Citizens Councils, Psychological Warfare and the 23/17 Phenomenon

In a prior article I weighed in on the recent shooting in Charleston, South Carolina's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in which nine people lost their lives, including Clementa C. Pinckney, a pastor and South Carolina State Senator (a Democrat who some have described as a rising star) who had recently become an advocate for requiring police to wear body cameras. This article was partly a criticism of the conspiratorial's right's inevitable clouding of the issues at hand as well addressing the shooting spree's bizarre synch to the murder of Roberto Calvi (he of the Vatican banking scandal and Propaganda Due) thirty-three years to the day of this present rampage and some musings about Operation Gladio and the likelihood that the American patriot and white supremacists communities were co-opted into these intrigues.

Clementa C. Pinckney, the liberal South Carolina state senator assassinated during he shooting spree, an act totally with in the MO of Operation Gladio

With this follow up I would like to address two other curious developments that have presently come to light: The first is the influence literature published on the Council of Conservative Citizen's website seems to have had on the shooter, Dylann Storm Roof. The Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) is a far right organization with roots dating back to the 1950s. It is the successor to an even more militantly racist organization known as the Citizens Councils of America (CCA, sometimes referred to as the White Citizens Councils). Here is a bit of background about the development of the CofCC:

"The Citizens Councils of America was founded after the Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954, and became known as the white citizens' Councils and the downtown Klan to civil rights activist. In several Southern states, where they were intertwined with local businesses, state government, law enforcement, the councils led the resistance to desegregation. The man credit with starting the 'council' movement, Mississippi State Circuit Judge Tom Brady, wrote a manifesto supporting white supremacy and promising massive resistance to integration in the South. Brady was a onetime delegate to the Democratic Party's National Convention, like many other southern segregationist during the Jim Crow era, and later became a state supreme court judge. At the Citizen Council of America's height it claimed sixty thousand members...

"During the 1950s and 1960s, Willis Carto made repeated overtures to the organization's leaders. He spoke at its meetings, won its formal approval when first starting Liberty Lobby, and put Judge Brady on an early advisory board. Carto also developed independent correspondence and a working relationship with Brady. The councils eschewed Carto's explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric, however, and a few Jewish businessmen joined its ranks. The pages of its bulletin, The Citizen, continued to expound white supremacy theories until it closed down. Once the battle to defend state-sponsored segregation was decisively defeated, however, the organization's founders exhibited little more than regret for the lost past and little vision for a post-civil rights era future. And so began a long slow decline during the 1970s.

"During the Carter administration, when other elements of the white supremacist movement began to surge again, the Citizens Councils continue to shrink. The remaining centers of activity in Carroll County, Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri and Memphis, Tennessee, acted as hubs for other local chapters. Political and social activism, rather than propaganda or pure ideology, kept these groups alive. Besides electing their own officers, members continued fighting against school busing. They built support for private (all-white) academies. They campaign for candidates for office – from school boards to county commissions to U.S. Congress. They held picnics and other social affairs, and one chapter even had its own women's bowling team. At the same time, these relatively innocuous activities continued to come wrapped in an undiluted rationale for the supremacy of those who deemed themselves white... 

"Finally, when the Citizens Councils of America gave way to the association calling itself the Council of Conservative Citizens, both Bill Lord and Gordon Baum helped birth the new formation. The full transition to the Council of Conservative Citizens occurred over a five to seven-year period, beginning in March 1985 with the creation of two related nonprofit corporations in Missouri and ending in 1990 with the financial dissolution of the old Citizens Councils of America. Baum became the chief executive. The Citizens Informer tabloid, still published in St. Louis by a third corporation, became the house organ of the reassembled amalgam of organizational faces. And the new Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) inherited the dead organization's mailing list and membership. The conversion occurred unevenly as local groups of the old Citizens Councils changed their names and formally affiliated with the Council of Conservative Citizens...

"While the old Citizens Councils had been simply holding on, the new Council of Conservative Citizens began a period of rapid growth in the early 1990s. Rather than simply marketing its tabloid to new subscribers, as Liberty Lobby's Spotlight did, or look for in few good men to turn into revolutionary cadres, as National Alliance did, it focused existing organizational resources in developing new local councils as matter of policy. Like any self-respecting Rotary or Kiwanis club, councils gave their best activists plaques and awards, as if supporting South African apartheid were a form of public service. They elected local boards of directors, held regular meetings, and created an internal organizational life that socialized and educated their members – without drawing them into the small cultlike groups that salted the Christian patriot movement in the Midwest and West. By building a stable foundation, rather than sending funds to a central headquarters, they enabled future growth and leadership development to occur organically. 

"Further adding to the CoffCC's momentum, they maintained a nonsectarian policy towards other like-minded efforts. Members joined their local Republican women's clubs, promoted local antitax groups, and helped elect school board members. They also continued supporting and sustaining all-white private schools, particularly in Mississippi, much as Citizens Councils had in the past. And councils adopted a set of issues that paid significant organizational dividends, such as the preservation of the Confederate flag and memorials. As result, the CofCC could reasonably point to itself as uniquely embodying the unity of white nationalism and traditional Southern conservatism.

"... Further adding to its strength, CofCC members entwined themselves in the Republican Party's Buchananite wing like kudzu on an Arkansas hillside. The council's emphasis on working at the Republicans' grass roots had handsomely rewarded a relatively small investment. Witness the prominence of Mississippi State Senator Mike Gunn...

"As a result of these policies and the growth they engendered, the Council of Conservative Citizens began to absorb activists from white nationalism's further corners. Most were from the second and third tiers of movement leadership. Their names, personalities, and immediate past activist histories, however, added to the CofCC's growing importance inside the movement. From David Duke's Republican campaigns in Louisiana emerged Hope Lubrano and Kenny Knight, among others. Knight brought his experience as Duke's campaign manager, and Lubrano had been a key organizer who later worked for Buchanan in the presidential primaries. From the Populist Party came A. J. Barker, the North Carolina siding salesman. Less than a year after joining, Barker became chair of the CofCC North Carolina affiliate. Also from the Populist Party's ranks came William Carter, a chiropractor who became the council's South Carolina state chair. As activists from a variety of groups enlisted, so did a few well-placed cadres from William Pierce's National Alliance, who took up positions of influence and authority..."

(Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind, pgs. 418-422)

Given recent developments in these United States, the CofCC's strong presence in the St. Louis area (which is close to Ferguson, MO, where the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent riots occurred) as well as its long time advocacy for the Confederate flag are most interesting. Revisionist historian and Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II has repeatedly pointed (such as here and here) to the banning of the Confederate flag on Texas licence plates being announced on the same day of the shooting as being a catalyst for the event. Naturally Hoffman has little to say about the COofCC, a group that has both advocated for years for the Stars and Bars and reportedly had a strong influence on shaping the world view of Dylann Storm Roof. But this is hardly surprising, so let us move along.

Hoffman

While being a largely obscure and fringe organization, the CofCC was able to make surprising headway with national political figures, ultimately claiming Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott as affiliates. This is quite an achievement for an organization that likely never had more than a hundred thousand members and affiliates nation wide. Indeed, given how far outside the mainstream the organization's views were by the 1990s, this is quite a shocking development and should have elicited more questions of "How?" and "Why?" amongst the curious.

Trent Lott, whose career was partly derailed by his association with the CofCC, is shown here speaking before one of their meetings

A possible answer to these questions rest with the director of the Citizens Councils of America, CofCC's predecessor organization, William "Billy" J. Simmons. Simmons had longstanding ties to Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, the scion of a wealthy New England family linked to the Bush dynasty and a "former" military intelligence officer. Despite only serving in the Army for a few years Draper would insist that friends and acquaintances address him as "Colonel Draper" or simply the "Colonel" throughout his life. Draper has been linked to a host of intrigues over the years, including the Kennedy assassination. Much more information on the Colonel can be found here.

the Colonel

Simmons and the Citizen Councils would become the recipients of the Colonel's largess during the 1950s and onward. As the Colonel neared death, they were one such organization that he sought to reward.

"... According to his will, in the year before his death the Colonel made twenty-nine separate contributions of $1,000 ($4,400 AFI) each to private segregated schools, none of them in Mississippi. It is hardly possible that, although he was donating to so many other schools throughout the South in 1971, Draper had contributed nothing to the development, a few years earlier, of the Council School Foundation's system. Not only was the Mississippi effort headed by 'Billy' Simmons, his close ally in the fight for racial purity, but the Colonel had some particularly strong connection to Jackson, perhaps because it remained the unwavering locus of support for white supremacy. Although he was raised in New England and a long-time resident of New York, Draper's checking account at Deposit Guarantee National Bank in Jackson contained $179,000 ($765,000 AFI) at his death, almost three times the amount in his New York account; the Colonel also $450,000 in diamonds (almost $2 million AFI) in a safe deposit box at Deposit Guaranty, requiring Weyher, the executor of his will, to employ an armored truck to transport the gems back to New York for sale.

"In addition, Draper left $1.7 million ($7.26 million AFI) in his will to the Puritan Foundation, which had been incorporated in Jackson in August 1963 by Buford and Shell for unspecified charitable purposes. According to its charter, the nonprofit foundation was to receive investments, the proceeds from which it would then donate as 'grants or gifts' to other nonprofit organizations 'engaged in efforts to improve the conditions of mankind.' That is, Puritan was formed to act as an intermediary, funneling money from unnamed donors to unspecified recipients. The true purpose of this vague document became somewhat clearer when an amendment, filed in March 1964 – exactly the same time that the Jackson Citizens' Council's School Committee was planning its alternative, segregated system – revealed the John B. Trevor Jr. was the Puritan Foundation's president and Harry Weyher its secretary, indicating that even before Draper's death the foundation had been one of Pioneer's unacknowledged activities. The participation of Buford and Shell in this laundering operation, both men members of the board of the Council School Foundation, suggested the ultimate destination of the Colonel's money in this case. Any residual doubt that Puritan had been Draper's method for funding segregated schools in Jackson was dispelled when, in 1978, the Puritan Foundation was merged into the Council School Foundation. For practical purposes, there probably was never any real distinction between the two organizations.

"Finally, Draper's will named Jackson's Deposit Guaranty as trustee for another $3.25 million ($13.9 million AFI). Although the ultimate recipient of these funds is unknown, they were also undoubtedly left for another operation intended to preserve 'some island of segregation.' The bank itself, where Simmons's father had been chair of the Executive and Trust Committees, had been utterly sympathetic to the segregationist campaign, providing substantial loans to local Citizens' Council and School Foundation for the five segregated schools in the Jackson area; disclosure of the loans in 1970 caused some embarrassment because, by that time, the chair of Deposit Guaranty's Executive Committee was also a member of an educational advisory committee set up by the Nixon administration to promote support for public schools in Mississippi. Between the Puritan Foundation and the unnamed recipient of the Deposit Guaranty trusteeship, the Colonel had left just under $5 million ($21.14 million AFI) to the center of resistance to civil rights."

(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 128-129)

Draper was a major sugar daddy for the far right and it has been widely speculated that the amount of money that he bequeathed to the moment is far beyond what the official numbers indicate. But certainly $21.15 million adjusted for inflation is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it was invested well. And by most accounts, the Colonel's financial managers were quite good. It is thus quite possible that by the time the CofCC replaced the Citizens Council the latter organization had quite a war chest to draw from, one of which that would enable it to influence national policy to degree that its actual membership (or lack therefore of) could never manage.

Its also interesting to note the presence of John Trevor Jr. as president of the Puritan Foundation, one of the NPOs which provided the Citizens Councils with its ample funding. Trevor was the son of John Trevor Sr., a long time Draper associate and former military intelligence officer. He was the founder of the far right anti-immigration and union-busting American Coalition of Patriotic Societies (ACPS). Trevor Jr. succeeded his father as head of this organization. Under his leadership, the ACPS would develop close ties with the American Security Council (ASC). This far right "think tank" has extensive ties to the US intelligence community, as has been noted before here.

Thus, it is not beyond the question, in this researcher's estimation, that the Citizens Council was originally envisioned in part as another psychological warfare front, one in which African-Americans and other minorities groups were routinely and viciously dehumanized while vigorous efforts were made to radicalize the largely white male membership that constituted the bulk of Citizens Councils members. Certainly the presence of both Draper and Trevor in the organization's history is indicative of an intelligence link. But moving along.

Before wrapping up, I can't help but note an appearance of the 23/17 phenomenon in the shooting spree. The 23/17 phenomenon was first noted by Robert Anton Wilson and is closely linked to the 23 enigma. Tek-Gnostics gives an excellent run down of this odd bit of synchronicity:

"The 23/17 enigma, simply stated, refers to the belief that many incidents of synchronicity are directly connected to the numbers 23… 17… or some combination or modification of these numbers. Uncle Bob Wilson (aka: Robert Anton Wilson) credits William S. Burroughs as being the first person to identify the 23 enigma. Wilson, in his book The Cosmic Trigger, related the following story.

" 'More important to our narrative, William S. Burroughs (author of ‘Naked Lunch’) introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was at Playboy... In the early '60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he'd been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23... Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in a lot of them.'

"Burroughs wrote a short story in 1967 called "23 Skidoo." The term "23 skidoo" was popularized in the early 1920s and means “it's time to leave while the getting is good.” This expression appeared in newspapers as early as 1906.

"Wilson, along with co-author Robert Shea of “Illuminatus!” fame, more clearly identifies the 23/17 phenomenon, in that both numbers are tied to the Discordian Law of Fives. The Discordian holybook, the Principia Discordia states that: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5. To Discordians, 23, a corollary of the law of fives, is considered either lucky, unlucky, sacred to their goddess Eris, sinister, sacred to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, or significantly strange.

"In Illuminatus!, the character Simon Moon illustrates this rational using the following mathematical-numerological-magical formula… in 23: 2 + 3 = 5, and in 17: 1 + 7 = 8 = 2³ ...clear as mud, right? To clarify, Moon pulls in another enigmatic number… 40. In the following excerpt from Illuminatus!, Moon further clarifies…

" 'That brings me to the 40 enigma. As pointed out, 1 + 7 = 8, the number of letters in Kallisti. 8 x 5 = 40. '

" 'More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 + 23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations… Jesus had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40 meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yo-yos a bit)—but I have no definite theory…  yet.' 

Robert Anton Wilson

More information from Wilson on the 23 enigma can be found here while this researcher has written at length concerning the number seventeen before here.

As for the Charleston shooting, the appearance of the number 17 is quite obvious: the killing spree unfolded on June 17th (the same day thirty-three years early when Roberto Calvi's neck famously found itself at the end of a rope dangling from Blackfriars Bridge). The appearance of the number twenty three in this sage comes from a surprising place: a browser tab used by Roof. The New York Times reports:

"The icon for the browser tab on Mr. Roof’s website is an Othala rune, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis that remains common among neo-Nazi groups."

the Othala rune

The Othala rune is generally listed as either twenty-third or twenty-fourth rune in various alphabets. Its meaning roughly translates to "heritage, inheritance, or inherited estate." Of especial interest in this case is the fact that this rune was adopted by 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen as a part of its insignia and later by the Italian neo-fascist terror outfit known as Avanguardia Nazionale (National Alliance). This organization was founded by the notorious terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie. Chiaie has been closely linked to Italy's Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic lodge over the years as well as Operation Gladio. And of course Robeto Calvi and his death have long been linked to P2 and Gladio as well (this researcher has addressed the connection of the former before here, here and here).

Certainly this then is a rather striking appearance of the 23/17 phenomenon. And with that dear readers I shall sin for now.