Simon Astaire is not the Anti-Christ.  But he seems to be grooming himself for the position, and his achievements so far are admirable.

“PR affects institutions, nations, campaigns,” Astaire explains as if quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After learning of his career, one suspects he knows the work quite well. For example, one day his client Nancy Dell’Orio, ditzy Italian model lawyer and girlfriend of footballer Sven-Göran Eriksson, deeply disturbed by the events of 9/11, came to him with the idea to develop a charity promoting football games as a way of resolving conflict between nations.  Astaire appreciates the role of PR in promoting world peace:  “Look at the Palestinian and Israeli conflict – they are waging a PR war as well as fighting one another for their land.”  He helped her start the charity, Truce International, which although it never amounted to much, nevertheless provided a welcome distraction to Nancy and Sven’s own public controversies, which he was hired to manage.

He is also the agent for other high profile clients such as Prince Michael of Kent (head of Freemasonry), Ulrika Jonsson, and actress Rachel Weisz, wife of director Darren Aronofsky.  His PR firm is aptly named Protocol Multimedia.

Religion: Threat to World Peace

In 2008, Astaire’s lifelong friend Peter Rodger started production on the documentary Oh My God, which surveyed beliefs about God from around the world and attempted to show how faulty religious concepts were at the root of global conflict and strife.  If only we understood that we all believed the same thing, world peace would break out all over.  Peter explains during a break in the filming: “The reaction to the teaser could not have been better.  I put it on the internet and almost instantly I had emails from people contacting me with encouragement about the message of the film and what I was attempting to do.”  Who was assuring him it was brilliant and convinced him that a documentary on religion would make him rich and encouraged him to liquidate his life savings to complete it while stuffing meth up his nose?  It could be none other than Simon “World Peace” Astaire.

Peter Rodger believed that children are born innocent and are corrupted by society and religion to do evil.  Witness his seething anger against religion in this 2008 video:

His own child was troubled but certainly not evil.  He didn’t need to burden his child with religious strictures like “Thou shalt not kill.”  Such rules are obvious even if children are inundated with stories to the contrary.  Take for example the Hunger Games, which depicts a dystopian future based loosely on the society described in the Protocols: a central elite oppresses the masses while distracting them with games to avoid a revolution.  Peter worked on the movie as an assistant director, as you well know, a movie in which children kill each other for sport.  So yes, children are born good and corrupted by society and culture.  Still, there is no need for religion to counteract corrupting influences, he believed.  It causes more harm than good.  Any deviations must be due to ‘mental illness’ or the corrupting influence of religion for the societies that still practice it.  Don’t blame Hollywood, or hardworking parents just struggling to get by.

Or take the 9/11 attacks, in which young men flew planes into buildings shouting “God is great!”  They were obviously caused by religious extremism, and not simply jealousy of Western culture.  Even if Osama bin Laden was once painfully rejected by a sexy blond, and even if white men plunder the Arab man’s most precious natural resource: his beautiful women.  They take them as wives, and the worst part is the women go freely.  Peter Rodger insists that Islamic fanaticism and anger are due to a faulty conception of God; even as he goes home to share a bed with the beautiful Moroccan princess he has taken for his own.  If we could only see the similarities in our conceptions of God….  It’s absurd to think that a man would massacre others out of jealousy….

The Protocols was required reading for German schoolchildren in the 1930’s, who joined the Nazi Youth and later the SS, and then plundered Europe in search of Jews to rape and kill — just reward for their betrayal.  They destroyed millions, sometimes leaving their bodies to rot in towering piles.  The horror was first documented by the war journalist and photographer George Rodger, who experienced the liberation of Bergen Belsen and recorded on film the piles of skeletons covered in skin, some of which were still moving.  He never recovered from this trauma, which brought on dark moods that his family called “The Thing”.  His son Peter realized that a “Loving God” was a revolting absurdity, even as the father developed in his son a keen cinematic eye.

Mental Health Time Bomb

Astaire knew Peter’s son Elliot from birth and inquired about the mental health of the lonely child on every call, planting the seeds of destruction in the boy’s fallow mind.  This may seem implausible, but consider the fate of Hollywood actors who once played the role of drug addict: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Corey Monteith, Heath Ledger, and River Phoenix.  They convinced themselves that they had a disease that was likely to kill them if they failed to entrust their will to a Higher Power, and this became a self-fulfilling prophecy through the power of suggestion.  And consider Russell Brand’s campaign to gain admission for Amy Winehouse into the 27 Club and who now testifies about the dangers of drug addiction before the British Parliament while high on meth, spouting ‘New World Order’ talking points at every opportunity.  And consider that Astaire’s 2011 novel Mr Coles is about an alcoholic pedophile teacher’s systematic grooming of a child entrusted to his care.

And consider that Astaire convinced Peter to give his son The Secret, a book which played a prominent role in the boy’s crime, even if he quickly recognized it as a fraud (and probably a cruel hoax as well).

Astaire may be best known for this half-hour interview on GMA just days after Elliot’s murderous rampage, in which he claims to be the parents’ main link to the outside world.  Despite many conversations about the boy and many visits to the house, he had only one conversation with the boy himself: they briefly discussed the solitude of writing.  As he walked away he was left with the most remarkable impression: “He was the loneliest person I’ve ever seen in my life.”  He concludes that we need to have a more open conversation about mental illness in this country.  Perhaps the boy should have been forced to take psychiatric drugs, but he is reserved on that issue.

Mission: Gun Control

He is also coy on gun control, being a foreigner in our proud land and understanding that the Brits can no longer write the rules around here.  Nevertheless, he managed to snap this photo of Peter embracing Richard “#NotOneMore” Martinez:

They evince a shared deep commitment to enact policies as yet unspecified but clearly intended to make the world a safer place in which to medicate our children and convince them that they might be possessed by a “monster”, which even good parents who “spent their lives trying to help their son” are powerless to subdue.  Rodger vows: “My duty now is to do as much as I can to try and stop this from happening again. Too many lives are being lost.”  Look at his eyes and see if this self-imposed mission is almost ‘religious’.  If you didn’t know better.  “Dear God, hasn’t he done enough already?” one might be forgiven for asking.

Addict in Denial: The Hidden Threat

At the start of his manifesto My Twisted World, Elliot Rodger denies he’s an alcoholic, which any experienced 12 Step member would immediately recognize as its characteristic symptom.  Many of his escapades are fueled by wine or vodka, like the adventures of Mr. Coles, a ‘hair of the dog’ drinker and evidently Elliot’s hero:

Does that define me as an alcoholic?  I was having this debate within myself….    Oh, to be with him — the craving was vicious enough to kill for….    I loathed myself and cursed my existence….   There is a section of the human race that is scum and should be crucified and buried alive in a deep grave or crucified on trees for the world to see their withered bodies….     Their noise and their happy faces made me want to wrench….   I am in Hell, looking at God’s imperfect creatures….     The more you cry out, the more retribution you are served….    The Mercedes was covered with a stream of bumps probably caused by knocking into the innocent strolling hand in hand.  Mr Coles

---

I wasn’t an alcoholic, but drinking alcohol always helped me with being more confident and sociable….      I often built elaborate fantasies in my mind that I had a hot, blonde-haired girlfriend….    Why do women behave like vicious, stupid, cruel animals who take delight in my suffering and starvation?….  I cursed the world for condemning me to such suffering….   I looked around me and saw lots of young couples holding hands and enjoying their pleasurable lives together….  They were in heaven and I was in hell…. I look at the human race and I see only vileness and depravity….   I named it the Day of Retribution.  It would be a day in which I exact my ultimate retribution and revenge on all of the hedonistic scum who enjoyed lives of pleasure that they don’t deserve….    I will cut them, flay them, strip all the skin off their flesh, and pour boiling water all over them while they are still alive….  When they are writhing in pain, their bodies broken and dying, they will fully realize their crimes….    I saw more young couples walking around, and I had the desire to run them over with the Mercedes as a sweet act of revenge.   My Twisted World

It’s so much easier to commit crimes when you can blame them on alcohol, or the desire for it, or a blackout from it, or the discomfort of the withdrawals.  If addiction didn’t exist, writers would surely have invented it.  Elliot didn’t realize he could blame his crime on booze.  Or perhaps he just didn’t want to.  Or perhaps he did:

Isoda told KTLA that Rodger was a sloppy, drunk mess who got aggressive….  Rugg [roommate] described Rodger as a recluse who stayed in his room mostly and would have angry phone conversations with his father. Rugg told ABC. “They got angrier and louder and he was drunk for a lot of the later ones.” (laist)

Astaire himself seems to have an ambiguous relationship with alcoholism.  In 2002 he is described as ‘teetotal‘ but in 2009 admits to getting drunk.  He spends about a week each month in LA, a hotbed of AA activity.  His commitment to recovery nevertheless outlasted his many others:

My book Private Privilege portrays a teenager’s struggle to fit into the public school system. Many have assumed it is autobiographical, it is not –although it has similarities with my school career. Soon after its publication, I wrote an article for a Sunday paper admitting that I am emotionally detached, and placed the blame firmly on my education. I attended Harrow for three years and the barriers in my life were formed then. I have never been married and have found it difficult to have a relationship past 12 weeks, the length of a public school term. Whether there is a direct correlation I do not know, but I noticed the timing between saying goodbye to my parents and the return home, and my love affairs. The response to the article was overwhelming.

Fortunately he spares us the vapid psychobabble in the books themselves.  (It seems like he’s always testing and stretching the bounds of our credulity.)  Admittedly, his novel Mr. Coles is a stunning psychological thriller: the dissection of a psyche so raw and grotesque as to be truly frightening.  It’s a work of genius and there is simply nothing like it.  The movie was previously promised for release this year, but may now be on indefinite hold.  Astaire is author of several critically acclaimed works in which the themes of loneliness, calamity, evil and alcoholism feature prominently.  The books I haven’t read are all high up on my list.

Of course, fiction was not the only fruit of his ‘alcoholic mind’, nor perhaps his proudest achievement, to which Elliot pays tribute:

My father foolishly decided to invest all of his money in his first feature film, a documentary named “Oh My God”….  If only my failure of a father had made better decisions with his directing career instead wasting his money on that stupid documentary….

 

The Trap Springs Shut

“By some weird coincidence, I just happened to know everyone involved,” Astaire remarked about Nancy’s 9/11 project.  But it’s probably true of most things he does.  Requiem for a Dream taught a new generation of addicts how to act like one.  The movie was directed by Darren Aronofsky, husband of client Rachel Weisz.  The Guardian reporter commented on his career way back in 2002: “We’ve allowed the snake-oil salesmen to bamboozle us into doing their bidding by buying their client. Ulrika, Sven, Arafat, Sharon, a paedophile priest or two… who can tell, any more, who’s being sold to us – and at what price?”

Simon Astaire knows we’re desperate to buy it.  He’s Alastair Crowley meets The Protocols — the half-blood Prince of the New World Order.  How could good and evil be so deeply intertwined in one psyche?  (Which I don’t wonder about Aronofsky or anyone else for that matter.)  Perhaps he’s just trapped inside a game of his own device. “The whole thing is surreal… it’s just such a surreal world now,” he laments in the GMA interview.

And we are all trapped in that world with him.

Read more:

• Oh My Gods – A boy’s dream come true
• Undiagnosed Alcoholic? – A typical AA drunkalog
• Lie Like the Wind – How to know if AA is right for you
• How to Drink Like a Normal Man – Just keep it simple
• Powerlessness as Religion – Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny – Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda – How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club – Watch what they do, not what they say
• Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
• I Call Blackout – I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction – The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky – 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels – What you actually learn in the rooms
• AA is a Pagan Cult – Putting the ‘pagan’ in propaganda
• The Little Psychopath Could: How the Addiction Myth creates new Drug Addicts

Did you like this article?  Please Like/Share: