Liberal Studies Program

By Charles Smith

“I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Hamlet II.ii.351

 

I wish I never watched The Matrix. For the uninitiated, it’s a movie where this guy finds out he’s been living inside a huge simulation. I saw it with my friend and his mom when I was a kid. After the movie, I couldn’t go to sleep. Hushed, I asked my friend how Morpheus knew he was in the Matrix because wasn’t it supposed to be a perfect replica of life? My friend wanted to know if I knew when I would shut up. His answers got shorter and shorter till he was just mumbling. Even so, I kept talking, I didn’t care. I was sure he didn’t exist, anyway.

This self-absorption was what came to mind while I watched Frank Hawkman, in the front seat of his black sedan in a Youtube selfie, talk about “gangstalking.”  Frank Hawkman is a white twenty-something with a full color tattoo of a rose on the right side of his neck. He’s wearing black Clubmasters, a black hoodie, and a hat that says, “DETROIT HUSTLES HARDER”. If you look closely, he has a slim silver septum piercing that hugs his nose like a glob of snot. He’s smoking a joint. He inhales, holds the smoke, and blows it directly at the camera.

And Frank narrates: “I’ve traveled in almost every continental U.S state.” He pauses to exhale his smoke. “Besides Hawaii.” Frank ashes and takes another pull. “I’ve done a lot of travelling, I’ve seen a lot of things, and my life’s been a fucking complete trip. And it’s only gotten crazier. I really got what I bargained for when I said I wanted an adventurous life, I didn’t think I was gonna get anything like this. Let’s get into it. I’m a targeted individual. TI for short.” He rolls up the car window.

Frank is a self-proclaimed victim of gangstalking, a worldwide operation where a person is targeted for covert harassment by a network of operatives who are seemingly innocent strangers. TIs are constantly looking over their shoulder, and a lot think that their friends and families are taking part in the stalking. The harassment is invisible to anyone but the TI, so they shut themselves off from anyone who isn’t similarly targeted.

What’s crazy, though, is that they love to talk about the experience. Frank Hawkman posts a video a day on the topic. It’s a twisted take on the belief that the world revolves around oneself: TI’s are so dangerous that they have to be under 24-hour surveillance. When they act up, they’re subjected to orbital bombardment from satellite mounted directed energy weapons (DEWs) that cause anything from headaches to instant death. When a friend of theirs dies, it’s induced heart attack—induced cancer—induced suicide.

The members of one message board surrounding gangstalking refer to themselves as “protagonists”. Aren’t protagonists people who do something? TIs, by and large, are people to whom things are done. Nevertheless, their situation is heroic. Each TI is up against the full-frontal force of the United States government and all its corrupt subsidiaries. They have police, attorneys, employers, therapists, friends, family, and space cannons after them, and they’re still kicking. Like a paranoid Rambo.

It’s also kind of like a kid who comes home from school and can’t find his parents and starts building a whole case file to explain their mysterious deaths before mom walks through the door an hour later. At least, that’s what I did… I had to talk to these guys. Maybe they could relate.

I posted on one of their forums that I was working on a report on criminal activity and was interested in researching gangstalking, so I needed some TIs to interview. I got a couple responses, regulars on the message board. I noticed that one of them, TargetedDistanceHiker, had been posting Frank Hawkman’s videos. Considering this, and Hawkman’s insistence that he’s a big traveler, I guessed that it was Hawkman.

            Hawkman was fine doing a video interview, so I got his number and tried to set up a time. He doesn’t wake up until two on weekdays, so we decided on a three o’clock interview. I got a text the next day at five; he’d just woken up. I got on FaceTime and called him. He has a lot of rose tattoos: one on the back of each hand, and one on his upper chest. I asked if there was any meaning. “Nah, decorative,” he said. It looks like he used to have gauges in his earlobes; now the lobes sag open.

            Hawkman says he’s not special. In fact, he thinks that most TIs are just unlucky. They get blacklisted somehow and become test subjects for some government R&D test studying neural networking. Besides that, he said, the other gangstalking theories were just made up by crazy people. I didn’t pursue that. I wanted to know about the blacklist. He mentioned that it’s a revenge thing, that you piss off the CEO of a Fortune 500 and your name is forever sealed. “Yeah- I pissed off the VP of State Farm, I pissed off his daughter. Smash and dash type deal. I was just a douchebag, she wasn’t happy. And daddy had connections. So, I got put on a list, and that was it,” he explained. “Damn, that’s wild,” I said. We talked for about an hour and then got off the phone. I just stalked Frank Hawkman, and all it took was giving him a little attention.

I agreed with him that gangstalking is a worldwide epidemic and must be stopped. I’m using his own testimonial to write a low hitpiece about his passion. Sue me. I changed the dude’s name to “Frank Hawkman”, so his real identity’s secure.

            Anyway, he kept mentioning that this would have never happened without “all the technology we’ve got today.” Gangstalkers rely on GPS, tracking chips, and internationally connected conglomerates to organize their attacks. I did another interview over text, with this guy who called himself Caribou. According to him, Hawkman’s insane for believing in any of that coordination.

Caribou told me the idea that limitless ordinary people are constantly stalking is a half-baked fantasy. Its just not realistic, in fact, it’s “logistically impossible, financially unfeasible, and operationally implausible.” The myth of gangstalking damages the credibility of TIs, makes them sound like crackpots. What’s really going on, says Caribou—well, I’ll just quote him:

“Mind control is used to make TI believe that we are being we are being harnessed and/or watched by hundred of strangers; for example: A TI jerks off in the morning and his coworkers be MCed [Mind Controlled] to will say a word(ie vacuum cleaner) when he is within earshot. Every time he jerks off, a coworker or a strangers will say the same word:vacuum cleaner, wherever he goes.”

            The more you chase this TI phenomenon, the wackier it gets; it’s all backstabbing and false-flags, so I’ll stop here. My point’s that this conspiracy doesn’t take any specific coordination or mind control tech to work—its an ancient paranoia. It’s a rustle in the hedge and now everything’s out to get you. That has been around since long before State Farm, long before vacuum cleaners. Check out this part from a poem called Kaddish, by Ginsburg:

“But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and spied a mystical assassin from Newark,

So phoned the Doctor—‘OK go way for a rest’—so I put on my coat and walked you downstreet—On the way a grammarschool boy screamed, unaccountably—‘Where you goin Lady to Death’? I shuddered—

and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma—

And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of the gang?  You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on—to New York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound—“

            That was 1956. Forget that State Farm and vacuum cleaners were around back then. I’m trying to say it doesn’t take much to be a paranoid. Believing yourself a TI’s no different than thinking people laugh behind your back, or that we’re all living in the Matrix.

            As it turns out, Caribou insisted that I read this book called The Matrix Deciphered, if I wanted to grasp the full truth. It’s a small world. Maybe he was watching.