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How Did I Know?
BY KEITH MCHENRY - CO-FOUNDER OF FOOD NOT BOMBS
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison - Sept. 24, 2024
My mother’s father John Vanderpoole Phelan slowly rowed our family’s sky blue dingy into position across the placid waters of Middle Pond, a few hundred feet from our beach on Cape Cod. My 5 year old frame sat on the bow bench armed with my first fishing pole. I faced my grandfather at the stern. He picked up a fresh water mussel from a pail, broke the paper thin shell, scooped out the slimy life and stabbed his fish hook into its grey flesh. I followed his instructions, skewed my bait onto my hook and dropped my lead sinker into the still waters. It wasn’t long before there was a tug on my line.
He instructed me to snap my pole to set the hook. A heavy creature fought as I reeled it to the surface.
“Unhook him and smack his head hard on the gunnel” he explained. “You don’t want him to suffer,” he added. I looked at those big perch eyes starring back at me, slid the hook from his gasping lips and smashed it against the wooden boat.
He continued with his lesson. “One day you may be asked to kill others. This is our duty. Those you kill will have no moral ambiguity. They will just be dead but for you it will be more difficult. This is the white man’s burden.”
He would repeat this lesson in one way or another for the next ten years often adding that I was born into a genetically superior family that was tasked to defend the rewards of capitalism.
My Grampy Phelan followed the path of many in the intelligence world attending Phillips Academy, Dartmouth College and Harvard Law. He was recruited into the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services, attended boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, spent time overseeing the testing of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress in Wichita, Kansas before being stationed in Burma where he directed bombing raids on Japan during World War II.
The 10-acre property on the Cape was our vacation home. My mother’s parents lived in Needham, Massachusetts in a huge two story white house with Dartmouth green shutters. My bed was down in their finished basement. I slept next to two metal file cabinets filled with the MIT formulas that my grandfather would sell to Ken Olson and became the foundation of Digital Electronics. A black and white photo hung on the wall next to my bed showing thousands of people in Burma smashing rocks with hammers or balancing reed baskets piled with stones as they toiled building my grandfather’s runway for his squadron of B-29s.
My grandfather’s first floor den was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he snapped from 20,000 feet of his progress in the world’s most deadly bombing campaign, Operation Meeting House, the fire bombing of Tokyo.
I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson.” he insisted. Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a “one off” and that America had no limits to what it would do to defend capitalism.
My grandfather taught me about how the US provoked Japan with tariffs and naval blockade and ordered the Pacific fleet to line up at Pearl Harbor to maximize the impact. He claimed that even though US intelligence knew Japan was about to attack the naval facility, they intentionally concealed this from the base commander. My grandfather explained that he and his friends set up the attack “because otherwise the American people would never support a war in the Pacific.”
During those days when my grandfather was arguing the logic of a third nuclear strike, his good friend Curtis LaMay was trying to convince President John F. Kennedy of the logic of bombing a shopping mall in Miami and blaming it on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba in their Operation Northwoods plot.
Grampy explained that elections were designed to divide people so they won’t be a threat to those in power. The intelligence agencies had the responsibility of placing people in positions of power making sure the correct people came to office and that according to him this included the President of the United States.
This can be achieved in many covert ways. For example, claims that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation to make sure Biden won, or making a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran in exchange for US weapons in an effort to sink President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign.
Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow in a Jan. 2017 interview, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, like Trump, he’s being really dumb to do this,” referring to claims by Trump that he would take on the Deep State. And sure enough the Deep State ate Trump and today we are witnessing the bitter fruits of a military dominated surveillance state free to overtly seize control of the government and confiscate its assets for their own benefit.
I spent the summer before high school living in that sweet little cubby in my grandfather’s basement while I attended summer classes at Needham High. He passed that winter.
My grandfather’s second wife held his funeral at the Congregational Church in Needham. The pastor claimed Grampy was a great and godly soul and would be remembered in heaven. I was stunned as my grandfather made it clear to me that he believed that God was a fiction and talked about having belonged to a secret Satanic order.
When I was an art student at Boston University, I had a part time job staffing Old South Meeting House on Milk and Washington Streets telling visitors about the drama of the Boston Tea Party, collecting the 50 cent entrance fee and selling post cards of the historic building.
During a lunch break I went to Boston Commons to eat and enjoy the warm spring sun. An older lady was standing on a milk crate telling a small audience of other elderly women about the threat of nuclear Armageddon and Mutually Assured Destruction. Her name was Dr. Helen Caldecott.
After absorbing Helen Caldecott’s speech it occurred to me that I could use my skills as an artist to address what seemed to be the most important yet mostly invisible issue of our times.
I dropped into the offices of Mobilization for Survival in the basement of Saint Peter's Episcopal Church to see if I could put my artistic skills to use. It wasn’t long before I was participating with the just formed Boston Alliance Against the Registration and the Draft. At first, nearly a hundred people were attending the weekly meetings but the number of participants started to decrease after a few months.
We had organized a plan where we would table outside the local high schools in the weeks before the students left for summer vacation to warn them of the potential danger of cooperating. Red Sun Press was going to give us a great price for the literature we intended to distribute. Once we were set to launch our campaign one of the leaders of BAARD announced she had spent most of our money on a first class plane ticket from San Francisco to Boston for Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and that he had agreed to speak at a rally on the Boston Commons after attending his child’s graduation at Harvard. We needed to raise more money for our printing.
Since the number of people attending our meetings was plummeting just when they were most needed, my friend Frank and I called those on our phone list to see why they stopped participating. Most were disturbed about the jokes by some of the core members about “getting guns for the revolution” so we made a suggestion that we stop any reference to guns since the point of the organization was to oppose war. There was push back from the others so we agreed to take a vote at the next meeting.
When Frank and I arrived to the meeting a dozen or more people who had never attended before were there to vote against our proposal and the policy was not adopted.
After the meeting I returned to the street with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers but I was arrested before posting the first flyer. Frank was still in the office and saw the woman who had spent all our funds on the first class plane flight for Ellsberg dial up the Cambridge Police. This event is described towards the end of Brian Glick’s book “War at Home” on covert actions against the peace movement.
The shock at learning that BAARD had been infiltrated and was intentionally sabotaging our efforts at tabling and plans for the July 21,1980 protest outside the Main Post Office inspired us to start another group we called AWOL. We organized our first meeting at the Clamshell Alliance office at 595 Mass Ave. in Central Square and just as it was about to start members of BAARD arrived with rebar and started attacking us.
It was very disturbing to discover that many of those who you thought were friends were likely working for the FBI. I was no longer a virgin to covert state manipulation and disruption.
I would face years of FBI, CIA, Interpol, local police and corporate intelligence operations. I have survived over 40 years of honey traps, the confiscation of all my out going and incoming mail for months at a time, elaborate smear campaigns, wiretaps, police doubles dressed as me who did crimes that I would be arrested for and the trauma of learning that an FBI agent slept with my wife while I sat in jail facing 25 to life in prison.
On August 15, 1988, the San Francisco Police arrested nine Food Not Bombs volunteer at the entrance to Golden Gate Park for sharing meals without a permit, a permit we would learn did not exist. A week later another 24 of us were arrested at Haight and Stanyan streets. Fifty-five more food servers were cuffed and taken to jail on Labor Day. The pressure on Mayor Art Agnos to end the spectacle led to our negotiating an end to the arrests and the creation of a permit process. I had to take the City to Federal Court to force them to comply with the process but they revoked the permit shortly after issuing it anyway and deleted the permit a year later.
That Thanksgiving volunteers wearing the Food Not Bombs button on their coat were approached by uniformed members of the National Guard as they waited for flights home after the holiday. They remarked that they had seen the Food Not Bombs logo at that weekend’s Domestic Terrorism Workshop claiming we were “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.”
In 2021 as part of a decade long Freedom of Information Acts Request effort by “Property of the People” we received a document that showed that the FBI- Joint Terrorism Task Force had watched the Aug. 22 mass arrests and sent a memo on Aug. 29, 1988, to the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office claiming we were a “credible national security threat.” There were only three chapters at the time with a total of 30 volunteers combined.
The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrest in all for sharing meals ending in1995. I was arrested 94 times, spent 500 days in jail and as noted before faced 25 to life in prison after being framed by the Mayor’s office. I was captured three time and taken to a dark room where my clothes were ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons were torn and stuffed into a tiny Stress Position Cage. I spent hours in that cold dark cage struggling unsuccessfully to stretch my legs.
A parade of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been framed in FBI invented terror plots: Connor Cash on Long Island, Eric McDavid in California and three of the cooks at Occupy Cleveland, Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens are among the many targeted.
While I find it frustrating when people express distress or support for the actions of Donald Trump suggesting they believe he is all powerful I understand they've had a lifetime of messaging that suggests that things like elections and the law are real.
I believe Trump was “hired” by the Deep State to perform the needed drama designed to implement the strategies formulated in think tanks, intelligence funded university research programs, the halls at the Pentagon and Langley and corporate boardrooms on Wall Street, in London, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley.
The choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate signaled that the Deep State was no longer going to play nice. When the PayPal Mafia of CIA contractors at Palantir took over power of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025, it became clear to me that things are about to get very bleak and not just the ways the liberals have been crowing about.
At Trump’s first press conference of his second term on Jan. 21, he announced the $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project called Stargate. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Larry Ellison of Oracle introduced their grand designs as though they were the masters of the universe.
Larry Ellison stepped to the mic, “Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn’t do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American. We’ve actually been working with OpenAI for a while, and with Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction.The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20, and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
“Walking down a suburban neighborhood street already feels like a Ring doorbell panopticon," writes Kenneth Niemeyer of Business Insider after Larry Ellison spoke at Oracle financial analysts meeting in Sept. 2024.
"We're going to have supervision," Ellison said. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.”
It appears that the United States government is about to be privatized and handed over to the techno-fascist oligarchs associated with the intelligence community. They seem to have the belief that their AI program has finally sucked up enough data that they are ready to implement a totalitarian terror state here at home and launch massive automated wars abroad to achieve their vision of global domination.
So when people ask me how I come to my unusual perspectives it is because I have nearly five decades of real world experience in the application of the grand lessons from my grandfather.
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