Conspiracy Con 2011: In Xanadu Did Kubla Khan/Satanic Mass Decree…

Douglas D. Dietrich is a striking presence. Part Chinese and Japanese, his face is one that you don't forget. If you sent to central casting for an oriental despot, or a James Bond villain, they'd send in Douglas Dietrich.

When you talk with him privately, Dietrich seems a gentle soul, with the antique gallantry of a bygone age. He's a veteran of Desert Storm and Desert Shield, born in Formosa to a Navy family.

I pick up a sense of betrayal behind his history and I ask about it. He feels his father was mistreated by the VA medical system and that the VA denied medical problems Dietrich suffered from his tours of duty in Iraq. This is hardly improbable.

Dietrich is also a compelling story-teller, and his rococo tales of diabolical practices at the highest levels of military power would stand to make him quite successful as a sci-fi novelist, scriptwriter, or graphic novelist. Except Deitrich doesn't present his dark stories as fiction.

Dietrich covers a lot of ground in his rapid-fire presentation. One minute we're in 12^th century Japan, the next in 1945 Okinawa.

"In 1281 Kubla Khan invaded Japan [with]…over 70,000 Mongol marines armed with the Turkish composite crossbow…There was nothing the emperor could do but get down on his knees and pray to the ancestors. and they… answered. " Dun-de-dun-dun. "That was the kamikaze. The winds on that day were 150 mph and every single man on that fleet died. The Japanese told the Americans 'we can do that again.'"

This is a promising start for an Indiana Jones movie. But, instead of Hollywood-brand escapism, the next hour and a half is a whirlwind roundup of – I'm putting this as plainly as possible – satanic occult practices at the San Francisco Presidio army base, with tangential forays into Roswell and Nazi Germany. Before we're done, we'll make pit stops at the Dresden firebombing, the Holocaust, L.Ron Hubbard, and that noted Satanist Sammy Davis Junior.

Dietrich's central focus is Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, who, he says "served most of his time in Vietnam in his satanic chaplaincy…[and]wrote the diabolicon, a series of quatrains that were channeled through Lt. Col Aquino [via] seven demonic spirits."

I wonder what you call it when storytellers fail to distinguish between themselves and their stories. I don't mean to be flippant.

There's a pattern here that suggests something neurological. Conspiracy Con presentations share two characteristics: First, they're vast, unorganized data dumps. Second, individual sentences (the datum) have the outward characteristics of being statements that communicate information, but on examination are empty of content.

For example here's once-and-future-dentist Lennie Horowitz:

"It is the amount of disinformation and fear that undermines our ability to act …I know for sure that on the spiritual plane they're regulating the church of Satan through the Rothschilds. They're acting through infiltrators. And these infiltrators may not even know themselves that they are acting through MKULTRA. That's the only way I may be able to know that you are mind-controlled."

Or this from galactic historian and UFO abductee Stewart Swerdlow:

"The Illuminati are at the top of their food chain. It doesn't really matter who's in control…It's who allows them to be in control. If everybody takes responsibility for themselves and eliminates the piece of what they're projecting, the illuminati will have no power over you and will disappear from the face of the earth forever."

Or try this from chemtrail theorist Sofia Smallstorm:

When we look at an organization called MITRE, .you go to their website, and their mission is to set the goals and the template for the…IRS….and they contract with operation cloverleaf… and if you google USA today for  May 12…the reporters talk about a thousand particles on the head of a pin….Get those letters and know those individuals. Those are the cross directors of the enemy we have to deal with today."

Or this from self-described former Illuminati witch Doc Marquis (who suffers from the misfortune of an Elmer Fudd-like lisp): 

"Plans are in the making between 2013 and 2018….2012 is the smokescreen [he says "smokescween"]. I have fought over releasing this piece of information. What if on or about December 21^st 2012 the usurper in the White House, who is a Muslim, is assassinated by a Jew…Everyone in the world would literally get involved. This is part of what may or may not happen."

Granted, I can't write fast enough to catch all the words, but, if anything, my redacted versions are more comprehensible than the originals.

But while I'm trying to capture this dizzying spectacle of flying information shrapnel, a war is brewing behind the scenes between conspiracist icons anti-vaccine crusader and former dentist Lennie Horowitz and shock-u-mentary maker and catastrophist Anthony Hilder.