RETURN OF THE PHANTOM PATRIOT
Richard only spent three days in the Bahamas. A September 4 2011, e-mail to me read:
Once I checked with Immigration, it became apparent that I wouldn’t be staying. In order to file for residency, you have to already own property in the U.S. To get a work permit, a potential employer must write a letter of recommendation and then Immigration will mull it over for several months. In other words, I was screwed.
Richard bought a return ticket to the States and headed to Las Vegas. I heard from Richard sporadically over the next few months. He found an apartment in downtown Vegas and protested a couple times as Thoughtcrime. On 9/11, less than a week in town, he found a local group of Las Vegas Truthers led by a local character with a big, bushy beard known as “9/11 Bob.” He joined them protesting on the strip.
“We greeted each other like old friends!” Richard e-mailed.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, in an early January 2012 e-mail, Richard outlined a new superhero action.
“I plan to make an appearance as the Phantom Patriot in San Francisco on January 20, the tenth anniversary of my arrest,” Richard wrote, saying he would dress in a replica of his original Phantom Patriot costume, march with a protest sign, and try to drum up interest from the local media.
“The main feature of the protest will be for me to stand in front of the Bohemian Club Mansion, unmask, then read a prepared statement… The Bohos will probably call the cops, but I’m not on parole anymore, so the area restrictions are invalid now.”
Wow, this is getting pretty intense, I thought.
He asked me if I could put him in touch with Motor-Mouth, a fast-talking, rambling Real-Life Superhero that led a small team of San Franciscan RLSH named the Pacific Protectorate. I had met him at an RLSH team-up in Vancouver while working on Heroes in the Night.
“I’m well aware I’m the ‘black sheep’ of the RLSH community, but it would be nice if some of the Pacific Protectorate guys showed up to stand with me,” Richard explained. And then, something I wasn’t expecting—Richard wanted me there, too.
“I can’t guarantee media coverage, but your presence would help,” he wrote. “I’ll make you an offer. If you have the time, but not the money, then I would be willing to pay for a round-trip ticket.” He added, “This mission is a go whether I do it myself (as usual) or these guys man up and show up.”
I thought about whether or not I should go. If Richard bought my ticket, I didn’t want to be beholden to him to write Phantom Patriot propaganda. Finally, I decided to go, but first I spoke to Richard, letting him know that his purchase of the plane ticket could not be seen as a sign that I was not planning to do anything but try to write about the experience and him objectively. He said he understood. But there was a bit of a curveball when I explained to him that “Tea Krulos” was not my real name and he would have to use my legal name to purchase a ticket. He seemed a bit weirded out, so I explained it was just a pen name, and that hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, actors, and more used them, including “everyone from Mark Twain to Ice Cube,” I wrote to him.
He seemed to relax when I explained it, but he had one last word on it:
“I know what a pen name is. By the way—Mark Twain was a Bohemian Club member, and Ice Cube is a Freemason. You might want to rethink your examples.”
OK, I thought. Let’s go to San Francisco.
AFTER STRIPPING OFF MY jacket, sweatshirt, shoes, and belt, I stuffed them into a gray tote bin. I unzipped my backpack and set my laptop into another gray bin and emptied my pockets on top of it. Noticing a toe sticking out of a hole in my sock, I held the waistline of my pants, so they didn’t droop down and reveal my buttcrack. Then I stepped into a sci-fi-like full-body scanner, held my hands up and my feet apart while a gyroscope scanner swooshed around me, and TSA watched me with a cautious eye. Cleared, I retrieved my possessions and sat on a bench to put myself back together.
Did Richard have a point about TSA? I wondered as I sat waiting for my flight, drinking coffee.
I HAD BEEN ABLE to contact Motor-Mouth, who turned out to be somewhat of a budding young conspiracy theorist himself. He agreed to meet Richard for his protest and recruited his teammate Mutinous Angel, who was oblivious to what he had volunteered himself for, to join in.
During my first day in San Francisco, I met up with Richard so the two of us could scope out the area he’d be protesting in the next day. As soon as I crossed the street and shook his hand, the conspiracy started rolling.
“Did you see all of these Occupy protesters walking this way?” was the first thing Richard said.
I had, I told him. As I had walked up Market Street, I had seen small groups of protesters here and there carrying handwritten signs, all heading the opposite direction I was walking.
Although Occupy camps had started to fizzle out by 2012, the protest was still active in the rainy streets of San Francisco. I initially thought this movement, although on a different wavelength, would be something Richard might embrace and try to be a part of, or appreciate on some level. After all, the members of the Bohemian Grove were the very definition of the “one percent.” But like his quick disappointment with the RLSH, Richard’s opinion of the Occupy movement soured when he placed them within the dark depths of the conspiracy. Richard told me he believed protestors were being manipulated as a strategy to discredit and eventually shut down protest movements, in a campaign of sabotage.
“9/11 Bob and I have concluded that the Occupy Las Vegas ‘inner circle’ are obviously ‘Obamanoids.’ There are reports that New World Order billionaire George Soros is bankrolling several of the Occupy groups across the country. Maybe that’s why Soros started this movement… to ruin the concept of protest in the eyes of the general public and to ‘outlaw’ any diehards (like me),” Richard wrote to me.
Now Richard had a theory that this particular Occupy demonstration had been arranged by a Bohemian Club puppetmaster to distract attention from his protest. Somehow, the Bohemian Club had gleaned information on his protest, probably getting the info by spying on his e-mail. That idea might sound paranoid, but then again, conspiracy theory turned reality in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had a far-reaching surveillance program called PRISM. The NSA collected phone data on millions of Americans and tapped directly into the servers of Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Snowden leaked documents to The Washington Post and The Guardian after working for the NSA as a contractor. Reports revealed that the NSA surveillance was far-reaching and could hack into live communication and stored data.
Richard and I walked down the rainy streets until we found the Occupy event, about a hundred people trying to stay dry with raincoats and quickly assembled tent canopies, handing out leaflets and signing people up for networking lists. Richard attempted to question volunteers on when and who had organized the event, to try to give credence to his theory it had been hammered together last-minute to distract from him, but the volunteers on hand didn’t have specifics.
AFTER WE LEFT OCCUPY, Richard asked me to join him as he cruised around town, hand-delivering some “press packs” he had made up to local media. Each included a zine-style version of the comic he had drawn about his Bohemian Grove raid, and a press release of sorts that talked about his planned protest the next day.
“It is a sad day in America when someone has to resort to gaudy street theater to get the truth out to the masses, but you have left me no other choice,” the last line of the press release read.
Richard was hoping I might be able to “talk the talk” and get people interested in covering his story. We made about five stops to San Francisco TV stations and newspaper offices, Richard navigating around with his GPS. He looked up driving directions to a local TV news station, and we showed up and approached a glass door with an intercom system on the door. I pushed the intercom button.
“Fffft fffchhh zzzzp…” a staticky, chopped-up voice replied. Richard and I looked at each other, quizzically.
“Ah, hello. We want to drop off a press release here,” I said, pulling on the door. It was locked.
“Ffffsss sssffff chhh….” I tried pulling on the door again, but it was still locked.
“Hello?” I said, pressing the button, then tried the door again.
Richard slid the press pack in between the door and doorframe. “Let’s go,” he said, dismayed.
Our luck didn’t improve from there. We ran into a succession of locked, unattended doors, and disinterested secretaries, who at best would throw the press pack onto a big stack of paperwork.
Richard and I parted ways, establishing a time and meet-up spot at a park—Union Square—just a couple blocks from the Bohemian Club for the next day.
THAT NIGHT I HUNG OUT with some members of the California Initiative, a group of people who had ties to the Real-Life Superhero community, led by a couple named Rock n Roll and Night Bug. The California Initiative and the Pacific Protectorate had different philosophies on the whole superhero thing, leading to a rare case of two RLSH teams in the same city. Rock n Roll and Night Bug had a charming, sunny California family and a young family friend, Angelita, who was willing to shoot video of the protest the next day. The California Initiative was concerned about a possible situation—perhaps Richard might flip out, or alternately, maybe a passerby might flip out on us. Rock had decided that it might be prudent to have her, Night Bug, and team member Eon on hand nearby.
The next morning, Rock, Night Bug, and Eon dropped Angelita and me off at Union Square to meet up with Richard and the Pacific Protectorate. The California Initiative parked and got seats to keep an eye on us discreetly outside the Honey Honey Café & Crepery across the street from the Bohemian Club.
After a couple of quick phone calls and a walk around the perimeter of the square the park was in, we found Motor-Mouth and Mutinous Angel, then turned the corner and discovered Richard standing quietly, as still as a statue, with his sign (“The Bohemian Grove Murders Children Every July 23!”) while passersby gaped at him. His skull mask stared blankly ahead, grinning maniacally. The Phantom Patriot was a striking appearance, and I saw more than one person walking by give a look of fear, including a frightened mother quietly herding her child away from his direction.
After Motor-Mouth, Mutinous Angel, and Angelita made their introductions, we headed up to the Bohemian Club’s front doors. Richard handed his sign to Mutinous Angel and his copy of a book he’d be reading from, Trance-Formation of America by Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien, to Motor-Mouth. Angelita started rolling video. At the last minute, Richard asked me to step in frame and introduce him. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I improvised:
“My name is Tea Krulos. I’m a journalist, and I’m here in front of the Bohemian Club with Richard McCaslin who has returned once again as the Phantom Patriot and is going to say a few words here today.”
Richard removed his skull mask and looked intently at the camera. Motor- Mouth handed him a single sheet of loose-leaf paper covered with Richard’s careful handwriting.
THE BOHEMIAN CLUB SPEECH
“MY NAME IS RICHARD McCaslin. Ten years ago, I was arrested outside the Bohemian Grove. My goal was to expose the Bohemian’s crimes of pedophilia, torture, murder, and treason against the American people. In 2002, I failed to convince a jury that these atrocities were occurring because I had no proof. Today, however, I have all the proof America needs to condemn these sociopaths. This book, Trance Formation of America, was written by Cathy O’Brien and her husband, Mark Phillips. Cathy O’Brien is the only vocal and recovered survivor of the CIA’s MKUltra Project Monarch mind-control operation. On August 3, 1977, the 95th U.S. Congress opened hearings into the reported abuses concerning MKUltra. On February 8, 1988, Cathy O’Brien was covertly rescued from her mind-controlled enslavement and scheduled execution in Bohemian Grove by intelligence insider Mark Phillips. Their pursuit of justice has been denied for reasons of national security. In other words, many of Cathy and her daughter Kelly’s abusers were high-ranking politicians, like Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Senator Robert Byrd, and both Clintons.
“I will now read pages 170 and 171 of Trance. Cathy O’Brien writes,” Richard began, opening the book.
I looked at the doors to the Bohemian Club behind him. The windows on the doors were slightly tinted, but I could see two men in black suits, one speaking into a walkie-talkie on the other side of the door. Richard began to read.
THE SECOND MOST DISTURBING MOMENT I had while researching this book was reading Trance Formation of America: The True Story of a CIA Mind Control Slave. The first was realizing that I hadn’t taken adequate notes on my initial read-through of the book and would need to go back and reread long sections. The text reads like an intense, rambling non-consensual torture erotica, the worst political porn ever created.
The first sentence of chapter one of Cathy O’Brien’s section (her husband wrote the first 80 pages) describes how O’Brien’s father began molesting her as a baby, and continues through a graphic depiction of abuse she claims she received from the world’s most powerful political leaders and famous entertainers. O’Brien claims that she was entered into a MKUltra-style CIA brainwashing program called “Project Monarch” at a young age and then was used brutally as a sex slave, drug mule, and encoded-message delivery person to the world’s most powerful men. Her “handlers,” who tortured her with brainwashing techniques and pimped her out, she says, included her father, who sold her as a slave to U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, and later her first husband, Wayne Cox, a country musician.
The brainwashing program continued with her second husband, a Nashville ventriloquist named Alex Houston, who toured the South with his dummy, Elmer. The duo started performing in the ’50s and often played clubs and festivals opening for famous country music acts. They also found some success appearing on TV programs like The Porter Wagoner Show and Hee Haw. The duo produced at least one comedy album and a couple of singles, like the holiday spoof “Here Comes Peter Cotton Claus,” and a ventriloquist dummy’s take on women’s lib, “Burn Your Bra, Baby.” Houston died in 2017.
Whenever these songs or TV show clips appear on blogs and YouTube, you’ll find a steady stream of commenters who have read Trance Formation of America and leave comments like: “Do you realize who this is? This is the criminal who mind-controlled Cathy O’Brien in the MK-Ultra program for her owner Senator Byrd!!!! Really!” and “Houston, I wish you to burn in hell forever!”
O’Brien claims in her book that Houston used mind control to condition her to become a sex slave that serviced Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (who enjoyed a bestiality film of O’Brien having sex with a French poodle named Pepe), musician and “CIA operative” Jimmy Buffett, and dozens of other senators, military commanders, and various other world leaders like Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King of Saudi Arabia. All of these men, O’Brien claimed, shared the same taste in a sex slave they found desirable.
Houston and O’Brien were married in 1980, he being almost 30 years older than her. One of O’Brien’s most disturbing allegations about the ventriloquist is that he “flesh carved a hideous witch’s face for Senator Byrd’s perversion” into her “upper vaginal wall.”
“Not only did this surgery give Byrd a vagina suited to his minute, underdeveloped penis, it also provided an equitable ‘curiosity’ to be displayed over and over again in both commercial and non-commercial pornography and prostitution,” O’Brien explains.
O’Brien also claims that as a “Presidential Model” sex slave she was abused by a long lineage of U.S. Presidents and Vice Presidents, starting with her teenage years and President Gerald Ford in 1974.
“That night, I wore my Catholic uniform as instructed and went into a dissociative trance as my father drove me to the local National Guard Armory, where I was prostituted to Ford. Ford took me into an empty room, pushed me down on the wooden floor as he unzipped his pants, and said, ‘pray on this.’ Then he brutally, sexually assaulted me. Afterward, my memory was compartmentalized through the use of high voltage. I was then carried out to the car where I lay in the back seat, muscles contracted, stunned, in pain, and unable to move.”
O’Brien claims in her book that her worst tormentor from this pack was former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had an “oversized penis” and an angry streak that would lead him to beat her often. O’Brien says that Cheney would make his sex slaves strip their clothing, then run naked through the woods of an unknown property of Wyoming so that Cheney could pursue them and hunt them down in his version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” When Cheney would find his prey, O’Brien explicitly describes being beaten and sexually abused.
Ronald Reagan, whom O’Brien says she also serviced, made his mind control slaves drink his urine, produced porn and, like all the politicians talked about in her account, loved to snort massive amounts of cocaine. O’Brien also says she was used for sex by Hillary and as a cocaine smuggler for Bill Clinton, and her daughter Kelly, also brainwashed in the program, became a favorite sex slave for President George H.W. Bush.
O’Brien says all of these experiences “regressed” and only came forward after she met Mark Phillips, who helped “de-program” her and she was able to recall the traumatic experiences under hypnosis. Although it seems likely that O’Brien has had traumatizing experiences of some sort (though not with the people she names), the book is entirely based on her word. Conspiracy die-hards, like any group of fanatic believers, are quick to be skeptical of any “mainstream” media reporting but will completely believe a self-published, poorly sourced book like Trance Formation of America as gospel truth, simply because it is presented as nonfiction. If it wasn’t accurate, Trance defenders often say, why weren’t Phillips and O’Brien sued for libel by the book’s subjects? One possibility would be that the subjects either haven’t been made aware of the underground tome or don’t want to give it the satisfaction of the spotlight with a libel suit.
RICHARD’S READING FROM Trance Formation of America is two pages in which Cathy O’Brien describes what she purports to be her time as a sex slave in a strange, perverse sexual playground somewhere in the Bohemian Grove. She claims slaves of advancing age or faulty programming were ritually sacrificed in the Grove. Instructed to perform sexually “as though her life depended on it,” O’Brien claims she was led through myriad horrific perversions for the world’s elite men. She says there was a necrophilia-themed room where she was “heavily drugged and programmed” to simulate that she was dead. She was forced to perform sexually in a pornography-themed room with former President Gerald Ford and was “brutally assaulted” by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the “Leather Room,” a dark, leather-lined room. “Cheney jokingly claimed I ‘blew his cover’ when I recognized his all-too-familiar voice and abnormally large penis size,” O’Brien writes.
She says she was locked in a triangular-shaped display case “with various trained animals, including snakes. Members walking by watched illicit sex acts of bestiality, women with women, mothers with daughters, kids with kids, or any other unlimited perverse visual display.”
“THERE WAS A ROOM of shackles and tortures, black lights and strobes, an opium den, ritualistic sex altars, a chapel, group orgy rooms including poster beds, water beds, and kitten houses.” Richard read loudly outside the Bohemian Club. “I was used as a rag doll in the toy store, and as a urinal,” Richard’s voice cracked with anger, “in the golden arches room. From the owl’s roost to the necrophilia room, no memory of sexual abuse is as horrifying as the conversations overheard in the [underground meeting room in the Grove] pertaining to the New World Order. I learned that perpetrators believed that controlling the masses through propaganda mind manipulation did not guarantee there would be a world left to dominate due to environmental and overpopulation problems. The solution being debated was not pollution/population control, but mass genocide of selected undesirables.”
Richard took a deep breath and handed the book over to Motor-Mouth. He looked intensely into Angelita’s camera.
“This book was published in 1995. Its sequel, Access Denied, came out in 2004, but the mainstream media has never mentioned them. If you think Cathy and her daughter Kelly’s case doesn’t affect you, consider this. Many of her abusers were the real masterminds behind 9/11, and they are still planning more false flag attacks in the near future. For instance, Dick Cheney has cooked up a scenario in which the CIA and Israeli Mossad would launch a false flag attack on an American warship in the Persian Gulf, then blame it on the Iranians. If the U.S. retaliated against Iran, Russia and China have already vowed to defend their ally. That means World War III, and that is exactly what the New World Order wants,” Richard looked down at his paper momentarily. His face flushed with anger. He stared at his notes for a second, then pointed at the building behind him.
“Don’t let these cold-blooded reptiles destroy the world!” He shouted. “In 2002, I was alone when I faced these bastards!” His voice cracked with emotion, and he was teary-eyed. “Today, I stand here with the Pacific Protectorate, and I ask America—all Americans—to do the same thing. Thank you.”
Motor-Mouth put a hand on his shoulder. Richard wiped the tears from his eyes and turned away from the Bohemian Club. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” he said, walking away, but then stopped and turned to us again. He still had tears in his eyes. “It feels good. I’ve waited ten years for this. Ten years!”
It hit home to me that this is all Richard wanted for the last ten years—allies, people to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. People to listen to him. He tried to deliver his message, and now via in person and through a video soon to be uploaded to YouTube, he would share that message. It seemed like a weight had been lifted off of him, and I thought that perhaps Richard had finally found some closure.
But I was wrong about this, too.