.”
Heiress Patty Hearst accompanied by federal marshals after her sentencing on bank robbery charges in April 1976. [Source: apnews.com]
Patricia Soltysik [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
The SLA met its fiery end in May 1974 when, on live TV, the LAPD shot up a house where many of its members were holed up after SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were arrested for shoplifting.[26] Nancy Ling Perry, Patricia Soltysik and Camilla Hall were executed by gunshot wounds and Angela Atwood and Willie Wolfe died from smoke inhalation after the LAPD shot tear gas canisters and pyrotechnic grenades into the home and stopped the fire department from putting out the fire it had ignited.[27]
DeFreeze was said to have committed suicide by shooting himself in the head; however, an investigation that analyzed the ballistics found he was shot by someone outside the house.[28]
Camilla Hall, with hand raised, in 1973. [Source: nypost.com]
A report by a Las Vegas private investigator hired by Willie Wolfe’s father found the LAPD at fault for failing to try to negotiate the SLA’s surrender, and that the LAPD began firing into the home without provocation after a false rumor was spread that the SLA had killed an LAPD officer.
[Source: sfchronicle.com]
The LAPD fired more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition into the house when the SLA fired only a small fraction of that total at them.[29] Nancy Ling Perry was said to have been shot to death after she fired at police, though her body was found ten feet away from the back of the house shot in the back, with no weapon near her.[30]
Nancy Ling Perry [Source: alchetron.com]
Despite the passing of a half century, the story of the SLA continues to intrigue the public and remains significant.[31]
Among other things, it helps illuminate the “strategy of tension” adopted by U.S. intelligence agencies, working on behalf of plutocratic elites, that helped to radically transform the U.S. political trajectory in the wake of the 1960s-era social movements.
Bruce Franklin, who was fired from his position as an English professor at Stanford University for involvement in political activism, was among those to identify the SLA as a “counter-revolutionary organization” likely created by agents provocateurs.
Franklin said in the late 1970s that the SLA did “a great deal of damage to the [1960s] revolutionary movement and played into the hands of the most reactionary forces in the United States today.”[32]
Professor H. Bruce Franklin in 1975. Teaching at Rutgers after being fired from Stanford, Franklin went on to a distinguished career as a literary critic and author of books critical of U.S. foreign policy and about political culture. [Source: nytimes.com]
Almost 50 years later, Franklin’s comments resonate because the reactionary forces that were intent on destroying the 1960s New Left are firmly in power and control both major political parties.
To understand where we are today, it is important to study history and see the dark forces at work that continue to corrupt our body politick, using some of the same sinister methods as in the time of the SLA.

---

1. DeFreeze was given the name Cinque by Colston Westbrook. Joseph Cinqué was the Americanized name of a Mende chief who, in 1839, organized a slave revolt on the Spanish ship La Amistad. After a trial in New Haven that freed the captives, Cinqué actually returned to Africa and enslaved and traded members of his own race. According to researcher Mae Brussell, DeFreeze had a double named Bernard Keaton, which was indicative of him being an intelligence asset. ↑
   
   
2. The California medical facility at Vacaville was run by the California Department of Corrections. ↑
   
   
3. Brad Schreiber, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA (New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2016), 35, 36, 43, 46, 56. Prisoners reported being turned into zombies by the drugs administered at Vacaville under MK-ULTRA. Willie Wolfe wrote to his mother that “terrifying drug treatments” were used at Vacaville to “vegetable-ize those who are troublesome in their political fervor.” ↑
   
   
4. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 14. DeFreeze worked with Ron Karenga, another police informant with the US Organization, a rival organization to the Black Panthers. Karenga’s job was to create a gang war between US and the Panthers. ↑
   
   
5. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 42. ↑
   
   
6. Idem. Schreiber notes that Westbrook’s “encouragement of black prisoners to talk about their experiences and identities, coupled with his outsized personality, helped him initially gain the trust of many inmates at Vacaville.” According to Wikipedia, Westbrook pursued a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in linguistics and taught in the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies. He later served as dean of students at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California, from 1978 until 1989, and established his own educational consulting company, Minority Consultants, in Berkeley, which assisted African immigrants and African-Americans to educate mainstream society about how African-Americans learn, and to assist immigrants in adjusting to American society. ↑
   
   
7. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 40. Westbrook also worked for the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, which had CIA connections, and was an adviser to Cambodian leader Lon Nol, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup in 1970 and acquiesced to a massive U.S. bombing campaign that devastated Cambodia. PA&E built the interrogation-torture centers used in Phoenix known as Province Interrogation Centers (PICs). Westbrook’s job likely was to help run the PICs and work with South Vietnam’s police special branch under Phoenix. Additional aspects of Westbrook’s CIA career are detailed in Mae Brussell, “The SLA Is the CIA,” The Realist, February 1974. ↑
   
   
8. See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990). ↑
   
   
9. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 38. ↑
   
   
10. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 38. According to Schreiber, Herrmann was a counterintelligence expert for Systems Development Corporation, which designed, integrated and tested complex computer systems for military application. Herrmann additionally worked with the Stanford Research Institute, the RAND Corporation and the Hoover Center on Violence. California Attorney General, Evelle Younger, also had a background in military intelligence. ↑
    
    
11. According to Schreiber, DeFreeze also received the privilege of dealing marijuana for one of the officers at Vacaville. The split was: thirty percent for DeFreeze and seventy percent for the corrections officer. DeFreeze further had sexual relations in the prison with Patricia Soltysik (aka “Mizmoon”) and Nancy Ling Perry who became part of the SLA. Many white radicals in the New Left were sexually attracted to Black outlaws. Sexy women were also deliberately brought in by Westbrook to attract people to the BCA and SLA. ↑
    
    
12. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 46. ↑
    
    
13. Mae Brussell, “The SLA Is the CIA,” The Realist, February 1974. Brussell wrote that DeFreeze was “a pathetic example of the way our society uses black males in its sadistic, imperialistic greed.” ↑
    
    
14. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 36. Hearst appears to have been apolitical before being taken into captivity by the SLA. Her then fiancee Steve Weed told journalist Roger Rapoport that “once when they were together, Hearst had “brazenly stormed through a United Farm Workers picket line at a Safeway supermarket, calling the protesters ‘miserable … migrant people’ and a series of expletives.” At the time, Weed said, she had little interest in the women’s movement, and she regarded her father’s concern and support for impoverished Latinos living in San Francisco’s Mission District with a mixture of distrust, amusement and disdain. ↑
    
    
15. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 42. ↑
    
    
16. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 96. Tellingly, in March 1974, according to Mae Brussell, a prisoner in Soledad Prison was offered a chance to “escape” by three prison officials if he would “join the SLA army.” Brussell asks: “How did the police and prison personnel know where the SLA was? Why would they want to ‘help’ them recruit more troops—except to link the terrorists later on with prison escapees?” ↑
    
    
17. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 100. At one point, Sarah Jane Moore, who had worked as an FBI informant, joined the SLA after working in the Hearst run breakfast program. Moore later tried to assassinate Gerald Ford in what some observers see as a “deep state” plot to install Nelson Rockefeller and/or George H.W. Bush as president. See Victor Thorn, New World Order Assassins (Washington, D.C. The American Free Press, 2011), 160. ↑
    
    
18. On January 10, 1974, SLA members Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, a Vietnam veteran, were arrested and then charged and convicted for Foster’s killing and given life sentences. Seven years later, on June 5, 1981, Little’s conviction was overturned by the California Courts of Appeal. He was later acquitted in a retrial in Monterey County. Remiro remains incarcerated; his eleven parole requests having been rejected. Little said later that Patricia Soltysik shot Foster, and Nancy Ling Perry shot Blackburn, aided by DeFreeze. ↑
    
    
19. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 104. ↑
    
    
20. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 106. ↑
    
    
21. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 105. Westbrook had called Foster a fascist. Schreiber concluded that DeFreeze was ordered to kill Foster by Westbrook. ↑
    
    
22. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 107. ↑
    
    
23. William Randolph Hearst Sr. was a famous media tycoon in the early 1900s who built the Hearst castle in San Luis Obispo, California. ↑
    
    
24. The Hearst kidnapping dominated TV and news media coverage for 18 months. ↑
    
    
25. Hearst claimed in her own memoirs that did what she had to do while in SLA captivity to survive. She went on to become a mother, grandmother, philanthropist, actress, novelist and kennel club competition winner. She was never again active in social justice struggles or politics. ↑
    
    
26. Mae Brussell pointed out that the Harrises and Angela Atwood had worked together as a “mod squad” narc team for the Indiana State Police intelligence division, raising questions if they were also agents provocateurs or undercover informants and as to whether the shoplifting arrest was a set-up to trigger the destruction of the SLA. Harris’s military ID, significantly, was found in the ashes of the burned house. Atwood and Emily Harris had been trained at the Indiana University School of International Affairs, which Brussell calls a “CIA think tank.” Brussell wrote that “Joseph Remiro and Nancy Ling Perry, important to the SLA for military tactics and cover-story rhetoric, were dependent upon drugs. Both were political conservatives with a ‘kill-a-commie-for-Christ’ background. Their transition into ‘radicals’ could have been assisted by the same chemical and psychological controls our intelligence agencies are using and experimenting with daily.” See Mae Brussell, “Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnapped,” in The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America, ed. Alex Constantine, with introduction by Paul Krassner (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014). ↑
    
    
27. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 173, 178. A TV station had footage of the LAPD stopping fire trucks that arrived at the scene. When a Fire Captain demanded to cross LAPD lines to fight the fire, the LAPD threatened him with arrest. A neighbor heard an LAPD officer shout to fire units over bullhorns: “Stop! Don’t come in here! Let it burn.” Nancy Ling Perry was executed while running from the burning house. Patty Hearst had called Willie Wolf “the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.” ↑
    
    
28. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 173. The bullet that killed DeFreeze was not from the .38 found under his dead body. It was a non-regulation steel-jacketed projectile of World War II type, which was not the kind normally used by the LAPD. Dr. Ronald Taylor, Director of the Forensic Science Laboratory at the LA Coroner’s Office, and Dr. Vincent Guitan, his scientific consultant who was a chemistry professor at UC Irvine, carried out the investigation and said that they learned most of their information from within the LAPD.
    
    
29. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 173. ↑
    
    
30. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 178. ↑
    
    
31. The story was kept alive in the 1980s when Hearst published her memoirs and Elia Kazan’s son, Nicholas, produced a Hollywood film Patty Hearst (1988), which failed of course to address how the CIA was behind the creation of the SLA. The Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers published articles on the 50th anniversary of Hearst’s kidnapping that also made no mention of the findings of Shreiber’s book. ↑
    
    
32. Schreiber, Revolution’s End, 156. ↑
    
    

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