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Senate Passes NDAA with Multiple Tillis Provisions, Heads to Presidents Desk
Includes $240 Million for Military Construction in NC, Provisions to End Domestic Violence and Child Abuse
Daniel Keylin or Adam Webb | (202) 224-6342
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, applauded the Senate passage of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019. The bipartisan legislation includes more than a dozen provisions authored by Senator Tillis, including a bipartisan provision he authored with Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) that directs the Secretary of Defense to submit an assessment of the potential purchase by the Republic of Turkey of the S-400 air and missile defense system from the Russian Federation, as well as an assessment regarding Turkey's participation in the F-35 program as long it continues to unlawfully detain Pastor Andrew Brunson, a native North Carolinian. Other provisions authored by Senator Tillis will improve the lives of our servicemembers and military families, make critical improvements to North Carolina's military installations, and provide the largest pay raise for servicemembers in nine years.
As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Senator Tillis chaired an open hearing on the markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019. On a bipartisan basis, Senator Tillis and his subcommittee colleagues passed an across the board 2.6% pay raise, for our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines. Additionally, Senator Tillis worked on a bipartisan basis to secure a number of provisions in the FY19 NDAA to reform how the United States military manages, trains, retains and recruits its officer corps. Senator Tillis' Personnel Subcommittee mark also addressed the opioid crisis, provided Impact Aid for local school districts, supported military spouses, and established policies and procedures to end juvenile sexual assault and harassment, domestic violence, and child abuse.
"I'm proud of the bipartisan work we accomplished with the NDAA, demonstrating a commitment to our servicemembers and our national security," said Senator Tillis. "I am pleased my bipartisan provision with Senator Shaheen to delay the sale of F-35s to Turkey so we send a clear message to President Erdogan that the United States expects Turkey to uphold its obligations as a NATO ally, including respecting the due process rights of American citizens who reside in or travel to Turkey. I'm also pleased the NDAA included $240 million to upgrade North Carolina's military installations and a number of provisions I championed that modernizes the management of officers and establishes policies and procedures to end juvenile sexual assault and harassment, domestic violence, and child abuse."
Senator Tillis' Priorities in the NDAA:
Delaying Transfer of F-35s to Turkey
Directs the Secretary of Defense to submit an assessment regarding Turkey's participation in the F-35 program. This provision is a direct response to the Turkish government's wrongful imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, and Turkey's troubling intention to purchase the S-400 system from Russia. The legislation also contains a Sense of Congress that the Republic of Turkey continues to unlawfully and wrongfully detain United States citizens, including Andrew Brunson.
Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) Reform
Introduces the most comprehensive reform of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act since its inception in 1980, which includes key provisions to better align officer management with the objectives included in the National Defense Strategy. These provisions will modernize DOPMA to provide the services with the authority and flexibility to better recruit, support and retain officers.
Addressing Opioid Abuse
Requires the DOD to establish and maintain a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program that will allow bi-directional information sharing for designated controlled substances.
This language, which was included in the Personnel Subcommittee mark of the Senate NDAA, was a result of the SASC Personnel roundtable hosted by Senator Tillis in Fayetteville, NC that examined pain management practices in the DOD, VA and Civilian health care sectors.
Establish a 3-year comprehensive pilot program to minimize early opioid exposure and to prevent opioid misuse and abuse. This program will maximize opioid safety across the entire continuum of care and seeks to prevent the progression to misuse or abuse of opioid medications.
Impact Aid
Authorizes $40 million in supplemental Impact Aid to local educational agencies with military dependent children and $10 million in impact aid for schools with military dependent children with severe disabilities.
Juvenile Sexual Assault and Harassment
Requires the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) to establish policies and procedures to extend the same Title IX protections to students at DODEA schools who are victims of sexual harassment.
Domestic Violence and Child Abuse
Includes provisions from S. 2846, the Military Family PROTECT Act, bipartisan legislation co-introduced by Senators Gillibrand and Tillis that would establish multidisciplinary teams for military installations on child abuse and domestic violence.
Authorizes a pilot program on the prevention of child abuse and training on safe childcare practices among military families.
Establishes a new punitive article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibiting domestic violence.
Military Spouses
Expands authority for non-competitive appointments of military spouses by federal agencies.
FY19 Military Construction Funding for North Carolina:
$20.257M – Special Operations Facility; Search Evade Rescue and Evacuation (SERE) Resistance Training Lab Complex
$12.109M – Special Operations Facility; Replace Training Maze and Tower
$10M – Dining Facility
Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point
$55M – Flightline Utility Modernization – Maintenance upgrades to runways in support of Marine Corps and national security requirements
$60M – Aircraft Maintenance Hanger for the Vertical Lift Fan Test Facility
$51.3M – 2nd Radio BN Complex, Phase 2
$32.58M – Ambulatory Care Center/Dental Clinic Replacement
North Carolina Total Funding:
Burr Votes in Favor of Service Members, North Carolina Bases in Bipartisan Defense Bill
August 1, 2018: WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released the following statement regarding the Senate's passage by a vote of 87-10 of the Conference Report on the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019, H.R. 5515:
"The National Defense Authorization Act ensures those who volunteer to defend our nation have the tools and resources necessary to do their jobs and I'm pleased to vote in favor of this critical funding measure," said Senator Burr. "I was glad to see this bill included a provision I introduced with Senator Murray to begin a pilot program for Special Operations Command (SOCOM) medics to become Physician Assistants in their post-military career more easily. The SOCOM medic pilot program will use operational experience of special operators, along with academic partnerships across the nation, to shorten the certification time from two years to five months. This bill also authorizes several hundred million dollars for multiple North Carolina military installations such as Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune, Cherry Point and New River. I look forward to seeing the NDAA signed into law soon."


Canon-Fronsac from the excellent 1989 vintage.
Excellent condition with levels into the neck, good labels and a deep, bright ruby colour.
An Appellation just next door to Pomerol, this small region turns out some great wines at really competitive prices.
From the excellent 1989 vintage, which was awarded 5 stars by wine critic Michael Broadbent.


This Hairless Creature was purchased at a local pet store by my daughter, Dinah. I am not sure whether it is a naturally occurring beast, or a product of genetic engineering. Nonetheless, various scientific and philosphical questions leap to mind when contemplating this beast.
I often wonder what his mental processes are like; what is it like to Be Mortimer? Is this question even meaningful?
A guilty thought - sometimes he looks temptingly like food himself; a Pogo, perhaps.
One might be skeptical about the place of Mortimer in the philosophical universe, but there are some things about him that relate to science. In particular, he seems to dis-confirm several of the most well-established scientific theories.
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, they say. But Mortimer is a prodigious eater, and seems to belie this theory. If I place a hunk of lettuce twice the size of Mortimer in his cage before retiring, by morning there is no more lettuce, yet Mortimer has not grown. I have come to the conclusion that Mortimer uses nuclear processes such as nuclear cold fusion to convert lettuce to pure energy. I intend to use Mortimer to heat the house this winter, and will shortly cancel oil deliveries.
2) The Theory of Evolution.
Evolution is supposed to imply the survival of the fittest, yet Mortimer is clearly unfit for anything. Every day I let him out of his cage for a "run", although perhaps "run" is a hyperbole. Eventually I have to catch him and put him back. It never takes more than a few seconds to grab him, despite his squealing and fighting, and attempts to escape, which are utterly ineffectual. If he fares so badly against a middle aged human, how would he do against, say, a jaguar? And, note, this animal looks very tasty indeed. Could such a beast, a short-legged cocktail weenie, have withstood the forces of evolution? My best theory is that he is an artifice of some lab, a product of genetic splicing, possibly a rat-zucchini hybrid, with a bit of dachshund thrown in. Plus a cold fusion digestive system.


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Band Feature
By: Ashley Driesbach
The Elizabethtown Area High School Marching Band performs their show at every EAHS football game (on Friday nights). The Elizabethtown band is featured before home games and at half-time at away games. The band consists of 140 high school students and is directed by Mr. Steven Barraclough. This year's show is called Fantasy, and includes music from Game of Thrones, How to Train Your Dragon, Wicked, and E.T. -The Extra Terrestrial.
This compilation of music has something for everyone because it includes Broadway, TV, and movies. One of the highlights of the show is "the closer, because the music is so iconic and is very different musically from other things that [the band has] performed," according to Mr. Barraclough. In addition to the music, the marching routine really showcases the music and fits with each song's particular style.
Come see the EAHS Marching Band perform their Fantasy themed show before the end of football season!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Erik R. Scott
scott@ku.edu
Modern Russia, Eurasia, and the Soviet Union; migration and diaspora; borders; comparative empires
In his research, Professor Scott (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) explores migration and diaspora within and beyond the imperial borders of Russia and Eurasia. His book, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire, looks at the USSR not simply as a Russian empire, but as an "empire of diasporas," where politics, culture, and economics were defined by the mixing of a diverse array of mobile nationalities. Following the history of Georgians beyond the Georgian republic from 1917 to the present, the book examines the evolution of the Soviet multiethnic empire from the perspective of its most prominent internal diaspora.
He is currently at work on a second book, Illegal Emigration: Soviet Defectors and the Borders of the Cold War World, which follows the unauthorized movement of people across Soviet state lines. Through an examination of the political, legal, and cultural phenomenon of Soviet defection, the project investigates how the global borders of the Cold War were defined, disputed, and transgressed in refugee camps, border zones, extraterritorial spaces, international waters, and on board airplanes, shaping an international refugee regime whose legacy remains with us to this day.
He has held research fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at Georgetown University's Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and Fulbright-Hays, among others.
In addition to his historical research, Professor Scott is the author of several publications on contemporary Russia and Eurasia and an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing the historical context of the current refugee crisis.
Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016; 2017 (paperback). Russian-language edition in press at New Literary Observer (NLO).
"Edible Ethnicity: How Georgian Cuisine Conquered the Soviet Table" Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 4 (Fall 2012): 831-858.
Organized Crime and Corruption in Georgia (Co-editor and contributor). London and New York: Routledge, 2007; 2013 (paperback).
"Georgians and the Birth of the Soviet Union." CSPAN, November 3, 2017.
"How the Russian Revolution Turned Refugees into Political Pawns." Washington Post, July 6, 2017.
"Georgian Diaspora and the Soviet Empire." Sean's Russia Blog Podcast, April 2017.
"Georgian Football." Sport in the Cold War Podcast, Wilson Center Digital Archive, December 2015.
Professor Scott teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Russian, Soviet, and world history. His classes emphasize the diversity of Russia and the Soviet Union and examine Russian history's global dimensions. In teaching, he draws extensively on literature, film, and music and encourages his students to consider what everyday life can tell us about broader historical changes.
HIST 117: Russia: An Introduction
HIST 301: The Historian's Craft
HIST 376: Immigrants, Refugees, Diasporas
HIST 378: Beyond the Iron Curtain
HIST 568: Rise & Fall of the Soviet Union
HIST 808: Comparative Empires


The world faces a learning crisis. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) indicates that 230 million adolescents – 61% of the world's youth – will not reach minimum proficiency levels in lower secondary schooling. This is a colossal tragedy for the world's sustainability. Without a next generation with the capability to participate in communities and advance solutions for the challenges of our time – ranging from poverty, social and economic inequality, climate change effects, environmental degradation, prosperity, peace and justice, as outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – our planet's future is at risk.
Why are we failing to support children's learning? Why do some education systems have better learning outcomes than others? While these questions may have different answers in different countries. At Global TIES for Children, we use research as a tool to serve low- and middle-income countries through program and policy interventions. Our international work confirms our belief that a key component to education reform is rigorous research. Without rigorous measurement and evaluation of inputs, implementation and outcomes of education systems, it is unlikely that schooling can address the global learning crisis.
The EQUAL (Education Quality and Learning for All) Network for Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to identify and develop research networks, provide seed grants and increase research-practice partnerships in two regions of the world affected by the learning crisis – the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). EQUAL is capacity building of networks of scholars so that the evidence bases in measurement and evaluation relevant to the lifelong learning goal of the SDGs is advanced at the country level and across countries within the two regions.
Provide grantees with a rigorous, multi-generational mentorship program.
The application process for EQUAL seed grants uses a mentoring approach, provided by an Advisory Board made up of 19 scholars from the MENA and SSA regions. Their input helps us evaluate applications with contextual and cultural specificity as well as research rigor. We ran two application cycles in both SSA and MENA, disseminating widely in Arabic, French and English, and are currently running our third MENA application cycle.
We have funded 22 research scholars (16 from SSA and 6 from MENA) and look forward to expanding our EQUAL network. Our belief in mentorship is embedded in the heart of our EQUAL model. Scholars identify both senior mentors and more junior mentees in their proposals, which focus on measurement or evaluation relevant to advancing SDG 4. They also identify NGO or government partners so that the mechanism for productive use of research occurs in the context of a research-practice or research-policy partnership in their countries.
Our six MENA grantees come from different countries within the region: Palestine, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. The topics include measuring the quality of education for sustainable development; developing a professional development plan to improve students' critical thinking; examining and developing interventions to counter school violence; analyzing curriculum innovation in an Arabic curriculum and evaluating the impacts of teacher professional development. We partner with local organizations like Shamaa (Arab Education Information Network) who help us advertise our call for applications.
Sixteen grants are being awarded to applicants from SSA. Our grantees come from different countries: Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal, Zambia, Malawi and Cameroon. Topics include measuring quality in preprimary and primary education; addressing non-formal sources of learning in child and youth development; and studies assessing program effectiveness in education. Our partners in this region include the African Early Childhood Network (AfECN).
We look forward to expanding our EQUAL network, further developing research capacity building initiatives and also instituting the consolidation and implementation phase of EQUAL activities. All these will be embedded within the EQUAL model of multi-generational mentorship, application to practice and policy, and regionally-based support to address the global learning crisis and advance quality education for all.
If you are interested in applying for the EQUAL seed grant, please read our Request for Proposal to determine your eligibility. If you are eligible, download and submit the Letter of Intent. For any questions, please e-mail Joyce Rafla at joyce.rafla@nyu.edu.
Joyce Rafla is Project Associate for EQUAL and Sesame Seeds at Global TIES for Children.
Dr. Paul Oburu is Research Associate Professor at NYU Steinhardt and Project Director of EQUAL.
Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education at NYU Steinhardt, and Co-Director of Global TIES for Children.
This entry was posted in Education, Policy-Practice and tagged global ties, seed. Bookmark the permalink.


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William Ramsey, The Satanic Panic Head Fake |463|
by Alex Tsakiris | Sep 16 | Spirituality
William Ramsey, this attorney turned investigative journalist and author has a unique perspective on satanic panic.
[Clip 00:00:00 – 00:00:27]
That's Matthew McConaughey from The Lincoln Lawyer schooling his client on how the legal system really works. It's a topic that factors into this interview I have coming up with attorney an investigative journalist William Ramsey, quite prominently, especially when it comes to the case we're going to talk about, one of them, the West Memphis Three, and how it generated this ridiculous meme about satanic panic. Because as you'll hear, no matter what you feel about the legal proceedings surrounding Damien Echols and these crimes, there really should be no doubt that this is an individual that was deeply, deeply involved in satanic occult practices. And I say that, of course, because you've listened to this show with satanic being in quotes because we can't pigeonhole all this evil and hang it on one guy
Here's a clip from the upcoming interview with William Ramsey.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:35] But he looks so innocent and harmless, but that's exactly the point I wanted to put on about the deception. He's caught with an outrageous lie there, right?
William Ramsey: [00:01:46] Right, yeah. I mean, they caught him in a lie that he was writing like a secret script. I mean, the allegation is that he was obsessed with the occult, but they denied all that. But while he was in jail, what's he doing? He's writing the secret script that has Jason Baldwin's name and Aleister Crowley. And then he gets out, what's he do? He's right back writing books about magick with a K, and making all these very different interviews, he's quoting, he's talking about the moonlight, he's talking about rituals, he's tweeting about it. I mean, it's just incredible that people can actually be led on to think that that's not involved in this case.
https://media.blubrry.com/skeptiko/p/content.blubrry.com/skeptiko/skeptiko-463-william-ramsey.mp3
Click Here for William Ramsey's website
Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:28] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Tsakiris, and today we welcome William Ramsey to Skeptiko. William is an attorney, researcher, author, filmmaker, and creator of William Ramsey Investigates, which is really quite an amazing, impressive body of investigative journalism and interviews. I've listened to so many of them. I think I first came across William on The Opperman Report and he's done a ton on there. But it's just an incredible body of work and it's really, really relevant to the stuff that I want to talk about, and that's why I reached out to William and he was nice enough to come on and talk about some of this stuff. It's such a great fit for some of the stuff I've been looking into.
Some of the books we should mention. I've pulled them up. Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three. You guys have heard me mention West Memphis Three, and sometimes I say it like inside baseball, and I know there's a lot of people that don't totally get that. I mean, they get it kind of on a place holder meme level, but William's really going walk us through that because he's done some amazing research on that.
And then there's Children of the Beast: Aleister Crowley's Shadow Over Humanity. A really interesting book. And also I should mention a Vimeo movie that you need to get, and we'll show that in just a minute. And then finally, Prophet of Evil: Aleister Crowley, 9/11 and the New World Order.
So William just pretty amazing stuff there. It's great to have you on. Thanks so much for joining me.
William Ramsey: [00:04:22] Great, thank you for having me, glad to be here.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:04:25] So I think right off the bat, a lot of people are super intrigued, hooked into this attorney researcher, writing books on Crowley and the West Memphis Three and not your traditional kind of true crime stuff. It's not at all your thing, so tell us a little bit about how you came to do what you do, William Ramsey Investigates.
William Ramsey: [00:04:52] Well, I was always kind of a person who was willing to research things that were not covered by the corporate media. I went to law school in DC and worked there from '95 to '98 and saw some very remarkable things. I've briefly worked on the, what they call the suicide of Vince Foster, which was really the murder of Vince Foster, and he was murdered and dumped in a park, Fort Marcy Park.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:17] We can't just leave that hanging for people who don't know, a quick sketch of that case. How significant it is, what it's about and why it's not a suicide.
William Ramsey: [00:05:28] Right. So he was a lifelong friend, actually. I think he lived in the same town as Bill Clinton. He was a lawyer, he'd graduated. His name was Vince Foster. Graduated first in his class at Villanova, which is a challenging law school. So it's a very significant accomplishment. And he worked in the White House. He was, I think, the Chief Council or a council in the White House.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:52] I mean, he was tight linked into those guys. Especially Hillary, right? I mean a lot of other things maybe.
William Ramsey: [00:05:58] Yeah. The Rose Law Firm, and things going back to Arkansas and there was all kinds of shenanigans and criminality that were happening in Arkansas. There was a massive drug and laundering op. Running a laundering operation that was using Mena Arkansas, which was a kind of an airport that was in the [unclear 00:06:17], it was transshipment point for, not millions, but billions of dollars' worth of cocaine and all that money had to be washed. There are all kinds of investigations of people who've talked about that aspect of how the Clinton's came up in power.
But Vince Foster was found in a Fort Marcy Park, it was called Fort Marcy, because it's an old civil war Fort that was made out of really large pieces of the civil war soldiers, the union soldiers cut down tall trees and made this Fort there that protected the Potomac and Washington DC during the civil war in 1860s.
And it's still a remnant and it became kind of a thoroughfare. I mean, it has kind of a sketchy background, but he was found there on a berm, under unusual circumstances. He left for lunch, I can't remember the dates now, I believe it was 1994. Clinton came to the White House in 1992 and had served two terms. But he was found there, and it was immediately called a suicide and it was super suspicious.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:07:29] Yeah, we won't go into it too far, but I'd like to know your involvement, but wasn't it crazy? Burn marks, you know, gun on the left side of the head, he's right-handed.
William Ramsey: [00:07:37] He was left-handed, right. The gun was in the hand, which almost never happens in a suicide because the involuntary shot goes through your body. So it looked like somebody who watched a Hollywood movie would stage something. And also the fact that he was lying down on a berm. So what he would have done to do that was to actually decide to walk all the way deep into this park, and then lie down with his back on a berm, and then perform the act, hold onto the gun, which nobody knew he owned, and then cover himself and rug fibers and then the blood pattern would magically drift away, that was non gravitational. And there were all kinds of covered up, there were ripped up suicide notes that were found in his briefcase. It was really dark and very dirty.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:08:30] How did you get connected and what did you do? Did you do investigations or anything?
William Ramsey: [00:08:36] Well, yeah, well, I was an intern for the lawyer, for Patrick Knowlton, who was one of the chief witnesses. So Patrick Knowlton, I mean, this goes back 25 years. It's unbelievable, but this guy's name was John Clarke, and he's still a lawyer in DC and I just went to work for him. And what I did for him was compile this evidence file that was different than what was in the Starr report. And it was Kenneth Starr and the chief aid for Kenneth Starr was Brett Kavanaugh, who is now the Supreme Court Justice.
So most of the Starr report was actually written by Kavanaugh. And if you ever read through the Starr report and read through the footnotes, which I suggest you do, you should read the footnotes before you actually read the main text. Kavanaugh didn't pull any punches. There were all kinds of stories about what Bill Clinton was really up to, how many girlfriends he had and stuff like that.
Anyway, so I worked for Clarke and I actually sat down with Knowlton and they're still around, they're still giving interviews. And Knowlton was the first witness at the park who saw something suspicious. The FBI tried to change his or manipulate his story.
After Vince Foster died, it's not really that funny, but after Vince Foster died, there was a new FBI director the next day. So the FBI director got switched out.
So what Clarke did it created something, and actually, it's pretty fascinating because he successfully had that addendum attached to the Starr report by the District Court of DC. It's a three-person court. They actually just ruled on the Flynn case if you're familiar with that. That's a three-person court and the Writ of Mandamus was accepted by them and they overturned the lower court with this corrupt judge, in my opinion, by the name of Sullivan who handled the Flynn case in an atrocity, he just shouldn't even be on the bench.
So that addendum, the Clarke addendum, or the Knowlton addendum to the Starr report is available and was put on there by this three-person judges, there are all kinds of facts that Starr didn't seem to want to think.
So the gripe it's Kavanaugh with the Clintons is personal, and it goes back to that. It goes back to the mid-90s. A lot of people don't know that. So a lot of this kind of specious, you know, "He laughed at me while he was sexually assaulting me," there's a motivation for all of that stuff that went down with Kavanaugh.
So that was a long side, but that was really how I kind of figured that their stories, their narratives, and then there's the real story. And the politicization of reality is unfortunately a horrible situation to endure for all Americans because you're still going through it right now. And that was one of the things that happened in the whole Vince Foster fiasco, along with so much other criminality.
Anyway, John Clarke had me take that addendum, I was so dumb. I was so naive. I walked around and hand delivered it to every member of Congress, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. So I was just handing this thing out, and I remember handing it to Arlen Specter's office and all these other places. So I was handing it out and that started some very interesting events of my life. But that was really how I was willing to kind of addressing. So that was really the big start and I was always a researcher. I was always reading things.
And I remember at the time I was reading Michael Rivero, who does whatreallyhappened.com, who is probably for me one of the more important alternative analysts or independent voices out there. But he had a website called Rancho Runamukka, that's how far back I go on all of that stuff. So that's really the start.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:12:40] Let me ask you this because you know, I've noticed, and I know this for myself, but there's this stripping away of the layers of the onion that I think a lot of us go through, you know? I can only imagine such a great story. I mean, you're an intern, you're so impressionable, like you say, you're laughing at yourself for being naive, and we can all relate to starting a career and just doing what they say and kind of following the numbers.
William Ramsey: [00:13:07] 100%.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:08] What was it like though, as you got… I mean, the stuff you're doing right now is so, so far out there. I imagine that yourself back then, couldn't even imagine you getting to where you're at now with this stuff, in terms of being far out there, I can relate to that for myself. I would have laughed at this stuff 10 years ago, and now it's like, so real.
William Ramsey: [00:13:31] I think so. I was always listening to people talking about JFK. So that was probably my thing. And I always thought they were kind of kooky. But now I think they were all right. And I didn't understand the kind of secret society element, the elite mechanisms of control through the media. So I had to learn really a lot of that stuff firsthand. So I was super naive. I believed everything in my books. I followed the path of high school, college, you know, these are the tiers of success. And, you know, I saw a whole different story.
It's pretty amazing too, because when I was in DC, I had very close friends who worked in these law firms. Like the attorney for Jeffrey Epstein before he was murdered, I used to go over to their law offices on Fridays for free beer and see all these guys, Reid Weingarten. So I just saw a lot of stuff firsthand. Plato Cacheris, who was Lewinsky's attorney, so I used to go to Plato Cacheris' office, because all of my friends, we were all interns. So we were all in this same kind of tier reality at that time.
So anyway, that's why I doubted Epstein committed suicide too. So these things do happen, these things really do happen, and I never really considered the occult, which is really something that I really started out with. Nobody really wanted to talk about occult ideas influencing political events or the culture, at least at my time. A lot of people would dismiss you, I've already been called a conspiracy theorist. But for my books, I really tried to very rigorously cite them and try to maintain a higher academic standard.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:34] I think that's what comes through and I think that's what kind of intrigues people, is you have that kind of lawyer sensibility. And as you get more of the background, you can understand… You know, I think a lot of people don't even understand the different jobs that attorneys do, and you're kind of giving us an insight into how you think. And I think some of that is from your legal training.
Now tell me more though about the occult thing, because one of the things I feel is kind of hanging in the shadows here, because when I originally contacted you, I told you this project I'm working on and it's Why Evil Matters. And it's really this idea that, it's kind of like, as I described in this show, kind of alternative science or frontier science and frontier spirituality. And by that, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that are happening in science that is pointing toward this larger, more expansive view of consciousness. An easy one to point to his near-death experience, or reincarnation, either one. Solid science, you can point to. I think 200 peer reviewed papers, at least in near-death experience. And the work that's been done in reincarnation, particularly at the University of Virginia, is just stellar work, no one challenges that.
And it's been my position, not really position, just what I've observed over the last 10 years that I've done that, is that has shifted the dialogue. We're going to talk about cultural lot, I think, because when you talk about the West Memphis Three, that's what I love about that case, it pops us right in the middle of this and it starts splitting up some of these things. Like the occult and satanic culture and how there's this wink and nod and do what thou wilt, and I can lie, cheat, steal, do whatever I have to. I can deceive you because that's part of it, man, you know.
But then, at the same time that we never talk about, is there is this twin part of it that just isn't exposed, and that is the atheistic, you're a biological robot in a meaningless universe part of science. So you go to neuroscience and it's still, I mean, I repeat this every fricking show, but I can't help it. They don't believe that you have not only free will, they don't believe that you have an experience. They don't believe that consciousness is real. And when I say that, they mean that consciousness is purely an illusion. It's a byproduct of the brain. And when you get stuck in that materialistic paradigm, and science is built on that, psychology is built on that, neuroscience, you know all this, I'm just repeating it. You can't even begin to process satanic ritual abuse. However, you are going to pull that apart, you would say what I've heard religious scholars tell me on this show, it doesn't matter if it's true, it only matters what they believe. And I'm like, well, no, you've got that completely backwards. The first thing that matters is, is there this extended realm of consciousness? And are they somehow connecting with some benevolent force in that realm? You may that, but at least you got to look at the evidence for that before you dismiss it and say, "Well, that can't possibly be true."
But the funny thing about our culture is we have this dual thing going on, where both are operating, where there's this, you know, Johnny Depp, Duncan Trussell, a wink and a nod, of course it's all happening in this extended realm. And then you've got this other side of Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, of course consciousness is an illusion.
And then here's the shadow part that I just got to get out there because I don't want it to be like hanging, is you have the religious part and the Christian part. And I think when we do an interview like this and I talk to you and that's why I'd rather get it out up front, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to watch the movie, read the book and they're going to be, "Oh, okay, I get it. This guy has a Christian agenda and he's going to start preaching to me and telling me his narrowly defined understanding of how I need to relate to God, how I need to relate to that ultimate thing," that's most important in everyone's life, is their soul, and what that soul means to them.
So, I've thrown a lot on the table there.
William Ramsey: [00:20:09] Well, I'm impressed because I think you covered it kind of a little, in a general sense the groups that are influencing the culture. You've got the kind of occultist, you've got the materialist scientists like deGrasse Tyson or Steven Pinker or Kraus, or some of these other guys, or the Darwinists. And then, you know, you can put me right in that Christian camp, I'm comfortable with that. I don't really think that I'm promoting a real specific kind of sectarian agenda within Christianity, but I definitely am a Christian, 100%.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:20:48] Okay. So let's just touch on that for just a second. Before we go there though. I did say I want to visit your Vimeo channel and show people some of the videos on there. And I want you to talk about that. And then we're going to talk about a couple of interviews I've done one with Opperman, who I think has a fantastic show, it's such a go-to show, he's just got to get rid of those trashy commercials. The only way I can listen to it is with my little player in my hand, my thumb, right there. Skip. Okay, come on Ed, give me something good.
But I want to about Opperman and then I also want to talk about Russ Dizdar, you know, Russ?
William Ramsey: [00:21:28] Sure, yeah. We go back a little way.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:30] So two guys I've interviewed, because I want to get that Christian thing handled, and then I want to dive into a Damien Echols because I think that'll get us right back to all these things were going.
I want you to tell people a little bit about some of the work that you've done on Vimeo, because you've taken the books that I showed, and they've done some really cool videos. And some of them have a lot of slideshow kind of stuff. But you have some great video in there. You have a really good voice for this stuff, you make it work. And you can watch here, if you're watching, but some of the stuff, you know, Johnny Depp and Echols and then you've got stuff on the Process Church. So tell us a little bit about what's going on on Vimeo. And then I have another one that I watched last night, Children of the Beast, a video you did on Aleister Crowley. So tell folks a little bit about how these movies came to happen, and you know, how you feel about them.
William Ramsey: [00:22:32] Well, they were kind of outgrowths from my books. So I've done, other than the Smiley Face Killers, which I think it's one of the most important true crime stories that hasn't really been told nationally, which is the abduction and disappearance of young men for the last 25 years, not only in the U S but all over the world.
But the other ones, the Children of the Beast, was an outgrowth from my book and I really just wanted to kind of make a more visual approach to that, so that people could see that. Because a lot of the books, if you put too much and too many images in there, it distracts from the narrative. But if you kind of put it into a documentary format, I think people also can learn and see things visually much better, obviously in the documentary.
So Children of the Breast, Prophet of Evil: Aleister Crowley, 9/11 and the New World Order, is another documentary, and then Occult Hollywood volume two is out there. So I've got five full length documentaries. My Children of the Beast documentary is beyond full length, it's three and a half hours of events that people say aren't happening, which is men disappearing, found in water, judged as accidental death over and over again, hundreds of times.
So that's how those really came about. So Children of the Beast was really an outgrowth of my research into Crowley, which was an outgrowth of my research in 9/11, which was just a general outgrowth of my interest parapolitics or occult politics maybe. But like all of those things, that's how my interest in the Smiley Face Killers came about, is because I kept seeing this symbol in my research into Crowley, and then it led me to think, "Okay, well, what, the Smiley Face Killers, is this an urban myth? And then I started studying it and then I started seeing people or young men disappear and end up in water.
The first one I studied was a guy by the name of Joey LaBute out of Columbus, Ohio, and then I just was watching it and my chief researcher, Jim Smith, has really been on the story. I think he's the best researcher out there on the subject. There are multiple ones, Gilbertson and Gannon were the original kind of inquirers into the study, they wrote a book called Case Studies in Forensic Drownings.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:54] The interesting thing to me, that I was totally unaware of, is that you connect the Smiley Face Killer thing, that a lot of people have kind of heard about and don't know kind of what to do with it. And you've connected it to some of this same strange occult signaling, satanic signaling that's going on. And it is funny because ever since you mentioned it, I start seeing that smiley face in art, in t-shirts in all the right/wrong places. And I like how you're very careful, again, you have this kind of investigator sensibility, just the facts ma'am and you build your case slowly, you don't jump to a lot of conclusions. And even when we're going to talk about Crowley and talk about the West Memphis Three, you're very careful to build your case counselor.
So let me just touch on the Christian thing because here's, I think, the catch. And then I'm going to let it go. But there is this sense among a lot of people that if someone is Christian, that they're so agenda driven and I'm guilty of accusing Christians of this too. Because I think Christians do not accept their culpability in some of this stuff, and culpability in the sense of just how the average person processes this, and says, "Really? In this day, with the Catholic Church outed as systematic sexual abuse from the highest level directed from the Pope, you're going to tell me that this folds right into Jesus on the Cross, Son of God, screw you."
And further, I mean, what Crowley is saying, and this is especially the reason I think we need to pull the Christian part about it, is that one way to read the Crowley narrative, the Crowley biography, and I think it's totally the wrong way, but it's the way they keep doing it, is he was rebelling against a just incredibly overbearing Christian father, who really was kind of a kooky. Anyone would say, you know, it's taken the Christian thing way to this kooky extreme. No birthday parties, no presents, no Christmas, you know, all this cultish kind of stuff. And of course, then then we can pack it back into the psychology, and then we never have to deal with the real stuff that's going on.
And I would maintain, and then I'm going to let you respond to it, maybe I'll play a couple of clips from Ed and Russ Dizdar, and then we'll move on. ed and, uh, and is, and then we'll, we'll move on. But I'd say the same kind of thing with the West Memphis Three, when you break that down, if people haven't heard your stuff before, it's going to be stunning, because you stack the evidence and it's just overwhelming. But people are still going to process it as, "Oh man, satanic panic, those damn Christians are at it again. Dah, dah, dah."
So in general, go ahead and respond.
William Ramsey: [00:28:08] I think that's fair. I'm glad that you brought up the Catholic Church because that's the exemplar that antagonists of what they believe Christianity, even Crowley too, he was part of the exclusive brethren by Darby, who you may argue isn't even enough authentic Christian. So he's definitely within this wide broad tent of what's defined as Christianity, but that's very generalist kind of way to put it. I don't think Darby was, I mean, he was a sense dispensationalist, there all kinds of problems with his theology.
Some of these Christian leaders in different sects are very comfortable with the occult. Supposedly like Darby, I need to research that more, but also Joseph Smith, the guy who started The Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witnesses. There are all kinds of problems. And I think that this actually happens often. It's like, you can look at the gospel as a kind of caricature and then say, you're just going to throw that agenda on people.
I know what happens and that's fine. I don't even describe myself as a kind of sectarian Christian. I'm really just a Bible believing Christian. So I think that the real basis of any proper definition of that faith would be to see what's in the gospels and what is in Paul's writings and that should be basis point, not the church. The Catholic Church has hyper corrupt. I mean, the kinds of things that have been going on in there and the doctrines that are there. And even Crowley it's interesting you bring Crowley up. He actually favored Catholicism. He actually said that the real enemy were the Protestants and the Jews. So he had this kind of like a tolerance for it. And even some of his religion that he adopted, he took from Orthodox Christianity. So his whole occult Gnostic mask is from the Orthodox Church and he absorbed a lot of Christian teachings and twisted it. But yeah, you're right. So Darby himself.
So I think that these critiques are common, they're fair, but I think that they can be addressed and that's fine.
You can look at me. You can look at me through whatever lens you want, but if you want to look at the facts, that I've written about in those books, they're all fairly long, they're all footnoted. They're almost none of my subjective opinions, they're really just reference points. They're properly referenced in my opinion. And then you can take it as what you want to believe.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:50] See, you know, right there. We're cool.
William Ramsey: [00:30:53] We're getting into epistemology, right? Like why do you believe what you believe?
Alex Tsakiris: [00:31:00] Exactly. And to that end, I pulled up the interview that I did with Ed, and I just rattled his chain, but I'm glad I did. I mean, I don' mind pushing people in that way. But what Ed said that really kind of set me off and I pushed on him and then he got really pissed off, is he's like, "Why do you care what I believe? Why do you care what I believe?" And it's like, you don't get it, Ed, that is the whole thing. You're entering this realm. You're entering this battlefield. Yes, I care what you believe.
Just like when I had Hugh Urban on, Dr. Hugh Urban from Ohio State University, telling me about his book on Scientology and how it didn't matter that Crowley and Jack Parsons were performing a ritual in the desert to bring forth the antichrist through the Whore of Babylon, and he said, "Hey, it doesn't matter if there's any reality to it. It's just matters what they believe." If Christians don't understand that it matters what they believe, and they better be ready to defend what they believe or, as you do, separate that and say, "I would like to keep my personal beliefs, my relationship with God out of this and instead, look at my a hundred pages of footnotes. Look at all my documents, look at all that," and just take that on its own merit.
Again, I don't care about Ed's… I love his show and stuff. It's just that thing.
I had Russ Dizdar on. Fantastic. Tremendous amount of information because Russ got what I was saying and right from the beginning he was like, "No Alex, you want me to approach this with just giving you the facts for satanic ritual abuse, and I'm going to tell you about the victims, I'm going to tell you about what we find when we go to these sites, and what we observe in terms of the inverted, pentagram, the language, all this stuff, and let that kind of tell the story." And that's what I like.
William Ramsey: [00:32:59] I mean, we're all biased. We all have our own outlook. I can't detach that from my books, my personality, and the way I believe about things. So I think people requiring total objectivity is unattainable. So people always say, "Oh, you're biased." Well, everybody's biased, age, race, education, gender, politics. So I think that that's fair. I listened to left and right, I don't really mind as long as they're really being honest, that's really what I want, if they're being honest with the facts. And that's really what I try to have, is an integrity towards the reader or listener of my videos. Like this is just what they thought. I don't do a lot of editorializing, unlike corporate media or CNN or MSNBC and all this trash that shouldn't exist. So I don't mind defending, I mean, we can do defensive Christianity, like what you think the true Christianity is. I don't stand with some of these people other people would call Christian or what would be the foundations of that faith.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:34:08] Another show, and I don't think it's our show. It's not the show that we need to do, because the show that we need to do is on your books, because you already totally get where I'm coming from and you picked up the trail immediately because you're a good attorney and you kind of saw through that.
But what I think is interesting is the link, the path, and the Damien Echols thing is just fascinating to me and we're going to approach it and tear it apart.
So I've been on the trail of the Crowley thing and I have friends who are in the magical community, if you will. And I have friends that are trying to make sense of that in a way that isn't crazy, that I don't think is evil, that I don't think is demonic. I'm not sure that really works at the end of the game, at the end of the day, in terms of my understanding of spirituality, but I respect that people have different ways of doing it. And I don't think that everyone who looks in that direction is damned or condemned, or even doing it for evil purposes.
So with that, you know, I just want to get to the facts, because I did this interview for my book with a guy I really like at Forum Borealis, and I did it with Al. And I started going into the Crowley test, what I call it. And when I get the apologists for Crowley I just started tearing them apart. I go, "How does that make any sense to you? This is exactly what he said. How does this make any sense to you? He did this. He admitted to diddling little kids." I mean, he admitted to that. He acknowledged that he had children present during his sex magic.
William Ramsey: [00:36:03] He encouraged it, right, he encouraged it.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:36:06] But there's all this apologist stuff and that's the test that immediately splits it.
But I'm kind of jumping ahead because I want to go back to, people don't really know, like I was telling you, Forum Borealis., he's in Europe, he's in Norway, and I'm rattling off West Memphis Three, and he's like, "What's West Memphis Three?"
So if you can just sketch out the big picture of West Memphis Three. And I think the other thing that I'd love to have you talk about, and then I'm going to hit you with some more questions on the details, because they're fantastic, is what happened to West Memphis Three? Because the general impression is, "Well, they just found him innocent that they didn't do it."
William Ramsey: [00:36:48] Right. So they're supposedly innocent. They were arrested for a crime they did not commit. These are the standard kind of PR axioms that you'll see in almost every article that is pro West Memphis Three, which there are very few anti West Memphis Three out there.
But the true crime story really started in May 5th of 1993, after three young boys went disappeared. They were eight years old, right, in line with Crowley's teachings on human sacrifice in Magick in Theory and Practice. They were eight years old. They disappeared. They were found the next day in a ditch, in a little area called Robinhood Hills outside of West Memphis, West of Memphis, Tennessee across the Mississippi river. Two were found later after a medical examination to have been drowned. They were tied up in a very strange manner, ankle to wrist. One had bled out after his genitals had been removed. And so it was a particularly graphic and brutal crime. There was blood all over the place. It was never admitted into court, but the luminol tests were taken, so there was blood all over that area.
And there was an outcry trying to figure out who did this. There was a suspect that was mentioned by a probation officer by the name of Jerry Driver, who said that this young man by the name of Damien Echols, his real name, given name Michael Hutchison was his born name, but he changed his name to his stepfather's last name and took on the name Damien.
So he was investigated. And according to the records that are on the police records, he was brought into the police office. He was questioned. He failed the polygraph test. He said, "If I talk to my mom, I'll tell you everything. If you let me talk to my mom." So he went and talked to his mom, then he clammed up, but the investigation continued. They didn't have enough evidence to arrest any of them until they brought in another young man by the name of Jessie Misskelley on June 3rd of 1993, who then confessed and implicated Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin.
And all three were arrested. They were tried separately, due to some evidence that was going to be put in the trial. And 24 jurors found them both guilty. Damien Echols was over 18. He was given the capital punishment. And the other two pretty much got life sentences.
And probably the key lever in creating doubt in the public's mind was the involvement of an HBO documentary. There was really a trilogy. The first one was titled, Paradise Lost, which came out in 1996. And then there were two others, I think it was 2001 and maybe 2004. I can't remember the exact dates of when those came out. But there were three that cast doubt upon the guilt. The first one kind of was somewhat of objective, but the second one kind of blamed one of the stepfathers by the name of Byers, and then third one pretty much implicated another man by the name of Terry Hobbs created kind of a furor. It snowballed, other people got involved, celebrities got involved. Money was raised, possibly they're saying a huge amount of money, 10 to $20 million. One of the best attorneys out there got involved and put pressure on the state government through new laws that had been created about DNA testing and there was going to be a hearing in 2011, I think in December to a judge, whether some of this DNA could be used. But in August 2011, an agreement was reached and the three pled guilty. So they already had all been found guilty. They pled guilty again, to first degree murder. They admitted on sign documents, you know, they're adults now, but through the best attorneys really available, that there was enough evidence to possibly convict them again. They went to court. They were put under 10 years of probation, they were let out while professing innocence on something called an Alford plea, which is based on a Supreme Court case Alford V North Carolina, which allows you to profess your innocence publicly while pleading guilty. So they're basically guilty. They're still guilty and under probation until next year.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:20] I asked you to keep it vanilla and man, you really kept it vanilla. Let me kind of pull you into the real stuff. Like anyone who goes and Googles West Memphis Three, I'm not exaggerating, the first 1o, the second 10, the third 10, satanic panic, satanic panic, satanic panic. That's the only thing you hear about this case. It doesn't have anything to do with the facts. And that's what's going to be so interesting as we dive into this. Why did this become the kind of poster child for satanic panic? And why do we think that that that's not accidental? It can't be. And all again, all the wrong people lining up with this guy and flashing, you know, satanic signs and all the rest with this guy wind up, lining up with this guy and flashing satanic signs and all the rest with this guy.
William Ramsey: [00:42:16] Statements, yeah, all kinds of stuff. I mean, it's all over there. So why is it satanic panic, if the guy, as a member of the OTO while he's in jail, while he's also just recently admitted to being part of AA, was specifically traced to Crowley who wrote in his own writing on vice that he was prosecuted for his love of the knowledge of Aleister Crowley specifically? Crowley's name pops up all over his, and that's really what peaked my interest in this whole case.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:42:44] Isn't it true William, that we have evidence of him, like performing a satanic ritual in a burning garage that he set on fire? Go ahead on that one.
William Ramsey: [00:42:58] Well, that's true. I mean, that was in the original case. They say that he was prosecuted for wearing black, but he was actually arrested before the events for kind of moonlighting, I think, in an abandoned trailer. And then there was testimony of all kinds of weird stuff he was doing. And there were all their statements in the court files, which I included in my book about them hanging out at Stonehenge, just crazy stuff. Off the charts.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:43:26] Off the charts and you do an amazing job in the film. Let me pause for a minute. Let me see if I can pull that up.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:44:01] Okay, I'll stop it there if I can. But I wanted to give people a little bit of a taste for the excellent movie that you put together. Tell us what's happening there. You really feel for that kid, I have to say. I know they prep these defendants, but he looks so innocent and harmless, but that's exactly the point I wanted to put on about the deception. He's caught with an outrageous lie there, right?
William Ramsey: [00:44:33] Yeah. I mean, they caught him in a lie that he was writing like a secret script. I mean, the allegation is that he was obsessed with the occult, right? But they denied all that, but while he was in jail, what's he doing? He's writing the secret script that has Jason Baldwin's name and Aleister Crowley. And then he gets out, what's he do? He's right back writing books about magick with a K and making all of these very different interviews. He's quoting, he's talking about the Moonlight, he's talking about rituals, he's tweeting about it. I mean, it's just incredible that people can actually be the led on to think that that involved in this case.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:13] So I want to touch on two things. I want to hit on the deception thing in a minute, because I think if people aren't aware that that is part of the ethos, that is built into this system of beliefs, which is that I can lie to you. It's okay for me to lie to get my end. And it's right in the title of your book. Do you want to speak to that, have you found that to be true?
William Ramsey: [00:45:42] Absolutely. I think that they lie about all that stuff. They lie about their secret society, associations, about who their friends are, about their signals. There's a real wink and a nod, just like you mentioned within these groups. So I think that not disclosing… What did Orwell say, "Admission is the greatest form of lie." So they admit to tell you all this stuff, that there's all kinds of weird associations. I mean, there's some dark habits. I mean, there's so much deception in this case that almost everything that's proffered by Echols in some thing, it's just nothing is really that honest. He said that he was sick, that he was beaten in jail all the time, that his teeth were going fall out, that they had to take the deal because he was going to die.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:46.33] Hey guys, I just wanted to jump in for one second with a couple additional points that I wish I would've asked William, but I didn't. So I'm going to try and get those in here. And these come directly out of his book, Abomination: Devil Worship and Deception in the West Memphis Three Murders. And it's really important for getting to the bottom of this question of whether Damien Echols did these deeds, these horrible, evil deeds.
I have to make the distinction because a lot of people don't get this. It doesn't speak to whether or not he should have been released, you know, whether there were some technical requirements in the legal system that weren't met, or any of that stuff, that's separate from whether the guy did it. But the guy did it. He has in the book the police interviews they did. And these police interviews are tricky because police in these situations do some pretty, I don't know, too me kind of shady kinds of things. Like one of the things they do to people is they say, "Okay, who do you imagine would have done this crime?" So they, they get them down this whole line.
But listen, what he says, first Damien confirmed that he liked to read books and one of his favorite writers was Church of Satan founder, Anton LeVay and The Satanic Bible. Now that again, for the people who are apologists for Satanism, they're like, "Hey, you know, should be able to read whatever you want." Sure, you should be able to read whatever you want, but they ask them specific questions about the murder. And they say, you know, "Damien how would you imagine it going down?" and he said he figured that the killer knew the kids in the woods and even asked them to come out to the woods. He stated that the boys were not big, not smart, and they could have been easy to control. He also felt that the killer would not have worried about screaming due to being in the woods and close to the Expressway. And then he said some important factual details. Damien said that the bodies of all the boys had been mutilated and one had been mutilated a lot more than the others. This is a fact that was not known to anyone except those at the crime scene because the police never released this information. He also said that Steve Jones from the Juvenile Authority had told him about how the boy's testicles had been cut off and that someone had urinated in their mouths. Damien said that that could have been the reason why their bodies were placed in the water, so that the urine could have been washed out.
This is another critical piece of evidence because this information was never released. Steve Jones from the Juvenile Authority had no way of knowing that and couldn't have told that to Damien. Only someone at the crime scene could have known that.
So again, I'll leave it off there because I hate all this nasty gory true crime stuff. But again, pack this back into the question of whether or not this is a case of satanic panic.
Okay, back to the interview.
William Ramsey: [00:49:50] You know, all kinds of crazy stuff. If you look at the totality, it's just nonsense. It's really hard for people to believe that in literal Satanism that there are groups of networked people out there. And I think that that's really the hardest part of addressing the West Memphis Three.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:11] I think you're absolutely right about that. You know, one of the chapters I have in my book is an interview that I did with this woman named Anneke Lucas. And she's really a lovely person, and we connected. We both like yoga and she's a yoga teacher for incarcerated women in Upstate New York, and she's got this transformation that she's gone through in her life. And she would have to, because at six years old, she was sold by her mother to a satanic ritual occult abuse network in Belgium.
William Ramsey: [00:50:46] Belgium right. Was she associated with the Dutroux thing?
Alex Tsakiris: [00:50:51] Well, she's careful about who she names, but it's very clear that that is the group that had her because she mentions, and that's fascinating too, right? Because talk about history repeating itself, you know, there was this big drain the swamp and this is this pedo ring. As I tell people, anyone who has any doubts, you can still Google photos of kids in cages, tied up. Just all the most horrible of the horrible things you can see. And her account is that she was going to be killed. She had been raped, like thousands of times, six years old remember, six years old by her mother.
But the interesting thing I always alert people too, is that if you want to take a secular perspective on this, it doesn't work because what these people are doing, and they will tell you what they're doing, is they are trying to, one, connect with some malevolent force in this extended realm.. and they're trying to connect with that force for a reason, to bring in a certain energy into this realm. And that's why they connect with Aleister Crowley. And it's nothing unique about Aleister Crowley, it's just many people have chosen that at all costs, they're so attached to this world and what they can get out of this world, that any entity in that extended realm that connects and offers that chance, they'll do it.
William Ramsey: [00:52:30] I'm glad you brought up that case because it was totally networked, it was covered up. There were all kinds of shenanigans that took place under the surface. Like the prosecutor got fired, and there's an incredible German documentary that traces just the people that were murdered around the Dutroux case that knew too much. It's like 25 people. Like, "I knew too much, they're going to kill me," ends up dead. Another person says, "I got information on this," gets run over by a car. It's incredible. It's like JFK, you know, all the people who knew about that, who ended up dead. It's incredible.
The Dutroux case, if you don't think that that's network evil, I'm sorry, you're just wrong because it went to the highest levels of that elite. And Dutroux was known to leave Belgium, he was moving around Europe. So they don't even know the totality of what happened and the horror show. Like two of the kids died because he was in jail and couldn't feed then in the dungeon.
So that's a real problem. People cannot connect to spiritual evil, and I'm glad you brought that up because that's what these people are doing. That's what Crowley was doing. If you read his Corpus and all the stuff, he's talking to entities, he's traveling through the astral plane, he's got Aiwass and the wizard and the Amalantrah Working, the [unclear 00:53:46] Working, Coronzon. He's supposedly talking to all these people. That's what a lot of these things are doing is summoning demons and that's who's giving him information, that's what he's writing down.
So, I think that magic, that's really it. And the real argument is like, are these figments of your imagination, or is there something outside of your personality that people are perceiving? And if you want to talk about the magical community, that's an argument.
However, I don't know how Crowley could have written down, like a gray alien back in 1918 in New York, after an Amalantrah Working. So that is such a stretch for the imagination, and you still see this kind of reference alien, extraterrestrial, what if they're extra dimensional? So they see when people do yage or they do ayahuasca, there's always this green man they're talking to. People have these weird entity experiences. And that may be all the UFO phenomenon really is, is really people who are having extra dimensional events, not extraterrestrial.
I could talk about the Children of the Beast, LeVay talking to McMurtry, and all of these other guys.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:55:08] I think, here's what I want to go with that. And maybe we've hammered on this enough or maybe not, I can't tell. But there's this doublespeak going on. The cultural part of it, and I'm struggling. I'd like you to talk more about the culture around Satanism and occultism. And I don't want to use those words in the way that they're usually used. You know, I mean, I had Oxford Christian scholar, Richard Smoley, How God Became God, a super great guy, a scholar, a religious scholar and remains a Christian. But he'll point out to you that historically Satan isn't in the pre-Torah writings and he kind of pops in after Zoroaster. And we have all these things of that reality, we're co-creating reality.
William, I can't tell you how many near-death experience people I've talked to, but I talked to a guy just the other day, a fantastic guy. I have no doubt about his Christ consciousness experience because that's what happened to him. He died. He went to kiss his girlfriend at the commuter train and the door closed on his coat, dragged him under the train and he died, and he saw Jesus and he had this incredible experience.
And I don't doubt that he had this incredible experience in this consciousness realm with Jesus. But then I asked him, I said, "You know David, a lot of people I've talked to that have multiple near-death experiences, they sometimes say that the Christ figure kind of gives way to an even greater and a higher God, and there's hierarchy." And he goes, "I can't deny that that isn't true, because I got a sense that there's more for me," and stuff like that.
I'm not trying to kind of preach to you on any of that stuff. What that opens up to me is the possibility that we need to consider an unbelievably varied realm in this extended realm, which is even more complicated than our realm, because we don't know what these guys are doing exactly. And I'm uncomfortable with just saying a demon, they wanted a demon. I just don't think we know enough. We know it's evil, we know it's dark and I'm just kind of rambling here. So save me.
William Ramsey: [00:57:33] I think it's interesting because you can even look at the biblical context, these, like demonic entities are all through, kind of the global mythos, through all of these legends and stuff like that, that there's bad spirits. Almost every culture has some kind of reference to these kinds of things that are outside of themselves. Not ghosts or something, but some kind of evil presence.
So it's a commonality, not just kind of in the Bible, where the New Testament talks about Christ being tempted by Satan. There are actually references to Satan right there at the end in Jerusalem at the Last Supper with Judas, right? Satan enters into Judas and he goes and betrays Christ. There's even a reference to Satan and Isaiah, for example, which is the Old Testament.
But yeah, before that, maybe not so much. It's interesting because in the Bible, Paul mentions Moses contesting against the two magicians of the time in Pharaoh's Court, Jannes and Jambres, but they're not mentioned in the Exodus or Mosaic narrative. So Paul seemed to have some reference to these two magicians and there are magicians in the Bible like Simon Magus and the Witch of Endor. So this kind of magical tradition is a part of human civilization, a dark magic, maybe if you want to call it that.
So something outside of yourself, like some demon, I think, extra entity or something like that, isn't that hard to believe. And then if you want to say, like people who've experienced miracles, near-death experiences, there are varieties of religious experiences, just like that book said. So I don't think it's outside of that. It happens whether it's within the Christian tradition or not.
Alex Tsakiris: [00:59:33] Right. So we're kind of pushed in this box. So we're kind of in agreement, that we're being kind of pushed in this box to either deny evil. And when I say evil, you know, let's try and work towards a definition. This kind of soul crushing, extra-dimensional help in order to destroy someone's soul, that's evil. We can kind of drive that one in the ground and say, "Okay, I don't know about drone striking a wedding party in Yemen," which I think is pretty bad, but who knows it has some geopolitical aim or something like that. This we can more clearly say, I can't see any other way that that isn't evil.
So then what is the play in culture? Why do we have this divide? Why do we have, like we talked about at the very beginning, you know, that Neil deGrasse Tyson, who we really think is probably just completely oblivious, you know, is just happy living in his materialistic world. And then you've got the kind of Hollywood, which you've just explored extensively, is going like, "Well, we're way past you guys. We're using the force."
William Ramsey: [01:00:46] That's a good point. I mean, look at Johnny Depp, he's supposedly uses these entities to inform himself on all of his roles. Like, he's fully involved in… like what we call evil. People ask me, "You're an admirer of Crowley, you seem to talk about in in laudatory terms," I don't, I call him the prophet of evil. He thought he was a prophet of the new aeon. I believe is evil because all of his ideas are antithetical towards the treatment of society, really in general. It's super selfish, like you said already and go over this theme of our conversation, you lie, you manipulate, the slave shall serve. Crowley was kind of like a classist of the worst sort.
But I think the definition of like, what people are willing to do to their fellow man to get worldly benefits, whether it's money, sex, fame, kind of the standard sins. Then can kind of counterpoise that at least in the teaching of Christianity to somewhat universal. It's like Christ is a servant, and you turn the other cheek and there are those teachings here where you're not supposed to propagate trauma or hurt on somebody else. That's kind like what turning the other cheek is, you don't strike back. So it kind of lessens whatever harms are out there, it doesn't engender that kind of malevolence towards people, people hurting each other.
It's interesting too about how many of these occultists really are Christ and Christian aiders, whether it's Hubbard or Crowley or Hitler or some of these other people. How they really deliberately counterpoise themselves against the teaching of Christ.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:02:53] And I think there's a couple of interesting things and I don't know if we can kind of smooth this out and hit all the points. And this is in the Crowley thing, and maybe you can pick up on it and elaborate on it. But the do without wilt ethos, which whenever you talk to a Crowley apologist, they jump on that, they go, "You don't know what that means. You don't know what that really means." I go, "His whole life is about that. Look at his life, look at the deeds, the fruit."
But I guess related to that is kind of this Sabbatian Frankist kind of, we can't all be saints, so let's all be sinners, and this kind of Crowley, I want to do the most horrible, but then they twist it into, again, this Christian thing, because that will in this twisted way bring about the next coming of Christ. Do you want to speak to that at all?
William Ramsey: [01:04:00] Well, I think that, you know, Crowley said he got power from transgression, and I think that's a very common theme within occultists or Satanists or whatever, however you want to call them. And I think the worst crimes, it's an inversion. So definitely it's there in Crowley.
It was funny, somebody asked Crowley, "What if you have two people who are doing what they will, what if they conflict, what if they headbutt over it?" and he didn't have an answer for that. So you can just see the wreckage of Crowley's life, the ruined lives, the wrecked lives, the suicides. It was like an energy drain on almost of his scarlet women, branding him on the chest, and then he was done, they were done, they were not giving him this spiritual energy that he wanted. And they just moved on.
If the apologists think that he lived an exemplary life, I think that they're deluding themselves, there's a lot of delusion in the Crowley followers and there's a lot of simplification there. The people who admire Crowley only saw him one side, which is his religion, but not his real personality and the way he behaved toward others. I think if they look at the truth of really what he did…
And that was really one of the things why I was inspired to write a book about Crowley, is because of all of the expurgated elements of his life that people just left out. They just call him the great man, or liberator of humanity and all of this other stuff, but he was an outright Satanist, he admitted as much, that Aiwass was Lucifer and the devil of the star or universe. So he just concealed it and camouflaged it much better than maybe a person like LeVay.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:06:06] So William, before we run at a time, because I've kind of babbled on about a lot of my stuff. One of the important things about your work, especially with Crowley, is you give the direct connections to present day culture. Like Timothy Leary might be one that some people have known that for a while, but some people don't. Obviously, the music industry, the Hollywood industry, and this just admiration and this kind of blind devotion. And you can only imagine the feedback we're going to get from this show. I mean, because there are some real Crowley defenders and they're just out to stamp out anyone who says that. Connection to important cultural figures in time, Crowley.
William Ramsey: [01:06:48] Well, I mean, you can just go back through so many influential people, whether it's Hubbard, whether it's Leary, whether it's Jimmy Page, Kenneth Anger, who's associated with the Manson family. I mean, he literally lived with Bobby Beausoleil and Bobby Beausoleil was Lucifer Rising. And one element of the whole corpus of works about Manson that you almost never hear about is that Beausoleil who murdered Hinman was living with Anger, he was in a movie with him, and he also considered himself a warlock. He was also associated with so many other cultural events, and still alive, still alive today believe it or not. Anger has been friends with Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron all the way to today.
And it's also an element of the elite because one of his great sponsors was J Paul Getty Jnr, one of the richest men in the world. Whenever Anger wanted to take flight, he just got a carte blanche payment from the Getty family, which tells you a lot about the elite. And Getty used to do all kinds of weird rituals and tunes and stuff. If you really look past the curtain of these people, they're much darker than you can imagine.
So I think that that culture is very important, and it's usually left out in these histories of these people. Like I said, it's selected history.
So if we can go back to the very beginning of our talk, where if you have a materialist, a Darwinist, a person without a spiritualist view, they just won't even look at these things as important markers upon character and how that character plays itself out in the real world. They just won't even accept it. Then you have occultists that are deliberately keeping that out. So there's a real historiographical problem because a lot of these people move into these characters and their understanding of what they're really doing, because there are parties deliberately, whether because of their own inherent biases or intentionally because they're occultist, which is to hide something, keeping that out.
And that's really, when you see these characters, how, if you don't get all of the facets of their character, and like Hubbard, he was the source, I mean, all the same fake prophecy type stuff, how toxic and dangerous Hubbard really was in Scientology. If you don't see that part of his connection to Crowley, you could literally have your soul raped by him in that whole organization.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:09:25] You know, kind of related to that, it took me a long time to come to this realization about the atheist materialist, you know, there's no meaning you're a biological robot.
William Ramsey: [01:09:35] The whole top of your brain is just a big deceiver of reality to perpetrate, your genes. That's all it is.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:09:44] It's impossible for me to accept that that isn't conspiracy also.
William Ramsey: [01:09:52] That's a good point, that's a great point.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:09:53] That that isn't orchestrated, because it just totally fits into the playbook. And people don't realize that to do that it doesn't require a completely orchestrated kind of thing. You just put the cheese in the maze where you want these little rats to run and they don't even know what they're doing, but they're doing the bidding of someone who says, "Hell yes, I want people to think that life is meaningless and to just be materialists and consumers," that fits in perfectly.
William Ramsey: [01:10:21] Let me just add to that because it's like, if you're an elitist, that's what you want the people, the slaves serving to believe. There's no meaning. Don't make any changes. There's no action on your behalf.
If you look at Darwin and really unpack The Origin of Species, it really is a big racetrack and it has its own ideology outside of science. It's about the most favored races, and the struggle for survival. That's the subtext of it. If you ever see Darwin, he's making the occult sign of silence. So this kind of occultism has been around forever, pre-Crowley. He just adapted and adopted and stole it. But it puts Darwin in a completely different light about what his real objectives his were and why The Royal Society wanted to promote those objectives, which is basically the King and Queen of England. They justified their whole empire, right?
Alex Tsakiris: [01:11:16] Totally.
William Ramsey: [01:11:17] They're at the top of the global empire.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:11:19] We did a bunch of shows on Wallace, you know, who was the contemporary of… If you go back in the history books, like 50 years, the co-discoverers of evolution were Darwin and Wallace. And Wallace is kind of erased out because Wallace comes to the conclusion that there's a higher order of consciousness to this. There's no getting around it. And in fact, I've had some scholars on here and I didn't make a very convincing case that Darwin plagiarized Wallace's his writings in order to get his theory. Because he didn't have the data. Wallace was in the field collecting widely the data. He stops on the Galapagos islands, which is great, you know, but he gets this very narrow bit. Wallace, he's the working man kind of thing. He's out there having to struggle and collect all these things. I forget where he was. But anyways, that's for another time.
Because he's the other question, I wanted to skip back and really, really dig into this one. We see the Hollywood thing and we get that Johnny Depp is in, he just looks like a tragic figure to me. He just looks like somebody whose soul has been sucked out of him. I know that's going to sound kind of churchy to people. Don't you see that? Don't you see that in some of these people?
But other ones, you feel like maybe they're just being duped and that's when you really feel sorry. They're going to the parties and, you know, Brodovitch is cutting up the cake and isn't this cool. And they don't understand what's at play, or do you think they do?
William Ramsey: [01:13:07] well? I mean, I could probably analogize, like they had just a naive view of certain things. You know, I had a very naive view of American politics, and there's a lot more going on under the surface than you could imagine. And it's probably the same in Hollywood. People wanted to be famous or they wanted to be in the arts, and they might not even know what it takes to get to the top. And I think that Hollywood, for example, at least recently, I think you've got to be initiated to get to the top. One way or another, you're either into pedophilia or occultism, or just something dark. So everybody knows something about somebody else, you know?
And that's why like a guy like Weinstein was raping people for decades. The amount of people who come forward is probably just a tip of the iceberg for that guy. So there's something really creepy going on in Hollywood. And I think a lot of those guys, if you really read about some of these stories, it's just… Have you ever read Crazy Days and Nights? It's a really good website, but they are leaking information from these guys that they're just monsters. A lot of these stars and celebrities and directors were child rapists.
And some people don't survive in Hollywood, they crack, and they leave, or they just are disillusioned. But the ones that have been there forever, Johnny, Depp's a perfect example. If you look at this court case that he's having with Amber Heard's involvement, they have a recording of that guy just howling in pain. There's something about him that's wrong. And his association with Echols. He was one of the chief financial backers to get Echols out along with Peter Jackson.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:14:56] Do you know who, uh, Chris Knowles is? He writes a blog.
William Ramsey: [01:14:59] Yeah, I know Chris Knowles.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:15:00] I interviewed Chris a few weeks ago, and I think he's like me. He has some friends who we like and respect, who are kind of in this magic community and we keep going, "What are you doing guys?" But he said it so perfectly. He said, "If you think you're talking to this demon or this entity, and they're going to do these fantastic things for you, what are you have to offer in return?" And I thought, doesn't that just ring true on a kind of personal level? How do you think you're going to make that deal work? You have nothing except your soul to give and that's what you will be asked to give at one point or another, you know?
William Ramsey: [01:15:46] Very good point. Very good point
Alex Tsakiris: [01:15:49] Last point and then I'll wrap it up. I appreciate we've pushed it right up to the 90 minutes. Russ Dizdar has a really interesting theory. It's going to sound completely wacky to a lot of people, but I got a lot of reason to believe that he's on the right thing. And that a lot of times when you hear about this sexual abuse of children, pedophilia, that it's not even so much about sexual abuse, it's about traumatizing children in order to create this dissociative identity disorder, because it is a direct link to making them more vulnerable to spiritual attack. And the crazy thing about that, is that connects directly to stuff we've learned about MKUltra and that we were trying to weaponize that dissociative identity disorder aspect, because we learned that it's almost like a technology, it's a secret code. What do you think about that? Do you have any thoughts?
William Ramsey: [01:16:49] I think he's right. I think he's right. I think that that's true. I mean, I think in a very dark way, a lot of the stuff that happens in the Catholic Church is to keep people in the Catholic Church. So they get traumatized, they become helpless, they become less active, so to speak or authoritative. So I think that that's definitely believable, right? I think that that's what they're doing. They're deliberately traumatizing the kids as well. Yeah, for sure.
And in some of these cases, McMartin and stuff, the kids are deliberately being traumatized or the Finders case, they're all using these same techniques and these strange occultists are running the whole show. Look at the Finders case man, terrifying.
And you can get into deliberate traumatization in 9/11, incredible. It's traumatizing if you think the government did it, or it's traumatizing if you think that some guy in a cave in Afghanistan did it.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:17:50] So when you get into weaponized traumatization, then just the thought that someone has figured out that they can get a leg up by doing that, is really scary, especially in this extended realm.
William Ramsey: [01:18:08] Very scary. And you know the traumatization starts and then the suggestion follows. Right? So you traumatized and then the suggestion, and then…
Alex Tsakiris: [01:18:16] You've opened up the door.
William Ramsey: [01:18:16] You're absolutely right. Then you have this kind of approach, this technique that they know, right? It becomes a skill and they develop that. I mean, this book, you should have Tom O'Neill as a guest, the book Chaos, about Manson. He uncovered information that these guys, Jolyon West and Greenberg were in communication with each other, talking about creating hypnotized people and traumatizing them all the way back in the 50s and 60s. And they had the lie about these techniques and say, it's not possible because that was the cover on the truth that they could literally hypnotize people through traumatization and stuff like that.
If you look at Sirhan Sirhan, I've talked to authors about that. He disappeared for two weeks. They don't even know where it was. California was really crazy in the 60s. Holy smokes. Anyway, that's off topic.
But it kind of is this technique you're talking about. Some of these wizards, materialists, like Jolyon West who had his son kill him and his wife in a fricking assisted suicide, which is super dark.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:19:28] Okay. I was going to try and wrap it up, but you've kind of opened something. So I want you to close that door because it brings it around full circle. You're talking about it and I love that you're just kind of, just the facts ma'am, but connect that. What does that mean on a political level, when you talk about local politics or national politics or geopolitically? What does that mean? We are part of that, right? We live here. How do you process that?
William Ramsey: [01:20:01] It's terrifying. Well, it's terrifying, like this book, The Shock Doctrine, they think that these political leaders, all the way back to the overthrow of Allende, duly elected guy in Chile, or Pinochet, that they have learned this technique of how to terrify a populace where you don't even have to use force because the psychological traumatization is so strong that people will be terrified to do anything.
And so I think that that is a horrible conclusion. Just the implication of that and the conclusion of that happening in other countries, and possibly even here. If you read My War by Vallely and Michael Aquino, don't be surprised if these guys are using that on you. I mean, that's what's really scary, is these techniques, they know it.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:20:57] I've avoided in all my shows, even talking about COVID, never brought it up. But the trauma part is just unavoidable. When you start putting together these cases and you're talking about Chile, you know, and let's get everyone in the soccer stadium and turn on the lights and keep them there for two days. And then let's just take two of them out and shoot them. That's all we have to do, is just kill two of them and bring back the bodies. And now everyone can go home. That's it.
William Ramsey: [01:21:29] In that whole overthrow they only killed 3,000 people considering was a huge country. It's a tragedy, but to pacify the entire country, it's not that many people dead.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:21:42] So William, it's been just awesome having you on, especially this end part. I hope people can get an appreciation for just gosh, the depth of knowledge. And I almost feel like maybe we didn't… I pulled around in too many of the wrong places, but I couldn't help it because you just know so much. And I wanted to pick and poke at so many different things. Tell folks how they can stay on top of this work, where they can find where you're going and keep up with your shows and keep up with your books. And maybe what's on the horizon coming up.
William Ramsey: [01:22:11] Well, I've been doing documentaries recently, so my documentaries can be found on Vimeo under William Ramsey. I have five documentaries there. And then I kind of do a podcast, William Ramsey Investigates, which you can get on iTunes or Spreaker or anything like that. I have a lot of old research into the West Memphis Three on my YouTube channel, which I'm trying to kind of just morph away from or use less. But there are old videos there if you want to see my research going back with all these other characters at William Ramsey Investigates.
And I have three books that I wrote about these different subjects, which you can find on Amazon, or my website is williamramseyinvestigates.com, if you want signed copies
Alex Tsakiris: [01:22:52] And William Ramsey Investigates, I just want to tell people again. It's up to date stuff. We've just been kind of in this one little lane, but you're talking to all sorts of different interesting people and really digging in, in that kind of attorney style, get to the facts, kind of thing. So who were some of the guests that you've had on recently that you were really excited to interview and who were some of the people you have coming up?
William Ramsey: [01:23:15] Well, just like I talked to you, I talked to Tom O'Neill about his book Chaos. I highly recommend that book. If you want to talk about a huge I talked to a really good book about, uh, the liberal, if you want to talk about a huge PSYOP, it's the Symbionese Liberation Army, the book is Revolution's End by Schreiber. I highly recommend that book because it was just one tiny little piece of this operation Chaos, where a fake leftist organization, in my opinion and I think the author's opinion as well, was created to subvert the left. And there was the Symbionese Liberation Army, and this guy Cinque. And I would highly recommend that book because it'll twist your ideas about how some of these…
Alex Tsakiris: [01:24:00] I would highly recommend that interview you did. That was a great interview.
William Ramsey: [01:24:02] Oh really good. Brad Schreiber is his name, highly recommended, a great writer. And then Lise Pease about RFK and Sirhan Sirhan, about political assassination. So, you know, I'm really definitely interested in parapolitics. And I think that those books all back up their premises and their positions. I think that Sirhan Sirhan was a patsy and something was going on with him. He was a subject of something, really creepy.
Those are just some examples. I think I've been very fortunate to get really good authors. I do read the books, so I definitely try to be an informed interviewer and not try to give anything away, just focus on the context of the book and let people make their argument or why they have this position.
I'm done with political parties, so I don't really have a partisan axe to grind and I think that benefits talking to people. So I think in that regard I'm pleased with some of the interviews I've done recently, for sure.
Alex Tsakiris: [01:25:21] Well, fantastic. It's been absolutely great heavy on, and I hope people do check out William Ramsey Investigates. So thanks again.
William Ramsey: [01:25:29] Well, it's great to talk with you man. It's really good to be with somebody as well informed as you. So it's been a delight for me.
Thanks again, William Ramsey for joining me today on Skeptiko. He is quite impressive, in terms of his knowledge of this topic and his ability to dive deep with all the legal stuff. So it was really great having him on.
The one question I tee up from this interview is, where do you come down on Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three with regard particularly to satanic panic? Is he the poster boy he's made out to be for satanic panic, or was there enough satanic stuff going on in and around his life? You know, I'd even bring up the thing with his mother. His mother gave birth to him when she was like 15 years old and it's just such dysfunctional. You cannot go through this and not feel sorry for this kid, Damien Echols, even though he did what he did. But his mother, his mother is into all of this stuff and gets him into all of this satanic stuff, and that's all washed away and obscured in this ocean of, "Oh, it's all satanic panic, witch hunt, craziness." Which it's not in my opinion, but what's your opinion, this is supposed to e a question, so let me tee it up as a question.
What do you think, satanic panic? Yes or no?
I realize it's going to be kind of hard to answer that one since I came down pretty strong on it, but it's kind of a hot button issue for me.
Do let me know what you think. Stay with me for all of these future shows coming up, I've got a bunch of them, I don't know how I'm going to get them all out, but they're coming. Until next time, take care and bye for now.
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