So Long, Dave McGowan

A few days ago, the world lost one of its original thinkers and most extraordinary researchers. David McGowan will probably never be mentioned in establishment history books, but his name and his work will be remembered as long as independent human thought exists.

Dave’s book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is an astounding read. It will make you look at the entertainment industry- especially the world of popular music- more cynically and skeptically. Dave found that virtually all of the rock stars who gravitated to Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and 70s came from families with powerful military backgrounds.

There should be no logical correlation between musical ability and a military background, but in the world of rock, Dave showed that aspiring musicians in that era with a high-ranking military officer as a father had a leg up on the competition. It strains credulity that all those rebellious rockers just happened to come from the kinds of backgrounds that directly contradicted their images. In one of his interviews, Dave stressed an important point I’d never considered; these rock stars were all of prime fighting age, yet not a single one seemed to encounter a problem with the draft. None of them went to jail or fled to Canada to avoid going to Vietnam.

Dave’s web site, Center for an Informed America is chock full of mind- blowing information. His investigations into 9/11 and the Boston Bombing were top-notch. His series on the Apollo program, Wagging the Moondoggie, is the absolute best work on the subject, in my view. And if you really want to go into the deepest recesses of these rabbit holes so many of us are drawn to, read his articles on the Lincoln assassination. He will have you doubting the event ever happened at all, and you’ll be hard-pressed to prove otherwise.

While I’d been deeply skeptical of our space program for quite some time, until I read Wagging the Moondoggie, I was still somewhat on the fence. Any reasonable person who reads Dave’s work on this cannot possibly believe we went to the moon nearly fifty years ago, yet somehow cannot go back there. As Dave noted, at what point do the masses start questioning this- on the 100th anniversary of the moon landing?

When Craig McGowan, Dave’s brother, first revealed that Dave was very suddenly in a literal battle for his life. I was not only stunned but terrified. At around the same time, I was rear-ended while sitting at a traffic light one night, totaling my car, and I was extremely lucky to walk away with only minor physical injuries. This brought home to me how tenuous our connection with this sphere is, and especially how prevalent premature demises are among those who write what we write.

Fortunately, Dave left behind a wealth of material, on his web site and in his books. He also was interviewed frequently, most of them easily accessible online. I was listening again the past few days to the powerful interview he did earlier this year with John B. Wells, on his Caravan to Midnight program. It was loaded with dangerous, subversive material, and I think it may not be coincidental that Dave was given his deadly diagnosis not long after it. It was eerie watching him (it was one of- maybe his only- video interview), and I was struck by how sickly he already looked.

Those who have read my book Hidden History know that it is filled with references to unnatural deaths. Persons connected in some way to these controversial subjects have an unsettling tendency to die unnaturally. When they do die of heart attacks or cancer- the two biggest causes of death for most humans- it tends to be under unusual circumstances. Other than Jack Ruby, I know of no other person who was given such a devastating diagnosis, with such little forewarning, as Dave was.

Dave was one of the first researchers to persuade me that anything is possible, and that perhaps nothing we perceive is as it seems. Reading his research on the Boston Bombing, and the work others have done on Sandy Hook, the Aurora shooting and other recent, widely-reported events, it’s difficult to avoid feeling like Jim Carrey’s title character in The Truman Show. Maybe we’re all witless reality show stars.

Dave was four years younger than me- far, far too young to die. He had so much more to offer, so much additional cutting-edge, innovative research to test our beliefs and perceptions. He probably would have been all over the recent attacks in Paris. I would love to have read his analysis of the video taken in an alley, which featured an allegedly pregnant woman, hanging from a ledge for several minutes, in the starring role.

It was eerily appropriate that David McGowan died on November 22, the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Dave’s writing and interviews were full of humor, and I think he would have appreciated the macabre coincidence there.

Those of us left behind will still fight the good fight, and hope to awaken each slumbering soul that we can. It isn’t easy going against the grain, and holding opinions that are sure to ignite the ire of conventional thinkers. Dave was going against the grain about as much as is humanly possible. Dave’s Laurel Canyon book seems to have been a tremendous success, but I don’t believe he made much money from it. That’s the reality for most writers, especially those who write about these kinds of subjects. No “conspiracy theorist” is ever likely to get rich.

I never met Dave McGowan, never even spoke to him. We did exchange a few emails, and ironically at the time I first learned that he was sick I was about to suggest that we swap autographed copies of our books. America is so bereft of clear-headed, daring writers, and it’s tragic that one of the best has been silenced. I’m sorry I never  met you, Dave, and I understand you weren’t a believer. For what it’s worth, I hope we do get to meet some day in a better, saner world.

Assessing the Presidential Candidates

As usual, we are left with a motley group of very, very wealthy individuals as our “choices” in the presidential election. Without much thought, we can eliminate nearly all of them. Chris Christie? Mobster wannabe warmonger. Lindsay Graham? John McCain clone- wrong on every issue. Marco Rubio? The dream candidate for open border advocates- absolutely awful. Carly Fiorina? One of the worst CEOs of all time, and a die-hard warmonger.

The mainstream media will do everything in their power to get Hillary Clinton elected. She is the clear first choice of the establishment. Her long record of corruption goes back to the Senate Watergate hearings. She would be perhaps the perfect person to reside over the inevitable economic and cultural collapse we’re headed for. There will be lots of inferences that “it’s time for a woman to be president,” but do we really want another Clinton? Does anybody really want this woman?

Hillary’s main party competitor is long-time “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders. Bernie is not independent- he is merely an extremely left-wing Democrat. Sanders talks a good game-  his anti-rich rhetoric stirs my blood. However, he recently proposed a large payroll tax increase. Payroll taxes are only paid on the first $119,000 of income. So it’s clear that no truly wealthy individual will be hurt by this kind of tax. Instead, the burden, as always, will fall on the poor and working class. Sanders also supports most of our military misadventures overseas, unlimited immigration, and is gung ho over our phony, seemingly perpetual “war on terror.”

On the Republican side, Jeb Bush is obviously the establishment’s choice, but his campaign has been so ineffective that they seem to be giving up on him. Ben Carson is about as dull and unimpressive a candidate as I’ve ever seen. He appears to have zero charisma. He is in favor of forced vaccinations for everyone, and is a suitably enthusiastic warmonger. The mainstream media have been insisting lately that Carson is “surging” in the polls. Much as they claimed, in 2012, that Rick Santorum’s campaign was “surging,” despite virtually no one showing up at his speeches and events, no one shows up for Carson’s events, either. Carson appears barely conscious most of the time. The media are clearly trying to create a monumentally false impression here.

Rand Paul should ideally be the Republican front-runner. Even considering that he plays politics far too much, and doesn’t match his father’s principled stands on important issues, Rand is the only candidate in either party who is against our war-first foreign policy, and the only one with the least concern for our civil liberties. But Rand has run a lackluster campaign, and failed to ignite the enthusiasm of young people the way his father did. It is true that he has been all but ignored during the debates, getting less air time than most of the other candidates, but Ron Paul had to deal with this, too, and still managed to retain hardcore support.

I realize that there may be good candidates running on Third-Party tickets. Certainly, I could support Jill Stein. I could vote for the Libertarian candidate again. But frankly I’m tired of doing that. No matter how hard we wish, the establishment is not going to break up their two-party monopoly. I voted for Ralph Nader enough times, and the media will invariably claim these Third-Party candidates received less than 1-2% of the vote.

That leaves us with the Republican seeming front runner, billionaire businessman-reality TV star Donald Trump. If someone had told me I’d be supporting Trump for president six months ago, I would have laughed. And yet, Trump continues to be the only candidate talking about the most important issues we face as a country. He is the only one on either side addressing the huge problem of immigration. We absolutely have to do something about the number of illegal immigrants in America, or we face a near future every bit as bleak as the worst years of the Great Depression.

Trump is the only candidate to address the reality of our massive unemployment. He has said, “That 5-6% unemployment rate is the biggest joke in this country.” Of course it is- they are only reporting on the number of applicants for unemployment benefits. In the same reports, they tell us that 94-100 million Americans of adult working age are unemployed. That doesn’t add up to a 5% unemployment rate, even using Common Core math.

Recently, Trump gave a remarkable interview with Breitbart News, in which he excoriated Disney for laying off their American I.T. workers and forcing them to rehire their H-1B foreign replacements. Trump blasted Disney and other American companies, and the government, for importing these unnecessary foreign workers, who are not more “qualified” than large numbers of unemployed Americans, and like illegal immigrants serve only to lower wages and reduce benefits. Everyone else in either party is adamant about the dire need for these H-1B workers, because of a totally imaginary “shortage” of qualified Americans.

Now it’s entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that Donald Trump is being insincere. He may just be a front for the powers-that-be, designed to implode on command. He certainly isn’t my ideal presidential candidate. But he is talking about crucial issues like immigration and bringing jobs back to America. No one else is. You know what you’re getting with all the other candidates in either party, with the exception of Rand Paul, who has been marginalized and realistically has little chance to win the nomination. War and more war. More state control. More laws that restrict human liberty. More legal and illegal immigrants taking dwindling jobs and resources. More massive concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Trump may be arrogant and egotistical. But there are no allegations of corruption and incompetence surrounding him. He doesn’t have the taint of insider corruption on him like Hillary Clinton does. He doesn’t have at least six malpractice lawsuits pending against him, for the most incomprehensible mistakes imaginable (leaving a sponge in a little girl’s brain, puncturing a patient’s eardrums during a routine procedure, etc.) like Ben Carson does. He isn’t advocating a huge tax increase for the lowest wage-earners in the workforce, like Bernie Sanders is.

People behind the scenes whom I respect have told me that Donald Trump is the “real deal.” Perhaps he always harbored these kinds of “America First” views, and simply hesitated to air them publicly. Like any businessman, he was about making money, first and foremost. Criticizing our immigration policy, and the outsourcing and global trade deals which have wrecked our economy certainly wouldn’t have been good for his business. Trump may indeed have hired illegals himself, and played “the game” in order to keep succeeding financially. But he isn’t talking like a corporate insider now. All we can judge him on at this point is his campaign rhetoric, and much of that has been about as revolutionary as it gets in our controlled campaign process.

Trump has struck a chord with people because his politically incorrect, no apologies-style is refreshing. There is a rogue honesty about him that is undeniably attractive. He may be completely phony, and if he’s elected he may very well forget his campaign promises and follow the globalist, corporatist game plan. There is little in Trump’s background to suggest a political maverick, but he is saying things that no front-running candidate has said in a very long time.

As anyone who’s read my book Hidden History knows, I believe voting fraud has been rampant in American elections for decades. So even if Trump is legitimately interested in turning the country around and rationally addressing our monumental economic problems, the vote could easily be rigged. Trump’s wealth and celebrity certainly help him; unlike other real or seeming renegade candidates, he cannot be easily ignored by the mainstream media. His campaign in many ways reminds me of Ross Perot’s 1992 effort. Let’s hope that Trump doesn’t mysteriously drop out and blame it on the Republicans threatening to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.

Thus, even though I strongly suspect voting is futile at this point, if Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination, and continues to speak rationally about the economy, I will cast a vote for him. It’s hard to imagine that I would ever be saying this, but he may just be our last desperate hope.