Fringe: The Strange and Terrible History of the Far Right and High Weirdness Part I

On August 5, 2012, something rather strange and terrible unfolded in the town of Oak Creek, Wisconsin. One Wade Michael Page, a military veteran, marched into a Sikh temple there and open fired on the crowd of worshipers. When all was said and done six were dead with an additional four wounded.

Something about this incident has always struck this researcher as highly curious. Page, a hardcore white supremacist, was depicted as an ignorant redneck who had mistakenly shot up a Sikh temple in a effort to kill Muslims by the mainstream media. But this doesn't pass the sniff test. Consider Page's military background:

"He served approximately from 1992 to 1998, and was assigned to psychological operations - the specialists who analyze, develop and distribute intelligence used for information and psychological effect.

" 'That is very exclusive,' said John Liebert, a psychiatrist who performs fitness examinations for the military and is an expert on suicidal mass murderers. 'It's like going from the lobby to the 20th floor.' "

Page was apparently intelligence enough to qualify as a psych ops officer and be detached to a highly prestigious posting (more on that in a moment) and yet he was unable to realize that he was killing Sikhs, and not Muslims?

Wade Michael Page

Perhaps his blind hatred of people of color led him decide that it was irrelevant who he shot so long as they were not white, but nonetheless Sikhs are a curious target. White supremacist typically target blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims or possibly even homosexuals. While Sikhs are theoretically fair game, they certainly do not draw anywhere near the ire as the other groups in such circles. Page lived in Cudahy, located just two miles outside of Milwaukee, where there are any number of ethnic communities he could have terrorized. And yet he drove into the suburbs to shoot up the temple of a religion largely unknown in America.

The Fort Bragg Connection

Further muddying the waters is Page's tenure in the Army. Here are some more details about his time in Psy-Ops:

"Fred Allen Lucas, a Bloomington, Ind., man who served with Page at Fort Bragg, N.C., in a psychological operations battalion, recalled that he spoke of the need for securing a homeland for white people and referred to all non-whites as 'dirt people.'..

"Lucas said he met Page in 1995, the same year that the killings of a black couple in Fayetteville by two members of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg revealed the presence of a white-supremacist movement among soldiers on the base."

This mention of Fort Bragg should tingle the spidey senses of regular readers of this blog. Fort Bragg is of course the home of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which has begun to emerge as a major power in the deep state with the election of Donald Trump (noted before here). The JSOC is not the only tie the Trump team has to Fort Bragg either.

General Keith Kellogg, who has been described as one of Trump's closet advisers and who was recently named as chief of staff and executive secretary of Trump's National Security Council, has longstanding ties to Fort Bragg. He spent much of military career with 101 and 82nd Airborne Divisions, both of which are based out of Fort Bragg. He took command of the 82nd in 1996, the year after two of its members were convicted of murdering a black couple in a racially motivated attack, and had been its assistant division commander for operations as recently as 1992. During this era Fort Bragg was reportedly a haven for white supremacism:

"In 1995, three years after Page joined the Army at age 20, the Colorado native arrived at Fort Bragg, a sprawling installation in Fayetteville, N.C., that’s home to the 82nd Airborne Division as well as the Army’s Special Forces Command.

"When Page was transferred there, it also served as the home base for a brazen cadre of white supremacist soldiers. Nazi flags flew and party music endorsed the killing of African-Americans and Jews. And, according to the Military Law Review, soldiers openly sought recruits for the National Alliance, then the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi group in the country. A billboard just outside the base even advertised for the National Alliance.

"That same year, three paratroopers from Fort Bragg murdered a black man and a black woman in Fayetteville to earn their spider web tattoos, racist badges of honor that sometimes signify that their bearers have killed non-whites. The soldiers went to prison for life, and 19 other paratroopers were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities. The scandal prompted congressional hearings and led to new military regulations aimed at preventing extremist activity. But as an investigation by the Intelligence Report a decade later showed, the new rules did not go nearly far enough." 

Page is widely believed to have radicalized during his stay at Fort Bragg, during the same time frame Kellogg was commanding the 82nd Airborne there. Whether this is significant or not is unknown, but the mid-1990s was not the only time Army Special Operations personnel have been linked to white supremacism. Consider this incident from the 1960s:

"... Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, the U.S. Army's Twentieth Special Forces Group sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan and instructed them to gather information on civil rights demonstrators. 'In return for paramilitary training at a farm in Cullman, Alabama, Klasmen soon became the 20th's intelligence network, whose information was passed to the Pentagon,' the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported years later."

(The Beast Reawakens, Martin A. Lee, pg. 165) 

the insignia of the 20th Special Forces Group

The 20th Special Forces Group is a part of U.S. Army Special Forces, more commonly referred to as the Green Berets. And like the JSOC and the 18th Airborne Corps (which includes both the 82nd and 101 Airborne Divisions), the Green Berets are headquartered at Fort Bragg. The Green Berets and Fort Bragg would play a key role for years in Operation Gladio as well.

"Next to the Pentagon the US Special Forces were also directly involved in the secret war against the Communists in Western Europe, as together with the SAS they trained the members of the stay-behind network. After the US wartime secret service OSS had been disbanded after the end of the war the US Special Forces were reborn with headquarters at Fort Bragg, Virginia, in 1952. General Aaron Bank established a Psychological Warfare Center in Fort Bragg and in the summer of 1952 the first Special Forces unit, somewhat misleadingly called the 10th Special Forces Group, started its training under Colonel Aaron Bank. The 10th Special Forces Group was organized according to the OSS experience during the Second World War, and directly inherited the latter's mission to carry out, like the British SAS, sabotage missions and recruit, equip and train guerrillas in order to exploit the resistance potential in both Eastern and Western Europe...

"Defeated Germany was the first nation to which the newly created American Special Forces were deployed. In November 1953 the 10th Special Forces Group erected its first overseas base in a former Nazi SS building that had been set up during Hitler's reign in 1937, the Flint Kaserne at Bad Tolz in Bavaria. Later, headquarters for US Special Forces operations in Latin America were set up in Panama, and Special Forces operations in South East Asia were run by headquarters set up in Okinawa on the territory of defeated Japan. After the Gladio scandal broke in 1990 it was revealed that Gladiators been trained at the camp of the 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tolz in Germany and that European Gladiators from numerous countries had received special training from the US Green Berets, allegedly also in Fort Bragg in the USA."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pg. 58)

the insignia of the "Green Berets"

For our purposes here this is most interesting as these European "Gladiators" were often recruited from elements of the far right. As was noted before here, the Italian Gladiators were almost entirely compromised of "former" fascists and worked closely with the infamous P2 Masonic Lodge, whose nominal leader, Licio Gelli, was a former Blackshirt and SS man. There is also ample evidence that Belgian Gladio forces were closely tied to the far right as well (noted before here and here).

And for years the Green Berets worked closely with these forces, frequently providing them with training in "counterinsurgency." Gladio was theoretically designed to provide Europe with a "stay-behind" force in the event that it was invaded by the Soviets, but much of the evidence suggests that the primary purpose of Gladio was to keep Europe in the American sphere of influence. To this end, the Gladiators were frequently used to destabilize nations such as Italy and Belgium via terrorism during the so-called "Years of Lead" and the "Bloody Eighties," respectively.

All of this tends to indicate the Special Operations Forces based out of Fort Bragg not only promoted white supremacism at times, but were active partners with a vast fascist underground throughout the Cold War. As unsettling as this may be (especially in today's climate), there may well have been even more terrible projects on the docket at Fort Bragg by the 1980s. But more on that in a future installment. Let us return now to the matter at hand.

Sinister Possibilities

Page's tenure then in PsyOps at Fort Bragg is ripe with possibilities. Was Page then a part of some type of Gladio-style terror campaign? Certainly Nazis and militia types have long constituted the American wing of Gladio (the Patriot movement's ties to the Pentagon and US intelligence community was addressed before here).

But there are a few peculiarities about Page's rampage. One curious aspect is the lack of a manifesto. Typically these type of incidents, which the perpetrator in many ways view as a statement, are accompanied by some type of written document that attempts to add clarity to their motives. Page, who was also in white supremacist band, certainly seems articulate enough. And yet he left no kind of written statement, leaving his motives and intentions a mystery. And, as outlined above, Page's choice of victims seems curious.

Even more curious, however, is the lack of media attention this incident has spurred. In many ways it is similar to the Charleston church shooting in which white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine African American church goers. Page killed six people in a Sikh temple and had even more extensive ties to the neo-Nazi underground to say nothing of his time at Fort Bragg when a racially motivated murder was conducted by white supremacist soldiers. Surely Page's shooting should elicit similar outrage and questions and yet the incident has largely been forgotten a little over four years later.

Dylann Roof

As I noted before here, one of the more eyebrow raising aspects of the Charleston church shooting were the political aspirations of one of the victims. The Sikh temple shooting featured a victim that raises even more strange and terrible questions.

The temple was founded by an individual known as Satwant Singh Kaleka, who was also killed during the shooting. And it just so happens that Kaleka is the father of filmmaker Amar Kaleka. At the time of the shooting Kaleka was working on a film titled Sirius that was based upon the work of controversial Ufologist Steven Greer, whom Kaleka is close too.

Amar Kaleka

Greer is one of the most well-connected Ufologists out there. The founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project, Greer's 2006 work Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge reads like a who's who of deep state players. While some of Greer's assertions have been questioned (such as his alleged brief of James Woolsey when he was the Director of the CIA), there is little dispute that Greer received ample patronage from Laurence Rockefeller over the years.

More recently Greer has been back in the news for his allegations of briefing John Podesta on UFOs in 2009 as Obama was taking office. Yes, John "Spirit Cooking" Podesta.

High Weirdness 2016

2016 marked not only the most contested and divisive America election of the modern era, but the strangest. Not only did "spirit cooking" became a household phrase, but the UFO question reentered the national debate on scale not seen since at least the 1990s. This was also due to Mr. Podesta. While he had already been talking up the UFO question in the spring, Wikileaks laid bare the extent of Podesta's obsession in the weeks leading up to the election. The Washington Times notes:

"It’s no secret that the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman is a UFO buff, but the recent WikiLeaks dump of Mr. Podesta’s hacked account sheds new light on how deeply interested he is in extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.

"Messages between Mr. Podesta and fellow alien enthusiasts — including a former Apollo astronaut and the guitarist of pop-punk band Blink 182 — came as a welcome surprise to UFO researchers. They are more convinced than ever that a Clinton administration would bring about the declassification of some of the federal government’s deepest secrets, including what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico; activities inside the notorious Area 51; and other pieces of a complex puzzle involving alien craft and space travel...

"Within Mr. Podesta’s private account is a trove of messages related to UFOs, aliens and conspiracies. Some are relatively benign, such as links to news stories about the return of the Fox TV show 'The X-Files.' 

"But others show a much deeper level of interest, seemingly confirming Mr. Podesta’s stated desire for secret government documents to be made public."

John Podesta

Podesta has been a key cog in the Clinton machine since the late 1990s. During the 2016 presidential election he was Hillary's campaign chairman and likely would have been her chief of staff had she pulled out the election. Podesta is thus no marginal figure and yet his interests seem to be far more inclined towards the bizarre --be they UFOs or spirit cooking --than conventional politics.

That Podesta would link up with Greer at some point seems inevitable. The Clintons' interest in UFOs seems to have been driven by Greer's longtime patron, Laurence Rockefeller, and one suspects that Podesta was even more convinced on the reality of UFOs after his tenure in the Clinton White House.

But Hillary was hardly the only candidate surrounded by high weirdness in this election cycle. Not by a long shot.

While The Donald and his close aids have been rather tight-lipped about such things, his supporters have enthusiastically embraced "meme magic" on a massive scale. More than a few have credited The Donald's victory to the power of one particular meme. Motherboard provides some interesting details:

"On the morning of November 9, Théodore Ferréol sat in front of his computer in Paris and wondered what had just happened. Ferréol is not an American citizen and so hadn’t voted for Donald Trump personally. But as an occult researcher, he knew about those who claimed responsibility for Trump’s upset election victory: an online group that spreads images of a cartoon frog.

"This group largely identifies with the so-called 'alt right', a white nationalist group, and believes the frog, named Pepe, is imbued with a magical power to bring Trump into office—as long as devotees plaster the frog’s image everywhere, like a flyer for takeout food. 

" 'I've been observing [this phenomena] first hand for quite some time now,' Ferréol told me. 'And I'm fascinated at the way internet folklore is turning into something new—not exactly activism, not exactly religion, but something close to a new form of magic and animism in an era when communities have transformed into tribes. And they are savage, creative and, as we now know, really powerful,' he added, referring to the online communities where Pepe is literally considered a god. 

"Ferréol is detailing what he calls 'memetic warfare.' The technique involves charging a symbol, which will then act as a proxy for a clandestine plan. In occult tradition, this is known as chaos magic. The image could be something as abstract as a hieroglyphic doodle, which a group decides will bring them, say, jobs or food or spouses. The image just has to be widely seen, even subliminally, so that it can seed the minds of the larger population and bring about real world results. (If you think this sounds a bit like hypnotism, you’re right.)

"In the case of Trump’s victory, though, the supposedly responsible image is Pepe, who’s widely seen on social media. This is a new era of chaos magic, fueled by viral sharing: enter the world of meme magic. According to this occult online army, Trump is set to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States thanks to their viral efforts. Not the economy. Not voter psychology. Not Paul Horner, purveyor of fake Trump news. But a frog meme...

"The rabbit hole goes deeper. Pepe’s followers look for synchronicity everywhere, building up a mythos from something that began as an innocuous cartoon character. This is the power of meta-history. When residents on notorious image-based online bulletin board 4chan dug up an Egyptian frog god named Kek, they learned he was a disruptive deity that shakes up basic etiquette and assumptions. Thus they reasoned: Pepe is just a modern day Kek, and both of these frog gods are like the iconoclastic Trump.

"From there, these same 4channers have found other strange frog connections, and gotten into the habit of making an unusual kind of bet. When someone posts a message or picture on a 4chan thread, their entry is marked with a multiple-digit, randomly-generated number in the comment thread, like a personal UPC. In other words, no one knows what the number will be beforehand. So Pepe enthusiasts started betting that posts featuring Pepe would end in double digits.

"When those posts did in fact end in double digits, the community believed to have found its greatest validation yet. It was as if the internet was saying yes, meme magic exists, and the electronic medium is standing by to spread the message that Donald Trump should be president."

a depiction of The Donald with Pepe/Kek

But it wasn't just nerds living in their parents basement practicing meme magic hailing Pepe/Kek. An even more curious figures got into the act: Richard "Heil Trump" Spencer, president of the unabashedly white supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI) and the individual who coined the term "alt right." Spencer appears to have wholeheartedly embraced Pepe/Kek in the months leading up to the election. Mother Jones notes:

"We are well into our third round of Arrogant Frog, a merlot that Spencer chose because its name reminds him of Pepe, the cartoon frog commandeered as a mascot by the 'alt-right' movement that has been thrust from the shadows by Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Spencer says Pepe could also be seen as the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian frog deity, Kek: 'He is basically using the alt-right to unleash chaos and change the world,' he says, looking slightly annoyed when I crack a smile. 'You might say, "Wow," but this is literally how religions arise.'

Kek even received a shot out during Spencer's infamous "Heil Trump" speech that unfolded in late November of 2016:

"Spencer, who has a masters degree in humanities from a fairly prestigious university, even mentioned 'Kek' in his speech, at which point a man in the back of the room yelled 'praise Kek.' He was sitting at a table with a man dressed in a hooded cloak resembling that of a Wiccan priest." 

the Kek druid is to the right

While Spencer's proclamations of Kek as the idol of a new religion may be a bit premature, there can be little doubt that his backers have ties to network long engaged in variety of high weirdness. Consider who put Spencer in the driver's seat at the NPI:

"In Spencer's telling, he steadily evolved Taki's into a magazine aimed at white nationalists. By 2009 he'd published essays by Jared Taylor and was regularly using the term "alternative right" in its pages to describe his youthful brand of anti-war, anti-immigration, pro-white conservatism. In December 2009, Spencer left Taki's to start AlternativeRight.com. The site caught the attention of the conservative publisher William Regnery II, who'd tried to start a whites-only online dating service, and, more recently, funded the white nationalist National Policy Institute. (His grandfather, William Regnery I, had bankrolled the America First Committee's campaign against fighting Nazi Germany during World War II, and his uncle, Henry, founded the conservative Regnery Publishing, which is known for printing Ann Coulter's books). With Regnery's backing, Spencer took over NPI in 2011 and began championing its message."

As was noted before here, the Regnery family had longstanding ties to the infamous American Security Council (ASC). While now largely a shadow of its former self, during the Cold War era the ASC was the principal lobby group/think tank for the military-industrial complex, with ample financial heft thanks to the backing it received from defense contractor heavies like General Electric, General Dynamics, Motorola and Lockheed.

But its lobby efforts only scratched the surface of the ASC's function. It was also a vast private intelligence network, heavily staffed with former CIA, FBI and military men. Its intelligence function initially revolved around blacklisting --the ASC maintained files on millions of Americans and used a host of questionable sources to compile them (which included private detective agencies such as Pinkerton and Wackenhut as well as "patriot" organizations such as the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby and the Minutemen). However, as the Cold War wore on, it became embroiled in some of the darkest corners of the deep state: drug and arms trafficking, terrorism, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Project ARTICHOKE and so on. Much more information on the ASC can be found here. Its links to the Kennedy assassination were discussed here while information in its involvement in Watergate and potentially ARTICHOKE can be found here.

Rivalries

As the Cold War progressed, the ASC and allied groups (i.e. the World Anti-Communist League [WACL, addressed before here] and Le Cercle [addressed before here]) increasingly found themselves at odds with Overworld establishment groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group. At the heart of this dispute was the question of how to deal with the Soviet Union.

Initially both factions had forged an uneasy alliance around the doctrine of Containment. But as the Vietnam War turned into a quagmire, the Overworld groups increasingly began to support the policy of detente, mutual coexistence. The conspiratorial right (which was largely a creation of the ASC, as noted before here) has long portrayed this as some grandiose communist conspiracy, but the reality boiled down to dollars and cents.

The CFR and their allies have long been dominated by banking, which reaps heavy profits off of trade. As such, the longstanding obsession of this faction has revolved around free trade and globalization. They aspire to turn the world into a giant free trade zone in which multinational corporations (but especially financials) will be beyond the reach of national governments.This has always been the real New World Order.

Thus, this faction increasingly favored normalizing relations with the Soviets so as to facilitate trade. This would make the Soviet Union more dependent upon the global financial order and thus more easy for the bankers to sway. 

The ASC and their allies, by contrast, were much more ideological driven. Many believed in the destruction of the Soviet Union on principal: Communism was evil and had to be utterly defeated. More than a few of these individuals reached this conclusion in no small part due to their religious extremism. As such, this faction favored rollback: a policy geared toward diminishing the Soviet Union's holdings and ultimately turning back the Bolshevik Revolution, even if it meant nuclear war.

In the end both factions won: the process of One World Free Trade is well underway while the Soviet Union is long gone and Communism is largely discredited across the globe. This led to a brief period of peace between the two factions (aided in no small part by the post-Cold War disarray of the Right), but the old rivalries began to reemerge during the Bush II years and may well lead the country into a second civil war during the Trump junta.

This struggle for the hearts and minds (or to put the knife in, depending upon the circumstances) has led both factions to some very strange pursuits. The Rockefeller family, long one of the cornerstones of the Overworld, has lavished millions of dollars on a host of arcane topics: UFOs, New Age tenets, psychedelics and so forth. The efforts of the Rockefellers and their allies in this regard are well documented. For those of you unaware, it is highly recommended that you check out the great Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP)'s outstanding article on this subject. 

What is far less well known is the role the ASC and their allies have played in this regard and their ongoing rivalry with the Overworld in such endeavors. The bizarre Sikh temple shooting may be one such manifestation of this rivalry. Over the course of this series I shall chronicle the far right's history in the medium of high weirdness from the Cold War to present and consider the implications of these interests on the Trump junta. Stay tuned dear reader.