THE THOUGHTCRIME TOUR
On May 19, 2011, Richard was finished with his parole and a free man. Less than 48 hours after his probation ended, Richard was on the road. He had been carefully working on a plan for months to do a coast-to-coast tour, staging a one-man peaceful protest in every state. After some debate, Richard decided that instead of relaunching his Phantom Patriot persona, he would create a new one. He invented a new costumed character named Thoughtcrime.
Richard viewed the tour as a chance to see America through his eyes, express his First Amendment rights and hopefully draw attention to a variety of issues—“TSA fascism,” Masonry, the false flag attacks of 9/11, the country music industry’s brainwashing tactics, the New World Order and their agenda, and of course, President Obama’s Reptilian bloodline.
The Thoughtcrime persona was a tribute to George Orwell’s classic tale of warning, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that dystopian tale, people are hunted by the Thought Police for entertaining ideas that would potentially be dangerous to the government—thoughtcrime.
Richard’s Thoughtcrime costume sported a long-sleeved shirt with a message scrolling down each sleeve. The left arm has an angry red circle with a slash through it above the word “POLITICS” and the right sleeve matches with the word “RELIGION.” The chest bears the Thoughtcrime logo—a smiley face with an exclamation point floating above it. For accessories, he has a large red belt that reads “Freedom,” red goggles, and a cap that reads “Thoughtcrime.” He also added a backpack to stash his gear in with a Bohemian Club owl symbol on it next to the words “I survived Bohemian Grove.” The look, with all of its labeling, is like an out-of-control editorial cartoon.
“It’s ironic and ‘subversive’ without being creepy, like the Phantom Patriot costume. The prison stripes are an obvious reference to my past incarceration. If the media decides to acknowledge my existence, this subject will come up,” Richard told me. “Now they’ve ‘painted themselves into a corner.’”
Every decent superhero needs a vehicle, and so Richard bought a 2008 Chevy HHR panel minivan to serve as his Thoughtcrimemobile. He outfitted it with magnetic signs to display messages like “Freedom is the Right to Tell People What They Don’t Want to Hear—George Orwell” and a detachable delivery-driver-style sign that lit up that read “Dare to Commit Thoughtcrime.” With that out of the way, Richard began to try to figure out the logistics of his journey and told me about his considerations in a letter:
I’m still hammering out my itinerary for the “Thoughtcrime Tour.” There are a ton of things to consider. How much money am I willing to spend? How long am I ready to be unemployed and functionally homeless? When will I decide that the tour is finished and where will I choose to live after that?
I have a decent inheritance and a small income from investments; so I’ll be OK financially (if the economy and stock market don’t completely collapse). I spent most of the summer of 2001 on the road (with an R.V.). I wouldn’t live that long in an R.V. again. It gets tiresome and claustrophobic. They are a bitch to drive in urban areas, and they suck gas like a Sherman tank.
I will start in San Francisco and slowly make my way across the country, toward the East Coast, traveling in a north/south zig-zag pattern and probably ending up somewhere in Florida.
I’ve decided to make tentative plans for all 48 states… This will probably be my “last run” before I ‘retire.’ Each stop will take 1–2 days. I will keep you updated with an e-mail (and maybe a picture) every few days. I should be in ‘your neck of the woods’ in late July or early August.
Before he departed, Richard wanted me to do him a favor: get him in touch with an unusual subculture of people I had become somewhat of an expert on—the Real-Life Superheroes (RLSH).
BEFORE RICHARD WENT TO PRISON, there weren’t a lot of examples of “Real-Life Superheroes.” He had read How to Be a Superhero, the self-published guide written by the mysterious “Night Rider” in 1980, and there were a few random examples—he was aware of a mysterious costumed and charitable stuntman, the Human Fly, who gained notoriety in the 1970s and had his own Marvel comic book before fading into obscurity. He had read an article about Angle Grinder Man, a British man who had snapped after getting a parking violation “boot” on his car one too many times and ran around England in a costume, sawing the boots off of clamped vehicles in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Starting in 2005, and expanding rapidly during the next few years, hundreds of people began adopting their costumed personas in what is described as a “movement” or “subculture” of “Real-Life Superheroes.”
Some RLSH have attempted crime-fighting, but many more RLSH have a tame humanitarian focus, like handing out food and supplies to homeless people, organizing charity events, or bringing attention to an activist cause. I’ve sometimes described them as “altruistic performance artists.”
Richard wasn’t amazed. His opinion was a love/hate cycle that indicated he wanted to be included in the movement but was also harshly critical of the typical RLSH.
“Unfortunately, it’s kind of sad to see how some of these guys have dumbed down and homogenized the superhero concept,” Richard wrote me. “I accepted the possibility that the Bohemian Grove mission would probably end in my arrest, maybe even my death. I was prepared to make that sacrifice. Would (these RLSH) be willing to do the same? Since when does handing out sandwiches and toilet paper to crackheads, while wearing ‘distinctive clothing’ make someone a superhero? Doesn’t the Salvation Army do that every day without special recognition? If you want to impress me, earn the costume by going after some real criminals.”
Despite this, Richard did make attempts to contact a few of the RLSH, particularly ones he saw in a leadership role, like Chaim Lazarus a.k.a. Life, who helped found an organization called Superheroes Anonymous. His attempts, to his disappointment, were unread or ignored.
When Richard’s initial attempts to get involved with the RLSH movement were shunned, he dubbed himself “the black sheep of the RLSH movement.” But now the long road ahead must have looked lonely to Richard, because he decided it was time to make a second attempt to try to contact some of his fellow superheroes, hoping to find some boots on the ground that would join him in his protests.
At the time, there was an active RLSH Internet forum at therlsh.net that I was signed up for and checked regularly while working on Heroes in the Night. Richard asked me if I would post a message he had handwritten and sent to me, titled “My Open Letter to all RLSHs,” on his behalf. I posted the letter along with a couple of paragraphs explaining who Richard was on a private section of the forum.
“Generally speaking, much of what you have read and heard about me, on the Internet, has been intentionally exaggerated by the Government-controlled media, to make me sound like a domestic terrorist,” Richard explained to them in his letter. “Other reports took the opposite approach and characterized me as a moron. I assure you that I am neither.”
Richard also included several rules for RLSH potentially meeting up with him for a protest, a list of eight demands that instructed the RLSH to make their protest signs, leave weapons at home, do their conspiracy research and that “any occult/reptilian/owl-themed RLSHs should respectfully sit this one out… it’s nothing personal. I just don’t want to send a mixed message.”
Although he would later make some inroads in the RLSH community, initial reaction to Richard and his call for help on the message board was mostly bewildered, contemptuous, and unsupportive. Many RLSH comments said that they thought he was crazy and didn’t want to be associated with him. A couple of people, like Razorhawk of the Minneapolis area, expressed an interest in his ideas and a willingness to meet him. He had already talked with other people about the Bohemian Grove in the past.
“I know a lot of people believe this (Bohemian Grove theory), and I think some strange things, so I can’t go into it thinking there’s something wrong with him,” the diplomatic Razorhawk later told me in a phone call. “I think the community rejected meeting him because here was a guy with a criminal record, who had been arrested going after conspiracy theories,” Razorhawk says. “Second, here is a guy who still has a conspiracy theory. And unless they are into conspiracy theories, or sometimes if they are but not the same ones, they don’t want to be involved with people with theories that don’t jive with their own.”
Razorhawk added that Richard’s record didn’t deter him. “He had done his time, and I don’t think it’s proper to be against someone because of that, he paid his debt.”
As comments continued to pile on the “My Open Letter to all RLSHs” thread, one RLSH pointed out to fellow hero Knight Owl that his occult owl imagery barred him from showing up at the Thoughtcrime protests.
An EMT and firefighter, Knight Owl responded with a post that joked:
“Isn’t he an arsonist? Maybe I should show up in a firefighter uniform!” Others viewed Richard as a potentially unstable threat. Zero, one of the founders of the New York Initiative, responded, “If we go, we’ll be making it very clear that we’re there to keep our eye on him, not to join him.”
THE THOUGHTCRIME TOUR
THE LACK OF RLSH interest didn’t deter Richard. His next letter to me came in April 2011 and included a neatly handwritten list of all of the cities and states he would stop in, including famous landmarks and spots explicitly chosen because of their relation to conspiracy.
He finished his costume and created several protest signs. “Down With Big Brother,” with a circle and slash through an Eye of Providence, read one. “Beware of False Flag Attacks” read another, with an upside-down flag and “CIA” lettered next to it. His pièce de résistance was a sign that had a photo of President Obama with his eyes replaced with slatted lizard eyes, a pentagram on his forehead, and a long serpent tongue drooping out of his mouth. “Reptoid Royalty,” the sign read. “No Blue Bloods in the White House!”
Richard packed up his Thoughtcrimemobile and hit the road for his first protest stop, San Francisco, where he marched the streets around the Bohemian Club headquarters on Taylor Street on May 21, 2011. He found a parking garage to change in, then adhered a message to his sign holder that read “The Bohemian Club murders children every July 23!”
“I adapted to the whole parading-around-in-the-open thing better than I expected,” Richard wrote. A couple of people shouted things at him like “Alcatraz!” and “Illuminati!” or asked questions, but nothing major, except for one strange encounter.
Richard ended his day of protest by taking a selfie in his costume at the Golden Gate Bridge. Some tourists asked for his photo, too, and then he was approached by a man in his mid- to late 50s, wearing sunglasses. From Richard’s letter:
“He approached me and asked, ‘are you protesting the Bohemian Club?’
Me: ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Are you a member?’
‘No.’
‘I have a friend who was invited to the summer encampment this year. He’s an artist. Have you ever been invited?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘Yes. I snuck in back in 2002.’
‘Did you get caught?’
‘Outside the gate.’
‘A lot of weird stuff happens there.’
‘Yeah… it does.’
‘Well, anyway, have a good evening.’ (He leaves.)
‘You too.’
I definitely got a strange vibe from that guy. He was wearing sunglasses, so he was hard to ‘read.’ I strongly suspect that he was a Bohemian, himself. This guy had a ‘creepy/smooth’ tone to his voice similar to the retired Secret Service agent who grilled me in county jail.”
Thoughtcrime at the Golden Gate Bridge.
THE LETTER FROM SAN Francisco was the last handwritten message I would receive from Richard for a while. After weighing his options, Richard reluctantly switched to e-mail, giving me updates from public libraries and hotel lobbies every few days while on the road. He always sent along pictures of himself in costume taken with a tripod and automatic timer on his camera. In each photo he is standing stoically in front of a different protest target—Mount Rushmore, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the White House, a variety of state capitol buildings, Mason lodges, and other conspiracy-related facilities. Some were obvious, like Ground Zero in New York City, others more of a deep cut like NASA headquarters in Titusville, Florida (home to a government brainwashing facility, Richard says). It was like a bizarre conspiracy version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
In several states, he also did airport protests rallying against the Transportation Security Administration, holding a sign that read “Down with Big Brother/TSA Fascism,” while reading a list of quotes that he read from I was surprised to see weren’t from David Icke or other conspiracy figures, but a range of historical philosophers and politicians that ranged from Plato to Mahatma Gandhi to Malcolm X.
“Airports are a ‘grey area’ in terms of protests. The public gathers there, but it’s still considered private property,” Richard wrote. “You can be charged with trespassing, but only if you refuse to leave, or disrupt business.”
Richard’s first airport protest was at San Francisco International as he kicked off his tour.
“Most of the Blue Shirts tried to ignore me. Some of them gave me dirty looks. A lot of the people in line just stared at me, dumbfounded like cattle or sheep (sheeple),” Richard wrote. “They were being ‘herded’ like livestock. Congress is considering the use of the TSA in railroad stations, harbors, sporting arenas, national parks, and shopping malls in the near future.”
Richard was soon confronted by airport security. They asked for his I.D. and searched his backpack, which had a copy of David Icke’s book Children of the Matrix. One of the officers told Richard he was “creating a lot of attention,” to which Richard replied, “That’s the point.” Citing the private policy clause, they escorted him to the parking lot, using the rail shuttle.
“I had a good conversation with them about fascism slowly creeping into American society. They actually listened… I made it clear to them that they (law enforcement) and also the military are the people who will determine whether America degenerates into an Orwellian dictatorship or not,” Richard wrote to me. “I told them their children’s future depended on it. I shook hands with them before driving away.”
I LOOKED FORWARD TO my updates from Richard as he made his way state to state. By June 6 he was in Las Vegas. On June 29 he was in the small town of Riverdale, Iowa, after hearing Obama would be making a stop there at an Alcoa aluminum sheeting plant. A photographer for the Quad City Times caught a picture of Richard (the sole protestor at the event) smiling politely and holding his Obama “Reptoid Royalty—No Blue Bloods in the White House” sign while a young girl with long blonde hair, wearing a fringy summer blouse, awkwardly talked to him. The photo got the headline “Alcoa protestor believes Obama is an alien,” and a short blurb:
Richard McCaslin discusses his theory about President Barack Obama’s reptile origins with Savannah Holmes, 14, of Provo, Utah, as the two wait for the presidential motorcade Tues June 28, 2011, near the entrance of Alcoa Davenport Works in Riverdale.
Richard had hoped to incite media interest in each state, but this photo caption was the only media hit he’d receive for the duration of the 48-state tour.
BY JULY 18 RICHARD had hit Little Rock and then the “redneck, Republican heaven” of Branson, Missouri.
“There was plenty of honking at me. Whether or not they supported me is anybody’s guess. At least I got their attention. Only one guy yelled at me, “Get out of Branson!” I guess anything short of a lynching is a good thing.”
RICHARD AND I MET in person for the first time after he arrived in Milwaukee on July 26, 2011. I joined him as he marched up and down Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare of downtown.
Finally meeting someone in person is always a weird experience. Richard was a little bit shorter than I imagined, physically in athletic shape, and had a bulbous nose. He looked like a Texan, even though he was Ohio-born. His voice had a slight Southern twang. He says Barack O-BAM-a, not O-bAAma. Overall, he was polite and appeared and acted easygoing, though he was prone to awkward silences and had a sort of manic look in his eyes at times.
Thoughtcrime with the author in downtown Milwaukee, 2011.
Richard marched with a sign that read “Down with Big Brother.” I decided I had wanted to show solidarity and feel what it’s like to be in his shoes, so I made a handwritten sign on tag board that read “No to New World Order!” I held it up and stood next to Richard. My sunglasses hid my gaze as I watched people’s reactions to the sight of us. Some people looked confused; others smiled or laughed. A couple of people looked irritated or angry.
We found that Richard had some unknown allies on the streets of downtown. First, a young man with dreadlocks approached us and began shooting video on his iPhone, rapidly speaking about the people needing to stand together against a corrupt government, like Richard was. He shook his hand and parted ways. When we approached a hot dog stand on the corner of Wisconsin and Water streets, the proprietor dropped his hot dog flipping tongs and walked to Richard, giving him a hearty handshake. “I love this,” he said, pointing to Richard’s Thoughtcrime costume and protest sign.
“You listen to Alex Jones?” he asked Richard.
“Yeah, I have.”
“How about David Icke?”
“Oh yeah.”
“We need more people out here like you. C’mon, I’ll give you a free hot dog. On the house.”
After walking a couple more blocks of downtown, Richard and I split ways but made a plan to rendezvous the next day. I was going to take a short road trip with him, to Chicago.
THE NEXT DAY, RICHARD and I stood silently on the moving walkway at O’Hare International Airport, his face in a tight, reflective expression. A jazzy rendition of “Happy Together” by The Turtles blasted out of a saxophone from somewhere, bouncing down the hall. Exiting the walkway, Richard spotted the busker wailing away on the sax and tossed a couple quarters into his case.
“Thanks, man!” the saxophonist said in one sharp exhale, before picking up the riff again. Walking into the airport, Richard appraised the scene. He noted the bathrooms and the exit doors and security, then rode the escalator up to a hall of airline ticket counters. A stream of passengers was entering the TSA checkpoint between the ticket counters to go through the examination process.
“Like cattle,” Richard said in disgust, watching them file in. Satisfied with getting a feel for the layout of the airport, we returned to the parking lot where he climbed into the Thoughtcrimemobile to change. When he emerged several minutes later, he was wearing an oddly baggy and bland-looking gray sweatshirt and matching jogging pants. It seemed like a suspicious choice of attire in the hot and humid summer air.
“I’m going to go into the men’s room, change out of this, and take my sign out of this,” he said, indicating a large portfolio bag. “I’ll put the jogging clothes in the bag, walk out of the bathroom, hand the bag off to you, walk as fast as I can to the escalator and then stand in front of the TSA gate for as long as I can. We’ll see what happens.”
I nodded in agreement, somewhat nervously.
Back inside O’Hare, we passed the busker playing the saxophone again, and then McCaslin shuffled in with the small crowd entering the men’s room. He exited a couple minutes later. He was now Thoughtcrime.
McCaslin took a couple steps toward me, handed off the portfolio bag, and then briskly walked toward the escalator holding his “Down with Big Brother” sign. A smaller sign was attached to the bottom that read “TSA FASCISM—I thought Nazis wore brown, not blue shirts!”
As he stepped off the escalator, all eyes that met him were filled with confusion. Some laughed, a little nervously; others looked concerned. Walking to the TSA gates, McCaslin stopped and pulled a piece of loose-leaf paper from his pocket, with a list of quotes he had written down.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” he said in a loud voice, quoting Benjamin Franklin. He was barely audible over the hum of passengers at the airport. Some people glanced at him curiously as they got in line to be scrutinized by TSA, but most ignored him.
I looked toward the corner of the room and saw a security guard looking at Richard and talking into his walkie-talkie.
He walked down to the next gate and read more quotes from George Orwell and Edmund Burke. By now, there were security guards and airport personnel in every corner watching Richard and talking on their walkie-talkies, but no one approached him.
After he got through his list of quotes, he began walking at a steady pace past me.
“All right, let’s go,” he said, and we headed for the exits. No one stopped to talk with us.
Richard dropped me off at Union Station to catch a bus back to Milwaukee, and then he was on his way to state number 27 on the Thoughtcrime tour, Indiana.
RICHARD CONTINUED TO SEND me updates and photos. He marched the streets of Detroit, Columbus, Charleston, Harrisburg, then in early August hit New England. His most anticipated stop here was New Haven, Connecticut, home of another notorious secret society, Skull and Bones. He had written a poem about them while in prison, titled “Numbskull and Bones.”
Skull and Bones is like a junior version of the Bohemian Grove. It’s the oldest fraternity on the Yale University campus, founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. (Taft was President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War and father of President William Howard Taft.)
Fifteen members of Yale’s Junior class are tapped each year to be members (or “Bonesmen”) of the elite club. Like the Bohemian Grove, membership has been of the people (the club was male-only until the 1990s) who will go on to rule the world. Presidents Taft, George H.W. and W. Bush (along with H.W.’s father, Prescott Bush), Time magazine magnate Henry Luce, FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, Supreme Court Justices Morrison Waite and Potter Stewart, Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, and pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. were all members. Many founding CIA members were also Bonesmen. In 2004, there was an interest in the club because, for the first time, two former Skull and Bones members—George W. Bush (Bones 1968) and John Kerry (Bones 1966)—were both running for the presidency.
The club is housed in a large, foreboding building on 64 High Street on campus known as the “Tomb.” The sandstone building has few windows, and inside is an Addams Family-style collection of macabre decorations—suits of armor, creepy paintings, and everywhere are skulls. It is a long-standing accusation that Prescott Bush and other Bonesmen stole the skull of Apache leader Geronimo while stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma during World War I. The artifact is said to still be in the Tomb’s collection, and there have been attempted lawsuits to extract it. Lack of evidence has caused the case to be dismissed as a hoax.
In addition to the Tomb, club members have access to a 40-acre island—Deer Island, located on the St. Lawrence River. Although this used to be a lavish retreat, Alexandra Robbins writes in her book Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power that as the years have gone by, it has suffered from neglect and has fallen into disrepair.
Like the kooky ooky Cremation of Care ceremony, Skull and Bones has its secret initiation ritual, a mix of fraternity hazing and occult mysticism that is administered to the club’s new pledges each year.
Many rumors circulate about this initiation ritual, with most claiming that initiates have to lay in a coffin and confess their most kinky sex secrets to the rest of the club, then go through a macabre set of obstacles designed to frighten them before they are accepted as club members. Each new pledge gets a Skull and Bones nickname. George H.W. Bush was “Magog”; McGeorge Bundy (United States National Security Advisor, 1961–1966) was nicknamed “Odin.” The tallest new pledge is given the house nickname “Long Devil.”
Yale has other secret societies, like Scroll and Key and Wolf’s Head, but Skull and Bones is the oldest and most infamous. Richard stood outside of the Tomb, holding a sign with a half skull and half Reptilian face drawn on it that read “Skull and Bones: Blood-Sucking Reptoids.”
AFTER STOPS IN NEW York (where he protested at Ground Zero), Atlantic City, and Philadelphia, Richard headed toward Washington, D.C.
Baltimore was pretty routine. Washington wasn’t. You’ll have to wait for the pictures, but here’s what happened. I was starting to circle the White House, with my “Reptilian Obama” sign, when a uniformed Secret Service agent drove up and started to question me. Two more on bikes showed up. Once they ran my I.D., the questions really started to fly. Two more plainclothes agents were called in, and they continued the interrogation. To be fair, all the agents were polite and professional. They patted me down respectfully, then asked to search my van, in the parking garage, a few blocks away. I signed their release form, and they went to it. There was nothing illegal in it, so they had to let me go. They were impressed with my outfit. I guess most protestors don’t go to this much trouble.”
The Secret Service report issued an advisory, circulated to law enforcement, and noted the protest appearance in a couple pages of their files.
“McCaslin approached the White House Complex, dressed as a comic book character,” reads part of the report, and in another, “Additionally MCCASLIN [an agent underlines the rest of the sentence] wants the American public to know that POTUS Obama is actually Satan,” and that Richard “believes he is an action figure and dresses accordingly” but that the agency ultimately “sent him on his way without incident.”
Richard decided to continue his costumed protest.
“Once I got back to the White House, over a dozen people took my picture. I continued up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol, back down Independence Avenue, through the Washington Monument area and back to the parking garage. I then drove up 16th St. and got a pic in front of the Masonic House of the Temple.” At first I didn’t pay much attention to this last sentence, as it seemed like just another place on a long list of conspiracy-related stops. But it would be an essential element of Richard’s story years later.
“A few minutes after that, the S.S. calls me and asks if they can search my motel room! Yeah, sure, whatever. They met me there and proceeded. The two agents were satisfied with their investigation, wished me luck, then left,” Richard concluded on his protest in the nation’s capital.
AFTER A STOP BY CNN headquarters in Atlanta and a visit to Orlando, Richard made his final stop of the tour on August 26, 2011, in Miami, Florida.
In an e-mail from Florida, Richard told me his post-tour plan was to move to the Bahamas, loading his car to a ship to sail away from Miami.
I liked this ending for Richard. After years of prison and parole, and after accomplishing a 48-state protest tour, the bitter conspiracy theorist retires to a tropical beach, just out of reach of the country that he feels has done him so much wrong. He would be an expatriate hiding out in the safety of the Bermuda Triangle. I imagined Richard living out his days on a remote beach, perhaps reading conspiracy classics like Behold a Pale Horse while sipping out of a hollowed-out coconut. Maybe he would finally find peace.
But that’s not what happened at all.
Thoughtcrime protesting outside the White House.