Review of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda

“You can’t get to the truth through a lie.” – William Patrick Patterson

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” – ex-CIA Director William Casey, 1981 (a statement witnessed and transcribed by Barbara Honegger, former Reagan campaign staffer and policy analyst)

Authors’s Note: This article consists of an overview of the works of Carlos Castaneda and the events surrounding the cult that he formed after he had gained fame as the author of the “don Juan” series of “anthropological” studies. It includes some insights from the new Castaneda biography by Ru Marshall, published in May 2026 by OR Books: American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Part 1 is an overview of the Castaneda story and Part 2 is focused more on reviewing Marshall’s book. The two parts can be read either together, or separately in any order.

Part 1 An Overview of the Castaneda Story

What happened to the witches? This is the essential question in the legacy of Carlos Castaneda and the books he wrote about his apprenticeship with a fictional Yaqui sorcerer, don Juan. In the following essay, I examine this legacy based on what I recall from Castaneda’s novels, the reading of the recent biography of him by Ru Marshall, and my reading of several books that have been written about the role of the American security state in shaping, nurturing, and even creating the counterculture movement of the mid-20th century. Listed below is a list of a few books that have established a high degree of certainty about what was once ignored as a conspiracy theory about government influence on culture, or cognitive warfare on the domestic population, as it is also called:

• Marks, John D. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control and The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979).
• McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (Headpress, 2014).
• O’Neil, Tom, and Piepenbring, Dan. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (Back Bay Books, 2020).
• Potash, John L. Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists (Trine Day, 2015).
• Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, 1999, 2013).
• Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End (University Press of Kansas, 1977).
• Stockwell, John. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (W.W. Norton, 1984).
• Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (William Collins, 2015).
• Wilford, Hugh. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2009).

The careers of many music celebrities have been investigated by John Potash and others for the unwitting role they played in steering the youthful rebellion of the 1960s toward apolitical partying, drug use and exploration of the inner world of the psyche. Others, like John Lennon, are given their due for authentically engaging with politics and paying the price for it.

In Tom O’Neil’s book, there is much convincing evidence (but not conclusive evidence, as O’Neil stresses) that Charles Manson was nurtured as an MK-ULTRA project. Psychiatrists and covert agents kept him out of prison, in spite of numerous parole violations, to keep him active in the California hippie scene, with the result that everyone is familiar with. The clinic in Haight-Ashbury where Manson began to gather followers was overseen by doctors connected to MK-ULTRA.

One influential artist of the era who escaped such scrutiny was Carlos Castaneda, author of a series of best-selling books that described a fictional Yaqui Indian sorcerer’s lessons about knowledge gained through judicious use of hallucinogenic drugs. The contemporary acceptance of using hallucinogens in psychotherapy can be partly attributed to their portrayal in Castaneda’s books, though it goes back further to other sources such as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who in the 1930s attributed his sobriety, partially, to an experience with belladonna (a species related to one of the plants used by don Juan).

The first book in the series was The Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968, and the others came in quick succession. Richard Jennings, on his website dedicated to investigating Castaneda and his legacy, describes him thus:

[Castaneda] was a brilliant storyteller whose best-selling tales, drawing from other great literature and spiritual traditions, communicated useful principles in a way that was vivid and compelling for many. He also lied as casually and often in those books and his daily life as any other con man with narcissistic personality disorder. And he used his fame and storytelling talent to create a cult around him. The members of that cult were made to cut ties with family and longtime friends, and to devote themselves entirely to following Castaneda and his whims. (1)

The information provided on this site is based on the experiences of Richard Jennings and Amy Wallace, both students of Castaneda and members of his cult in the years before his death. It is also based on extensive research into court and other records, and numerous interviews with other cult members, and former cult members, which is thoroughly documented here … This site is the only comprehensive source of this information.

Carlos Castaneda’s name, at birth in Peru on December 25, 1925, was Carlos Arana, though he made contradictory claims about this name and this date and place of birth. He immigrated to the United States in 1951 at the age of 26. In the early 1960s, under the name Castaneda, which was his mother’s maiden name, he enrolled as a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA after having completed his qualifying degrees at community college and UCLA. Though a native speaker of Spanish, as an undergraduate student he passed himself off as a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, then took courses in Spanish for easy credits. The rejection of his father’s name is a curious hint that generational trauma and a serious unresolved father issue were behind his compulsive lying and pursuit of a new identity. In the first book, the only personal anecdote is a tearful, hallucinated conversation (during a mescal trip) that he had with his long-lost father.

Castaneda’s story before 1951 is obscured by several contradictory tales that he told about his early life in South America. He claimed to have been raised by an elite Brazilian family, but Geoffrey Gray, in his lengthy 2024 article about Castaneda, discovered:

His father was not a dreamy academic but a struggling goldsmith and watch repairman. The family was so poor that Carlos was sent away as a child—not to an elite boarding school in Buenos Aires but to his extended family’s chicken farm in rural Brazil. He grew up dressing in hand-me-downs and cleaning out coops, not wearing crisp uniforms and reciting Latin… After moving to Lima, he attended a fine arts school for a time, yet according to later accounts, he spent his days at the racetrack, earning a meager living wagering on horses. During this period, his girlfriend became pregnant, and instead of sticking around to support her and his daughter, he fled to the United States. He never looked back. After questions were raised about the authenticity of The Teachings, a Time reporter tracked down Jose Bracamonte, one of Castaneda’s friends from his gambling days at the Lima racetrack. “He was witty, imaginative,” Bracamonte recalled. “A big liar and a real friend.” (2)

Ru Marshall’s biography contains valuable details about Castaneda’s early life in Cajamarca, Peru. Furthermore, the author goes beyond his early life story to delve into his family’s rise and fall from the wealth they once derived from hacienda ownership, mining, and the South American rubber extraction holocaust of the early 20th century. Marshall theorizes that this generational family trauma may account for Castaneda’s need to lie, break with family, falsify his family history, and fabricate alternate realities—in general, it accounts for his narcissistic sociopathy and the abuse he inflicted on his followers. (3)

One might wonder how, being from such humble origins, he could have qualified as an immigrant, learned English well enough to write ready-to-publish ethnographic studies, or had the means to support himself in the United States. Why did the immigration authorities allow entry to a single man with no apparent skills or means of support—a deadbeat dad no less—and no sponsoring employer or relative? It is also not clear why the obvious fiction he wrote was accepted by UCLA to pass as a dissertation in anthropology and not referred to the creative writing department. The publisher of his books still categorizes them as non-fiction, long after it was widely accepted that they were fiction.

Castaneda faded from cultural consciousness in the 21st century while other figures from the 1960s such as Bob Dylan and Hunter S. Thompson are relatively well known today. This is why it is easy to overlook the impact that Castaneda had on fellow artists and the culture in general. His books were in every hitchhiker’s backpack. John Lennon described his wife, Yoko, as his “don Juan” (Castaneda’s fictional shaman). Prominent filmmakers such as Oliver Stone, George Lucas, and Federico Fellini were enthusiastic readers of his books. At one point, Oliver Stone aimed to adapt the books to the screen, but nothing came of this plan. He named his production company Ixtlan Productions, taking inspiration from Castaneda’s book Journey to Ixtlan. George Lucas said he based Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars on Castaneda’s don Juan.

Fellini came to Los Angeles in 1984 to discuss a film adaptation of the books, but once he got there, Castaneda jerked him around in an elaborate hoax, referred to by Marshall as an “epistemological clusterfuck.” It sent him on a pointless quest to the Yucatan Peninsula, with unsigned taunting notes appearing at his hotels, and phone messages that came from anonymous callers with cryptic messages mocking him for the downward trajectory of his career.

The hoax continued when Fellini was back in Italy. Fellini could not explain how Castaneda knew where he and his companions were going to be, and he felt too angry and spooked by the experience to ever have contact with him again. This episode is told in Marshall’s biography (chapter 21, pages 378-387), and, like Fellini, Marshall offers no reality-based (positivist) explanation for how Castaneda was able to pull off his sadistic pranks. One could choose to believe that he really had developed occult powers to taunt Fellini and teach him a lesson about what would come from his curiosity. If one chooses to look for a mundane explanation, then Castaneda would have spent a considerable amount of money to have Fellini followed in three countries, or he would have needed help from the kind of people who are experienced in espionage and sustained psychological operations or “theater of the real” as some call it. In both cases, the motive would be hard to fathom for people who live within the bounds of normal morality, but of course it was a power move. He was telling Fellini that if he really admired the books and had an interest in the path of the warrior, then have at it: fuck around and find out.

According to the trickster philosophy Castaneda followed, biographical facts should not matter to anyone devoted to the pursuit of the truth and power. The truth is that truth is an illusion. Identity is an illusion, and, like all cult leaders, he told his followers to erase their past selves, change their names, and cut ties with all people from their pasts.

Castaneda’s lies about his background, his reputation for lying, and narcissistic abuses as a cult leader are enough to make one wonder if there was a guiding hand that brought him from obscurity in South America into the counter-cultural wave that swept the US in the 1960s. He is just the sort of artful dodger intelligence agencies would want to recruit. Amid all the fantastic lies that he did tell about himself (Korean War veteran!), the one that he did not tell—one often told by such compulsive liars—was that he was doing work for the government that he was not at liberty to discuss.

If one’s real identity didn’t matter, there were agencies within the US government that had exactly the same philosophy. Their employees were experts in crafting false identities for operatives who could be assigned to long-term infiltration projects. South America at the time was full of anti-communists who would jump at the chance to take up the adventurous life of an asset in exchange for an immigrant visa. Spycraft goes hand in hand with creative writing and with Castaneda’s concern with occult forces. There is a reason why spies are referred to as spooks. Their world is one of “illusion, deception and sleight of hand.” (4) There is a long list of spies who wrote novels, some of which were pulp and some of which are classics: E. Howard Hunt (Hazardous Duty), Joe Weisber (The Americans) Ian Fleming (James Bond), Graham Greene (The Quiet American) and John LeCarré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). Drama and adventure were the main attractions. For someone in poverty like Castaneda, the calling to work as a covert asset would have had immense appeal. It would also be a great way to escape from life as a racetrack hustler and the dreary responsibilities of being a father and husband. It is also possible that Castaneda’s recruitment happened without his knowing its ultimate purpose. Compartmentalization is standard procedure in intelligence work. It might have occurred, for example, under the cover of an offer of a scholarship from a foundation indirectly financed by a US government agency.

It is worth adding here that Castaneda’s philosophy was deeply unconcerned with politics and social context, and fascist in many ways that progressive drug-culture seekers failed to notice in the 1970s. Robert Bly noted it in 1978 (see the excerpt in the appendix). The quest for power, at the expense of all morality and ties to family and community, were much like the aspects of Nietzschean philosophy that appealed to Nazis. Castaneda’s father was a leftist revolutionary, who, because the Peruvian leftist revolution was crushed, was deemed by his son to be a loser and failed professor. When Castaneda’s long con finally got him his PhD from UCLA in the early 1970s, he had finally surpassed his father in career status. He reached the end of his rivalry with his father, but to what end? What would follow such a hollow victory?

The CIA would have been thrilled to find in South America a devoted, intelligent anti-communist with a narcissistic personality disorder, someone who could be inserted into academia and publishing to be an influencer, in some form yet to be determined, in a philosophical movement that would divert mass behavior away from political organization. Assets like Charles Manson would take the low road in this endeavor, while others like Carlos Castaneda could take the high road, targeting a different social stratum. Many such assets must have faded away and gone unnoticed, but, if my speculation here has substance, Castaneda is an example of someone who hit the ball out of the park. You can look long and hard at his writings and you will find no words of wisdom about how to end the war in Vietnam, advance civil rights, help the Black Panthers, or reduce urban poverty. There were certain racial demographics in the United States that had absolutely no interest in the teachings of don Juan in the spring and summer of 1968 when cities were burning after the MLK and RFK assassinations.

Of course, one can go too far in seeing the powerful influence of the CIA everywhere. The agency’s work was actually quite easy because there were just so many who wanted to believe that there was something exciting beyond mundane reality and that social change could come from inner transformation. It was nice to think that the old Indian sitting on a bench at the bus stop could have been a crow a minute ago. Now he is a sorcerer with secrets to reveal, if I know how to ask. The coyotes in my backyard haven’t come to the city to eat my cat. They are messengers from the spirit world who have something to tell me, if I have ears to hear them. An amusing aspect of the stories is that don Juan says he decided to take on Castaneda as an apprentice because he could tell he was “the chosen one.” Thus, the fans of Castaneda, who were too hip to go along with the squares of mainstream society, were basically reading a Harry Potter story.

If Castaneda were a government asset, this would explain UCLA granting him undergraduate and graduate degrees for his works of fiction passed off as factual ethnographic studies. I speculate here that everyone knew it was bullshit—not later but at the time—but somebody got a call, and forces were in play to let it pass. Or, to some degree, it was also just a case of groupthink—that once he was in and his work had been praised, no one wanted to voice a dissenting opinion. There was just an implicit understanding that this project was being advanced for some reason. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

I speculate that the work of UCLA anthropologist Harold Garfinkel, Castaneda’s supervisor, was exactly the type of disrupting and disorienting social science research that the CIA would have funded (through concealed sources) in the MK-ULTRA program. Under this program, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University conducted abusive LSD experiments for the CIA. This is not conspiracy theory. The case is famous and the victims were compensated by the US government many years later. Ru Marshall wrote about this, however, in a way that suggests the CIA was much more benign: “Many academics wanted to understand the phenomenon of brainwashing in order to know how to resist it.” (p. 419) I find this to be a naive understatement of what the US government actually did with cognitive warfare against its own population, but he continues, “The US government, which funded some of this research, as well as some of Garfinkel’s, had an interest in being able to recreate it.” (p. 409) Marshall seems to imply that the US government had benign purposes in mind and would never, never—perish the thought—think of using the insights of such research for cognitive warfare against the US population.

Garfinkel’s “breaching experiments” were, essentially, elaborate pranks on unwitting subjects whose assumptions were put to the test by unexpected social-norm-breaking behavior of the experimenter—to the point of creating lasting anger, disorientation and confusion. The ethics of breaching experiments were later challenged because there was an inherent lack of informed consent. Debriefing the subjects (cooling out the marks, one might say) was often impossible, and disrupting social norms could trigger real emotional responses, such as fear, suspicion, embarrassment, or intense frustration and anger. Ru Marshall points out that Castaneda’s cult was essentially created through many prolonged or repeated breaching experiments. Furthermore, Castaneda “outbreached” the breaching guru at UCLA by challenging the norms of his academic discipline when he got the anthropology department to let his works of fiction be categorized as anthropological research. (p. 308)

Then again, Garfinkel might have been aware and in control the whole time. Having sources of support in government and objectives that he may not have wanted to declare, he continued to stonewall those who questioned whether Castaneda’s work qualified as anthropological research, supporting him until he obtained his graduate degree and made his breakthrough into popular culture. Garfinkel expressed his anger about Castaneda only years later when the books became a controversial embarrassment for UCLA and the famous and wealthy author, no longer needing UCLA or academia, became notorious for his dubious activities.

The CIA could have easily worked behind the scenes, as they did in many cases (refer to the works of Stockwell and Wilford listed above), to create the essential buzz for the book. The publisher would slap a low paperback price on it, then the CIA would have its contacts in the media and academia post reviews of it. A cultural phenomenon was born. This reach of the CIA in academia and the publishing industry has been well documented. (5) CIA agents referred to their ability to spread information through domestic media as “playing the Mighty Wurlitzer.” (6) Marshall notes that a few years after Castaneda became a best-selling author, critics were starting to come forward, pointing out the lies and inconsistencies in the purported works of non-fiction. In 1972, The New York Times Book Review commissioned anthropologist Weston La Barre to write a critical review of the first three books but then pulled it because it was found to be “too furious,” to quote Marshall’s assessment, (p. 282). The review that was published in its place was entirely positive.

The theory that Castaneda was a psy-op is made more plausible by the fact that he turned the success of his books into a thriving seminar and workshop business, making it blend in with other self-help phenomena and pop religions that blossomed in the New Age era, helping the US government redirect the frustrations of the population away from political organizing. These movements were basically revival tent meetings for people who thought themselves too sophisticated to join fundamentalist Christian churches. These were such movements as The Human Potential Movement, Esalen, and Scientology. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple was in a class by itself because it mixed religion with Marxism and actually tried to help the poor before it descended into suicidal paranoia.

If the “don Juan” cultural phenomenon had ended with the books, perhaps Castaneda’s legacy would have been more respected. Many admirers of the books were put off by Castaneda’s cashing in on his fame to gather a cult following, which included his personal harem in the inner circle—women who stayed silent when they knew that his preaching of celibacy was bullshit.

The first book inspired thousands of fans to seek peyote from Native Indian tribes, causing them to protest the distortion and disruption of their communities. Castaneda portrayed his shaman protagonist as shocked by the reckless, unguided recreational drug use of the youth. In the first book he made it clear that “learning about ‘Mescalito’ is a most serious act,” but that couldn’t stop the tide of seekers.

Some might object that I am being too dismissive of the human potential movement and the idea that you can change the world by changing yourself. There is obvious truth in this idea. It was a goal of psychotherapy long before the New Age. In 1930, before nuclear mutually assured destruction existed, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents:

Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two “heavenly forces,” eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary. (7)

Or, if you prefer, as Dionne Warwick sang, “What the world needs now is love sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” There are a lot of people active in politics who would do well to heal themselves before they damage the causes they are committed to. John Lennon, to cite the example mentioned above, was a figure from the 1960s who had limited effectiveness in political activism because of the effects that childhood trauma had on his emotional life as an adult. I would argue, however, that the therapeutic movements of recent decades have taken the culture too far from political engagement, and as for their potential for healing the world, they have had no effect on the wounded psyches of the sorts of people who commit themselves to Ukrainian nationalism or Zionism, to cite just two examples tearing the world apart right now. Freud, writing in the 1930s, must have been well aware of this paradox. The ones most in need of psychotherapy were the least likely to seek it.

The mysterious events that followed Castaneda’s death also suggest that government agencies may have been involved in the cleanup operation, a possibility that Marshall overlooked completely in his biography (see the review below for more on this). Castaneda’s six favored and high-ranking female followers (brujas, or witches) disappeared soon after his death. The car belonging to one of them was found in Death Valley soon after her death, and eight years later, her remains were identified in the desert soil near the place her car had been found. No one had been looking for any of them. Three explanations are possible: 1. They took their inheritance, or gold bars stashed years in advance, and lived abroad under assumed names. 2. They committed suicide to follow their guru into the astral plane, or 3. they were killed and thoroughly disposed of by persons unknown.

Marshall himself became involved as a subject in his own biography of Castaneda by joining with others to pressure the National Park Service in Death Valley and the local sheriff department to search a mine shaft near the place where the skeletal remains of the one cult member had been found. That effort did not succeed. Both of these agencies prevented them from searching the mine shaft, under threat of arrest. The local sheriff department had opened a missing person investigation, but then it decided to take no further action. Some relatives of some of the missing forced the Los Angeles police department to open a missing persons file, as they were legally obliged to do, but in this case too, they sat on the file. No one was questioned. No leads were pursued. On this issue, Marshall misses something important in his otherwise excellent biography. He seems to be unfamiliar with studies of the US intelligence agencies, the MK-ULTRA program—all of the extensive literature on the cognitive warfare performed against US citizens. He would have done well to read Tom O’Neil’s study of the Manson murders. It is not cited in his book. O’Neil compiled a convincing body of evidence that points to government agencies’ involvement in nurturing, aiding and abetting Manson, and failing constantly to put him back in prison for violating his terms of probation.

In the case of Castaneda, there was this curious withdrawal of interest by agencies in investigating disappearances in which there were clear grounds to suspect group suicide, which would automatically raise suspicion of coerced suicides/murders of those who changed their minds at the last minute. Alternatively, they were bound to investigate the possibility that the missing persons had fled the country with funds from Cleargreen or the Castaneda estate.

Before these disappearances, there was a conspicuous absence of any criminal or civil cases against Castaneda or the organizations he founded. None are described in Marshall’s biography, yet one would expect such a figure to have had a lawyer on retainer for the various complaints that such groups are prone to by their very nature. He seems to have never faced any legal investigation for anything, in spite of his habitual lying, cheating and conning.

Another mystery not explained in the biography is how Castaneda obtained a visa to reside in the United States. He came as a single man with no financial resources, no higher education or job skills, and no relatives in the country to sponsor him. All of this adds up to a big dog that didn’t bark. It is reasonable to suspect that he was recruited by the CIA in Peru, allowed into the US, and protected throughout his life afterwards as he went about a mission to infiltrate the social sciences and culture. Like so many other such human assets, he may have gone off the leash and beyond the control of his handlers, but that wouldn’t mean that the company stopped watching and protecting him or acting to clean up the loose ends when it was time to close the Castaneda file.

This may seem to be far-fetched speculation, and it could never be proven, but it is a fact that the CIA had liaison officers in every large law enforcement agency in the country, so it is plausible that when people asked for investigations to be opened, the officers involved would see a code on his file that indicated that responses were to be extremely passive. (8) This would explain why on several occasions agencies at first promised to investigate but later decided that no further action would be taken.

Those who say that the missing persons committed suicide claim that this act was the logical and unavoidable outcome of the path they had chosen. They had cut themselves off from their past and had no alternative once their leader was gone. (9) They planned their act so carefully that they left no trace, with no hint to anyone about how, where or when they would do it. Castaneda was aware of their intention. If one accepts this theory, then it is odd that Castaneda and his cult are not remembered as well as Jonestown. How was the case kept at such a low profile?

The counter to this theory states that the witches had been set up quite well under the terms of Castaneda’s last will, as if they had definite plans to carry on after his passing. The suicide pact theory is also weakened by the fact that so many other followers kept Castaneda’s seminar business going long after his death. There were indeed alternatives for the witches. Furthermore, such group suicides seldom go as planned. People change their minds at the last minute, and things get messy when the plan gets discarded and the diehards resort to murder of the ones who hesitated (but perhaps the ones who hesitated should be called the “diehards” in this case). It is far more plausible that the witches had arranged false identities, new passports and a ride to the airport with a fixer, but the fixer then might have taken them on a surprise detour to long-term parking (look up the fate of Adriana in The Sopranos to get the reference). If this is what happened, there is an irony here in a cult of Western civilization, a supposed alternative to Christianity, finishing with the persecution of witches.

The group suicide theory doesn’t explain how they could carry out a group suicide and leave no witnesses and no bodies that would be discovered by someone sometime in the future. Furthermore, no other members of their organization showed the slightest interest in finding out what happened to them, which suggests they knew what happened to them, and it was not a group suicide. They fled the country or they were murdered. If there is one type of group in society that can make this kind of disappearance happen, and make everyone in their circles afraid to ask questions about it, it is groups that usually operate in the desert closer to Las Vegas casinos. No need to go all the way to Death Valley.

Tensegrity was the physical movement theory that was taught at workshops organized by Cleargreen Inc., the business arm of the cult. They also produced motivational videos, sold T-shirts, and recruited new witches. Cleargreen continued to operate for more than two decades after Castaneda’s death, gasping its last breath, ironically, during the years of the covid psy-op. According to the reports by Richard Jennings (at sustainedaction.org), the people who took over the management and ownership of Cleargreen never explained what happened to the substantial financial assets generated by Castaneda’s work. They claimed to have no answers about or interest in what happened to the missing high-ranking witches, nor did they satisfactorily explain to skeptics why they had the rights to manage Cleargreen. The books still generate royalties for whatever entity is now the legal heir to them.

Castaneda was dying of liver cancer in 1998 when he signed his last will at his lawyer’s office, in front of witnesses who all claimed he was mentally competent. He died a few days later from liver failure. The liver problem involved metabolic encephalopathy—a condition that causes personality disorder, memory loss, and difficulty in thinking—all of which occurred, apparently, only after he signed his last will and testament.

This description of Castaneda’s life and works is a quick summary written after a short journey down the rabbit hole of sources cited herein—and in particular after reading the thorough biography by Ru Marhsall. This was written with little consideration of the content of Castaneda’s books that I read and loved when I was in my twenties. No one can deny that they contain some excellent simple adaptations of philosophical traditions from throughout the world. I may have got some details wrong here. This is just prima facie speculation, but a superficial review of the case is enough to nominate the Castaneda story as possibly one of the many covert government influence operations that shaped the culture of the late 20th century.

The numerous critics who are outraged by the unresolved mysteries might do well to consider the possibility that powerful unseen entities made sure that the loose ends of their operation would be swept away and buried in the same hole as the files concerning Jim Jones, Charles Manson, JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, and other such cases. This should be apparent in the fact that all the officials and lawyers in a position to investigate chose not to look very hard.

It is plausible that Castaneda was inserted into the intellectual life of the United States. His frequent disappearances from Los Angeles to go wandering in the desert with don Juan might have been time spent in libraries or with his handlers and ghost writers, all of whom might have found their creative writing project very amusing and challenging. I would bet also that Castaneda was a popular author among CIA staff because the teachings could be equally useful to both hippies and covert agents. In fact, they have a decidedly fascist and apolitical bent to them.

When Castaneda’s writing struck bigger than anyone could have expected, it was transformed into a cultish, anesthetic psychotherapy movement. When he died and the cult leaders presented too many loose ends to deal with, the cleanup operation was activated. Once the higher level was eliminated (the people who knew too much), Cleargreen, a remnant of the organization, was allowed to die a natural death on the margins of a society that was quickly moving on. There weren’t a lot of seekers going on walkabouts after September 2001. The New Age was in old age, and Castaneda’s works declined in influence, probably largely because they were, with embarrassment for the publisher and UCLA, understood to be works of fiction, and because of the unseemly events that followed his death. Another factor must have been the economic decline of the United States. People were now just too preoccupied with survival and “meat hook” reality (see the quote in Part 2 by Hunter S. Thompson) to be concerned with spiritual quests. The social trend was a move back to traditional Christianity, as evidenced in the Charlie Kirk phenomenon. Many of the new Christian groups operate like the familiar fundamentalist personality cults that have long been a part of American life.

The millions of right-thinking educated seekers who were devotees of the books (not at all to be confused with those low-life Manson and Jonestown deplorables) would be slow to consider the possibility that they had been taken for a ride by a covertly supported sophisticated intellectual who compiled his philosophy from whatever snippets of Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy he could find in the UCLA library. (10) They dismiss Castaneda’s critics and deny that he was a textbook example of a narcissistic liar and cult leader. His deceptions and fabrications were, they say, his creative genius’ method of teaching how to shed the ego and find the path of the warrior. Who cares if he lied about the veracity of his work, or his true identity and details of his past? He was a self-described trickster. If you’re the kind of person who thinks personal integrity and family connections and responsibilities are important, then you are just too hung up in your ego and conventional morality to appreciate the brilliance. Unlike Manson, Castaneda was charming. He did not creep people out, and he could write coherent and compelling prose. And unlike Jim Jones, he wasn’t actually taking concrete steps to help the poorest segments of the US population. These are the reasons I say he might have simply been the highbrow liberal version of other psyops that were carried out in the 1960s. Fools might come around and admit that they were duped, but educated fools take much longer.

Part 2 A more detailed review of American Trickster

This review re-iterates many of the points above, and it could be read as a stand-alone piece, but I include it here as further discussion of the text that precedes it.

Ru Marshall’s biography of Carlos Castaneda may come to be considered the definitive biography. The great merit of his work is the writer’s thorough knowledge of his subject that he developed during a twenty-year commitment to it. He did extensive research in psychology, sociology, the cultural history of the United States, and the history of South America related to Castaneda’s story, yet there are some serious gaps in his coverage.

He provides excellent coverage of Castaneda’s early life. He went to Cajamarca, Peru, the town where Castaneda spent his childhood, and spoke to people who knew him. He argues convincingly that Castaneda’s damaged psyche was a product of his unconventional upbringing and his family’s background as perpetrators of the rubber extraction holocaust of the early 20th century.

Julio César Arana was the head of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, a company registered in Britain that terrorized the natives of the Amazon in order to force them to collect and deliver rubber. His assets were eventually frozen by the British government, thanks to the publication of the crimes of the company by journalists, activism in Britain, and the British government having previously opposed Belgian King Leopold’s similar crimes in Congo. This led to the financial downfall of the extended Arana family that Castaneda was born into. These ancestors had also been owners of haciendas and gold and silver mines. Their hands were soaked in the blood of imperial and capitalist exploitation, yet they lost their fortunes as the 20th century progressed. Marshall remarked on the deep irony of Castaneda’s legacy:

Could it be that the author of perhaps the best-selling books ever on Native American spirituality was descended from a man who’d murdered tens of thousands of Indigenous slaves? (p. 364)

Castaneda’s father betrayed his class, after the family fortune was gone, by joining the revolutionary leftist movement, which was crushed in the post-WWII era. The father’s political commitments left him thwarted in his academic career. He spent most of his life as a humble watch repairman. The son might have respected his father for his principled commitment to socialist revolution, but instead Castaneda’s Freudian conflict with his father caused him to dismiss the man as a loser. He adopted his mother’s surname, Castaneda, when he came to the United States for three possible reasons. One was to reject his father. The other was to hide the connection to his infamous ancestors, and the third was to hide from the teenager he had got pregnant back in Lima. Once in the United States, he never engaged with politics, and when he gained a large following later in life, he never encouraged anyone, unlike Jim Jones, to work toward the construction of a better world or at least a functioning commune. He despised the society around him and told his followers to ignore it and seek a life outside of it as spiritually superior beings. Yet this path led only to their wanting to depart from this earthly realm, to cross over to a higher dimension. The followers who vanished ended up no different than the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult that performed a mass suicide in Los Angeles in 1997, one year before Castaneda’s death—if indeed his followers really committed suicide.

All of this is covered well in Marshall’s book. The weak point in his analysis, however, is his rather conventional, mainstream views that he uses to relate his subject to contemporary culture. He finds, for example, that it was Donald Trump rather than Anthony Fauci who had a cult-like following during the pandemic that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. He wrote:

It’s also important in understanding his [Castaneda’s] need to control everyone and everything. With words. Even—or above all—death … If cancer wasn’t named as “cancer,” it wouldn’t kill him. The need to believe diseases can be controlled with language is common among charismatic leaders. New Thought advocate Neville Goddard taught that imagination was more powerful than death. In early 2020, Donald Trump (who was raised in Norman Vincent Peale’s New Thought aligned Marble Collegiate Church) believed he could make a pandemic go away by saying, over and over, that he’d done so, thus contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. (p.564)

The 2020 election was stolen. Climate change isn’t real. The measle’s vaccine causes autism. They can believe this shit, I tell myself, in precisely the way she [the author’s friend] and I believe the opposite… anti-vaxxers and the MAGA base aren’t “against facts.” They believe they have the facts. However unhinged their beliefs may seem to me, the process through which they’re arrived at isn’t essentially different from that employed by my side. We rely on sources we trust. And, as Castaneda knew from Garfinkel, we believe stories that fit the narratives to which we already subscribe. (p. 60)

Marshall is reasonable and self-aware here, but it is notable that he didn’t use an example from the opposite political camp such as, for example, the belief that President Biden and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris subscribed to from 2023 to 2024 that no genocide was occurring in Gaza, and that Isreal was a virtuous, indispensable ally, or that Russia was “totally unprovoked” in February 2022. Marshall made a careless reference to “anti-vaxxers” when there has never been an identifiable “anti-vaxxer” organization with an appointed leader and policy platform. This term was a broad, meaningless pejorative similar to the terms “libtard” and “woke” used by people within Trump’s MAGA movement.

Furthermore, from another perspective, the 2020 election was stolen by the Democratic Party when it deprived its own supporters of a primary campaign then anointed the aged, mentally declining Joe Biden as the candidate, ending the progressive insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. Competing third parties were given no access to the legacy media and the presidential debates. This sense of the election being stolen was always ignored by critics such as Marshall who focused solely on the delusions of the MAGA movement.

It is also difficult to draw a clear line between a “stolen election” and the long-standing problems of re-districting, legal trickery to keep people off voter list, chain of custody problems with ballot boxes, voting machines becoming “black boxes” with no paper records, or the enormous sums of money that pour in from Zionist donors when a candidate presents a challenge to the tradition of unwavering support of Israel. Every election is stolen by the oligarchy that runs the country. The focus on “anti-vaxxers” and MAGA followers misses the larger point that the entire epistemological framework of five hundred years of Western supremacy is crumbling. Laala Bechetoula has described this also as “the collapse of the moral architecture of the West.” (11)

Millions of the alleged “anti-vaxxers” have widely divergent criticisms of vaccines and the way they are used. There are those who think viruses don’t exist, and others who were only particularly opposed to the rapid deployment of mRNA injections—a novel medical technology for which there were no long-term studies to verify their safety or efficacy—as stated on the makers’ package inserts in 2021. The mRNA-shot hesitancy proved to be well-founded by numerous studies published by dissident experts in the following years, all of them difficult to find because of search engine suppression. (12) If you go to a search engine and look for the authors of these papers, you are led to ten articles “debunking” them but not to their peer-reviewed published articles.

Other “anti-vaxxers” question the wisdom of giving a high number of vaccines to infants in the first years of life when nothing is known definitively about the cumulative effects of doing so. Others would like to see new vaccines undergo double blind placebo testing (the “gold standard” demanded when some doctors claimed that there were effective drug treatments for Sars-Cov-2 infections), without the placebo group being defined incorrectly as those who get the older vaccine. Other “anti-vaxxers” had a healthy reaction of dismay when they saw governments coercing medical treatments (a gross violation of medical ethics) and punishing citizens for not complying, thereby inciting the compliant majority to partake in the punishment and ostracization. Finally, some opponents of vaccination research and deployment would like to see Bill Gates and pharmaceutical companies stop treating children in Africa and Asia as experimental subjects.

Some “anti-vaxxers” also had the rare ability to perceive the enormous financial incentives that drove the unified global response to “Covid-19” (an obvious conspiracy prepared in advance) and financed the repression of dissenting expert opinions, especially the ones that said there were alternatives to the enormously profitable mRNA solution that the pharmaceutical companies were planning to deploy.

Dissenters were in the minority, but that does not make them wrong. Nor does it make them people who just interpret facts according to the pre-existing preferences that they subscribe to. This is not about different ways of seeing, like one person who sees a six when another sees a nine. There was an objective reality to be perceived, and the followers of Anthony Fauci—whose messaging always contradicted what he had said earlier—refused to look at it. The correct analogy to make is not that the “anti-vaxxers” had a cult-like allegiance to misinformation. They had no pre-existing group or leader to adhere to. They were the ones who were able to maintain independent thinking and break with or not join the massive cult-like behavior of the majority. In an analogy to smaller cults like Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shirikyo, and Castaneda’s Cleargreen, the dissidents who walked away from the Covidian cult were the types of people who leave at the first signs of the guru’s contradictions, magical thinking, abuse, and hypocrisy. Another important point observed in the Covid-19 social experiment was that those who balked and walked came from all age groups, social classes, and education levels, and from every point on the political spectrum.

In any case, the anti-“anti-vaxxers” should, logically, appreciate Trump for initiating “operation warp speed” to get the mRNA shots into human deltoids within a year of the feared virus appearing in the United States, thereby contributing, according to their view, to saving hundreds of thousands of lives. In spite of Trump’s bizarre statements and behavior during 2020, the pharmaceutical companies and the lockdown-mask-jab enthusiasts got exactly what they had wanted. As for official denials and attempts to talk the virus out of existence, it is plausible that any political leader in Trump’s position would have tried to change perceptions in order to restore confidence and save the economy. President Obama did exactly this during the influenza scare in 2009 when, shortly after the 2008 financial disaster and before Zoom calls existed, it was out of the question to think about confining people to their homes and shutting down the economy.

Marshall shows himself to be a conventional thinker in other ways. In describing Castaneda finishing work on his first book in 1963, he briefly puts this in the context of other events of the time. He shows that he subscribes to the lone gunman theory of the JFK assassination by writing:

On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley died. Knowing he was about to make the great transition, he chose to do so on LSD. In Dallas, on the same day, a grandiose loner darkened history. (p. 175)

He also holds to the conventional explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in 2001:

… members of a high-demand group, on the instruction of their charismatic leader, flew two planes into the World Trade Center, leading to three times as many deaths as had occurred at Jonestown. (p. 551)

Because he mentioned Jonestown in that quote, I will just add that Marshall didn’t seem to know something that would have helped his discussion of whether Castaneda’s witches had died because of “coerced suicide.” Investigators in Jonestown saw evidence that clearly suggested most of the dead had refused the poisoned Kool-Aid and had been shot or forced to drink it at gunpoint. Jonestown residents also differed from Castaneda’s witches and seminar participants in that they were people from the lowest ranks of American society. They had come to Guyana to live in an agricultural commune and escape from the nightmarish conditions of poverty in American cities. The tragic descent of the leader toward his suicidal end might have been avoided if the lawyers fighting him and congressional investigators had acted more cautiously. In addition, there are many unanswered questions in the Jim Jones story about his early connections to the CIA and motives that the agency had to shut down one of the many people and organizations that had started as controlled assets but later gone rogue. Mark Lane’s book on Jonestown discusses these matters and shows clearly that there were undercover government agents within Jim Jones’ inner circle who needed to be extracted and, afterwards, have their involvement covered up. (13)

While lamenting the tendency of social media followers to dismiss and ignore legacy media as “fake news,” Marshall argued, “Both [Associated Press and the New York Times], I thought, sometimes do get stories wrong. Errors aren’t lies.” (p. 62) He did not acknowledge that such papers of record have been shown to be willing accomplices in conveying government propaganda and ignoring and suppressing what goes against US interests. Retired CIA agents have also told about how they would feed their disinformation to the major media platforms that gladly ran them as “exclusives.” (14)

The nature of the pre-internet media has been covered thoroughly in well-known media studies by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, and Michael Parenti, among many others. (15) Additionally, the truth about media and government agency (the security state) cooperation was disclosed in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (a.k.a. the Church Committee) in the mid-1970s. One can go back further to the work of George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War in which he noted the capacity of the British press to not just get things wrong but to fabricate a completely false version of events that fit with the required “party line.” These comments could apply equally well to the way the Western media covered Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, or Syria and Ukraine in the 2010-2026 period:

I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. (16)

Related to this attention paid to alleged weirdos who don’t follow mainstream views is a speculative question that I have which could have been addressed in the book. If Castaneda was a manifestation of South American generational trauma, what about the present-day manifestation of white South African generational trauma that we see in the likes of Elon Musk and Tesla and Peter Thiel and his surveillance behemoth Palantir? While both men have the citizenship of other countries, during their childhoods, their families lived by choice in Namibia and South Africa during the apartheid era. Castaneda wanted to leap from a cliff to reach beyond conventional reality. Elon Musk, being more literal-minded, just wants to leave earth and colonize Mars. Peter Thiel, along with other tech billionaires, thinks like Bond villains and aims to establish Zionist colonies outside of Israel or to seek refuge in bunkers in the southern hemisphere. Are these people, with their muddled fascistic political ideologies and misanthropic, undemocratic beliefs, the contemporary version of the nihilistic cults of the last century? The old cults had millions of dollars, these ones have billions and are inside the institutions of political power.

It is unfair to make a long list of everything that is not mentioned in a book. A reasonable response to this review might be that I should go write my own book if I have so much to say. Nonetheless, I will mention just two more omissions that I think are important.

Having been an early contributor to Salon.com, Marshall should have been familiar with the work of its founder, David Talbot, on the history of the CIA, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, but it does not appear in the bibliography.

Another omission is the work of Hunter S. Thompson. He seems to be a rather obvious and important literary contemporary of Castaneda’s who also had a profound influence on the counterculture. Both writers injected hallucinogenic drugs and fictional elements into genres that were supposed to adhere to objectivity, facts, and sober assessments. Castaneda stuck to de-contextualized esoteric philosophy and wrote fiction that he passed off as anthropological field work. Thompson observed, with extreme subjectivity and creative liberties, political campaigns and sub-cultures such as the Hells Angels and Haight-Ashbury in 1968. He never wrote about Castaneda but the quote below suggests that he would have been sympathetic to his fans and followers but also would have found them somewhat pathetic:

[Leary] crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force—is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. (17)

Thompson, known for being fully immersed in the drug culture and an alcoholic, nonetheless stayed grounded in the reality of America’s socio-economic system, no matter how nightmarish it became. He described himself as a political junkie. He had a scathing disdain for Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, the two Bush presidents, and Clinton. He sought no solace in alternate realities and wanted no cult followers. To the end of his life, he stuck to the Sisyphean task of calling out corruption and rousing people to a higher level of political consciousness, regardless of how much cynicism and anger there may be in his prose.

A knowledge of the literature cited here and a more skeptical attitude about the role of the security state in cognitive warfare would have greatly improved American Trickster. In his book, however, Marshall shows only a naive faith that the US government studied mind control and brainwashing—and funded, as he pointed out, the social scientists at UCLA who supervised Castaneda—only to understand how the enemy might use them, not, for example, to deceive and program patsies who would play key roles in covert operations and assassinations: (18)

Many academics wanted to understand the phenomenon of brainwashing in order to know how to resist it. The US government, which funded some of this research, as well as some of Garfinkel’s, had an interest in being able to recreate it. (p. 419)

A knowledge of the often disparaged “conspiracy theory” literature would have provided better insights into the life and times of Carlos Castaneda, and such knowledge would also open the door to new leads to investigate, including the academics in his milieu who might have been government assets or targets to some degree. This is not to say that they and Castaneda were consciously or directly controlled by the security state but that they were elements of a well-funded general influence operation that nudged public consciousness in a preferred direction away from class consciousness and toward dead-end cults, individualism, relativism, and psychological adjustment therapies of various kinds. (19) This is why I contend that some answers about the mysterious disappearances of Castaneda’s witches may be found through an inquiry into what was written about him in the classified files of the security state. Yet I cannot find any mention of the author’s FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests or a government or immigration file on Castaneda in the entire book. This is the strange missing element in this otherwise excellent biography. The possible role of the security state is the dog that didn’t bark in the mystery of the Castaneda witches. Pursuing this question could shed some light on the enduring mystery. It would also explain why the strange events around his death were ignored by police and the mass media, and why Castaneda faded so abruptly from public consciousness after having been so influential on the generation that read his books. The neglect and forgetting may have been intentional.

The possible role of the security state might also explain why Marshall suspected that UCLA Press, the organization that published Castaneda’s books, was trying to capture and kill his book. They showed a keen interest in it at first, but then they demanded cuts and revisions, then delayed some more until the project stalled over several years. There may be undeclared reasons for this. Institutions have long memories. Marshall wisely found another publisher to work with.

This review may seem harsh, but it deals with only two aspects of the book. It has been focused on only a couple of weaknesses that I found in it—a poorly chosen analogy and the neglect of the possible role of the security state in the Castaneda mystery. In all other respects, American Trickster is an laudable achievement and an illuminating ride through the mind, heart, and soul of the Americas.

Appendix

Robert Bly, “Carlos Castaneda Meets Madame Solitude,” The New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1978, pp. 7, 22. Review of The Second Ring of Power (1978)

Excerpts: Castaneda good‐naturedly gives the capitalist college students what they want—fantasies of gaining power without becoming more compassionate or more honest. Neruda had a vague sense that the United States as a nation longed for exactly that sort of power, and Chile found out what it was like when we found our “power spot.” … The absence of women in the first four books is striking. There is not a single thinking woman, and not one woman at all lovable in the way the frolicsome men are. Genital energy is not felt anywhere. … But the regression shows most clearly in poor vocabulary, the thin texture of language, the poverty of metaphor, the monotonous way people talk, the tawdriness of image. The use of cliches deadens all of Castaneda’s teaching. … When an Englishman regresses, he goes to the Middle Ages, to chivalry and Hobbit crusades; when an American regresses, he goes to Mexico. Castaneda drives to the anal stage. As his books go on, Castaneda learns more and more interesting ideas, but the regression deepens. I had the oddest sense in reading The Second Ring of Power that I was not in a house in Mexico at all, but in a kindergarten, that the “little sisters” (the four women) are his companions in kindergarten and Doña Soledad the Witch is his kindergarten teacher: “Don Juan said that in view of my total lack of control over the forces which decide my destiny, my only possible freedom in that ravine consisted in my tying my shoe laces impeccably.” … In The Second Ring of Power, all the women are frightful, empty and powermad: Doña Soledad wants to kill Castaneda and steal his “luminosity.” All are greedy. Sexual scenes, usually involving a woman lying heavily on top of Carlos, or he on her, contain horror always. People who offer to present occult information cheaply, in fantasy form, probably have this anti-female material in their psyche also…

Notes

1. Richard Jennings, “Investigating Carlos Castaneda and his legacy/Intro,” July 2024.
2. Geoffrey Gray, “The Case of the Missing Chacmools,” Alta, June 20, 2024.
3. Ru Marshall, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books, 2026), 554-568. Subsequent references to this book are made not with end notes but with in-text references to page numbers.
4. Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, Deep Cover, Shallow Graves (Trine Day, 2026), 1, 2. Cited in Jeremy Kuzmarov, “CIA Drug Pilot Claims to Have Flown JFK Assassins into Dallas,” Covert Action Magazine, June 9, 2026. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2026/06/09/cia-drug-pilot-claims-to-have-flown-jfk-assassins-into-dallas/
5. David N. Gibbs, “Academics and Spies: The Silence That Roars,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2001.
6. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2009).
7. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 144.
8. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House, 2018). This book describes in detail how CIA staff within the LAPD blocked investigation of the murder of Robert Kennedy and intimidated other detectives from pursuing obvious leads in the case.
9. Robert (Ru) Marshall, “The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda,” Salon.com, April 12, 2007.
10. Patterson, William Patrick. William Patrick Patterson Explores the Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda (52-minute lecture, YouTube, 2013). Listen to this lecture for a point of view opposed to the one I have taken above. Mr. Patterson gives high praise to Castaneda in this lecture and dismisses the concerns people have had over the years about everything discussed above. (“The brilliance of his early near-archetypical renderings of non-ordinary reality clash with his accrued reputation as a manipulator, liar, and trickster, and that, no doubt, is the way he would have wanted it. He leaves us not knowing and questioning”). However, later in the lecture, he makes the statement that I quoted at the beginning of this essay: “You can’t get to the truth through a lie.” (28:56). This indeed leaves me not knowing and questioning.
11. Laala Bechetoula, “The Exposed State: Israel, Gaza, and the Collapse of the Moral Architecture of the West,” Michel Chossudovsky on Substack, June 3, 2026.
12. P.I. Parry, A. Lefringhausen et al. “‘Spikeopathy’: COVID-19 Spike Protein Is Pathogenic, from Both Virus and Vaccine mRNA.” Biomedicines. August 17, 2023;11(8): 2287. doi: 10.3390/biomedicines11082287. There are many sources that I could add to support this claim, but since this issue is not the main focus of this paper, I supply just one. For those who are curious to know more, search for articles on the increase in all-cause mortality that coincided with the arrival of the mRNA treatments, or others on the shoddy and flawed testing procedures of the operation warp speed program that rushed these treatments toward approval. Additionally, there was the suppression of dissenting experts who had developed effective treatments for Sars-Cov-2 infections. There were also the false claims made about the efficacy of mRNA treatments and its ability to bring the pandemic to a rapid halt.
13. Mark Lane, The Strongest Poison: How I Survived the Guyana Jonestown Massacre (The Lane Group, 1980, 2014). See also my commentary on and summary of this book: “Jonestown, Drinking the Kool-Aid, and the Great Reset.”
14. Clete Roberts (correspondent), “CIA Officer Frank Snepp Discusses Planting Stories in Vietnam,” Witness to War, 1983. Frank Snepp said in this interview that when he wanted to circulate disinformation, he would pick out the most respected journalists, and they would print it as exclusives. The theme discussed in this interview can also be found in Frank Snepp’s book Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End (University Press of Kansas, 1977).
15. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (Cengage Learning, 1991), Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1986).
16. George Orwell, “Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War,” New Road, June 1943. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/
17. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Random House, 1972).
18. Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House, 2018). Lisa Pease’s book, among others, provides a convincing argument that Sirhan Sirhan was under hypnosis when he performed his role in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The coroner’s report is solid evidence that RFK was shot from behind his ear at close range. Sirhan was in front of him during the shooting.
19. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self. An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Tavistock Publications, 1959). Putting it too simply perhaps, Laing is famous for arguing that psychotherapy forces unhappy individuals to adjust to a sick society. Like many other radical practitioners of the 1960s, he used LSD on himself and his patients, and his work became controversial and fell out of favor. He was mostly concerned with treating schizophrenia, but many refer to his work now in criticizing the pharmaceutical treatment of depression, anxiety, attention deficit, and hyperactivity as a toxic attempt to make people adjust to unnatural ways of living.
    
    (Featured Image: “Panamint Sand Dunes” by Jens Fricke is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)