Guitar Legend/Committed Anti-Terrorist

The Strange Trip that is Jeff "Skunk" Baxter

By RAR

Hollywood types have had a long history of involvement in government operations, particularly with regard to promoting certain political agendas where their celebrity and status as cultural icons has often made them more effective as messengers than politically compromised elected officials might otherwise be. There have been challenges, however, for the political right of Southern California who have typically felt themselves to be in the minority among a liberal Hollywood establishment. It is an odd sense of oppression, given that it has been within their group that celebrity-based upward political mobility has developed. Notable among their stars, who have stepped forward to promote the interests of the right, are Ronald Reagan, who rode an acting career, involvement in union politics, and finally corporate spokesman duties to the governorship of California and on to the White House. And there was Charlton Heston, of the NRA, and former Mayor of Carmel Clint Eastwood. Other right-wing entertainment industry supporters have included actor James Woods, and musicians Gene Simmons and Kid Rock. Perhaps the strangest case, among the righties, is former Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter.

I must admit that when I first learned that noted guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter was retiring from years as a special operative with the Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.) my first impulse was to imagine that he had been a narcotics officer, a narc. It wasn't hard to imagine that Baxter, whose 35-year music industry career has put him in close quarters with many of the music world's biggest stars, probably got busted somewhere along the line and offered a cooperation deal with the cops to turn on the rock world's hard-partying elite.

It turns out that wasn't what happened at all. In some ways, Baxter's story has been much worse.

After years of working in audio recording environments, the auto-didact Baxter had developed some considerable expertise in the use of compression and other electronic tools for isolating and enhancing sound frequencies. At some point in his career, he began to work on recordings given to him by the L.A.P.D. who hoped that he could improve their sound qualities for the purpose of developing evidence against individuals under investigation.

Baxter, as it happened, was living in the type of upscale Orange County communities favored by the Southern California corporate and political elite, who were quite enamored with the presence of this rock icon who happened to show a particular technical interest in their worlds. Baxter had a next-door neighbor, for instance, who happened to be an engineer who had worked on the sidewinder missile program. This became Skunk Baxter's doorway into a new technical arena, which was missile defense systems.

Southern California, you may remind yourself, has been at the center of the nation's defense industry spending since World War II. In the post-war years, large numbers of African Americans moved into the middle class on the strength of the L.A. area's defense economy, though by the 1960s other large swaths of previously self-sufficient Black communities were reduced to poverty when employers began moving production facilities out of the area. This came to be the root of a very serious dynamic in L.A. community affairs, centered around economic disparity, high rates of crime in certain neighborhoods, and large populations of Hispanics and Asians. The L.A.P.D. became rife with brutality and corruption as it struggled to deal with a massive underclass population that was coming apart at some of its seams, even as other parts of the nearby population continued to do quite well. Tensions grew worse when defense spending began to decline significantly during the George H. Bush administration and then throughout the Clinton years, not rebounding until George W. Bush assumed the presidency. (A reviewing of the Michael Douglas movie "Falling Down" would be most helpful for those of you unfamiliar with the economic decline experienced in Southern California in the late 1980s, and the impact it has had on large swaths of the L.A. basin.) The SoCal defense sector would rebound but it would never achieve the economic might that it had from the end of WW II and on into the 1980s. The nature of defense spending had changed, and with the advent of personal computing and the establishment of the Internet a significant share of California's economic muscle shifted north to the Silicon Valley.

As a result, there developed in SoCal a particular type of moneyed political conservative, typified by rigid views on law and order and personal responsibility, opposition to immigration, and fanatical desires to get government out of their lives. Remember, this is Southern California, where government investment has, one way or another, been in large part responsible for these people having as much money as they have in the first place. Never mind the details, the focus for "the haves" has been to protect their gains; to spot threats and take preemptive action to eradicate them.

Skunk Baxter, who had already been doing work on L.A.P.D. surveillance tapes, began to educate himself in missile defense systems, eventually feeling confident enough on the subject that he developed a five-page paper on the possibility of converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile system into a rudimentary missile defense system. You'll notice the focus here: defense, because we are under attack. We need to be listening in on recorded conversations of identified agents of evil and to remain ever on the watch for incoming threats.

Also living in the Skunk's neighborhood was California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who read Baxter's proposal and then started jumping through hoops to get his rock'n defense protégé a raft of national security clearances so he could view sensitive government documents. Rep. Rohrabacher could clearly see that Skunk Baxter's cache as a known entity in the rock music world plays well with his geeky, unglamorous cohorts in Congress. He noticed the reaction he got when striding through the Capitol Hill area with this "hippie musician", though Skunk Baxter turned out to be a little right of Attila the Hun when it comes to playing hardball with his enemies. He proved this by getting opportunities to contribute as a civilian war gamer against Pentagon war planners. His advantage - he claims to beat the Pentagon warriors time and again - is that he thinks out of the box. He employs psychological terror tactics to disarm his opponents and prevails by virtue of the fact that he is crazy enough to do absolutely anything to win. Otherwise put, he is a terrorist.

In fact, there you have your complete evolution, the story behind how Skunk became a skunk. He leveraged our celebrity culture to gain access to information and opportunity, and in the process was seduced by the power of the circles into which he had gained entry. And what a circle they are.

Outside of his Orange County district (the Orange County Register even seems to hate him), Rep. Rohrabacher is perhaps the most-reviled politician in California, with the possible exception of his SoCal stablemate Rep. Darrell Issa. The wealthiest man in Congress, Issa made his fortune selling car burglar alarms, which as a former juvenile car thief he was most well-qualified to do.

Rohrabacher's crimes, to his detractors, are that he is a climate change denier who also has a propensity for supporting CIA-managed terrorist groups, such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Iranian MEK. He also received some personally awful press in 2012, when he abandoned a lease agreement he and his wife had on a property in Orange County, leaving behind around $25,800 in damage, including some grotesque environmental hazards. A feisty anti-Obama and Obamacare partisan, the feisty Rohrabacher came to power with Ronald Reagan, working as assistant press secretary for Reagan's 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, and after that as a speech writer in the Reagan White House. He is considered to have played a significant role in the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine, which continued opposition to the global expansion of the power of the Soviet Union. He also played a role in developing Reagan's Economic Bill of Rights, which vowed support for a range of citizen protections from government intrusion in their lives, including reform of the nation's welfare programs and educational policies.

Rep. Rohrabacher is Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, so he has access to all manner of highly classified national security documents, and thanks to this so does his friend Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. The Orange County Register reports that Rohrabacher is outspending his four political opponents for the fall election by a 33-to-1 margin. However crazy his rants about fluoridation and the Karsai government might be - he was recently denied entry to Afghanistan - and however bad his personal press might be, he is likely to stick around Washington D.C. in a position of power.

In a world of nerds, Skunk Baxter's profile has endeared him to a lot political partisans and has created opportunities for him to develop consultant practices and be a participating member in a number of the right wing's "think groups". The most notable of these is a Florida-based operation called the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. This organization does research and development on artificial intelligence, cognitive science, human-centered computing, and perhaps most importantly, entrepreneurship in government and academia. Otherwise put, they are an extension of the right-wing desire to promote the private sector in areas now often under the control of the federal government.

There has been a debate about the role of government in scientific research going back to WW II and the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Those developments, along with the technological leaps forward eventuated by the development of war machinery, made clear that technology would be the ruling force in the future of world politics, and so the United States established the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), and its governing body, the National Science Board (NSB). The technology developed in WW II had largely taken place as a cooperative effort sponsored by the federal government but developed by universities throughout the United States. The charter for the NSF and the NSB was essentially to continue that cooperative partnership in the years following the war, rather like a continuing peace dividend leveraging an R&D infrastructure that had already been established. The initial idea was to spread research funding broadly across the nation to give every academic institution an opportunity to participate in the brave new world of federally-funded science research. In practice, funds mostly flowed to pockets of scientific elites.

Leading all of this focused effort was engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush, who was head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war. That name now jumps off the page due to the proliferation of conspiracy theories that identify Bush as the leader of a secret government organization, "Majestic 12", which was reportedly responsible for managing information pursuant to the federal government's experience and interactions with extraterrestrial biological entities, or space aliens. Whether such an organization ever actually existed, and whether or not there was ever any need to manage information regarding contacts with extraterrestrials, continues to be debated, mostly on cable television. Whatever, Vannevar Bush wrote an influential treatise titled Science - the Endless Frontier that provided the blueprint for forward progress in research and development at the nation's top science schools, to be led by the nation's top scientists. It provided the context for John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" vision, which culminated in putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

In that little vortex of energy, jolted to life by the R&D requirements of the Second World War, and electrified by the inclusion of former German, Nazi-regime scientists and security professionals into the U.S. intelligence community, lies virtually the entire nut of what has become a government conspiracy industry. It includes secret government agencies, the recovery of alien technology from various crashes of extraterrestrial craft near top secret government air bases and research facilities, presidential assassination, global surveillance and mind control technology, weaponization of weather, and even the truth behind "Bigfoot".

Somehow that you would get a case like "Skunk" Baxter in this mix seems sort of natural, like something that might happen in a Phillip K. Dick novel. Of course the auto-didact Baxter gets the keys to the nation's national security inland empire, he's a famous rock guitarist!

In fact, the nation's science and engineering clubs have always found ways to incorporate the contributions of uniquely qualified outsiders. My dad was one of these, parlaying his experience as an Air Force radio technology instructor and his private-life experience as a television repair man into an opportunity to work in the burgeoning aerospace industry of the 1950s and early 1960s. Skunk Baxter, with his celebrity, has managed to turn his opportunity into a consulting empire, helped along also by a certain strain of political thinking that has always been a main vein of right-wing thought: privatization.

Why on earth, from their way of thinking, would taxpayer funds be poured into universities across the nation when all of that research and development could be better done in private research facilities that would be in a position to profit from the development of new technologies? You get better science, with the only paydown being that the proceeds from the R&D goes into the coffers of private investors. This thinking has been carrying the day for years and has contributed to the dynamic that has created giant pharmaceutical companies that governments are unable to control. None of Obamacare happened, you will remember, until after Obama had first signed a deal with the huge pharmaceutical companies guaranteeing their ownership of the U.S. market, and disenabling the option of American citizens to buy less expensive prescription drugs through Canadian suppliers. Obamacare itself did nothing more than guarantee that health care in the United States would continue to be the province of private insurance companies. What Americans called for was a government-run universal health care benefit, guaranteed by a portion of their tax burden. That isn't what we got.

Instead, we got the kind of thing championed by Institute for Human and Machine Cognition CEO Dr. Ken Ford. Ford serves on the board of directors of the NSB, in charge of all that science research and development. A computer science Ph.D., he is big on research into artificial intelligence and he is one of those guiding humankind toward that inevitable moment of "singularity", when our computers become smarter than the humans who created them, after which only human-machine integration will be able to guarantee a continued human existence.

By now, Skunk Baxter is probably pretty inured to the company he keeps, no doubt having developed expectations of respect befitting his defense consultant standing (Northrup-Grumman and other defense contractors), not to mention his rock star status. Still, it is a decidedly strange group of top security classified technologists and right-wing politicians. Surely there must remain a level of intoxication within Baxter that somehow he has been able to become a highly-paid defense consultant, an expert in anti-terrorism, on the strength of his intellectual curiosity, his connections, and his fear-leaning political-defense inclinations.

There was a time when those who knew him as a musician didn't take him seriously as a defense expert. "After 9-11 that all changed," Baxter told NBC's Today Show. He told them he felt like "the luckiest man alive", "privileged to be in the fight..."

Baxter, like others of the political right, are battling demons largely created by the machinations of those with whom they are aligned. Think Rohrbacher and his KLA and MKE connections, which are military equivalents of Al Qaeda as created by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to combat the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the political equivalent of Reagan's Contra Rebels in Nicaragua. It is like a self-perpetuating virus that creates evil doers who you then must be afraid of and defend against.

To the left, such activities are a mask of the real motivations behind those schemes, which is to divert the public from noticing that in the course of fighting against boogie men of our own creation, we are surrendering our liberties and allowing a small handful of the population to enrich themselves at the expense of the general population.

There is a kind of single child mentality at work in these Republican ideals, a sense that as individuals they are part of the elect, whose wealth is indicative of their worth in God's eyes. Of course guitarist Skunk Baxter gets a seat at the table where attitudes about the future of science and technology and humankind are in play. He was a Doobie Brother! And besides, he's sincere and in the fight. There are not enough of his type on the right, so why not him? Most musicians inspired to play at the levels we think of as the standard of rock stars on Baxter's level tend to be advanced in the humanities; not just deep thinkers, but deeply sensitive beings.

What, on the other hand, other than a deep, abiding fear of his fellow man could possibly explain the Skunk? One suspects that he doesn't really like people very much, which would explain his connection to a research group that anticipates replacing human beings with programmable robots, even knowing that such machines will soon be programming us humans. And how many people in distant countries must be killed before powerfully paranoid people in the federal government and its many sub-parts experience some level of security?

It will never end, not if Skunk Baxter has anything to say about it.

The Two Skunks

For the vast majority of Skunk Baxter's public life, he has been a pretty popular figure, instantly recognizable for this walrus-like mustache. He represented something, way back when we in the public first noticed him in the early '70s, that said counter-culture. Who could have imagined that the culture he was counter to was the one he most resembled in personal appearance. He was playing a role, like a high-end professional, although something seems to have eroded his personal cache over time, until Skunk the guitarist is mostly a memory. That said, the videos provided below show the two Skunks: the one we used to love, and the pod person who has taken over his being in its current form.

THE SKUNK WE LOVED, SORT OF

The concept alluded to by this headline is not as far-out as one might imagine. I once knew a Colorado girl whose resume included having been a long-time girlfriend to the droopy-mustached Baxter. She told me he was real nice. In the video below, the Skunk offers instruction on guitar technique, and he seems nice, though he may not like those hair guys down on Melrose. It's probably "a tell". On the other hand, he vows to be all about making you "special", one of the elect. Man, that sounds so Republican!

THE SKUNK WHO MAY HAVE YOU ELIMINATED

The concept alluded to by this headline is, once again, not as far-out as one might imagine. Check out this address given at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Skunk tells the story of "drifting away from my comrades". A lot of what Skunk says is weirdly constructed. He has turned military jargon into a fetish and he seems to have a natural tendency to suck up to military authority. Something about this 2005 video - and now Skunk has nearly a decade more of immersion in his weird anti-government, anti-terrorist calling - feels revealing of his personal nature, which seems a little bitter. By 2005, he had developed quite a tale for himself explaining how utterly superior he proved to be to the intelligence community's top brass, just as he had to his Playboy-reading band mates. It seems equally incredible that he would so blatantly self-promote, which somehow cast doubt on his real place in the world of intelligence experts. In fact, he seems like a shill.

Skunk the National Security Agent

If you look at this photograph and think "Schutzstaffel", you may not be a redneck.

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter is listed as a Senior Thinker & Raconteur with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. They list Baxter's resume credits as the following:

Although still actively involved as a guitarist, composer, producer and engineer, Mr. Baxter currently serves as an advisor to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, (Chairman, Sub-Committee on Oversight and Investigations and Senior Member, House Foreign Relations Committee). He is a Specialist Reserve Officer for the Anti-Terrorist/Major Crimes Division of the Los Angeles Police Department and member Terrorist Early Warning Group, (TEW), Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. He is a consultant/contractor for NGA/InnoVision, (National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency), as well as holding current consulting agreements with SAIC, Northrop-Grumman, Ball Aerospace, Defense Group Inc, Sierra Nevada Corp and General Dynamics Information Technologies. He is an advisor to both the Principle Deputy and the Director of Mission Support for the NRO, (National Reconnaissance Office), a consultant to the OSD/Special Capabilities Office and to the AFRL, (Air Force Research Laboratory) at WPAFB, the OUSD/I, (Office of the Undersecretary for Intelligence) for OSD and The DNI, (Director of National Intelligence.) He is a Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Regents at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Senior Thinker at the IHMC, (Institute for Human & Machine Cognition) and a member of the Director’s Strategic Red Team at MIT/Lincoln Laboratory. He has served as a consultant to Mr. Charlie Allen, Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis at DHS, (Dept of Homeland Security) on both his Advisory Board and his Collection Strategy Board. He has also served as a consultant to NASIC, (National Air & Space Intelligence Center) and NASA’s ESAC, (Exploratory Systems Advisory Committee.) Mr. Baxter has also made presentations on the subjects of VR, cyberspace, CI and CT to In-Q-Tel, the ODNI, (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), the past 4 GEOINT Conferences, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the FBI. Mr. Baxter has also served as a consultant to the CIO of NCTC, National Counter Terrorism Center), the Laser Advisory Board at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, General Atomics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin as well as for 4 consecutive Directors for MDA, GEN Mallory O’Neil, GEN Lester Lyles, GEN Ronald Kadish and GEN Henry “Trey” Obering.) Other affiliations upon request from persons with appropriate clearances.

Skunk is Not the First of the Musical Technologists

It should come as no surprise that among music's elite technologists there exists quite a number of exceptionally bright people. Queen guitarist Brian May, for instance, is a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. He is co-author, with Sir Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott, of Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe (published in 2006)[102] and "The Cosmic Tourist" (published in 2012).

The elite of this set of brilliant music folk has included Les Paul, who invented much of what the electric guitar and its related components (effects, mixers, compressors, etc.) are all about. He was an electronic and audio genius.

The other that comes to mind was producer and recording engineer Tom Dowd. His successes included Ray Charles, The Drifters, The Coasters, Ruth Brown and Bobby Darin, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, among many others.

Dowd was a physics student who was drafted into the Army during WW II, entering the ranks as a Sergeant. He later worked on the Manhattan Project.

Looking at that company objectively, it is not immediately obvious on the strength of what Jeff "Skunk" Baxter contributes that he is really in the league of any of those notably bright and accomplished guys.