Rainbow Farm was something of a watershed for me, the end of the four-year trail trying to manifest a cannabis festival that could rival Woodstock.
The mission had begun with a trip to visit Ken Babbs of the Merry Pranksters. “I’m thinking about calling it the World Hemp Expo Extravaganja,” I said. “That’s great,” said Babbs, “but you should just call it Whee!” That’s when a lot of stuff clicked in my head and I realized the vibe we were really trying to scout was fun, and I endeavored to manifest the world’s most fun festival possible, and I am sure in many people’s minds succeeded. Just ask Fishbone. But I was saddened to see a recent attack on the festival in the Portland Mercury, a savage piece of hippy bigotry posing as humor if ever there was, a piece that failed to mention a single ceremony, much less the amazing birth of a baby. Although it’s true the site was comically packed with people stoned out of their minds, we were used to that vortex from years of producing the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, and referred to the telepathic effect as “entering stonerville.” Whee just had ten times more stoners.
John Sinclair, Dennis Peron, Stephen Gaskin and Paul Krassner did a peace circle with the Rainbow Gypsies early the first day while tents were still going up. Just seeing that circle made the event for me, but there would be dozens more to follow over the weekend, some small, and some immense. I was sure we were well on our way to rebuilding the counterculture and couldn’t imagine the difficulties that lay ahead.
One significant problem was Oregon was infested with meth heads, and that scene carried a ton of bad vibes and rip-offs. The other problem was the owner of the site was way out of tune and had no respect for the Pranksters and no idea who Ken Kesey was on the cosmic scale. But after two festivals, he ended up losing the property, while fighting county officials and local law enforcement the entire time.
The next property owner to volunteer to host my event was Gideon Israel in Washington. But after one Whee, he was also taken down by a local sting operation. Gideon’s festival site was a campground called Rainbow Valley.
I made a plea at the Cannabis Cup for someone brave enough to hold a Whee! festival considering the first two were crushed by the authorities. That’s when I joined forces with Tom and Rollie of Michigan. They were the brave ones who stepped forward, only this time the authorities weren’t just taking the property. First, they had child services take away their son and refused all contact. Although a gay couple, the boy was Rollie’s child and the most important thing in their lives. And after losing the boy, they both lost their minds and decided to go down swinging.
I was in Woodstock when it all went down and had just returned to New York City. While picking up some video tape at B&H, a teller told me a plane had struck the Trade Towers. I noticed the smoke while riding my Honda Hawk across town. But when I got to my office, I was horrified to discover a string of voice messages from Tom and Rollie, the first of which announced their plan to stage a Waco-like event to bring awareness to the benefits of cannabis legalization. But as the messages went on, they became more and more frantic, until it was just Rollie. By that time, I’d already searched online and discovered they were both killed by FBI snipers. The story was already nearly a week old, but virtually nothing had penetrated the national media. And, of course, this was September 11, and a story was unfolding that would wipe Tom and Rollie’s quest for glory from the pages of history.
Fortunately, Dean Kuipers wrote a book about the event, and the book is being made into a major motion picture, so hope remains alive Tom and Rollie’s quest for martyrdom may not have been in vain. This is a difficult subject for me because it accompanied the shock of 9/11 in a massive double whammy. I had a string of people join me on my missions only to wind up in prison for a few years. But now the authorities were taking lives as well as prisoners. For years, I found it impossible to write anything about Rainbow Farm or about 9/11.
The saddest part for me was the Whee! vibe was all based around improvisational fun and peace ceremonies and learning how to foster and spread non-violence.
When I emceed the first circle to be held at Rainbow Farm, Tom came running up to join in and hold hands, an indication he really wanted to participate in peace culture.
Gatewood Galbraith, a trail-blazing attorney from Kentucky, was pushing armed revolution at the time, and may have helped hook Tom up with the spook-infested Michigan Militia, a huge mistake. I will always wonder if I’d been at work that week, would I have been able to talk Tom and Rollie out of this insane plan to create a Pot Waco? Could my participation in some way have prevented their deaths? Had I known what was going on, I would have attempted to mediate a peaceful solution when the stand-off began. I just never got the chance to play that role and it haunts me.
But you can check out that first peace circle at Rainbow Farm on a video from my archives first posted online two years before their deaths.
Long in the shadows of the great European powers, the United States emerged after WWII to command the world’s greatest economic engine centered around her merchants of steel, oil and gunpowder, aka the military-industrial complex.
The smoke of WWI had barely cleared before the Morgan-Rockefeller-DuPont axis began fomenting an even bigger boom-and-bang. Right after the “war to end all wars,” IG Farben was manifested through John Foster Dulles’ magic wand (and some massive Wall Street loans). The company was designed as a European mirror of Standard Oil, which was owned by Dulles’ cousin by marriage, David Rockefeller.
Farben swiftly transformed into the dominant cartel in Europe, as well as Hitler’s biggest booster. Perhaps best remembered for its creation of a petrochemical poison known as Zyklon B (designed originally for insect infestations, and later deployed to exterminate “useless eaters,” i.e. Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, disabled), Farben conducted business with Standard Oil throughout the hostilities.
Although the corporation was split into pieces after the war (much like Standard Oil was divided by anti-trust laws), one of Farben’s divisions now owns Monsanto, leading to speculation on who won the peace.
Elements of the Nazi empire were secretly imported into the USA to construct NASA and the CIA, among other projects. NASA was built on the back of German rocket science and the CIA was built on the back of the Gestapo science, some of which seems to have involved forbidden substances and mass mind control. Despite promises never to engage in operations on native soil, the CIA immediately corrupted our media, banking system and major universities, while launching a mind-control program known as MK/Ultra that mixed hypnosis with LSD in the hopes of creating robot slaves.
In 1963, the CIA asserted their dominance by assassinating President John F. Kennedy while deploying Nazi and MK/Ultra assets during the planning, execution and cover-up. There are numerous dirty secrets held close to the vest, but JFK’s murder remains the CIA’s most worrisome secret, and through the decades they’ve launched a thousand memes to divide, misdirect and confuse anyone attempting to penetrate the truth. This blog concerns one of those memes, a spoof religion called Discordianism.
Meet the founder: Gregory Hill. Aside aside from the name, however, virtually nothing is known and it took decades for the name to emerge because he was known only as Malaclypse the Younger. (And who knows if Greg Hill is a real name anyway.) However, we do know some details on Hill’s sidekick and co-conspirator, Kerry Thornley, who was in boot camp with Lee Harvey Oswald. In hindsight it seems possible Hill’s real bio might contain some link to military intelligence, just as Thornley and Oswald may have been subjected to MK/Ultra experiments. The duo were forever entwined after the assassination. Thornley helped concoct a clever brew of fact and fantasy to create the CIA’s original Tin Foil Hat Patrol, and spread a cloud of chaos over the case, one that has defined the spook-infested world of conspiracy theory. Thornley became an important witness for the Warren Commission, providing evidence Oswald was devoted to the communist cause. You see, it was very important a communist kill Kennedy.
You can tell by the photo Thornley was a flower child influenced by the Beats, Merry Pranksters and Maynard G. Krebs, among others. But after his Warren Commission testimony, he attended at a spook-infested summer camp in Colorado popular with the Koch family, co-founders of the conspiracy-mongering John Birch Society. And upon graduation of that program moved to California to become chummy with Johnny Roselli (one of JFK’s assassins.) Thornley then moved to Atlanta and commenced a long correspondence with Robert Anton Wilson during a time Wilson was letters editor of Playboy magazine, the first and perhaps only national magazine to interview DA Jim Garrison. Garrison was a rare public official with balls enough to go up against the CIA.
Wilson was mesmerized and soon heavily influenced by Thornley’s tales of secret societies secretly running the world, a cosmology that bore similarities to the suddenly popular Morning of the Magicians, a text published in France in 1960, but released in America in 1963.
One online reviewer sums the book up thusly: “Medieval alchemists producing atomic bombs and atomic fusion; the Nazi movement inspired by memory/dreams of Atlantis; the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside; the Moon, Mars and Jupiter and the stars are made of ice; and three Moons have crashed into Earth, producing great evolutionary jumps and de-evolutionary lapses, like “Gypsies, Negroes and Jews.”
Hill and Thornley wrote a similar opus for their goof religion published in the style of an underground fanzine, a confusing mix of parody rituals, little-known Illuminati facts tossed with horror fantasies plucked out of Edward Plunkett and H.P. Lovecraft, who’d invented terrifying tales of monstrous conspiracies at the beginning of the century. Horror fantasy held a magnetic attraction in the LSD-fueled Sixties, and the higher people got, the harder it became to discern facts from fantasies, especially when so many fantasies revolved around the JFK assassination. It seems possible counterintelligence realized the Kennedy assassination could best be concealed by wrapping it inside stories of magic powers and alien visitations to deceive the gullible and lead them into the rabbit holes.
Mae Brussell came from a wealthy family, graduated from Stanford and Berkeley, and her father was a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles. She purchased all volumes of the Warren Commission as soon as available and launched a career as a radio host examining holes in the official story. Her files on the subject became as large as Mary Ferrell’s. Later, her research appeared in Paul Krassner’s Realist, and attracted the attention of John Lennon, who donated money to help publish her book. Much of the work involved Operation Paperclip and the MK/Ultra and Nazi connections to Kennedy’s assassination.
In 1977, after publishing Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson was interviewed in Conspiracy Digest about the JFK assassination, the Illuminati, Aleister Crowley, UFOs and other issues. Brussell wrote a scathing response accusing Wilson, John Lilly and Timothy Leary of being CIA stooges leading the youth into a fake drug-addled utopian fantasy involving space travel. “Ask Leary or Wilson anything practical about today’s miseries and they change the subject,” she wrote.
Wilson responded by denying he was a CIA dupe, insisting he was “a high official of the agency since July 23, 1973.”
One of the primary precepts of Discordianism was never believe anything about anything, and Wilson never wavered from his roll as a Prankster-deceiver. In hindsight, however, most of the nonsense people believe today about the Illuminati has roots in his fantasy trilogy, and his work shows little evidence of scholarly research into the history of the Illuminati. Wilson believed the-eye-in-the-pyramid was an Illuminati invention and ridiculed the suggestion the society could have been a Jesuit penetration of freemasonry.
Actually that is certainly one of many valid possible explanations, not something to be ridiculed. According to Wilson, the Illuminati were “good guys” fighting against royalty and religion, and not some devious intelligence operation deploying ends-justify-the-means morality codes. Wilson introduced the idea that the number 23 was an Illuminati concept (it never was) and usually insisted the society had died out shortly after being founded. He believed Oswald shot Kennedy and Garrison’s investigation was a fraud.
Wilson’s biggest contribution to Discordianism was called Operation Mindfuck or OM, and involved disturbing a person’s reality matrix with some mindblowing conspiracy information and then trailing off into some make-believe maze of confusion. Life as zen koan wherein any sufficiently ambiguous answer works for any question whatsoever. If you ever got really high on psychedelics and had friends fuck with your head, you’ll recognize the sadistic underpinnings of Operation Mindfuck, and how it runs contrary to real investigations into conspiracies.
Within a few years, however, Antony Sutton published a factual book revealing how Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones deploys remarkably similar rituals as the original Illuminati, and the Bonesman have successfully penetrated the upper levels of the CIA, investment banks and military industrial complex. Prescott Bush was a Bonesman and also acted as Hitler’s banker on Wall Street to the point of being chastised for trading with the enemy after the war. The society was created prior to the Civil War by the cousin of the heir of the American opium cartel (Russell & Co.) after visiting Southern Germany, and based off a secret fraternity he’d been inducted into while there. After establishing Bones, he became the biggest financial backer of John Brown, the terrorist who sparked the Civil War’s armed confrontation. No, this is not some Operation Mindfuck going down, just some simple truths that most people have yet to digest.
Brussell, in the meantime, was not up on Sutton’s research. Instead she began making outrageous claims, connecting dots that probably didn’t connect, accusing almost every celebrity death of being orchestrated by the CIA for some nefarious purpose, much the same way every school shooting is instantly branded a fake event by today’s Tin Foil Hat Patrol. Brussell claimed there were immense assassination plots to derail youth culture and even claimed Charles Manson was a Manchurian Candidate under hypnotic control. That was one of her wildest theories, and one that may actually have been true.
However, when Krassner began checking out her evidence for a potential book on Manson, he claimed it didn’t add up. Krassner suffered a paranoid meltdown at his dentist’s office and soon departed the plains of conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, Karl Koch was the son of a right-wing publisher in Germany, and he began rebelling against his dad as a teen. Karl had an early interest in computers as well as a fascination with the Illuminatus! Trilogy, claiming to have read the book 30 times. Karl may have been Wilson’s biggest fan and the two met briefly at a hacker convention. Karl was especially taken with the magic number 23 and seems to have swallowed Wilson’s imaginative suggestion that George Washington could have been assassinated and replaced by Adam Weishaupt, something based solely on a slight resemblance between the two men and the fact the eye-in-the-triangle appears on US currency (even though Weishaupt never used that symbol). Of course it was all OM and Karl got mindfucked.
Despite operating with only a primitive Commodore 64, Karl successfully penetrated a number of military-industrial websites around the world and sold passwords and other information to the KGB to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, a connection established by his cocaine dealers. Most of the money he earned from hacking flowed back into the dealers’ hands. Karl descended into a paranoid cocaine-induced psychosis for a while. Meantime the German authorities offered up a hacker’s amnesty in order to crack the subculture and Karl took the offer, but was soon found in a forest, burnt to a crisp. Strangely, his death was ruled a suicide, but a more likely explanation is the drug dealers killed him in retaliation for going state’s evidence.
In the mid-1960s, there were thousands of kids like me who weren’t quite fitting in. We became noticeable right away when we stopped cutting our hair. In the mid-Sixties males were expected to sport looks straight out of Marine Corps boot camp, so bangs or even ducktails were radical, much less hair over the ears. We skipped school often as possible and got into trouble due to our bad attitude concerning authority. But there was a mecca beckoning to us from across the sea, a heaven-on-earth called Summerhill, a boarding school in England with no grades, no bells, and no rules, run by students, who were allowed to do whatever they pleased all day long. Founded by a psychologist in 1921, the school proved children flourish when provided with tools and access to educational materials, and they learn faster on their own when immersed in subjects over long periods. Today, I realize Summerhill isn’t that far off from home schooling, although in the Sixties few realized home schooling was an option. In case you didn’t know, it’s been proven home schooling works better than traditional schooling.
Suddenly, hundreds of attempts at Summerhill “freedom” schools were launched, some of which survive to this day. Our established school methodology of constantly ringing bells and rotating subjects on the hour seems to have been devised in Germany for the purpose of conditioning youth to happily accept a meager factory environment and always obey authority for the remainder of their lives. Strangely, it seems possible some Summerhill experiments could have been experiments in mind control, which would be the exact opposite of what A.S. Neill had intended.
Bill Ayers was a rich kid in Chicago who attended the Lake Forest Academy before graduating from the University of Michigan in 1968. He joined the SDS in college and upon graduation went straight to The Children’s Community, a recently-created Summerhill-type school in Ann Arbor. Almost immediately, he was named director of this school. His girlfriend Diana Oughton worked there too. She was from an even more privileged upbringing than Ayers, and his upbringing was pretty swank. She’d recently spent a summer in Germany, where she was apparently “radicalized.”
These two swiftly become the leaders of the violent Weather Underground, which has all the markings of a counterintelligence operation designed to destroy the student youth movement by driving it toward violence. And that wasn’t easy to do since the student youth movement was almost universally non-violent at the time. By the late 1960s, this movement had become centered on stopping the war in Vietnam, but it had begun by supporting the Civil Rights movement and the growing realization among the young that racism was a serious problem being overlooked. The freedom school movement of the 1960s was the first large-scale attempt to integrate schools, so the most intense opposition came from racists.
Soon, however, Oughton would blow herself up while fashioning a bomb intended to be set-off at Fort Dix, a shrapnel device designed to murder dozens of cadets and their dates at a social dance. This unplanned explosion in a ritzy Greenwich Village townhouse was the only surfacing of the Weather Underground since they had declared war against America and gone underground. Suppose a group of students today announced war on the United States and started murdering innocent people? How much support would they achieve? Somehow these rich kids from privileged backgrounds joined forces with America’s known enemies in anticipation of a coming Communist revolution they claimed would leave millions murdered or put inside Stalinist concentration camps. It would have been laughable had they not been able to supply so much C4 and automatic weapons to so many psychopaths, or had they not garnered dozens of mind controlled robots, all of whom were gradually reprogrammed during LSD-fueled sex orgies, or had they not generated so many contributions from within the National Lawyers Guild.
What I find interesting is the CIA and FBI were terrified of a rise of a black messiah capable of uniting the Civil Rights and student youth movements. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were both obviously assassinated for this reason, and in the wake of those assassinations, an activist named Fred Hampton emerged in Chicago, someone who created the phrase “rainbow coalition.”
Pretty soon, however, Hampton was assassinated while sleeping in bed, and the next morning Bernadine Dohrn gave press tours of the killing zone while deploying the event as her fulcrum to drive the SDS toward violence as the logical response. Her instant appearance on the scene and manipulation of information that day should be viewed as a possible counterintelligence psyop anointing Dorhn as Hampton’s successor, much the same way Jesse Jackson was anointed immediately after the murder of King.
Dohrn was soon portraying psychopath Charlie Manson as her culture hero, while Ayers was doing the same thing for Sirhan Sirhan. It should be noted Dohrn attended the prestigious University of Chicago and became the first student organizer for the spook-infested National Lawyers Guild.
After Oughton’s death, Ayers and Dorhn became the ruling couple inside the Weather Underground, and they remained in hiding for decades, living in beachfront homes under fake IDs. But after Watergate, when Cointelpro’s illegal activities were unveiled, all records of the Weather Underground’s devious alliances with America’s enemies were suddenly scrubbed from all FBI offices, while Ayers and Dorhn moved swiftly into tenured positions at major universities.
Since every counterculture-leaning grad student with long hair was sacked during the Sixties, it’s hard to fathom how our highly conservative education system would give high-paying salaries and pensions to two admitted terrorists who’d been responsible for dozens of bombings and numerous deaths, several of which involved law enforcement officers. Unless, of course, Ayers and Dohrn were spooks all along, which seems the most logical explanation.
The first casualty of a Weatherman bomb was a police officer in San Francisco named Brian McDonnell. Although they never took credit for the police station bombing that killed McDonnell, the event certainly had all the earmarks of the Weather Underground opening salvo in their insane war against America. One former member of the group, Karen Latimer, had fingered Dohrn as being the ringleader for the bombing, and apparently the San Francisco police came very close to indicting her. Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, this event remains a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over Dohrn’s head.
Strange how Chesa Boudin, the son of convicted cop killers Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, has recently become district attorney for San Francisco, a strategic posting insuring Dohrn, who raised Boudin after his parents were incarcerated, will never be investigated nor charged while Chesa Boudin remains at this post. Chesa’s mother was eventually released and skipped straight into a cushy professorship at Colombia University, just as Dohrn and Ayers scored high-paying university jobs.
Gilbert, however, has not been so lucky and continues to serve his sentence for the failed Brinks truck robbery in 1981 that left two policemen and one security guard dead. Dorhn was living in New York at the time and some former members of the group seem to believe she was involved in this event as well. While in jail for decades, Gilbert devoted his life to proving AIDS was not a government plot, certainly a strange obsession for a radical who was once bent on destroying our system of government. Maybe you know AIDS appeared in New York City and San Francisco shortly after a free vaccination program for gay men inoculated hundreds in those two cities. It would appear that vaccine may have been contaminated with a monkey virus similar to SV-40 that infected the polio vaccine, a story mostly kept out of the national press, although a team of writers in Boston published The Virus and the Vaccine detailing exactly how SV-40 ended up in Jonas Salk’s widespread polio vaccines. Debate about AIDS being either planned or an accident were spreading like wildfire through the prison system so Gilbert wanted all his fellow prisoners to rest assured these stories were complete nonsense, which they obviously are not.
There’s another thread to this story that involves the history of freedom schools in America, as well as my old friend Don Henderson, who was sent to one of the earliest freedom schools in Florida, a school located through Paul Krassner’s Realist magazine.
Paul and Rev. George
“Did you know about Rev. George Von Hilsheimer’s background in military intelligence when you met him?” I once asked Krassner.
“No,” was the terse reply. “I remember I did fund his operations for a while though.”
Shortly after the Realist transformed Krassner into an important influencer and surveyor of the emerging zeitgeist, Krassner was visited by an energetic fellow with aspirations of becoming an influencer for the counterculture generation himself. He’d already established himself as minister in a religion of his own devising when he came up with the idea of establishing an American version of Summerhill and enlisted Krassner’s support.
Interestingly, if you believe what you read on the Internet, Hilsheimer had previously been posted to military intelligence in Berlin. Krassner had recently begun acting as a referral service for women seeking doctors willing to give abortions, so spooks and subpoenas were raining down on him.
Hilsheimer convinced Krassner to fund the school to the tune of around $50 a month, and deployed the magazine to recruit students and staff. His first attempt (Camp Summerlane, Rosman, North Carolina) ended with the entire camp fleeing in terror from gunshots and explosions instigated by the local townspeople, who’d been enraged by rumors of nude swimming in the lake. Or maybe it was the inclusion of one girl who was half-black on the student roster. The town attack took place on July 11, 1963.
There were a few schools through the decades, up and down the East Coast, but in 1973, Hilsheimer was arrested by Volusia County deputy sheriffs and charged with practicing medicine without a license at his Green Valley School for emotionally disturbed children in Orange City, Florida. The charges were dropped after a raid of the property was deemed improper by the state attorney’s office. So Hilsheimer skipped (just like Ayers and Dohrn).
Meanwhile, kids from the school have come forth over the years with tales of hypnosis, forced injections, electroshock, psychic dreaming, sex with adults, rampant drug use and other weirdness…
“The place was supposed to be a school for troubled kids but it was really a dumping ground for kids who were too much trouble to their parents. The place was crazy – drugs, prostitution, spaced-out “teachers” that had sex with some of the kids and / or supplied them with dope – something out of a nightmare. For me, the problem is that there are folk who think Green Valley was some sort of countercultural utopia. Either nobody knew, or they’re not willing to acknowledge, what an insane place it was.” Former student commenting online