Notes on the Jerry Seinfeld Society

Riding the Wave, "Rectifying" the Record

2011-08-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

"Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers inSoviet Russia spent long hours smoothing out the blemishes ofimperfect complexions, helping the camera to falsify reality.... But it was during the Great Purges, which raged inthe late 1930s, that a new form of falsification emerged....

Photographs for publication were retouched and restructuredwith airbrush and scalpel to make once famous personalities vanish.Paintings, too, were often withdrawn from museums and art galleriesso that compromising faces could be blocked out of group portraits.Entire editions of works by denounced politicians and writers werebanished to the closed sections of the state libraries and archives orsimply destroyed" --

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, by David King and Stephen F. Cohen

"Most of the ills of the world would disappear if people just started telling the truth."--

Robert Welch

Manipulation of photographs is a familiar method of misrepresentation. The same end can be accomplished by manipulating photo captions, as well.

Until just a few days ago, the following photo -- including the caption -- was found on the website of the so-called "Freedom Project," an appendage of the JBS that provides the otherwise unemployable Alan Scholl with a paycheck and title:

Rick Santorum is a Republican presidential aspirant. He is among the most unabashed supporters of the welfare/warfare/torture state. He is a perfect specimen of that kind of authoritarian conservative who sees nothing amiss in building a huge, invasive apparatus of state violence and regimentation -- as long as it's in the hands of the "righteous."

On August 22, I posted that photo, along with a few acerbic comments, on my Facebook page.

Today (August 26), the original caption was consigned to the Memory Hole, and -- to borrow the familiar congressional formula -- Scholl and Company inserted the "revised and extended"
version seen below:

The first version was clearly meant to convey the impression that Santorum conferred his blessing on the "Freedom Project"; the second makes the remarkable claim that Santorum was being tutored regarding the Constitution by the bottomless fountain of wisdom and principle known to lesser beings as Alan Scholl.

In an e-mail sent out to donors today, Alan recounted that Santorum, canvassing for votes at an Iowa homeschool conference, "drops [sic] by our booth because of the buzz over AOF [American Opinion Foundation] and the Freedom Project among the attendees." Alan handed him some materials and posed for a photo. An aide later supposedly said that Santorum was impressed with the program and "feels that we need more of this kind of activity in America." Alan concludes by claiming that "the fact that he did what he did indicates that we certainly have the high ground, and he was concerned about our influence."

The original caption, in my view, conveyed exactly the opposite message: The "Freedom Project" was eager to exploit Santorum's influence to establish its credibility with kind of people who would support him -- and his agenda of unending war abroad and authoritarian regimentation at home.

It's clear to me that those captions were targeting two different audiences: The first was a come-on to prospective customers seeking a seal of approval from a political celebrity, the latter a "Hooray for Us!" message to the project's donors (long-time Birchers hungry for evidence that the group has "influence").

In the weeks leading up to my termination five years ago, Alan -- and the two very expensive advertising hacks he hired -- were constantly talking about the supposed need to "ride the wave" -- that is, to suck up to the Red State Fascist constituency that favors the likes of Santorum. They also were fond of reciting potted platitudes about offering "milk" before "meat." I had thought that the "Madison Avenue Boys" were responsible for this change in the JBS's "corporate culture." It's clear to me now that this reflected the influence of Alan Scholl, someone whose conscience is elastic and whose commitment to the truth is highly qualified.

No, we're not dealing with Stalin-grade agitprop manipulation. The applicable standard, however, isn't Stalin's dishonesty -- it's Robert Welch's unflinching candor and commitment to honesty. I grant that it's a judgment call, but this seems a lot closer to the former than to the latter.

JBS: Fanning the Flames of a Race War ?

2010-07-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

(This is adapted from an e-mail I sent to a number of friends and professional acquaintances; for links and other supporting documentation, see earlier installments of this blog. -- WNG)

Are the people running the JBS actually EAGER to see a race war erupt?

They've been peddling reheated alarmist nonsense about the Mexican Peril for years They continue to do so now, even though both immigration and violent crime are sharply DOWN from five years ago. But it's an election year, and -- just as in 2006 -- the GOP is cynically trying to stir up an electoral wave with the immigration issue.

The pathetic fools in JBS upper management (as distinct from the membership and field staff) are hoping to ride that wave, because they have neither the character nor creativity to make waves of their own.

Sampling the comment threads on thenewamerican.com leaves the impression that the message being sent by TNA and the JBS isn't about the need for a change in policy regarding "border security" or welfare, but rather the need to perceive Mexicans as an internal enemy that must be expelled or exterminated. I can't say that this leaves me perplexed, given that TNA's treatment of immigration issues habitually depicts the "enemy" as poor brown people -- rather than members of the Power Elite of whatever background.

"In only 25 years Whites will be a minority, not only here in the USA but almost in all the White Countries," fretted one recent commenter. "There is no time to loose [sic] for decisive action. No more `christian' [sic] love. Arizona should be the starting point for our total liberation. It's either get rid of 95% of the non-White masses and the subjugation to our laws and our will of those 5% allowed to stay or our painful disappearance from this planet."

One commenter appears convinced that every Mexican residing in the U.S. is a sleeper agent of the Reconquista, just waiting the signal to rise up and slay the Gringos:

"Judging from the general attitude of Hispanics I encounter in the course of everyday business it is becoming evident that they feel as though they already own America. To say that they are acting like unwelcome guests is an understatement. The general feeling of US citizens in my area is that they are just waiting for a signal of some sort to embark on a physical takeover."

Even Mexicans who aren't militant are a plague, according to another contributor to a TNA comment thread:

"Living in New Mexico, I have watched this develop over the last 10 yrs. At first there were few Mexicans around, now they are everywhere. I hate to go to Walmart, it is full of them.... I have seen lots of young females with their `anchor babies' at Walmart.......just really disgusting."

"Mark my words," warned yet another, "if this comes down to an internal war, I am willing to fight tooth and nail to defend my country against this scourge."

Of course, the authors of those sentiments -- not TNA or JBS -- are primarily responsible for them. But TNA does filter out "offensive" content from its comment threads (the first was initially approved, but removed only after I had made an issue of it on my blog and in e-mails to people associated with TNA).

My username was blocked by TNA because of substantive criticisms I had posted regarding specific articles on the website. THAT sort of thing just can't be tolerated! But unfiltered bigotry and unabashed promotion of inter-ethnic conflict? Why, sure -- bring it on!

This is the kind of stuff I saw coming back in 2006, and my complaints about TNA's handling of this issue probably had a lot to do with the decision to throw me under the bus. I warned that the immigration issue was being exploited to build the Homeland Security State, boost the GOP's political fortunes, and inflame ethnic hostilities that could erupt into outright inter-ethnic violence as the economy collapses.

Four years ago,when JBS upper management rebuked me for publishing that warning, I asked them to tell me what I had gotten wrong. "Shut up!" they explained, a few weeks before I was fired. Now they seem content to let the comment section of The New American degenerate into a passable imitation of what we can find at NewSaxon.org.

It's Not What Is Said -- It's Who Said It That Matters

2010-07-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

From the Birch Blog, July 9, 2006 (and republished here):

"Unless your Congressman is named Ron Paul, he doesn't deserve to be re-elected.

On at least one occasion during the last congressional term, every member of the House of Representatives – Dr. Paul being the sole exception – violated his oath of office by voting in favor of unconstitutional legislation; this is documented by the most recent installment of The New American's Conservative Index (CI)."

From The New American on-line, July 23, 2010 (and republished from here):

"[T]he 2,000-plus people attending this year’s FreedomFest crowd made it clear what they wanted: less government, less spending, lower taxes, fewer bureaucrats and no deficits. And they also want every incumbent running for office defeated this year… with the possible exception of Ron Paul."

The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a substantive difference between those two statements. The second was written by Chip Wood, a former news editor for Review of the News, a forerunner to The New American.

The first was written by Yours Truly, a former Senior Editor at The New American -- in a blog post that was taken down a few hours after it had been published, but not before I endured a barrage of angry e-mails complaining that the post ran afoul of the "corporate consensus" that it was necessary to ride the Republican wave in order for the JBS to survive and prosper.

My insistence that Republicans revealed to be incorrigible collectivists by their Conservative Index scores was a significant example of what Art Thompson, the stentorian suck-up who swans about calling himself the Society's CEO, would later call an unacceptable "nuance." Once that nuance was "rejected," Thompson would insist, publication of it constituted a firing offense, but only of limited application: As far as I can tell, that was a category of "offense" specially created to justify firing one TNA employee.

Three years later, Chip Wood is not only free to write such things on his own blog (hey, wait a second -- you mean he doesn't have to pre-vet what he writes in his own webspace?), but they are welcome at TNA as well. (The other guy, incidentally, is blocked from so much as posting on comment threads below articles on the TNA website.)

Of course, there is an important difference here, at least where the wave-riders in Appleton are concerned: When I wrote that Ron Paul was the only incumbent (of either party) who deserved to be re-elected, there was a Republican in the White House and a Republican congressional majority. Now there's a Democratic president and Democrat-controlled Congress. Apparently that makes all the difference. Well, that and the fact that nobody in Appleton is trolling for excuses to get rid of Chip Wood.

White Nationalists Welcome on TNA Comment Threads...

... but banished TNA Senior Editors? Not so much.

In today's (July 23) editor of TNA on-line, there is yet another press release-generated missive in support of Arizona's "arrested for driving while brown" ordinance. The first two comments posted in reply are from a fellow calling himself "Allisio Rex," an individual whose views are quite akin to those of a former JBS member who has been in the news recently.

Here are Mr. "Rex"'s contributions, with emphasis on some particularly noteworthy passages:

Allisio Rex said:

States Rights ans Arizona Immigration Law
Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that enforcement of Immigration Laws or other Federal Laws is the exclusive responsibility of the federal Government.

Furthermore, Amendment 10 of the same Constitution don't expressly prohibit any State from doing so and should be left alone to pass,within their States, any laws necessary to maintain law and order.

This admimistration is anti-Whites and anti-America and its aim is to destroy Western Civilization. States very soon,regardless of who is in power,whether Republicans or Democrats, will have to withdraw their allegiance (secede),not from the other States but from the Federal Government if we want to continue to exist as civilized people.

And all third-world immigration,including the Muslims, must stop.

July 23, 2010
Votes: +1

Allisio Rex said:

...
In only 25 years Whites will be a minority, not only here in the USA but almost in all the White Countries. There is no time to loose for decisive action. No more "christian" love.

Arizona should be the starting point for our total liberation. It's either get rid of 95% of the non-White masses and the subjugation to our laws and our will of those 5% allowed to stay or our painful disappearance from this planet .Read Pat Buchanan on this subject.

By the way, of course, I fully agree with the above well-written article.

(End of comments.)

Granted, no website or blog can be held accountable for opinions expressed in comment threads.The problem here, of course, is that TNA is willing to provide a forum for the expression of proto-genocidal views about immigration, while maintaining a barricade against comments written by the Banished One (that would be, once again, Yours Truly).

In reaction to an earlier piece promoting the impending pogrom in Arizona, I wrote the following comment, only to be informed by the screening program that my "username had been blocked":

Bad premises and hyperbole

The state's central defense against the federal complaint is that it is not usurping federal authority, rather it is reluctantly filling a void caused by years of federal disregard to the hordes of invaders (armed and unarmed) swarming across the desert and into the private land of Arizona’s ranchers. [/i]

Regulation of immigration is not among the "few and defined" federal powers, but part of the "numerous and indefinite" police powers reserved to the states, as Joseph Baldacchino documents in a tightly-reasoned essay published by the National Humanities Institute:

http://www.nhinet.org/epistulae10.htm

Is the point here to defend Arizona's reserved powers, or to pressure the Feds into exercising supposed "authority" nowhere delegated to them? Or is TNA too busy seeking to ride an election-year "wave" being churned up by the GOP to think such matters through?

It is rank and childish hyperbole to refer to the "geometric expansion of illegal immigrants throughout the country," given that immigration -- both legal and illegal -- have tapered off since 2007.

Readers interested in a treatment of immigration that doesn't traffic in facile sloganeering about "hordes of invaders" (good grief -- did someone recently reissue the Know-Nothing manual?) or bad constitutional premises should check out Butler Shafer's recent essay at LewRockwell.com:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer221.html

(End of comment.)

It was only the stalwart vigilance of the people running TNA that spared their readers from exposure to such shocking sentiments. Meanwhile, all that stuff about beginning the genocidal "liberation" of the white race by expelling all non-white from the country, beginning in Arizona? It whistled right through. Good to know the heroes in Appleton have some standards....

UPDATE, 11:54 July 23 --

After "Allisio Rex's" comments were republished here, TNA deleted the second, more overtly proto-Nazi posting while leaving the other one on the thread.

UPDATE, July 24 -- Here's another specimen of permissible commentary at thenewamerican.com:

Jimmythewelder said:

Things are out of hand
Judging from the general attitude of Hispanics I encounter in the course of everyday business it is becoming evident that they feel as though they already own America. Open contempt for our laws, our way of life and Americans in general manifests itself in every facet of their behavior. To say that they are acting like unwelcome guests is an understatement. The general feeling of US citizens in my area is that they are just waiting for a signal of some sort to embark on a physical takeover. The fact that the president of the US and his administration seem ready and willing to give this signal is most disturbing.

July 24, 2010
Votes: +6

OOOOOOoooooohhhh -- Beware the Brown Peril! They're EVERYWHERE! They're beheading people in the vast, trackless Arizona desert, and just waiting for the signal from the White House to rise up and slay Whitey!

And another example-- this one should be entitled: "Ooh, Ick - Mexicans!":

I will help out...
Living in New Mexico, I have watched this develop over the last 10 yrs. At first there were few Mexicans around, now they are everywhere. I hate to go to Walmart, it is full of them. I call it "The Peoples Store". I have seen lots of young females with their "anchor babies" at Walmart.......just really disgusting. New Mexico, is a "sanctuary state" for Mexicans. We even give them drivers licences. I am hoping that this November, we can elect a conservative government and make wholesale changes here.

July 24, 2010
Votes: +4

I don't know how I missed this offering:

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Valerie said:

Compliance with the law is NOT OPTIONAL
Looking at these photos I have to wonder if our journalists aren't doing their best to inflame this issue even more than it already is. The open defiance and hostility of these NON citizens of this country is ASTONISHING!!!!!!~ Who in the world would welcome foreigners who not only are not here legally but are stating that they will not comply with any law that says that they MUST GO?? Mark my words.......if this comes down to an internal war, I am willing to fight tooth and nail to defend my country against this scourge. The other day my daughter in law told me that two hissspanic girls threatened her as she walked by the photo dept. saying "what the f--- are you looking at bit--?" This is becoming and ugly turf war and guess who is going to lose in the end? Yes businesses may suffer at first, but this will pass and the end result will be that this country can begin to recover from what the influx of Mexico's poor has done to us. I live in SC where illegal aliens are all over. Either something is done now or forget about it, this country WILL BE LOST FOREVER. Hang in there my fellow Americans and don't forget to VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

July 24, 2010
Votes: +13

I simply have to ask: Are Art Thompson and Jack "Torquemada" McManus deliberately sabotaging the JBS, or is the organization drifting into overt racialism because of some combination of stupidity, timidity, and opportunism on the part of upper management?

"Correction, Please!" Redux

2010-07-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Item:

In a brief essay that did little more than repackage a press release from the Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff's Department, The New American reported on July 8 that Sheriff Paul Babeu has bravely declined a personal security detail despite threats on his life "from the Mexican Drug Cartel and Drug Cartel members." Those alleged threats, which are deemed "credible," were provoked by Sheriff Babeu's bold efforts "to secure the United States border," readers were told.

Correction, Please!

Perhaps this should be described in terms of a correction made necessary by subsequent developments that impeach the credibility of Paul Babeu and his department, at least where gathering and assessing "intelligence" is concerned.

After former* JBS member, unabashed neo-Nazi, and accused federal provocateur J.T. Ready assembled a militia-like group to patrol Pinal County in search of illegal immigrants, Sheriff Babeu told the press that he neither encouraged nor invited Ready and his chums to act as a law enforcement auxiliary. He mentioned the possibility that Ready's little knot of knuckleheads "may have gotten the attention of the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico," reported Arizona's KPHO-TV, a CBS affiliate.

Babeu referred to an article supposedly written by "Michael Webster, [a]columnist with the LA Times," describing a sit-down meeting with a member of Los Zetas. "During the interview," reports KPHO, "the cartel member specially mentioned Babeu."

"`We're going to hold Sheriff Paul Babeu personally responsible,' Babeu said quoting the article," recounted KPHO. "I've never seen threats made publicly, using our media to make threats south of the border to us," the sheriff concluded, emphasizing that "the threat will not intimidate his department."

One problem here is that Michael Webster doesn't write for the Los Angeles Times, and never has. No article of the sort referred to above was ever published by that paper. Mr. Webster, who describes himself as a "syndicated investigative journalist" -- and who may, indeed, so some worthwhile reporting -- publishes most of his work through an on-line news aggregator called U.S. Border Fire Report.

Webster's essay refers to a conversation he claims to have had with "One of my informants that I have called Juan" in which the 35-year-old man, "who claimed to be an officer in the Los Zetas drug cartel organization," criticized Babeu for not properly investigating the killings of drug couriers, which were supposedly committed by vigilantes.

"The Los Zetas officer said `I believe there is a cover-up by sheriff Paul Babeu by protecting the Americans who did the killings. If the true facts of this case are not revealed publicly and the guilty ones are not brought to justice I will hold the sheriff personally responsible."

Taking this account at face value, it's difficult to discern an actual death threat, as Sheriff Babeu clearly intends. But there is nothing about this story to elevate it above the status of printed rumor: While we may be justified in accepting Webster's claim to have met and spoken with "Juan," we're given no reason to believe that this man was what he reportedly claimed to be.

The Zetas presumably know enough about operational security, and have sufficient organizational discipline, to deny their cadres the luxury of mouthing off in detail to bloggers regarding their malign designs against U.S. law enforcement officials.

Babeu or his office misrepresented Webster as a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, and repackaged his intriguing but dubious account as legitimate intelligence regarding a plausible threat against the sheriff.

Obviously, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office has pretty emancipated standards of "credibility" when it comes to assessing supposed threats to Sheriff Babeu's life.TNA would be wise to run a clarification or retraction of its earlier PR story about Babeu, but it won't.

Santayana famously said that "skepticism is the chastity of the intellect." When it comes to assessing sensational claims made by opportunistic Republicans seeking to exploit nativist impulses, The New American's editorial "leadership" is a pushover. This is the sort of thing we'd expect from people content to repackage "news" from undisguised tabloids like the Globe -- assuming that the "news" item resonates with the narrative being written by the GOP-aligned media apparat regarding the evil deeds of the foreign-born usurper Barack Obama. (Mr. Obama, I hasten to point out, is at least as despicable as his Republican predecessor, whose policies he has continued with almost perfect fidelity.)

Back in the 1960s, when the Feds through COINTELPRO and other initiatives were creating the conditions for violent racial conflict, the JBS used what influence it could to put out or contain the fire.Today, the weak-willed opportunists running things in Appleton are helping to spread accelerant.

As recently as 1996, when TNA was still in the business of investigative journalism and the management of the JBS was burdened with principles of some kind, the organization actually exposed cynical efforts to pit Americans against each other through engineered racial conflict (see, if you can find it, the July 22, 1996 cover story "Behind the Burnings: There is More than Racism at Work"). Of course, that was about a decade before the organization fell into the hands of people content to ride waves because they were too timid to make them.

*Ready claims that he wasn't expelled by the JBS, which has a black-letter policy forbidding members to be active in white supremacist organizations. By his account, Ready simply allowed his membership to expire.

They Just Don't Care, Do They? (Updated and expanded, 7/13)

2010-07-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

(See additional update below)

Correction, Please!

Mexican Anschluss in Arizona?

Item:

In a June 29 essay burdened with the alarmist title "Eighty Mile Swath of Arizona Surrendered to Cartels," The New American addressed what it called "the menacing terror of drug traffickers and human smugglers that have all but taken adverse possession of the region."

"Eighty miles from the border with Mexico in Arizona, the federal government has posted signs warning Americans not to approach any closer to the border, as it is a region of `active drug and human smuggling' and that those that ignore the warning may “encounter armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed,'" wrote TNA contributor Joe Wolverton II.

Those warning signs, he insisted, are "white flags of surrender flying 80 miles within the border of the United States of America. Is [sic] such examples of federal contempt of the border crisis enough to convince those who scoff at cries of treason and invasion?"

Correction:

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any territory in Arizona has been surrendered to Mexico, or to narcotics gangs operating out of Mexico. A Border Patrol agent stationed in the supposedly surrendered territory responded to a question about this supposed cession by dismissing it as "false information."

The claim that the Obama administration turned over the territory to Mexico originated with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a publicity-fixated Republican neo-con and ally of John McCain. Babeu's jurisdiction does not abut the border with Mexico. Clarence Dupnink, sheriff of neighboring Pima County, which does share a border with Mexico, insists that border violence has actually decreased in recent years.

Drug smuggling and related violence -- which are unavoidable bi-products of the demented "war on drugs," an unconstitutional and counterproductive effort to regulate the bloodstream of Americans -- are a problem for Arizona (albeit a smaller one now that it was several years ago). The same is true for sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

Many crime-ridden urban neighborhoods are controlled by drug-dealing ethnic gangs; for example, some neighborhoods in Philadelphia are run by the Dominican mafia. Does this mean that parts of Philadelphia have been surrendered to the Dominican Republic? Do the depredations of the Russian mob in Brighton Beach mean that Brooklyn's "Little Odessa" is now an island of Russian sovereignty?

Keep an eye peeled for an upcoming TNA piece retailing Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's latest bombshell disclosure -- the sudden surge in beheadings committed by illegal immigrants in the Arizona desert!

The Obama Administration Running Legal Interference for New Black Panthers?

Item:

"The New Black Panther Party has been a controversial subject for a number of reasons," wrote GOP stenographer Raven Clabough a July 10 posting on the TNA website. "On Election Day 2008, Black Panther member King Samir Shabazz and national chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz were caught on video bearing billyclubs outside of a Philadelphia polling center. An investigation was launched and charges of voter intimidation were made, but the Department of Justice, under the leadership of Eric Holder, elected to dismiss the case."

Correction:

The New Black Panther Party -- a less-than-fearsome group that is equal parts comic opera and street theater -- is a pretty loathsome outfit, and neither they nor anybody else should be permitted to intimidate voters for any reason. The Justice Department examined the behavior of NBBP cadres and decided to drop the criminal probe.

That was the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department, not the Obama-Holder Justice Department.

The decision was made three months before either Obama or Holder had anything to do with the matter.

J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney-turned-GOP activist, claims that under Obama and Holder the voting rights section of the Justice Department repeatedly showed "hostility" toward prosecuting intimidation cases involving "black defendants and white victims," and said that its dismissal of the NBBP case illustrates this institutionalized bigotry.

Thomas J. Perrelli, identified by Adams as the one who ordered the dismissal of the case against the NBPP, wasn't confirmed until three months after the Bush administration dropped the criminal complaint.

Deputy Assitant AG Julie Fernandes, who per Adams' version ordered subordinates not to prosecute minority voter intimidation cases, didn't start at her post until six months after the criminal case was dismissed.

Why wasn't Adams outraged when the Bush-Mukasey Justice Department dropped the criminal probe of the NBPP? Why is he trying to give the Obama-Holder Justice Department all of the blame for this, when, at most, they were simply building on the decisions of their predecessors?

The Obama administration won the civil case against the NBBP by default. It didn't pursue an injunction against the entire organization -- which was the department's original approach -- focusing instead on the one individual whose actions, captured on tape, were clearly illegal.

What Adams describes as "reverse discrimination" has been referred to by others involved in the decision as a disagreement over strategy and priorities among "career people" in the department. This seems entirely plausible, pending corroboration from Adams of his alarming accusations of official misconduct that, if true, would be grounds not only for impeachment but criminal prosecution.

UPDATE --

While the people in charge of TNA are pandering to the Fox-aligned demographic by retailing breathless accounts of Afro-Militarism, an Arizona offshoot of the National Socialist Movement -- led by former JBS member, Hitler fanboy, and likely federal asset J.T. Ready -- are actually taking people hostage at gunpoint.

The New Black Panther Party's alleged "voter intimidation" involved one NBBP goofball -- roughly one-eighth of the group's entire membership -- making faces and saying offensive things. The NSM's "border patrols" are quite likely to get someone killed.

Obama's a foreign-born usurper -- we read it in the check-out line!

Item:

"Globe magazine has jumped into the citizenship controversy with a July 12 cover story that states, `Obama was not born in the U.S.,' writes Raven Clabough, who appears to be TNA's liaison to the Hannitized. "The supermarket tabloid may not have the best track record for accurate reporting among mainstream publications, but it does have a large circulation and its voice and what it has to say will undoubtedly bring the issue of Obama's citizenship to the attention of a lot more people and cause them to consider seriously if there is anything to it."

Correction:

Actually, there's nothing to correct here, because there's no story -- at least none that The New American would have bothered with back when those producing it aspired to provide credible news and thought-provoking commentary.

To the extent that there is "news" here, the substance of it would appear to be this: Whether or not Obama's an illegitimate president owing to foreign birth, a large-circulation tabloid has lent its support to that theory, and this will have an impact on the opinions of its readers (make that "browsers").

This isn't reporting. It's not even blogging. It is pure, undisguised pandering of the worst and most transparent variety. And it is an all-sufficient indictment of the abysmal standards that prevail at what was once an exceptional publication.

Oh, If Only We Had a Military Dictator....

Item:

In a paean to "Operation Wetback," the paramilitary Border Patrol operation that rounded up and deported millions of Mexican laborers, Dr. Roger McGrath extols the "bold, decisive, and forceful leader" who presided over it: General Dwight Eisenhower (who was president at the time), and Lt. General Joe Swing, Director of the INS.

"It took a military man, who thought that national borders should mean something" in order to defeat the "unholy alliance of agribusinessmen and other employers," in concert with perfidious Mexicans, to subvert the border and undermine the labor market in the southwest, writes McGrath.

The problem began during World War II, when, "with so many Americans in the service — and fighting and dying overseas — Mexicans illegally entered the United States to take advantage of employment opportunities, especially as agricultural laborers."

Fortunately, Eisenhower and Swing were willing to employ military means to beat back this invasion, offering an example we would be wise to follow, concludes Dr. McGrath.

Correction:

First of all, it's notable to see Eisenhower -- not Robert Welch's favorite public figure -- being extolled as not only a hero, but as something akin to the savior of the republic, in the pages of The New American. Perhaps the TNA editorial staff decided it was acceptable -- in this one instance -- to traffic in "nuances" that differ from Mr. Welch's views. (Of course, publicly differing in "nuance" from the incumbent JBS management is a firing offense, or at least it was in one specific instance.)

Of greater significance is the omission from Dr. McGrath's essay of any mention of the 1942 "Bracero" treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.

McGrath depicts Mexican laborers as "taking advantage" of dislocations in the labor market caused by the war socialist economy of WWII. In fact, it was the FDR regime that invited those laborers into the country through the 1942 Bracero Treaty, which didn't expire until 1963. Through that agreement, the U.S. government imported millions of Mexicans to labor as "guest workers" in fields, factories, and other productive roles left vacant because of mobilization for the war.

Mexico at the time was in the midst of its own depression, which was even deeper and more tragic than ours. So it's not surprising that millions of Mexicans -- in some cases, literally entire villages -- migrated northward in search of the promised wage of 30 cents an hour (which was specified in the treaty). Nor is it surprising that the northward migration didn't flow tidily in government-established channels.

"Operation Wetback" was not the first time Mexican laborers who had come north to fill jobs left vacant in wartime were rounded up and expelled. During Woodrow Wilson's War, as well, fan informal Bracero-style agreement was reached with Mexico that permitted laborers to come north with their families. Many English-speaking American citizens born in this country pursuant to that agreement were among those eventually rounded up and summarily expelled at gunpoint.

None of this is mentioned or even alluded to in Dr. McGrath's homily regarding the supposed virtues iron-handed military rule.

By omitting "Bracero" from this discussion, McGrath produces a caricature: The villains are insidious Mexicans "stealing" jobs from American draftees, and conniving businessmen bereft of civic virtue.

The "heroes," by way of contrast, are "decisive, forceful" military leaders in positions of political authority -- guys like Lt. Gen. Swing, whom McGrath describes as "[h]andsome and square-jawed with sparkling blue eyes, white hair, and a bearing that suggested strength and decisiveness...." Yes, someone like that is just the hero to beat back the Brown Peril, isn't he?

Mini-clarification, July 18: In the photo caption on page 37 in the print edition of TNA's July 19 issue, there is a fleeting reference to the "Bracero Agreement" as providing to Mexican laborers "a legal way to enter the United States and work." This truncated, inadequate description is the only mention of Bracero in the entire article.

Observations:

The TNA stories examined above display the superficiality, selective credulity, and opportunism that have come to characterize the publication since -- oh, let's pick a date purely at random; how about October 2006? Dr. McGrath's story, produced by a capable writer and long-established academic figure, represents something worse: Deliberate omission in an effort to promote an ideological agenda.

There was a time, not long ago, when TNA would take the time and invest the effort to examine and report on issues responsibly, rather than simply retailing whatever resonates with the Republican-wedded, Fox "News" and Talk Radio-obsessed sub-population.

They're too busy riding the wave in Appleton to take the time and care to find out if part of Arizona really is under the rule of throat-slitting Mexican narcotics lords, or if the Holder-era Justice Department really is a festering pit of Afro-racist corruption.

But this would require actual reporting, and it might complicate the effort to pander to the lowest common denominator -- and in the cases discussed above, that denominator runs right along one of the fault-lines Robert Welch warned about.

"The Cressbeckler Stance": JBS-TV's New Star Attraction?

Why bother watching Art Thompson stumble through the latest installment of "cranky old reactionary reads the newspaper"? Joad Cressbeckler offers pretty much the same content in a much more entertaining way:

A Meeting of the Minds in Mesa? (Updated, June 24)

2010-06-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

Neo-Nazi planetoid J.T. Ready rallies his boyfriends...

While Jack McManus is in Mesa today (June 22), he really should make a courtesy call to local anti-immigration activist J.T. Ready. The two of them see the world in very similar terms, at least in their choice of enemies.

Like McManus, Ready served in the Marines, albeit briefly and without honor or distinction: He somehow managed to be court-martialed twice.

More recently, Ready -- a conspicuous representative of the National Socialist Movement -- was briefly a member of the JBS, despite the fact that the Birch Society has an ironclad rule against collateral membership in anti-Semitic and other bigoted groups. That rule apparently didn't survive Jack McManus's decades-long involvement with a schismatic Catholic group founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney.

...Ready following a post-rally beer or two.

Both the NSM and the Feenyites embrace political models under which severe civic restraints would be imposed on Jews and others, albeit for different reasons.

Ready and his comrades would insist that only those who belong to the volkish nation -- people of supposedly "pure white" extraction -- would be citizens; the Feenyites insist that the state must be controlled by their proprietary brand of Catholicism. Although they disagree about the particulars of government administration, both groups agree that Jews should be disenfranchised and, if necessary, expelled.

Where the subject of illegal immigration is concerned, however, I doubt there is any daylight between McManus and Ready. Among other things, they've both endorsed the deployment of the military at the border as a means of turning back the Brown Peril from Mexico.

Neither of them seems to have noticed that, both in Arizona and nationwide, immigration -- both legal and illegal -- is sharply down since the housing bubble collapsed. The same downward trend is apparent regarding violent crime in Arizona.

Jack's Summer Speaking Tour is entitled "Stealing the American Dream: How Illegal Immigration Affects You." In terms of title and marketing, this is pure, undisguised pandering, coupled with opportunistic scapegoating: In a time of severe and deepening economic hardship, Jack and the bankrupt JBS brain-trust are encouraging people to believe that brown people who speak with funny accents are the cause of their misfortune. Needless to say, where Ready and his goose-mincing boyfriends are concerned, Jack's message is coming in five-by-five.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the JBS went to great lengths to explain how people of Ready's ilk are used to cultivate conflicts that expand government power at the expense of liberty. (In fact, William F. Jasper produced Pulitzer-worthy work on the subject.) Right now, the panderers running the organization are so worried about finding a "wave" to ride they're willing to allow themselves to be co-opted.

Get a room, guys: Ready and Russell Pearce

The most acute threat to the "American Dream" in Arizona, as elsewhere, is a profligate, incurably corrupt government that has destroyed our economy and is suffocating our liberties. This has nothing at all whatsoever to do with immigration; our enemies are not the people misruling Mexico, or those driven from that country northward; it is the people controlling the regime in Washington, D.C.

The dated, ill-informed presentation Jack will disgorge this evening will have nothing to do with the causes of Arizona's economic afflictions. The current issue of Harper's magazine offers some genuinely terrifying details: 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater"; unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent, or higher; the newly created town of Maricopa, forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix, suffers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent.

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash."

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona -- which, like Nevada, fell prey to a delirious, Fed-financed real estate frenzy earlier this century -- is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie and Freddie. When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions.

A threat to the "American Dream"? Murder victim Brisenia Flores.

In all of this, the chief villain is the Federal Reserve.

To the extent illegal immigration played a significant role, it was in providing relatively inexpensive labor during the boom. Now that the bust has descended, the jobs are gone and the laborers go elsewhere.

What this means is that the immigration problem -- yes, "problem," not "crisis" -- is what the JBS used to call a "tangent" -- a distraction from much more important matters.

Rather than exercising leadership, Art andJack are content to join in the torchlight parade: They extol the supposed merits of Joe Arpaio, the Mussolini of Maricopa County, and promote the "papers, please" measure promoted by Ready's political paramour, Russell Pearce.

Meanwhile, Ready and his bunkmates -- who consider themselves a self-appointed law enforcement auxiliary -- are bidding fair to become public face of "immigration reform" in Arizona; an Arizona resident murdered his Mexican-American neighbor following an argument over the "papers, please" law (the alleged killer reportedly told the victim -- who had been born and raised in the U.S. -- to "go back to Mexico"); and shirt-tail associates of JBS Speaker's Bureau attraction Chris Simcox (who is in a bit of trouble himself) are accused of murdering an innocent man and his nine-year-old daughter (both of Mexican ancestry) in a deranged robbery plot intended to fund a breakaway Minuteman faction.

No, Jack isn't responsible for any of this, nor is the JBS. But there was a time, once again, when the JBS would use whatever influence it had to defuse manufactured ethnic conflicts, rather than abetting them, either actively or obliquely. (Witness the role the Society played in de-fusing an orchestrated race riot in Americus, Georgia during the 1960s, or Delmar Dennis's speaking tours exposing the Klan.) Even if Jack were inclined to play the role of peacemaker, I don't think he could do so credibly.

For all of these reasons, and many more, it would be entirely appropriate for Jack to break bread with J.T. Ready while he's in Mesa today, even though the spectacle -- like much of what Jack and Art have done to the JBS -- would make Robert Welch weep through gritted teeth.

Update: Appleton's Inexhaustible Hypocrisy

Apparently, there is no limit to what a contributor to The New American can get away with, assuming he or she isn't named William Norman Grigg.

On the TNA website today (June 24) can be found an essay entitled "In Immigration Debate, Politicians are the Problem," by the immensely gifted Becky Akers. Published near the end of Jack's "Stealing the American Dream" immigrant-bashing tour, Akers' essay deftly and effortlessly demolishes the fraudulent foundation of Jack's presentation -- namely, the idea that immigration is an unrelenting "invasion" of alien usurpers who are (as Alan Scholl once put it) "wrecking our economy."

Those blaming immigrants -- legal or illegal -- for the loss of jobs or other economic problems "are scaping the wrong goats," Akers observes. "If they truly want to `fix' unemployment, they should go after politicians and bureaucrats, not immigrants. Government destroys exponentially more jobs than immigrants could ever `steal'...."

Akers observes that "we play right into our rulers; hands when we beseech government to `protect' jobs, whether from immigrants or from foreign competitors via tariffs." Ah, but what about the federal government's constitutional duty to protect each state from "invasion"? Doesn't Washington have a duty to "secure the borders"?

Not exactly.

The Founders, Akers writes, "didn't include `Control movement into and out of the country' among those [limited federal] powers," Akers observes. "In fact, the nearest the Constitution allows government to approach immigration is `establish[ing] a uniform Rule of Naturalization.' But setting the standards whereby people become citizens is far, far removed from walling off our borders or erecting bureaucracies to harass everyone, American or not, with orders of `Papers, please.'"

"When it came to jobs or borders, the Founders knew better than to trust the State," she concludes. "Why don't we?"

Implicit in that question is the following one: Why the hell is Jack McManus abetting misplaced trust in the State in his "Stealing the American Dream" excursion?

Akers' essay is quite comparable to my now-notorious June 22, 2006 "Birch Blog" installment entitled "Phony Immigration Debate vs. Real Police State Threat." We agree that the immigration issue is cynically exploited as a distraction by opportunistic politicians, and it is being used to manipulate the public into accepting police state measures. But Akers actually assails the claim that there is a constitutional case for immigration restriction -- and she does so in an essay published by the JBS while its President is making exactly the opposite case in a national speaking tour.

Art Thompson treated my re-publication of the immigration-related Birch Blog essay as a firing offense, because I was publicly disagreeing with his, ahem, inspired "leadership" in a matter of nuance. There is nothing nuanced about Akers' disagreement, which was published with the imprimatur of TNA editor Gary Benoit -- you know, one of the four former friends who connived to stab me in the back and throw my family to the wolves.

Nemo me impune lacessit!

The McManus Credo: Dulce et Decorum est Mendacium Decir

2010-06-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

He never stops lying, and until the breath permanently departs his lungs he never will.

For an inveterate liar like John McManus, a speaking tour presents a number of potential pitfalls. One is the possibility of being asked, in public, about the lies you have told and the people you have betrayed. This happened to Jack during an interview on KID-AM in Idaho Falls, and he handled the matter with the unctuous dishonesty that is his most recognizable trait.

"I'm curious as to why you fired William Norman Grigg," inquired a caller during Jack's appearance, "and also if you would address the accusations of anti-Semitic statements, [such as] saying that Jews and masons are the cause of the conspiracy --"

"Now, wait a minute," interjected an audibly flustered McManus as the host very thoughtfully cut off the caller. "Hold on a second, you're spreading a lot of rumors."

"Mr. Grigg refused to, uh, adopt the positions of the Society regarding decorum in his blog and so forth," Jack lied, inventing yet another version of what happened in October 2006. "We asked him to do so, he said he wouldn't, so we said, okay, well then we can't continue."

This is an extravagant falsehood, as I have discussed elsewhere. "Decorum" had nothing to do with my firing. I was fired for publishing a blog on my own time -- one Appleton used as a fund-raising tool for nearly two weeks after I was terminated. The only specific charge Art Thompson could muster was that I had used my blog to publish material that had been "rejected" by Appleton because I had disagreed with JBS management on matters of "nuance."

I was offered the opportunity, after the fact, to grovel for my job by agreeing that everything I wrote or spoke for public consumption would be subject to prior approval by Appleton.

One of those who would be given the veto over my writings and utterances was John F. McManus, who had spent decades promiscuously violating the JBS's standards and principles regarding anti-Jewish bigotry.

Jack's second answer is a combo platter of mendacity, one that is even larger, more audacious -- and, quite unintentionally, very revealing.

"He [Grigg] has accused me of being an anti-Semite," Jack continued. "An anti-Semite is somebody who hates. I don't hate anybody, I never have hated anybody, I'm not an anti-Semite -- and I don't want to discuss the matter any further."

Notice that the caller did not connect the two questions: He didn't ask Jack why I had characterized him as an anti-Semite, or even mention that I had made the accusation. Jack's answer was intended to leave the uninformed listener with the impression that I was the source -- apparently, the original and only one -- of the idea that Jack has ever expressed anti-Semitic views.

Jack knows this isn't true, of course -- because, among other things, Jack eagerly used me in October 2005 to defend him against those accusations.

The source of those accusations is a large and enviably well-documented dossier compiled by Art Thompson, who had become alarmed over Jack's anti-Jewish agitation no later than 2000. Jack's side career as a Jew-baiter made him (and the JBS) vulnerable to blackmail during the 2005 management struggle.

When an effort was made to blackmail Jack, I resigned my job in disgust and, to an extent, his defense -- not because I sympathized with his bigoted views, but because I couldn't countenance the use of criminal means to settle a leadership dispute.

At the time I knew nothing about Jack's views beyond the clips I had been shown by his critics in the previous JBS administration, and the fact that he had used the repellent expression "slimy New York Jew" in a conversation. After Art Thompson was appointed CEO, Jack asked me to re-join the staff.

It wasn't until Don Fotheringham used his website to publicize the Art Thompson-created dossier on Jack that I learned that he had spent years propagating anti-Semitic nonsense, while pulling down a pretty decent salary to be the figurehead president of the JBS. He did so in prolonged, conscious defiance of the Birch Society's principles. This is why he was -- at Art Thompson's initiative -- removed from his position as JBS president. As the effort to blackmail him in 2005 demonstrates, Jack's actions directly threatened the very existence of the organization.

So, naturally, Jack was reinstated by Art Thompson as JBS president, and a year after I had risked my job on their behalf, Jack and Art stabbed me in the back.

Jack's self-serving definition of "anti-Semitism" as "one who hates" is worthy of remark. I can't address Jack's inner life, or his unspoken motives, so I grant that it's entirely possible that he doesn't hate Jews. That isn't the issue, nor is Jack's definition of "anti-Semitism" the proper one for our purposes.

Jack is committed, as a matter of covenant, to a minuscule and deeply authoritarian schismatic para-Catholic cult founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney. In 1959, Feeney -- a defrocked priest still referred to as "Father" by his followers -- insisted that "the Jews, as an organized force, are the implacable, declared enemies of Christianity — of its tenets, its traditions, its moral code, its very culture. We think it is vital, too, for American Catholics to realize that the Church has always known this fact about the Jews, and, to the extent of her influence, has counseled and decreed regulations for curbing their malice." (Emphasis added.)

Feeney and his followers insist that "the state must declare itself officially Catholic" -- that is, "Catholic" as defined by Feeney, since everybody else in the Roman Catholic Church is controlled by the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. Under a Feeneyite regime, the "curbs" inflicted on Jews by the state would include the denial of citizenship. Historically this has led to some pretty ugly consequences, up to and including the Shoah.

Presumably, Jack would see this as a form of rigorous "Christian" love -- the same kind of tough but necessary correction that Torquemada and other torturers applied in order to purify Jews and other heretics through pain. The day after I was fired, while I was still bleeding from the dorsal knife wounds he helped to inflict, Jack sent me an e-mail professing to be my friend. So there's reason to believe that his views of affection would be suited to the practice of "Christian" kindness of the sort described above.

Despite the fact that the Feeneyite ideology is utterly incompatible with constitutionalism, let alone the professed principles of the JBS, Jack has been peddling this stuff while taking home a Birch paycheck -- and he's been doing so for decades.

Several weeks ago, I received a letter from a veteran in the liberty movement who describes his first meeting with McManus:

I first met Jack in 1973. I was a high school senior in Boston. My history teacher, [name omitted] ... had given me "The Law" by Bastiat and I discovered I was a libertarian. [The teacher] told me about the JBS bookstore in Belmont and I rode my bicycle over to check it out.

That's when I met Jack. I was at the bookstore perhaps once a month or so buying books. When you entered the front door, the book store was to the right, and Jack's office was to the left. If Jack was there he'd always invite me into his office for a chat. Jack would give me his spiel on the Masonic Pope, the Masonic UN, and the Masonic Masons. In the summer of 1974, I told Jack I was planning to go to [an Evangelical Christian college] that fall. Jack was horrified! "They hate the Catholic Church!" he said. I was still indifferent to religion. I decided on [that school] because I didn't want to go to a leftist college like Boston University or any of the other schools in Massachusetts.

I'd found out about [the school Jack hated] through their ads on the back cover of American Opinion magazine, and I made the mistake of assuming that since the JBS bookstore sold lots of libertarian books, (Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Bastiat, etc) that anything and anyone connected to the JBS also had to be good. Duh!

Anyway, I only lasted one semester ... and soon after I returned in December, Jack told me about St. Benedict Center, which at that time was in Harvard, MA. He also loaned me a number of books about catholic history, extolling the virtues of the Inquisition, Queen Isabella, Philip II and the like...

It didn't occur to me at the time, but looking back, and reading what you say about Jack on your blog, it is interesting that at no time did Jack seem interested in what I might do in relation to the JBS, but he was extremely interested in getting me involved with SBC. [the Feeneyite cult's religious community].And all of this while sitting in his office in the Birch Society headquarters, collecting his salary from the JBS.

So his religious crusading goes back at least to mid-1974.

Jack is obviously deeply committed to the Feeneyite religion. On the basis of his example it's apparent that honesty is not among its tenets.

Nemo me impune lacessit!

Heckuva Job, Artie

2010-04-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

"If we're attacked by [Morris] Dees [and the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC], many Birchers will rally but some will question leadership. It may be [that] Dees quietly shows McManus material around without a major public outcry....

.... Dees needs something solid with which to fully demoralize the membership. Does the [anti-Jewish] language of McManus do that? Maybe....

More than likely, Dees will hint that some Birchers are less than tolerant, not all, but some, while showing the McManus material to key locals: police, D.A., etc...."

Excerpts from Art Thompson's memo to G. Vance Smith and Tom Gow regarding John McManus's career as an anti-Jewish agitator, October 22, 2000.

"An ultraconservative Roman Catholic, [Jack] McManus has been accused of anti-Semitism, a charge he has denied. In 2005, according to The New York Times, Birch staffers who were ousted amid internal turmoil leaked recordings of McManus saying that Judaism was a dead religion and that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who were `Satan's agents' and part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval."

Excerpt from the SPLC's recent screed attacking "right-wing extremists."

It takes a certain gift to identify a potentially fatal problem and address it in a timely fashion. That gift is one dimension of the combination of traits called "leadership."

It takes a different and much less commendable set of attributes to recognize that problem, prescribe a responsible solution to it, and then permit that problem to grow into a crisis because dealing with it candidly would be contrary to one's self-interest. That's a species of hypocritical opportunism.

When one is the innocent victim of deliberate misrepresentation, he make a legitimate claim of persecution. When that criticism is rooted in truth, the word "persecution" doesn't apply. If one belongs to an organization the "leaders" of which have done disreputable things -- and then covered them up -- that individual may find himself a collateral victim of criticism he didn't earn, but that is quite properly directed at those who claim to lead him.

It is a testimony to Art Thompson's unique collection of gifts that he has managed to put the membership of the John Birch Society into the predicament described above.

Jack McManus, the most prominent spokesman for the JBS, is an incorrigible bigot whose career as an anti-Semitic agitator is being used to damage the reputation of the organization. This was made possible by Art Thompson, who anticipated what is happening now -- and who, for self-serving reasons, set aside his concerns about Jack for the sake of "Survivor"-style coalition politics during the 2005 leadership dispute.

Given the escalating campaign to vilify, marginalize, and -- most likely -- criminalize "right-wing extremism," this is more than merely a matter of social inconvenience for members of the JBS. It may prove to be something akin to a matter of life and death. And while Art will try to portray this as a case of the JBS being persecuted because of its effectiveness, this is actually an indictment of his own cynical dishonesty: He's directly responsible for creating this mess.

Ten years ago, Art Thompson recognized that Jack McManus was a potentially fatal liability to the JBS. He pointed out that as of October 2000 Jack had "for well over 10 years been speaking for and to Catholic organizations as the President of the JBS with most of this info on our nickel. (It has not been uncommon that he arranges these talks while in the area while on JBS business let alone the special trips he has taken[...])."

For at least the previous "3 1/2 years," Art observed, Jack had been haranguing audiences with "anti-Semitic dialog," in presentations during which he "refers to himself as representing the JBS."

At the very least, Thompson wrote, McManus would likely become "an embarrassment to the public at large reflecting on the JBS in conservative circles." At worst, McManus's anti-Semitic evangelism would precipitate an attack on the JBS, most likely involving Morris Dees "convincing local authorities to not interfere in a federal crackdown" against "extremists." Another possibility Jack listed would be that "McManus launches the attack" against the JBS himself.

It was Art's idea to "Put on a video [of] short clips of various speeches by McManus" and use it as part of an attempt "to get McManus to do the right thing" -- that is, to resign.

Five years later, the "right thing" for McManus to do, from Art's perspective, was to support Art's campaign to unseat Smith and Gow. What had changed in the interim? Certainly not the nature of McManus's anti-Jewish diatribes, or the vulnerability of the JBS to the kind of demonization Art described in his 2000 memo.

The only thing that changed was Art's calculation of his own self-interest, which he placed above the good of the organization he now "leads."

And the JBS is now facing exactly the scenario Art outlined in 2000 -- because of Art's own cynical, hypocritical, self-serving actions. This included compiling the very clips now being cited by Dees as ammunition against the JBS.

Jack is currently on a 40-city speaking tour on the subject of illegal immigration. This comes several years after the immigration bubble burst (roughly the same time that the Fed's housing/mortgage re-fi bubble collapsed), so it's hardly a timely subject.

Given Jack's involvement and his unique, self-inflicted vulnerabilities, this tour is a profoundly bad idea. This would have been even if it weren't for the fact that somebody (most likely on the payroll of a three-letter agency) hadn't started pulling COINTELRPO-style stunts designed to defame the JBS as a Klan-style hate group.

Folks, things are just going to get worse from here. False-flag operations, embedded provocateurs, Orwellian hate sessions, indoctrination of law enforcement about the "extremist threat" -- all of this can be found in play right now, and we can expect much more of the same.

In this environment -- one in which the JBS is dealing with blood libels linking the organization to groups like the Klan -- the Society simply cannot afford to be represented by a committed, impenitent anti-Semite like Jack McManus, nor can it continue to be "led" by a CEO who saw this problem with clarity a decade ago and allowed the wound to fester for so long that it may prove fatal.

A couple of additional thoughts....

In the current environment, I'm concerned that people -- well-intentioned, conscientious, patriotic volunteer members of the JBS -- are likely to get hurt because of Art and Jack.

Here in Idaho there's a really decent young man -- father of a large family -- who is running for elected office while working as a volunteer member. He is a principled fellow with very little patience for the petty hypocrisies that typify politics. He has the potential to be a Ron Paul-type statesman.

All it may take to snuff that promising career would be for his political opponent to point out that the patriotic group he belongs to is fronted by a career anti-Semite who was put in that position by a CEO with detailed, guilty knowledge of the problem who chose to cover it up rather than deal with it.

There are volunteer JBS members who suffer socially because of their commitment to the organization. Some of them might suffer professionally and economically as the effort to demonize the "radical right" deepens and accelerates -- and Jack's tainted background and current prominence make this all the more likely.

Anticipating one of Appleton's likely objections, I point out that what I've described regarding Jack's background, and Art's duplicity, is already a matter of public record -- in no small measure, once again, because of Art's eager efforts to compile the damaging dossier on Jack ten years ago. I didn't invent this problem. As someone who stuck his neck out for Jack in October 2005 I'm entitled to resent not being made aware of all the facts Art had at his disposal at the time.

On another subject ....

JBS field coordinator Kip Webster quite sensibly dismissed the execrable Mark Levin as "at best a useful idiot" during an interview with columnist Paul Mulshine.

Levin turned down an invitation to speak at this year's CPAC event because he didn't want to be associated with the Birchers.

Ah, the agony of unrequited love: One of the reasons I got fired was a blog post I published four years ago lampooning Levin's pseudo-tough guy act. Little did I know that Alan Scholl apparently had something of a man-crush on the adenoidal propagandist for the neo-fascist GOP.

In any case, it's no longer a firing offense for JBS staffers to speak ill of that wretched, scrofulous fascist troll. That's an improvement, albeit a very modest one.

Oh, and it's no longer a firing offense for staffers and TNA contributors to have their own blogs and websites, either, given that all of them -- including the JBS's chief on-line editor -- self-publish on the web without supervision or prior approval from JBS management.

It becomes ever clearer that the guys who stabbed me in the back in October '06 were simply trying to find a "problem" to justify the pre-ordained solution -- namely, getting rid of me.

Nemo me impune lacessit

No, Art -- The Russians Aren't Coming

2010-03-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

If I run just a little harder, I think I can get it....

"Believe it or not, the world-wide terrorism and growth of communism, both in Latin America and Africa, are linked to Russia," wrote Art Thompson (or, more likely, whoever had the unfortunate task of transcribing his video monologues and rendering them into semi-coherent prose) in a March 1 essay. "It is a fact that without Russia, the whole system would collapse. We are fighting the wrong enemy."

So -- if Russia is the focal point of global evil, how do we take the "fight" to the Russians?

"We do not need to go to war with Russia or China to stop these things," Thompson -- or his amanuensis -- assures us, thereby tacitly acknowledging that someone in Appleton is reading what appears in this space. "All we need to do is stop foreign aid that assists the process, make foreign policy decisions based on these facts, and particularly treat Russia for what she is, not as an ally in the War on Terror."

The vague recommendation that the U.S. "make foreign policy decisions" based on the assumption of an active and growing Russian strategic threat takes in quite a bit of territory, much of it bellicose and counter-productive. But the only substantive suggestion here simply won't work, since Washington is dependent on foreign aid from Moscow (as well as Beijing, Tokyo, and Riyadh), rather than the reverse. It is Russia, not the U.S., that can use foreign aid -- in this instance, by purchasing or dumping T-bills -- as leverage.

Russia under the siloviki is more capitalist than the United States is in the post-Bush II era. It is also much less militaristic: As the dreaded Putin observed three years ago, Washington's military spending is twenty-five times that of Russia.

Furthermore, Moscow doesn't seem in much of a hurry to upgrade its strategic arsenal. Putin recently announced that it would develop a new generation of strategic bombers, but they most likely won't be added to the fleet until 2025. In similar fashion, Russia's T-50 stealth fighter won't go into production until 2015 at the earliest -- decades after the U.S. unveiled its own model.

Clearly the Russians have better things to do than piss away their money on military hardware they don't need. If only the same could be said of the deranged people in Washington....

Tell me again: In what sense is the world threatened by Russian hegemony?

Washington isn't satisfied merely to spend our own nation into oblivion in pursuit of global military hegemony. Washington's Commissar for International Aggression Robert Gates recently berated the Europeans for their supposedly inadequate commitment to military Keynesianism.

What makes Washington's martial profligacy genuinely remarkable -- and entirely unsustainable -- is the fact that it is being subsidized by the same Russian and Chinese governments Art Thompson believes to be at the center of the global communist terror conspiracy.

Perhaps their scheme is to continue underwriting military socialism in Washington until our economy collapses. Whether or not that's their plan, that's the likely near-term result of Washington's current course of action.

Moscow and Beijing, along with other nations, are working to end what they consider to be Washington's unnatural global dominance in favor of a more "multi-polar" arrangement. Since Washington, in the original constitutional scheme, isn't supposed to be in a position to dominate anyone, anywhere, I fail to be terrified by the prospect of "multi-polarity."

Sure, it would be terrible in theory to live in a world in which either Moscow or Beijing, or both in collaboration, exercised hegemony. But we presently live in what has to be considered at least the equally terrifying reality of Washington's global hegemony, which is rapidly curdling into undisguised despotism.

Ironically, Russia's emerging generation of anti-Communist conservatives have a much better understanding of the contemporary freedom struggle than that displayed by the entrenched Cold War gerontocracy running the JBS.

In Russia today, "Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is required reading in schools for 11th graders," notes Russian writer Stanislav Mishin (who could be described as the Russian equivalent of a Pat Buchanan-style nationalist conservative). "All the brutality of the Soviets and the crimes that were committed will be in the minds of our children for generations. Where is any review [in American schools] of the crimes that Wall Street committed when it sponsored and set up those same Communist Marxists or Hitler's Fascist Marxists? No where. Where is the admission of the massacres that the American army committed in the independent nation of the Confederate States? No where, nor anything of the terror bombings of German cities or anything else of that nature. You will never hear anything on these from those NYC/DC blabber heads who love their Wall Street and think that genociders like Sherman were bully."

(Interestingly, Solzhenitsyn has been blithely dismissed by Jack McManus, who insists that he wasn't a genuine "enemy of Soviet barbarism"; it's difficult to see how McManus -- an individual who has suffered nothing for his contributions, such as they are, to the freedom fight -- can judge those made by a man who survived Stalin's gulag and suffered greatly for his efforts to rally Western civilization against the barbarism of both the Soviets and their Western allies.)

Mishin observes that under the reign of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin -- who are supposedly pursuing totalitarian rule -- Russia has a flat income tax -- "and not the 30% or so suggested by those American conservatives but at 13" -- and a top corporate tax rate of 24% "compared to the American Federal rate of 36% and additional state rates." There is also a far greater diversity of opinion in the Russian media than one finds in the American "free" press.

What about foreign aggression and revolutionary subversion? Aren't Putin and his comrades to blame for promoting terrorism, as the ever-vigilant Art Thompson would have us believe?

Well, not so much.

"Who invaded over 30 nations in less than 200 years?" Mishin quite reasonably inquires. "Who has fought over 6 wars since 1991: Iraq followed by 10 years of bombing them, Somalia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, while engaging unofficially in Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Pakistan and the Philippines? Who waxes and screams for full invasions of Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, Venezuela? Who threatened to bomb our ships and come in and defend the Chechen Islamics? Who sponsored revolutions in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus (failed), Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan (failed), Moldova (failed)?"

(Helpful hint for Art Thompson: No, the answer isn't "the Soviets," by which you presumably mean the Russians.)

Mishin, to his credit, is a genuine patriot who is willing to admit when the government ruling his country is wrong, which is why he objects to Moscow's aid to radical Islamic regimes in "Iran, Syria and Sudan and will happily see it stopped." But first, he continues, why doesn't Washington "set the example when they cut off Pakistan, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Turkey-held N.Cyprus, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, PLA, Albania, Bosnia, Indonesia and the illegal entity of Kosovo? As well as America feeding such nice groups as the Chechens, while backing every Saudi Jihad there ever is or ever will be, never mind that you created, along with the Saudis, the Islam International that now murders tens of thousands of non-Muslims each and every year. All that blood is on the hands of the DC elites and the fools who back them."

As if issuing a specific rebuke to Thompson for his monomania regarding Russia's supposed support for "world-wide terrorism," Mishin concludes: "All those dead Christians are on or should be on your collective consciousness, but we are the great enablers of Islamic Jihad?"

Mishin's very informative and poignant essay, like an earlier one lamenting America's descent into unalloyed corporate socialism, was published in Pravda -- no, it's not that Pravda; the Bolshevik newspaper of that name was shut down a long time ago. In any case, we're left with this all but imponderable irony: We can get a much more reliable view of the contemporary source of Soviet-style mayhem and misery from Pravda than we can from the ill-informed and delusional fool running the John Birch Society.

Addendum: Who are the real Chekists now?

In his harangues about the supposed Russian threat, Mr. Thompson never neglects to mention that Vladimir Putin is a chekist -- a product of the Soviet/Russian security organs, which began as the Cheka before becoming known as the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and now the FSB. This is true, of course, and troubling -- to those who are in some sense threatened by the government Putin helped to create.

Eric Margolis, a writer who has forgotten more about Soviet and Russian affairs than Art Thompson will ever permit himself to learn, recalls that during the Stalin-era terror, Soviet secret police induced those accused of various offenses, including those designated as "terrorism," by threatening the families of the accused.

In 1936, "the Soviet courts changed the law to permit the arrest of children over 12 years," recalls Margolis. "That gave the NKVD a potent lever for getting parents to confess under threat their children would be jailed and disappear."

Margolis points out that a supposed "terrorism expert" who worked in the Bush administration boated that exactly the same Soviet method was used to exert leverage against Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi, who recently confessed to a terrorist plot against New York City. "We also learn that CIA interrogators menaced suspects with an electric power drill," he continues.

This shouldn't surprise us at all, given that John Yoo, the legal architect of the Bush administration's Sovietesque torture policies, has explicitly endorsed the idea that the president can order the sexual torture of children in order to compel their parents to submit, confess, or do whatever else government agents require of them.

For all of this, we're supposed to believe that the real threat emanates from Moscow, rather than Washington, D.C.....

Why Does the JBS Want War with Russia?

2010-02-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

It has been said that for neo-"conservatives" of a certain kind, it's always 1939, with an emboldened Hitler poised to invade Poland and set Europe aflame.

For the people running the JBS, apparently, it's always 1979: The Soviets are running rampant in Africa, funding revolution in Latin America, and poised to invade Afghanistan.

Why does Appleton's bankrupt brain trust want to cultivate conflict with Moscow?

Perhaps it's a generational thing. More likely, it's a marketing ploy. But it seems clear that the opportunistic clique in charge of the JBS pines for a revival of the Cold War.

How else are we to interpret the following comments by Art Thompson, the organization's CEO (ellipses are used to enhance intelligibility; Thompson is an undisciplined writer who displays a Palinesque aversion to cogency and clarity):

"The terrorist network is run out of Moscow, which is something The John Birch Society has proven over and over, but certain conservative circles refuse to recognize this.[...]

The terrorist network is armed and trained by Russian KGB/FSB agents. Yet our government calls Russia a partner in the war on terror. As a result we will never win this war anymore than we have won the war on drugs, which has dragged out now longer than any combat war we have ever engaged in.

Our government’s policy is tantamount to the State of Pennsylvania invading New Jersey because Newark street gangs are harassing Philadelphia. Even though the Newark gangs are essentially supplied with drugs, guns, and direction from the New York mafia bosses, the Pennsylvania governor and National Guard leaders keep this information from their citizens and soldiers.

It is all rather like attacking the tentacles of an octopus rather than the body. And it is what we are doing in the war on terror."

Thompson muddled the cliche, which usually builds on a distinction between the "tentacles" and the "head" of an octopus -- but never mind. On this construction, isn't Thompson calling for a triumphant decapitation strike against the supposed head of the Terror Octopus, Russia? His logic -- such as it is -- seems to demand a concentrated strike at the "source" of the problem in order to achieve "victory" in the "war on terror."

Thompson's statement that the JBS (meaning the ruling clique in Appleton, rather than the better-informed and more principled people who are volunteer members) has "proven" that Moscow controls the international terrorist network is puerile and foolish.

Sure, Russian intelligence cultivated Muslim assets, just as the CIA did. The latter were much more successful, because they had more money to play with. Practically every Arab/Muslim dictator and his intelligence apparatus was on Langley's payroll. The Saudis, who fund most of the Jihadists, have never been pro-Soviet. It was Washington, not Moscow, who built the European Jihadist network in the Balkans during the 1990s.

In fact, Russia (acting out of historic cultural and religious affinities) supported Serbia's admittedly brutal efforts to contain Islamic expansion in the Balkans, a fact which on at least one occasion (Kosovo, spring 1999) quite nearly led to war between the U.S. and Russia.

It was the CIA that funded and organized the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s, not the KGB. As Zbig Brzezinski has admitted in a January 1998 interview with the French newspaper Le Nouvel Obserateur, the CIA cultivated the Afghan Mujahadeen before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

Brzezinski certainly qualifies as an "Insider" as the JBS uses the term. Here he admits, candidly and on record, that it was Washington, not Moscow, that catalyzed the modern phenomenon of revolutionary Islam.

The same CIA, working through Pakistan's ISI, continued to arm and support terrorist training camps in Afghanistan long after the Soviets had left. It likewise funded, armed, and trained the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army and helped entrench Islamic radicals in Bosnia.

Thompson is aware of all of this, yet he dishonestly tries to shoehorn it into a contrived indictment of Moscow as the global "Terror Masters." Either he's trying to misdirect anybody who takes him seriously into supporting a bellicose posture toward Moscow, or -- perhaps -- he's trying to curry favor with neo-cons who would like nothing more than a ripping good war (either hot or cold) with Russia.

Much of this information regarding the CIA's role in fomenting Islamic terrorism has been published by the JBS. In fact, a great deal of it can be found in the last article I was permitted to publish before Thompson and his comrades fired me in October 2006: "Civilizations in Conflict."

That essay was one of seven articles composing the cover story package: "Iran: Behind the Veil." It was nestled uncomfortably among articles depicting Tehran as a world-menacing terrorist uber-power. At the time, according to the hyper-expensive "Madison Avenue" PR team Alan Scholl had hired to run the organization, this was the message that would resonate with the public Appleton sought to attract. (At that time the same Alan Scholl, as I've pointed out elsewhere, was promoting a genocidal nuclear attack against Iran.)

I was off-message with Appleton's efforts to find favor with the War Party. Weeks later, I was gone. Draw your own conclusions.

Robert Welch, whatever one thinks of him, was not a warmonger. In 1979, when the rest of the Washington-centric conservative movement was ready to go to DefCon 1 and let the missiles fly, Mr. Welch was actually condemning Washington's policy of "imperialism by the dollar, as its substitute for the sword." He often warned that those who seek to destroy freedom employ a simple formula: "War, money, and hatred."

Yet the supposed protectors of Robert Welch's legacy are cynically exploiting hatred in a way that could eventually lead to war.

There is a government that behaves in much the same way the Soviets did circa 1979, but it's headquartered in Washington, not Moscow. I tried to make that point in a "Last Word" essay for The New American back in March 2005, but that column -- which noted some interesting parallels in the respective official personality cults being created on behalf of Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush -- was spiked by the JBS editorial collective.

"For all the superficial parallels that can be drawn between Mssrs. Putin and Bush, they made an oddly matched pair during their February 24 meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia," I wrote. "After all, it could be said, one of them heads an increasingly authoritarian and lawless government that is pursuing a radical vision of global revolution rooted in the teachings of the Soviet Union’s founders. The other is merely the president of the Russian Federation."

Comments of that kind simply couldn't be published by the "largest, most effective freedom organization." They were welcome, however, at the news site run by the president of an organization actually worthy of that description, the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

JBS management grandly claims that they can be found "Standing for Freedom and Family." Yet their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the War Lobby -- the most powerful enemy of individual liberty and all families everywhere -- are as transparent as a new windowpane.

Sure, money is tight, and some people will do anything for a buck. Appleton, which has gone from its supposed "surge" to an employee "purge," is desperate to get some of the slop-off from the funds collected by the War Lobby.

That Art Thompson and Jack McManus would do anything for money is pretty clear. I would expect, however, that they wouldn't be quite so obvious; their present conduct would strike a Tijuana whore as unacceptably shameless.

Appleton's Ministry of Truth in Action

2010-01-15T18:26:00.001-08:00

Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify....

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. --

Orwell, 1984

That familiar passage describes how Winston Smith, as an employee of the Ministry of Truth, "rectified" public records by excising inconvenient or embarrassing facts and casting them into the Memory Hole.

The stalwart defenders of truth, freedom, and decency in Appleton, as is demonstrated below, follow exactly the same procedure in the interests of sanitizing their corporate image.

(Click on the images below to enlarge.)

"We live in a world of double standards," pontificated JBS CEO Art Thompson in a January 13 essay. "There is the standard of what a socialist can say and do and then there is the standard of what a conservative or constitutionalist can say or do."

Art either is possessed of world-class audacity, or stricken with a crippling lack of self-awareness, to be hurling that particular set of stones from the dubious shelter of a very brittle glass house. By "stones," of course, I refer to the geologic objects. If Art were actually possessed of the metaphorical kind, he wouldn't have to take refuge in cheap, petty acts of censorship.

As I have copiously documented in this space, Art and his ally Jack McManus are notorious for their double-jointed ethics.

Herewith a brief but necessary recap:

In 2000, Art campaigned to have Jack cashiered as JBS President because of Jack's long-standing relationship with a schismatic Catholic group whose teachings are unabashedly anti-Semitic. Jack was videotaped delivering an address to the group in which he propounded a theory of history and politics depicting a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy as the enemy of the Christian West.

Jack is entitled to both his religious convictions and his political opinions, of course, even when they flatly contradict the principles and official positions of the JBS. But under long-established, black-letter corporate policy, Jack would be -- at the very least -- "red-starred" for his high-profile association with an anti-Semitic sect.

It's impossible to see how he could, in good conscience, continue to be the most prominent spokesman and official ideologist of the Society when he engaged in conduct and cultivated associations that would have been grounds for expulsion on the part of a volunteer member -- unless he was the beneficiary of one of the "double standards" assailed by Art in his January 13 essay.

Jack was removed as President and given a place on the Council, but he wasn't fired. A few years later, Art collaborated with Jack -- who retained his position on the Board of Incorporators -- to oust G. Vance Smith as CEO. Apparently as a reward for his cooperation, Art re-instated Jack as JBS President.

This was done despite the fact that Jack was being blackmailed by Vance's supporters, who threatened to take the compromising video excerpts of Jack's anti-Jewish speeches -- excerpts that had been compiled by Art Thompson five years earlier -- to media outlets if Jack didn't agree to a compromise that would leave Vance in his job for at least another year. Jack explained his predicament to me. Disgusted over the prospect of the management struggle being settled by blackmail, I resigned from the staff of the JBS.

Two days later, after Vance was removed and the Thompson-McManus faction was installed, Jack invited me back on staff and made a point of having me stand next to them when Art first addressed the Home Office staff as CEO.

One year later, almost to the day, Art and Jack, along with Alan Scholl and Gary Benoit, decided that I had to be fired as Senior Editor because I had begun to publish a personal blog entitled Pro Libertate. I did this because of numerous e-mails and other communications from JBS members and TNA subscribers who were puzzled when Appleton discontinued the Birch Blog.

The Gang of Four has never clearly explained why I was fired. I was invited to grovel for my job by taking down the blog, apologizing in writing for everything published therein, and promising that every word I wrote or spoke for public consumption would be vetted by Appleton. Had I done so, Art told me, I might get my job back. I wrote him a letter explaining that Appleton rented my time as an employee, but didn't own my name or my private time. So he dispatched an official termination letter sanctimoniously -- and falsely -- accusing me of behaving in a fashion incompatible with the "principles" laid down by Robert Welch.

He never specified how I had violated those principles, with good reason: Unlike Jack, who violated (and continues to violate) those principles promiscuously, impenitently, and with impunity, I never did.

One standard applied to me. Another entirely different one applied to Jack. By my math, two is twice as many as one; ergo, Art and Jack (and Alan and Gary) were guilty of a double standard.

Accordingly, when Art saw fit to pose as an ethical tutor, my responsibility to the truth dictated that I underscore his own culpable hypocrisy. Doing so meant I had to find a way to breach the Chinese Wall erected to keep me from posting to comment threads found on JBS websites. I knew -- on the basis of previous performance -- that once the comment was posted it would soon be cast into the Memory Hole. Thankfully, with the help of a friend more computer-savvy than myself I was able to capture images of the comment thread (see above) before it was "rectified" by Appleton's Ministry of Truth.

Here's the full text of the comment:

[title] The Age of the Double Standard

How about this one: A self-described "freedom" organization fires a long-time senior editor for the supposed offense of maintaining a personal blog, but continues to employ a publisher who -- in defiance of long-standing company policy -- routinely gives speeches before anti-Semitic audiences? This patent hypocrisy is compounded by the fact that the same publisher had once been identified as a liability by the company CEO ... the author of the foregoing essay lamenting hypocrisy.

Motes and beams, Mr. Thompson.

As those who visit that thread in its current form can see, the comment has been dispatched into the ether.

The terms of usage statement at the JBS website specifies: "By submitting your comments we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete your comments and portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice."

It is instructive to see how that "discretion" is employed: The comment above is confrontational and highly critical, but it is neither vulgar nor libelous. It is the documentable truth -- one that the supple-spined Upper Management in Appleton cannot countenance and from which it seeks to "protect" its readers.

This behavior is indistinguishable from the internet censorship practiced by China's Communist oligarchs and others of that ilk -- something the JBS has properly denounced.

Thus we find ourselves colliding with yet another of Appleton's double standards.

Oh, by the way.....

The comment thread here also illustrates, to good effect, why interdicting my posts is a corporate priority for the truth-aversive people in JBS Upper Management.

Jack McManus: The William F. Buckley of the JBS -- And No, That's Not a Compliment

2009-12-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

JBS Hypocrite-in-Chief John F. McManus

"To put it bluntly, if you betray a man, you have no right to complain that he isn't as nice to you as he used to be. That's the special nature of betrayal; it cancels everything in a friendship." --

Joseph Sobran

"I wouldn't trust a man who would sell out his friends."

"Dumkopf -- who else can you sell out? You can't double-cross an enemy." --

Maxwell Smart and his arch-rival Siegfried, discussing the ethics of defection.

On the subject of JackMcManus's hypocrisy -- previously discussed in this space, but a topic that could fill a work the size of Newton's Principia -- I should mention the utterly craven and vicious role he played in the JBS's dismissal of Joseph Sobran from The New American several years ago.

In addition to being the finest political and cultural commentator of our time, Mr. Sobran is a traditional Catholic -- a convert as a teenager, I was surprised to learn -- and one of the most principled men I've ever been blessed to meet. He has suffered a great deal for his commitment to the truth as he's been given wisdom to understand it.

In 1993 the execrable William F. Buckley, seeking to appease the neo-Trotskyites who had taken control of the conservative movement, fired Sobran because of his opposition to the first Gulf War. Sobran had publicly disagreed with his employer on a matter of principle about which he was right, and his employer wrong; this was deemed a firing offense.

As a graduate student, Sobran had once put his academic career in jeopardy to defend Buckley's right to speak on campus. Funny how little that courageous act mattered to Buckley when Sobran needed a friend. Sobran was left without a steady job, a man in failing health consigned to eke out a living as a freelancer.

McManus often referred to that episode to demonstrate how evil William F. Buckley truly was. Of course, in October 2006, McManus participated in a decision to do exactly the same thing to a long-time contributor to The New American -- Yours Truly.

Just a year earlier I had actually resigned my job (temporarily, as it happened) to protest the effort to blackmail McManus using the same collection of anti-Jewish statements that Art Thompson had compiled around 2000. This gesture counted for little when Jack had an opportunity to speak in my defense.

As I've previously explained, I thought the statements being used against Jack were pretty loathsome, but I assumed that we were dealing with an isolated episode. I had no idea about the extent to which McManus had made something of a second career out of propounding such nonsense -- and Art Thompson, who did know, was happy to abet my misunderstanding.

My resignation in October 2005 was a gesture of bone-deep disgust over the prospect of working for an organization in which "leadership" positions could be obtained through criminal means, and blackmail is a crime.

It would take a sophist of exceptional skill to identify a substantive difference between Buckley's treatment of Joseph Sobran in 1993, and the treatment I received at the hands of Jack McManus, Art Thompson, Alan Scholl, and Gary Benoit in October 2006. Where Jack is concerned, however, he was simply being true to form, since he had eagerly participated in a similar purge of Joseph Sobran from the TNA masthead several years before.

After being cast aside by National Review, Sobran continued to write and syndicate his column. Among the outlets that bought Joe's column was The Spotlight (now the American Free Press), which was published by a quasi-offshoot of the JBS called the Liberty Lobby.

Worried that any association with the Spotlight and its sponsor would "taint" the Birch Society, Vance Smith decreed that Sobran would have to stop permitting his work to be published in that weekly journal. The problem here, of course, was that although Sobran's name adorned the masthead of The New American, he was not an employee of the JBS.

Unlike Vance or Jack, Sobran had actually suffered for his principles and desperately needed every dollar he could earn as a writer. He didn't enjoy a corner office and a generous salary and benefits package, as Vance did; he wasn't ensconced in a well-compensated sinecure, as Jack was (and is today). Sobran worked hard for everything he earned. By telling him to stop selling his column to a willing customer, Vance was in effect trying to impose a pay cut on someone whom he did not employ.

To the surprise of nobody who knew him, Gary Benoit -- who invariably goes whither the prevailing suck-up wind carries him -- was willing to collaborate in this outrage. (It was Gary's willingness to countenance the effort to blackmail Jack that actually prompted my resignation in 2005.) What I found surprising was Jack's eagerness to act as Vance's hit-man where Joseph Sobran was concerned.

Sobran considered Jack a friend, and -- like myself and others who made the same mistake -- he soon discovered that dorsal knife wounds are the stigmata of that status. Jack met with Joe several times in an effort to convince him to knuckle under to Vance's presumptuous and unjust demands. But Joe wouldn't budge, any more that I would later be willing to put up with similarly improper and dictatorial demands made by Jack and his cohorts.

So Sobran's name was stripped from TNA's masthead, and another paying outlet was closed off to a brave and principled man who was, by at least an order of magnitude, the finest writer ever published in that journal.

Now, there are many -- including some people whose views I respect and whose friendship I cherish -- who believe that Mr. Sobran is an anti-Semite. I am emphatically not of that opinion. He is a critic of the Israeli government, just as he is a critic of every version of the institutionalized affliction called "government." He is also a critic of the Zionist movement, in both political and theological terms.

Whatever one thinks of his opinions, Joseph Sobran has never endorsed any act of violence, hatred, or bigotry committed against any Jewish individual anytime by anybody, and he never will. He has not called for Jews to be shackled by civic restrictions or subject to punitive government policies. He is consistently opposed to government violations of individual rights irrespective of the race or religion of the victims.

In this respect Sobran is entirely different from Fr. Leonard Feeney, Jack McManus's religious guide and model, who insisted that "the Jews" are always and everywhere the enemies of Christian civilization, and called for government to impose legal "curbs" on Jews because they are Jews.

While Jack McManus was collaborating in the purge of Sobran from The New American, he was speaking and writing on behalf of his little Feeneyite sect. In fact, as I recall the chronology, within a few weeks of Sobran's dismissal, Jack was giving the very speeches that were later used in an attempt to blackmail him.

Even those who disagree with Sobran's views about the Israeli government, the Zionist movement, or the value of historical revisionism cannot deny this: There is something exceptionally nasty about the hypocrisy Jack displayed in his treatment of Sobran.

The most remarkable decorative filigree in this portrait of self-serving duplicity is this:

Before being kicked aside by JBS management, Joseph Sobran had written a typically elegant foreword to Jack's silly little book about William F. Buckley, a project that began sometime in the early 1990s and consumed most of Jack's time until it finally wheezed into life in 2002. Joe did this as a personal favor to Jack, knowing that the foreword -- for which Joe received no compensation -- would enhance the book's market value.

The long-gestating product of an institutional grudge against Buckley, Jack's book fell stillborn from the press: By the time it was available, Buckley was no longer a consequential figure, even among people old enough to remember a time when he was considered the voice of "respectable" conservatism.

Sobran's foreword was the only element of the manuscript that offered fresh insights and elegance of expression. When he was designated an un-person by JBS upper management, however, Sobran's foreword had to go, and with it went the only selling point for Jack's derivative, tedious, thinly researched tome, which was essentially a monograph fed steroids to inflate it to a size justifying a hardcover format.

Jack is either too dim or too arrogant to see that what he did to Sobran was exactly like the treatment Buckley gave to Robert Welch, and later to Sobran as well. I'm sure that point wasn't lost on Sobran.

Writing a few years after being fired by National Review, Joseph Sobran described the Buckley modus operandi in words that apply just as well to McManus and the other invertebrates currently running the JBS:

"[T]he people Bill has broken with have consistently been more principled than he is -- Randians, Birchers, Murray Rothbard, Wilmoore Kendall, Brent Bozell, Gary Wills, and others of lesser renown. His only recourse is to imply that they are fanatical, extreme, obsessive...."

Buckley sold out better men as the price of fame and wealth. McManus, on the other hand, is like the Hobo who puts a knife in a friend's back in order to steal his blanket on a chilly night.

They Don't Know Jack -- And If They Did, They Wouldn't Admit It (Updated, 12/11)

2009-12-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

"I don't expect Will to take this [i.e., being fired for no definable, let alone defensible, reason] lying down.... If he would go quietly and pursue his own interests, I would think better of the man."

Jack McManus e-mail to Art Thompson, October 3, 2006 (mistakenly cc'd to me).

Weeks have passed since Jack McManus's latest -- and by no means only -- constitutional atrocity: Endorsing, in comments published by The Hill, the trial of civilian terrorist suspects before military tribunals as a proper "wartime" measure, despite the fact that Congress has not declared war.

Absent a declaration of war, and with the civilian court system in operation, it is constitutionally impermissible to try civilians before military tribunals.

The best and most concise examination of this issue from a constitutional perspective was offered by former federal Judge Andrew Napolitano in an essay originally published in the Los Angeles Times -- that's right, an organ of the much-derided MSM.

Robert Welch explained that of the original purposes in creating the John Birch Society fifty-one years ago today was to provide patriotic Americans with vital information that wasn't available through the controlled media. Yet on this extremely vital issue -- one on which principled leadership is indispensable, given the eagerness of the talk radio-fueled right wing to tear down the constitutional court system and replace it with lynch mob rule -- the public was better served by a mainstream news organ than by the President of the JBS, the individual who is supposed to be the most reliable arbiter of constitutional and ideological matters.

Yes-suh -- that's leadership!

I am informed that Appleton had an opportunity to publish an essay by another writer that would have corrected Jack's statement without mentioning him by name. That essay was never published, which means that Jack's endorsement of the military tribunals, and his equivocal position regarding the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war, are now de facto positions of the John Birch Society. That will remain the case until somebody -- anybody -- in Appleton compels Jack to overcome his petulant intransigence and admit that he was wrong.

This is what can be expected of an organization presided over by a management caste more concerned about image-making and ego maintenance than defense of principle. If the current JBS upper management were committed to the proposition that "truth is our only weapon," they wouldn't hesitate to retract Jack's statement -- at whatever cost in terms of PR and despite the injury it might do to Jack's ego.

If Art Thompson were actually a leader, rather than a shill, he would demand that Jack do the right thing for the organization. After all, Art is supposed to be Jack's boss, and Art has famously made it a policy to fire people over matters of "nuance." Of course, that policy appears to be a bill of attainder directed at one person -- Yours Truly -- and Jack's error in this instance deals with a basic constitutional principle, not a matter of "nuance."

Duplicity and hypocrisy come as easily as breathing to Art and Jack. It should be remembered that it was Art, many years ago, who first made an issue out of Jack's extra-curricular activism in propagating anti-Semitic notions before gatherings of schismatic Catholic groups. Art went so far as to map out an entire campaign to isolate, neutralize, and expel Jack from his post as JBS president.

A few years later, when it suited his interests to do so, Art allied himself with Jack, dismissing concerns about what he had called Jack's "anti-Semitic dialog." By the time Art had been appointed CEO of the JBS, Jack had been exposed as a liability to the organization by being targeted for blackmail. Those who targeted Jack made use of the very same anti-Jewish statements that Art had assembled years earlier.

More recently, when it appeared likely that Jack's career as a part-time anti-Jewish demagogue would be examined by the New York Times, Art and the JBS PR department enlisted a couple of Jewish JBS members to act as a human shield for Jack.

I suppose this is the current Appleton regime's idea of "putting the members first."

Prior to his "promotion" to the JBS Council several years ago -- an arrangement in which he resigned as president and took a pay cut in order to minimize the damage he was doing to the Society -- Jack had been urged to discontinue his involvement with the Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, where he (and other speakers) had unbosomed themselves of anti-Jewish sentiments.

What is genuinely amazing here is this: Jack has never stopped attending programs sponsored by that group. In fact, he was a featured speaker at an SBC function just weeks ago. This isn't surprising, once one understands the fact that Jack's religious obligations to the SBC are more important to him than his professional obligations to the JBS. Art Thompson pointed out as much in 2000: This is Jack's religion -- and the anti-Jewish nonsense is a central tenet therein.

It is not my intention to disparage or mock Jack's beliefs as I describe them below. I think he is in grave theological error, and I find much of what his sub-sect of Catholicism teaches to be not only wrong but offensive. I can appreciate and respect his deep and serious commitment to his faith. What I cannot countenance, of course, is hypocrisy, in this case the protracted, ongoing pretense that someone can be as deeply involved in this particular sect as Jack has been without it creating a conflict of interest where the JBS is concerned.

Jack is a "Third Order member" of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which was organized by a controversial excommunicated priest named Leonard Feeney sixty years ago.

Feeney's detractors considered him an heretic, a lunatic, or some combination of the two. His followers regard him as a vessel of truth in a world incurably corrupted by apostasy. To them, Feeney was, quite literally, more Catholic than the Pope.

The "Third Order" to which Jack belongs involves quasi-monastic discipline: Although they are not cloistered or required to take vows of celibacy or poverty, members are under the strict authority of their superiors and required to sustain and carry out the tenets of the Order. Obviously, those who adhere to the Order that Feeney founded are expected to treat his teachings as authoritative.

One of the central pillars of Feeney's teachings -- something that Jack is literally under covenant to believe and promote as truth -- is this:

"Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal."

According to a man esteemed by Jack as at least a quasi-prophetic figure, "the Jews" are a monolithic force for evil. That would include the two exceptionally decent Jewish men whom Jack and Art pressed into service as "character" witnesses for Jack earlier this year.

Here's Feeney, writing in the January 1959 issue of his journal The Point, at his most candid regarding what he considered to be the paramount enemy of Christian civilization (emphases added):

"...[O]ne topic especially has occupied The Point ’s attention during the past seven years: the problem, in its many aspects, of the Jews.

Why this emphasis? Because we think it is imperative that American Catholics wake up to the fact that the Jews, as an organized force, are the implacable, declared enemies of Christianity — of its tenets, its traditions, its moral code, its very culture. We think it is vital, too, for American Catholics to realize that the Church has always known this fact about the Jews, and, to the extent of her influence, has counseled and decreed regulations for curbing their malice. And since American Catholic publications, in general, seem determined to say little about these basic matters, we have tried to make up for their negligence by our own insistence.

Our solution to the Jewish problem, however, is not merely a series of warnings and exposures to let American Catholics know what their enemies are up to. For we will be able to withstand no enemy, however well informed we are, if we are not strong from within. The ultimate point of The Point is therefore to inject American Catholics with a crusading zeal for the truths and traditions of their Faith, and thus to foster in America a strong, militant Catholicism, worthy of a country that is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception."

As I noted above, I vehemently disagree with Jack's theology. This is the most important consideration in an ultimate sense, but it's not the most important objection in an immediate sense. My chief concern here deals with the notion of imposing "curbs" on what Feeney calls the "malice" of Jewish people, and also his endorsement of a "militant Catholicism" in the context of civic affairs.

Feeney was mortified that nominally Christian countries in Europe extended citizenship rights to Jews. In a Catholic polity, Jews would not be granted citizenship, and be subject to various other civic handicaps. The same most likely would be true of non-Catholic Christians.

From my exposure to the literature and rhetoric of this strain of Catholicism, I think it's fair to say that they see Torquemada as a misunderstood humanitarian (he was devoted to purging heresy through pain), the Holy Office of the Inquisition as a good idea that was poorly implemented, and the rack, thumbscrews, and stake as implements of a severe but necessary mercy, rather than instruments of diabolical torment.

If they were in control of the state it's likely that heresy would be considered a capital offense.

One political prescription endorsed by Father Feeney was found in a 1957 pastoral letter issued by Bishop de Castro Meyer of Brazil, which Feeney described as "A Sure Defence Against the Jews."

"We do not know how many Jews there are in the diocese of Campos, nor what Judaic inroads have been made into Catholic life there, but the things Bishop de Castro Mayer says in his Pastoral Letter ... are, pre-eminently, the sort of thing that needs to be said in the U. S.," insisted Feeney.

The most important of those recommendations, at least in my view, was that the Roman Catholic Church be made the state religion (in Brazil, but also in the United States), and that freedom of religion be abolished (emphasis added):

“The Church ... has the right to see her laws and doctrines respected by temporal public powers. The State must declare itself officially Catholic; it must offer all its resources for the preservation and expansion of the Faith. "

Toward the end of creating an authoritarian Catholic state, some limited collaboration with infidels is permissible, albeit as a temporary and most unpleasant expedient (once again, any emphasis is mine):

“Collaboration of the faithful with non-Catholics so as to attain common objectives is only occasionally allowed by the Church ... The Church looks at these associations with apprehension, and bans them. When, under some exceptional circumstances, she feels as if she were forced to tolerate such collaborations, so as to prevent greater evils, she does it fearfully and full of sorrow."

Think of this directive in light of Jack's involvement with non-Catholics, including Jews, in the John Birch Society. At best, according to this perspective (given the unqualified endorsement of Father Feeney), that collaboration is a source of sorrow and apprehension for the Church, and can only be justified as a means of pursuing the eventual creation of a Catholic state.

The Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire is the focal point of Feeneyite efforts to claim the U.S. on behalf of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. Jack lectures at the SBC at least once every year, and that's where he's delivered most of his anti-Semitic harangues. His most recent speech to the SBC took place on October 7 during the group's fall conference.

Once again, Jack's attachment to this organization is a matter of covenant; it's a religious obligation. This explains why Jack wouldn't desist from giving speeches before those groups. Perhaps the assumption that collaboration with non-Catholics is permissible on a limited basis explains why he refuses to admit that Feeneyite teachings and political ambitions are incompatible with the JBS's values and perspective.

What's really disturbing here is that the JBS can't, or at least won't, be rid of him. Jack spent spent years, or perhaps decades, agitating on behalf of his cult on company time, defiantly indifferent to the damage he was doing to the organization. Not even Vance Smith (who wanted to get rid of Jack) was willing to cast him aside completely, despite the fact that he was audio-and video-taped giving speeches to the SBC and related groups while identified by name as JBS President.

At one point, Appleton literally went so far as to pay for Jack to make a bogus "business trip" to Canada to give him a cover story so he could back out of a speech at the St. Benedict Center. That strikes me as a species of fraud and failure to carry out fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of JBS management. This was as much Jack's fault as Vance's, I suppose. In any case it still strikes me as amazing that nobody in Appleton had the dangling anatomy to force Jack to choose between the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and serving as President of the JBS.

I wasn't aware of Jack's irrepressible conflict of interest when I, along with the rest of the editorial staff, was called into a meeting with Jack a couple of years before Appleton threw me under the bus. Jack held forth at length -- probably about two and a half hours or more -- about what he called the "Masonic infiltration" of the Catholic church, as well as sharing faith-promoting fables about nuns who were able to be in two places at once through "miraculous bi-location" or somesuch.

That lecture was interesting, but it struck me as an odd use of company time -- not only Jack's, but of several other people who, like myself, were required to do actual work in order to produce a magazine.

Shortly after I joined the staff of the JBS in October 1993, I asked Jack about Robert Welch's reported deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Jack proudly confirmed that he had supervised that event, describing it in some detail. On the strength of Jack's confirmation, I'll share the late Gary Allen's description of that event from an August 19, 1985 letter (scroll down to the bottom of the page here), which is somewhat less than complimentary:

"About the lowest, most vulgar stunt I've ever heard of was when John McManus slithered into Mrs. Welch's office just two days after Mr. Welch’s death to gloat to her that her husband had converted to Feeneyite Catholicism on his deathbed, after having taken instructions in the faith. This is a damnable lie. During the last months of his life he didn't even recognize his wife most of the time. He couldn't take instructions in anything. You may think this stunt is beneath contempt, but I have a lot of contempt for it.

The Feeneyites believe the Pope, whom the KGB tried to assassinate, is a Communist and that all non-Feeneyites are going to Hell.... [T]his cult virtually runs Belmont [Massachusetts, at the time the site of the JBS home office]. If the general membership ever found out about Feeneyite control of the Belmont bureaucracy, there would be revolt in the ranks. …"

Not all of the traditional Catholics in Appleton are Feeneyites. In fact, I think Jack is the only significant figure on the JBS staff to adhere to that group. So Allen's despairing description of Belmont two decades ago isn't an accurate description of Appleton today.

But Jack's behavior remains at the center of the problems afflicting JBS upper management. And it helps explain why, after he and three other upper management castratti knifed me in the back, Jack was so concerned that I "go quietly."

The "Big Question": Why Did McManus Sell Out the Constitution?

2009-11-20T18:06:00.001-08:00

Sellout: McManus joins John Yoo, the Weekly Standard, Michelle Malkin, and other neo-fascists in defending the Regime's illicit terror tribunals.

The management clique in Appleton is just as proud as a mother hen over the fact that Jack McManus is among those chosen by The Hill newspaper to comment on various topics in a blog feature entitled "The Big Question."

According to an Appleton press release, "Readers will gain valuable insight from McManus' Constitutional perspective."

On the basis of the most recent edition of "The Big Question," it appears likely that readers will be fed a casserole of regurgitated Republican talking points.

In the most recent TBQ, McManus recites the neo-con position on 9-11 trials, insisting that "These trials should be held in military courts where no [discovery or due process] rights exist. Their crimes were acts of war (didn't we go to war as a result?), not the acts of ordinary criminals."

As late as early 2006, before Jack and his colleagues turned the JBS over to the short-lived reign of the "Madison Avenue Boys," the JBS and The New American candidly acknowledged that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are unconstitutional and illegitimate. TNA has likewise acknowledged that the terrorism tribunals are illegitimate.

In fact, today's TNA website (November 20) has an incisive and witty article by Becky Akers taking exactly the opposite position from the one set out by Jack in today's "The Big Question." "Attorney General Eric Holder announced last Friday that after 8 years of illegal imprisonment and 183 waterboardings from a government that does not torture, Khalid Sheik Mohammed will stand trial with four other suspected terrorists in New York, scene of their alleged crime on September 11, 2001," writes Akers. "That ignited a fracas. Whether there should be a trial at all and where to hold it, not only geographically but in a civilian or military court, set the usual loudmouths roaring."

As Jack's equivocation demonstrates, that question likewise set the usual suck-ups to sucking.

"Neocons who refuse to call Gitmo’s inmates prisoners of war lest they come under protection of the Geneva Convention now wail that we cannot try soldiers in a civilian court; Democrats doggedly defend their inept and arrogant Administration," she continued. "Were we cynical, we might suspect a conspiracy to distract us from the real issue: why has Leviathan `detained' Khalid et al for years despite the Constitutional requirement of habeas corpus, torturing them in violation of not only the Constitution but basic humanity?"

Akers concluded her terrific piece by imagining some of the useful trouble that might ensue if a "fully-informed jury" were to hear the case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

"What would a `fully informed' jury decide regarding Khalid and associates? Would it concur that they acted in a vacuum, murdering Americans because they hate our freedom, as the Feds pretend? Or would it consider 9/11 retribution for the carnage cursing the Middle East after decades of American meddling and skullduggery there? Would it pronounce the accused `guilty,' or would it suggest that terrorists rebelling against the American empire understand the Constitution better than politicians who’ve sworn to uphold it yet `regime-change' worldwide? Would it damn Khalid Sheik Mohammed as the devil incarnate, or would it ask why the Feds ignored warning after warning of the impending attack? Heck, it might even notice that the wrong terrorists are on trial."

This is the kind of perspective that the JBS used to provide, before it was neutered by the Thompson/McManus/Scholl combine. Before Scholl and the highly paid, principle-free PR people he hired decided to have the JBS "ride the Republican wave," TNA would proudly and defiantly denounce tyranny and corruption of the Regime in terms very similar to those used by Akers. Heck, a lot of that material was published on the old Birch Blog, which Appleton quite thoughtfully consigned to cyber-oblivion.

That brings up another point.

The letter of termination sent to me in October 2006 listed my "firing offense" as publicly disagreeing with the Thompson/McManus/Scholl clique in a matter of "nuance." Yet here we see a TNA contributor (Akers' name is listed on the current TNA "tombstone"), in an essay published by TNA, vehemently expressing exactly the opposite view from the one expressed by TNA's Publisher on the same day.

Is this what you had in mind, Jack? Communist-turned Nazi Judge Roland Freisler (center) convenes a session of the Nazi "People's Court," that regime's version of the "terror tribunals" Jack now supports.

So once again, given a choice between taking a lonely stand on behalf of principle or playing to the Red State Fascist lobby, Appleton chooses the latter and applauds itself for displaying "leadership."

This is what "leadership" means to McManus and his fellow geldings in JBS Upper Management (assuming that the term "fellows" applies here): He's using a relatively high profile spot to recite pre-digested neo-con talking points. What good is "influence" if it's used to ratify the designs of the Constitution's enemies?

Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, which actually promotes individual liberty rather than the warmed-over Feenyite authoritarianism McManus peddles, points out that the obvious and undeniable ancestor of the "Terror Tribunals" McManus supports is the German National Socialist Regime. Given some of Jack's other enthusiasms, that pedigree might not be a deal-breaker for him.

Video Extra: "Raving Roland" Holds Court

Roland Freisler is seen in the full flower of his malignancy in this film clip. Any resemblance to Fox "News" programs such as The O'Reilly Factor is ... just a coincidence. Or not.

Charlie Smith's Long Crusade

2009-11-01T07:49:00.000-08:00

My original interest in the JBS came from hearing Charlie Smith on a televised "Meet the Press" interview in Orlando, Fl in the early 1970's. --

Jess D. Roques, current John Birch Society Council member

During the early and mid-1970s, Charlie Smith was easily the John Birch Society's most brilliant, popular, and influential speaker. Robert Welch once told the office and field staff of the JBS that Smith was the only individual in the JBS Speakers Bureau who could speak effectively on any subject of importance.

Charlie recently tracked me down and spent several hours telling me about his experiences as a JBS speaker, his recollections of Robert Welch, and describing in detail his opinion of current JBS management (he wasn't exactly rhapsodizing about their character and competence) and the reasons for that opinion.

Although I was aware of Mr. Smith's noteworthy speaking career, I had never had the chance to talk with him at length until yesterday (October 31). He was in the audience during a speech I gave in 1996 (I seem to recall it was in Florida or Georgia, but that may be a mistake on my part), but we only had time to shake hands and exchange perfunctory pleasantries.

Like countless others who have been through the JBS, Charlie Smith remains committed to the freedom struggle and places a very high value on the people he met through the organization -- while having nothing but contempt for many of the personalities who managed to insinuate themselves into management positions within the hierarchy. He makes no secret of the particular (and, my experience would suggest, well-earned) contempt he feels toward John McManus, and he expressed it in terms a bit more pungent than I would have employed.

Our conversation yesterday included some reflections on the way that the JBS tends to extract as much as it can out of its employees before wadding them up, throwing them away, and then running down their reputation after they've departed.

"I don't know how it was that the Society ended up getting rid of you," Charlie told me, "but it means that you must have been doing something right, you must have displayed independence and an ability to think for yourself. They really don't have much use for people of that kind."

Although they're not directly relevant to our conversation, I thought it would be worthwhile to share a few of relatively recent video clips of Charlie offering some informal, extemporaneous commentary regarding current affairs.

***

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Part II, Part III , Part IV

The Wages of Wave-Riding

2009-10-28T22:15:00.001-07:00

Fat guy in a Nazi coat: Former JBS member J.T. Ready, the "Tommy Boy"/"Black Sheep" of the white supremacist movement, takes part in an October 24 neo-Nazi rally in Riverside, California. Incidentally, Ready wasn't kicked out; he left of his own volition.

People who passively ride a wave shouldn't be surprised to find themselves washing ashore in the unwanted company of some feculent flotsam. That's certainly the case with Appleton's decision, back in 2006, to make opposition to the Brown Peril -- in the form of illegal immigration from Mexico -- the central focus of its activism and recruitment.

No, that campaign didn't result in a huge windfall of recruits to the JBS, as Alan Scholl insisted that it would. Furthermore, if you visit the JBS website today you'll find that it devotes relatively little attention to the immigration issue. In fact, it doesn't appear at all on the "Advocacy Action" page (as of October 28). Sure, the issue bobs to the surface every once in a while, but it doesn't command the sense of urgency it once did.

Now that the collapse of the credit bubble has reduced demand for cheap labor, immigration from Mexico is sharply down, other matters -- such as the effort to audit and abolish the Fed, to oppose the renewed push for socialized medicine, and combat the ever-metastasizing Homeland Security State -- demand much more attention.

While there's no shortage of immigration-related problems -- most of them either created, abetted, or exploited by the federal government -- it simply isn't the civilization-threatening challenge that the JBS pretended it was in its effort to catch a Republican-aligned "wave."

In 2006, shortly before I was stabbed in the back by the liars and charlatans running the JBS, I wrote a piece describing how the immigration "debate" was a phony exercise, and how the most important threat to freedom was the effort to build and expand the homeland security state. Ironically, the same people who petulantly took offense over that essay -- that is, JBS upper management -- have validated my position by de-emphasizing immigration almost to the point of forgetting about it.

Furthermore, a very potent illustration of my point was made over the weekend in Riverside, California with the help of one of Alan Scholl's prize JBS recruits, Falstaffian neo-Nazi gadabout J.T. Ready.

"Oh, you vicious brute!" lisps one of Ready's more assertive colleagues after he absorbs a punch from a Chicano radical. Rather than waddling to the defense of his frail, delicate man-friend, Ready was ... well, somewhere in the back. It's pretty clear that these guys aren't representatives of the Master Race.

Ready was one of a handful -- say, a dozen to 20 -- neo-Nazis who staged a provocation (neither "demonstration" nor "protest" seems a suitable term) in Riverside, California.

Several hundred counter-protesters, fronted by a contingent from the Chicano radical group Brown Berets de Aztlan, turned out to confront the Nazis, reciprocate their insults, and exchange a few ineffective punches.

So the lines were drawn between two groups of ethnic poseurs -- comic-opera radical racist groups (neo-Nazis waving Swastika banners on one side, Brown Berets flying the Mexican flag on the other) -- with a large contingent of heavily armed riot police in the middle.

***

***

As Maxwell Smart might say, this was the old "order out of chaos" trick, albeit carried out on a very small scale.

Say, where have we seen this cartoon before?

Well, a little more than a decade ago, back when The New American actually permitted its writers to commit acts of investigative journalism, that publication ran two cover stories (one of which is still available on-line) describing this dialectical strategy at work and getting into the details of specific incidents and personalities used to carry it out.

Ready (the gelatinous mass in the center wearing a Sgt. Schultz helmet) does a quick impression of "Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker" while one of his boyfriends works the bullhorn.

The most recent mini-riot in Riverside offers a splendid opportunity for the JBS and TNA to do what they once took pride in doing: Using current events to educate people about the tactics and strategies -- including the cultivation of racial collectivism -- of those who seek total power.

Giving that incident a little attention would be especially appropriate in light of the enactment of a new federal "hate crimes" measure. It's almost as if the spectacle in Riverside had been staged to coincide with that development -- a piece of street theater intended to dramatize the supposed resurgence of "right-wing hate groups" and the purported need for increased federal scrutiny of "anti-government" radicals on the right.

So a piece on the Riverside incident, if done with the intention of uprooting that one blossom of ugliness and examining its roots, would be both helpful and timely.

It would be difficult for TNA to provide a suitable examination of this case, however.

First of all, the -- ahem -- bold and insightful people running the JBS fired the last guy who attempted to put the immigration issue into a larger strategic context involving the use of that issue to build a domestic police state. There are people in the current TNA writing pool -- beginning with Bill Jasper, the nation's best investigative reporter -- who could do this issue justice.

However....

The high-visibility role played by former Bircher J.T. Ready in the Riverside incident makes it ... let's say, "problematic" for Appleton to give it the proper coverage. This is especially true in light of Appleton's huge and growing vulnerability on account of Jack McManus's dilettante dabblings in anti-Semitism.

I think the last thing Appleton wants is for Ready's activities to provide a news hook on which to hang an examination of Jack's lengthy career propagating what Art Thompson called (circa 2000) Jack's anti-Jewish "religion" (no, by that he did not mean traditional Catholicism). At the time, Art was worried that Jack's anti-Jewish activism might prompt the malign interest of Morris Dees. Well, J.T. Ready has come to the attention of the degenerate Dees and his comrades at the SPLC. So the dreaded "linkage" already exists, thanks to the strategic blindness and ineptitude of the current Appleton junta.

Heckuva job, Artie and Company.

Terror and Remembrance

2009-09-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

Editor's note:

The following essay was originally published shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It is worth noting that the behavior of the government ruling us has lived down to the lowest expectations expressed in this essay; in fact, it has hit bottom and started to dig.

I should also point out that in the years that have passed since this was written, my views have changed somewhat regarding several of the points I made, including the first two items in the suggested action agenda.

Will the Laws Fall Silent?

As America braces for a war of uncertain length against an unspecified enemy, many have embraced the ancient legal maxim inter arma, enim silent leges - "In time of war, the laws fall silent."

In a sense this is an understandable reaction to the depraved lawlessness displayed by the foreign enemies who killed several thousand Americans in the attacks of September 11th. While we certainly must track down and eradicate those directly responsible for that attack, we must also remember that our laws – the Constitution that frames our system of government, and the heritage of Christian laws that inspired our nation’s charter of government – define us as a people. If we allow those laws to become "collateral damage" in the "war on terrorism," we will suffer losses even greater than those we endured on that terrible Tuesday morning.

Under the Constitution, the federal government is allocated a few specific responsibilities, the most important of which is to secure our nation’s borders and protect our citizens from foreign attack. It does not diminish the guilt of the perpetrators of the September 11th assault to observe that the success of that terrorist strike represents a failure on the part of our federal government to carry out its most important role. That failure is now being invoked to justify lifting the constitutional restraints upon the central government’s power. Even more ominously, we are being told that the present crisis can only be dealt with in the framework of "collective security," as administered by the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies.

Following the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, then-Congressman Charles Schumer told a reporter that new restrictions on freedom would be necessary in order to deal with the threat of terrorism. After all, he insisted, "in wartime, it's different than peacetime. In terrorism time, it's different than peacetime." It’s hardly surprising that those sentiments would be expressed by Schumer, a fervent advocate of "gun control" and federal surveillance of "right wing" domestic dissidents. It might be considered surprising, however, to see even more expansively statist views being expressed by the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, Utah, a reliably pro-Republican newspaper.

"Americans need to rally around President Bush and the federal government," declared a September 14th Deseret News house editorial. "Some Utahns have become almost consumed in recent years with their distrust of Washington and various federal agencies. That must be put aside for now…. Utahns of every stripe ought to be ready to respond to whatever their president asks."

If one assumes that the most important task before us is to punish the guilty, rather than to prevent further assaults upon our country, then it might make sense to embrace a vision of president as war dictator, and to suppress criticism of our central government. But under the Constitution’s mandate to "provide for the common defense," our most urgent task is to take immediate steps to protect the citizenry. Finding and annihilating the foreign enemies who attacked our country, while necessary, will do little to enhance our national security in the long run unless the failed foreign and security policies that led to the disaster of September 11th are changed.

Within hours of the September 11th attack, congressional leaders of both parties emphasized their unanimous and unlimited support for the President. On September 14th the Congress passed – with one single negative vote – a joint resolution to "authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks against the United States." That resolution cited the War Powers Resolution, not the constitutional provision for a congressional declaration of war. Further, Congress chose not to approve a joint resolution introduced by Congressman Bob Barr that contained an explicit declaration of war.

In brief, Congress – as it did in 1965 with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – ignored its constitutional role, choosing to ratify the President’s decision to commit our nation to war, rather than re-asserting its authority to declare war.

Indeed, the Bush administration has behaved as if congressional approval were a mere formality. On the day following the attack, President Bush told reporters: "Now that war has been declared upon us, we will lead the world to victory." White House correspondent Fred Barnes notes that as the reporters were ushered out of the Oval Office, "Bush was asked if he would seek a declaration of war. Bush didn’t answer, flinch, or look up. He sat stonily."

This is not a trivial matter. University of Pittsburgh law professor Jules Lobel points out that the use of force resolution "is not directed against anybody. For example, if the President believes Libya, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan were involved in harboring these terrorists he could attack all of them." The BBC reported on September 16th that the Bush administration aims "to uproot perceived terrorist networks spanning 60 countries in America’s war against those who carried out Tuesday’s suicide plane attacks in New York and Washington."

So, without a declaration of war, President Bush has announced his intention to "lead the world" in a war that could involve military action in nearly one-third of the world’s existing nations. That undeclared war could last for decades, thereby consuming our wealth, devouring the lives of our young men, and deepening the bonds of our "interdependence" with the UN and its auxiliaries.

These are precisely the dangers that our constitutional provisions for war-making were intended to address. It is through war that the power of the State is most dramatically magnified. That is why the power to declare war was vested in the branch of the federal government most accountable to the people whose wealth, liberties, and lives would be directly affected by war.

Alexander Hamilton, who was a proponent of a strong chief executive, wrote in 1793: "It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War." Writing a year later, Hamilton emphasized that "war is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say -- whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War."

Madison’s Notes of the 1787 Convention document that the Framers understood that a President’s duty to "preserve … the blessings of peace" included an ability to "repel sudden attacks" – or, in the words of Roger Sherman, "to repel and not to commence war." September 11th represents the first time in our history that a President has had to deal with a sudden attack upon our homeland (Hawaii, at the time of Pearl Harbor, was not a state).

President Bush was within his constitutional mandate to mobilize military and law enforcement personnel to prevent further attacks. But without a congressional declaration – or, for that matter, a specific enemy – the President, with the support of Congress and the media, committed our nation to what is expected to be a long, costly, and bloody foreign war.

The Uses of War

War swiftly dissolves both the legal and moral restraints upon government power. The American war that began with the Japanese attack upon our naval forces in Pearl Harbor ended with the atomic strikes that vaporized tens of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is difficult to imagine that Americans prior to Pearl Harbor would have countenanced such wholesale slaughter of civilians. It is impossible to imagine what measures the public will be willing to support in the wake of a terrorist attack that killed thousands of American civilians in the heart of our most prominent city. But Americans must remember that the powers we are willing to allow our government to exercise against our foreign foes may someday be used against us as well.

It must also be remembered that social revolution is a predictable consequence of war. Indeed, this is why statists of all varieties regard war as something to be exploited (and even encouraged), rather than prevented. Norman Dodd, director of research for the Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations (the so-called "Reece Committee"), has described how the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace eagerly supported America’s entry into World War I as a means of bringing about a social revolution.

In an interview with investigative reporter William H. McIlhany, Dodd recounted the findings of Kathryn Casey, who had examined the minutes of Carnegie trustees in the years prior to World War I. In the minutes, the trustees discussed the following question: "`Is there any means known to man more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?’ And they discussed this and at the end of a year they came to the conclusion that there was no more effective means to that end known to man. So, then they raised question number two, and the question was, `How do we involve the United States in a war?’"

When the trustees convened a meeting following America’s entry into the war in 1917, Dodd continued, they "had the brashness to congratulate themselves on the wisdom of their original decision because already the impact of war had indicated it would alter life … in this country. They even had the brashness to word and to dispatch a telegram to [President Woodrow] Wilson, cautioning him to see that the war did not end too quickly." Since there is little prospect that the open-ended war on terrorism in which our country has become embroiled will end "too quickly," it stands to reason that the conflict will present unprecedented opportunities for social reconstruction.

The war on terrorism will also be used to preserve and expand the power of globalist institutions, particularly the United Nations, which until September 11th were under sustained political assault. One ominous portent was the decision of Representative Tom DeLay (R-Texas) to withdraw his proposed "American Servicemen’s Protection Act," which was intended to exempt U.S. servicemen from prosecution by the UN’s proposed International Criminal Court. The Bush administration opposed DeLay’s measure as an intrusion upon the President’s power to conduct foreign policy, and the Congressman withdrew the measure following the terrorist attack as a way of expressing support for the President.

In the early years of the Cold War, congressional critics of U.S. involvement in multilateral alliances and institutions found that President Truman and his foreign policy trust could cite the Soviet threat to justify nearly any foreign entanglement or assertion of presidential power. Senator Robert Taft, whose anti-Communist credentials were impeccable, complained in 1947 that he was "more than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason for doing any – and every – thing that might or might not be desirable or necessary on its own merits."

By 1950, as congressional inquiries into subversion documented the extent to which our foreign policy institutions had been infiltrated by Communists and their allies, political opposition was building to American involvement in the United Nations. Writing in the June 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwartz of the World Policy Institute observed that Harry Truman’s "secretary of state Dean Acheson put things in proper perspective: describing how Washington overcame domestic opposition to its internationalist policies in 1950, he recalled in 1954 that at that critical moment the crisis in Korea `came along and saved us.’"

Tens of thousands of American servicemen were killed in the Korean conflict. They fought as part of a UN military force, under rules of engagement that denied them victory, and under a UN chain of command in which our battle plans were made transparent to the Soviets and the Communist North Koreans. But from Acheson’s perspective, these losses were necessary in order to "save" the designs of the internationalist Power Elite.

Acheson is in many ways typical of that Power Elite, which is infinitely resourceful in creating or exploiting crises to magnify its power. The most visible element of the Power Elite is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, to which Acheson (and nearly every other Secretary of State, including Colin Powell) has belonged. On September 14th the CFR held a televised forum featuring the "U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century," which submitted its report to President Bush earlier this year. The forum featured a frank discussion of the ways in which the September 11th attack and its aftermath can be used to enhance the drive to create a UN-administered new world order.

During a question-and-answer period near the end of the program, a Harvard scholar declared that America is "facing the reality of a new world order" in which we must collaborate with other governments in counter-terrorism efforts. Responding to this statement, Commission co-chair Gary Hart expressed the hope that the Bush administration could "use this disaster to achieve that end, or at least explore the possibility to take some of these countries we have held at arm’s length and challenge them to help us."

James Sasser, a former ambassador to Red China, elaborated upon that point, noting that as a result of this assault, the United States might be led into an anti-terrorism coalition with Russia, Red China, Iran, and similar states. "Can we not use this as a catalyst to reach out and develop intelligence in conjunction with these other regimes?" asked Sasser. This suggestion was warmly embraced by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the CFR-dominated Commission.

So, in the name of "collective security," the United States is to enter into a coalition with the most notorious state sponsors of international terrorism. This Orwellian proposition, which provoked not a single critical comment from the CFR forum’s participants, is typical of the "wisdom" of our foreign policy elite.

NATO’s ruling Council has already invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, thereby designating a terrorist attack upon any of its members to be an attack upon all of them. And Beijing has already indicated that it would gladly cooperate in an anti-terrorism coalition, as long as it is organized through the United Nations. The logic of "collective security" against terrorism dictates that in exchange for the help of our dubious allies in finding and punishing those who attacked our nation, we must be willing to reciprocate should any of those nations be attacked.

This may mean using U.S. power not only to punish attacks upon our NATO allies, but also to put down any movement that threatens Beijing, Teheran, or any of our other new "allies" in the grand coalition. It may also lead to expanding our intelligence and law enforcement collaboration with Moscow and Beijing. It will almost certainly mean further empowerment of both NATO and the United Nations.

And what will be done once the crisis has passed, assuming that it ever does? Would these new arrangements be dissolved or institutionalized? Will the new powers assumed by the President devolve back to Congress? Will our global crusade against terrorism eradicate that menace, or exacerbate it as we acquire an even larger roster of foreign enemies?

What is to be done?

Since the attack of September 11th, The Powers That Be have recited the mantra that the terrorists responsible for the slaughter hate us for our virtues – our freedom, prosperity, and global influence. Some have insisted that the example of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society is abhorred by the radical Islamists who are presumed to be behind the assault.

But it’s worth remembering that Switzerland is a free, prosperous, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society as well – and that despite its much greater geographic vulnerability, it has never been a terrorist target. That nation has chosen to exercise its global influence through finance and neutral diplomacy, rather than through military intervention. By refusing to insinuate itself into foreign quarrels, it has eschewed the role of "superpower" – and preserved its own domestic tranquility. Switzerland was admired by our Founding Fathers as much for its resolute independence as for its stable, long-lived institutions of ordered liberty, and its example is now more relevant than ever.

The familiar arguments against "isolationism" should be casualties of the September 11th attack, which was the predictable – and tragic – product of our government’s interventionist foreign policy. For several days after the attack, our country was, to a remarkable extent, isolated from the world, as our airlines were grounded and our borders were sealed. The financial and commercial networks through which Americans conduct business with people abroad were disrupted, or shut down altogether. It’s not clear yet if our sense of normalcy can ever be completely restored.

But there are necessary steps that can be taken immediately to address our most critical national security needs:

Rather than pouring tens of billions of dollars into an open-ended foreign war, Congress should radically increase the budget of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and vastly expand the manpower of the Border Patrol.
Congress should rescind the counterintelligence guidelines created by Attorney General Edward Levi in 1976, which destroyed the FBI’s ability to collect intelligence on foreign terrorist and subversive groups operating in this country. The Levi guidelines forbid the FBI from investigating a terrorist group unless it has solid evidence of a plan to commit a federal crime within 48 hours. The foolishness of those guidelines is illustrated by this fact: The plot carried out on September 11th took years to plan and carry out.
While it is proper for the FBI to investigate crimes, the Constitution specifies that law enforcement is almost exclusively a state and local responsibility. Over the past three decades, as federal funding and control over state and local police agencies have increased, their ability to collect intelligence on subversive and terrorist groups has been all but destroyed. This capacity must be restored immediately, if we are serious about preserving national security without creating a federally dominated garrison state.
As the Pentagon was burning, and with (fortunately inaccurate) reports of another hijacked plane en route, one Pentagon staffer cried out: "Where’s our air cover?" Americans might well ask themselves a similar question: With all we spend on our military, why are we so defenseless? Why have we deployed troops to scores of nations around the world, when our homeland is vulnerable to attack? We must end our meddling in the affairs of other nations, bring our troops home, and build a military devoted exclusively to defending our nation. If we can identify the foreign enemy responsible for the attack, Congress should declare war and commit the necessary resources to defeating that enemy. But our first priority should be to defend our homeland.
Just days before our nation was attacked, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was communing with Arafat, Castro, and sundry other terrorists at the UN’s "anti-racism" summit in Duban, South Africa. That event was a riotous festival of America-bashing led by regimes that almost certainly were connected to the attack on our country. This illustrates the compelling necessity to get our nation out of the UN, and to invite the world body to relocate to Durban, Damascus, or some similar haven of enlightenment.
There is obviously a compelling need to find and destroy the foreign enemies who attacked our nation. If we must make war, we should do so with strict fidelity to the Constitution, and unhindered by entangling alliances with multi-national bodies such as the UN and NATO. In prosecuting such a war we should make it clear to the world that America is willing to extend the hand of peace and honorable commerce to all nations who will reciprocate our goodwill – and that we are just as willing to punish without mercy those who make war upon us.

All of these steps would enhance our national security while preserving the constitutional framework of laws upon which our liberties depend. But it is obvious that for any of these steps to be taken, our government has to undergo some radical changes – not to its constitutional structure, but with regard to the people who are currently occupying positions of trust. We cannot expect sound leadership from the very officials who helped create this catastrophe. But new political leadership devoted to restoring our national security and preserving our independence will not emerge until the American public itself is educated in sound principles and mobilized to hold our leaders accountable.

As the human cost of the September 11th attack becomes clear, the temptation to set aside our laws in order to exact revenge will be almost irresistible. But resist we must, because if our laws fall silent, our freedom and independence will be destroyed – and terror will have its ultimate victory over liberty.

The McManus Cover-Up Continues

2009-08-09T21:10:00.000-07:00

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Of all the varieties of dishonesty, disingenuousness -- feigned puzzlement or pretended confusion -- is the worst and usually the most transparent. This is because it necessarily involves an insult to the subject of the deception: He is expected to become an accomplice in deceiving himself.

Obviously, this species of dishonesty has no place in the behavior of those presuming to lead an organization that describes "Truth" as its only weapon. Yet it's clear that disingenuousness is the only weapon left in the arsenal of the current management of the JBS.

In a recent posting in this space I put JBS management in a box from which it cannot escape.

I noted that Robert Welch's reaction to the controversy over his pre-JBS manuscript now called The Politician was to make it available, in book form, to all interested parties.

I then proposed the following: Given the persistent controversy over Jack McManus's non-JBS speeches before Catholic audiences -- speeches plausibly characterized by those who have examined them as anti-Semitic -- the JBS should, and ethically must, make those speeches available for public inspection, as well. That would be the behavior of people committed to the propagation of pure, unalloyed Truth.

The behavior of JBS Upper Management, not surprisingly, is to attempt to change the subject. I was recently given a copy of a letter being quietly disseminated by Appleton in an attempt to reply to the challenge described above. It is a Whitman's Sampler of various kinds of dishonesty, ranging from disingenuousness to outright, brazen mendacity.

Referring to a letter I wrote on October 19, 2005, referring to the blackmail attempt against Jack McManus, the letter observes:

"In 2005, Mr. Grigg claimed that the McManus speech was `barren of any material that can fairly be described as anti-Jewish.' In 2009 ... he is now claiming the completely opposite assessment....

In a June 15, 2009 posting on his blog, Mr. Grigg refers to `Jack McManus, a person who spent years propagating anti-Semitic theological and political theories, which were captured on audio and videotape….' In this same posting, he referred to having been subjected to the aforementioned video clips but he now labeled them (a total of less than three minutes taken completely out of context) as something `I call ‘Jack McManus Sings the Nuremberg Variations’ – that is, conspicuously ugly excerpts from those same anti-Semitic speeches.'

In this same blog posting, Mr. Grigg further referred to the supposedly [sic] anti-Semitism of Mr. McManus as `repulsive' and to Mr. McManus having “a full-time sideline as an anti-Semitic demagogue.'"

All of this, the letter insists, constitutes a "glaring reversal [on my part] about the supposed anti-Semitism of JBS President John McManus...."

Note well that this is not a denial that the speech in question contained anti-Semitic material; instead, the effort here is to focus on the fact that I had changed my opinion about the material.

What the reader of that letter will not be told by the supposed paladins of Truth running the JBS is this: I changed my opinion, in large measure, because of the criticisms of Jack's anti-Semitic presentations offered by Art Thompson, Gary Benoit, and others who now defend him. Those criticisms were not made available to me by Art and the others; instead, they were published on the Web as samizdat by the faction loyal to Vance Smith.

I did have a chance to read the text of one of Jack's speeches in addition to seeing the video excerpts mentioned above; I read that text in Art Thompson's hotel room, in Jack's presence, on the Saturday following the 2005 "coup." Both Art and Jack earnestly insisted that the speech was meant as a "theological" statement.

Neither one of them saw fit to inform me that, years earlier, Art had become sufficiently alarmed over what he described as Jack's anti-Semitic lectures that he, Art, had outlined an entire campaign to get rid of Jack.

This wasn't just a "glaring reversal"; it was a deliberate cover-up laquered with pure hypocrisy.

I've mentioned previously about being shocked when Jack referred to commentator Ben Wattenberg (not my favorite public figure) as "a slimy New York Jew." This was said in the presence of Gary Benoit, who was likewise astonished.

When I saw the film clips mentioned above my reaction was one of weary disgust -- both over Jack's foolishness, and the potentially criminal actions of those who appeared ready to blackmail Jack. Since I consider blackmail more serious than bigotry, I focused most of my criticism on the Smith faction; since I was repeatedly assured by Art and Jack that Jack would never propagate anti-Jewish prejudice, I was willing to extend him the benefit of every doubt.

One ugly remark I could stomach; one ill-considered speech, I could abide; but my views did change when I learned, thanks to Art (by way of his critics) that Jack had been reveling in anti-Semitic nonsense for "years."

The doubt I extended to Jack disintegrated when I heard Art's criticism of Jack's anti-Semitic "religion," and read his detailed plan to oust Jack as a liability. And, to be perfectly blunt, my outrage did come into sharper focus when Jack joined in the decision to kick me and my family to the curb for supposed offenses against tolerance and decorum.

If I had been more faithful to the principles I profess I would have made an issue out of Jack's bigotry sooner. But to be fair, I did have other things to worry about.

So here's where we find ourselves:

*We have a non-denial from Appleton that Jack's material is anti-Semitic.

*We apparently have not one but two "glaring reversal[s]" of opinion regarding Jack's anti-Semitic lectures -- mine, and that of Art Thompson, Gary Benoit, et. al. Mine was a result of being exposed to facts that had been withheld from me by Art and Jack. What explains Art's reversal, assuming that he has reversed his opinion.

*Appleton still won't make Jack's speeches public.

The third point is easily the most important, because it is the one Appleton is trying to avoid. The letter they are circulating offers several greasy insinuations that I lied about the tenor and character of Jack's speeches; they even intimate that what I have written is libelous.

Well, if that's the case -- publish the speeches. Put everything before a candid public, or whatever portion thereof would be interested in the issue. Let there be no ambiguity about the matter.

Or, what would be more or less the same thing, let Jack sue me for libel. The discovery process would churn to the surface all of the material Appleton is desperately trying to hide.

My first defense witness would be Art Thompson, who -- under penalty of perjury -- would have to explain his own "glaring reversal" regarding Jack. My first question: "Why did you say, in 2000, on the basis of the speeches in question, that `This is [Jack's] religion, to be anti-Semitic and anti-Mason'? My second question: If what you describe as Jack's anti-Semitism was patently obvious to you, am I not entitled to draw the same conclusion from the same evidence?"

If they were promoting the truth rather than covering their posterior, Art and Jack would make that evidence available for public inspection. Rather than doing so, they continue to emit piffle and persiflage. Res ipsa loquitur.

Lying By Anachronism

The recent letter from JBS management is fetid with dishonesty; its authors (I discern, once again, the hand of Alan Scholl) lie about literally every matter discussed therein. One of their preferred tactics is to misrepresent the past by "telescoping" events together -- that is, taking one incident and dishonestly compounding it with an unrelated one that took place much earlier.

Here's a specific example of the kind of creative anachronism called "telescoping":

"Shortly after writing his 2005 letter, Mr. Grigg relocated to Idaho and eventually parted company with The John Birch Society and The New American magazine. He continued, however, to issue his commentaries on a variety of topics via his own blog. One of the frequent targets of his commentaries in recent years has been The John Birch Society – including the complete reversal of his attitude about the supposed anti-Semitism of John McManus."

The transparent intent of that paragraph is to prompt the reader to think my criticism of JBS management took place immediately after my family relocated to Idaho in 2005.

In fact, the blog you are presently reading didn't come into existence until 2007, when I created it as a way to reply to lies being disseminated by Alan Scholl and others (such as the story being told to JBS members in some western states that I had been sued for libel, or Alan's charge that "everything" I had written had been "heavily edited," apparently owing to my supposed professional incompetence.

As to the "frequency" of my "attacks" on JBS management (I have never attacked the Society itself), here are two critical facts: First, I created this website to deal exclusively with JBS-related subjects, something that wouldn't be known by the otherwise uninformed person who read the paragraph above. Secondly, since being fired in 2006 I have written and published nearly 500 essays. I've mentioned the JBS fewer than twenty times, including the JBS-centered essays published on this blog.

A second example of "telescoping" offers an interesting twist: The authors of this letter retroactively amended a decision I made:

"Of additional interest in Mr. Grigg’s June 15th blog is his characterization of the Smith-Gow campaign waged against Mr. McManus as `blackmail.' He stated that when he arrived at that conclusion, `I resigned from JBS; I simply could not be associated with an organization in which personnel disputes were settled through blackmail.' Mr. Grigg did submit a letter of resignation, a step he temporarily withdrew. He retracted that decision, as he indicated in this blog entry, partly because of being `entreated back on the staff.' He noted that the person “who persuaded me was – Jack McManus.'" (Emphasis added.)

The words in boldface above are a bold-faced lie: There was nothing "temporary" about my return to the JBS staff after Jack begged me back. He didn't say that the arrangement was "temporary," nor did I. In fact, when the new management team assembled the JBS staff the Friday afternoon of the "coup," they made a point of having me stand beside them (in jeans and a casual shirt; I was packing for the move to Idaho) to help assuage concerns on the part of home office employees. Nobody said anything to the effect of, "Will is back as Senior Editor -- on a temporary basis."

The only way the statement from the letter cited above could make any sense is if it is a tardy admission that upper management was tacitly planning, as early as October-November 2005, to be rid of me. I have no evidence that such is the case. Which necessarily means that the statement above is a damned lie.

The same is true of this paragraph:

"In 2006, Mr. Grigg decided that he would not accede to repeated requests that he temper the characterizations of persons he was writing about in his various blog postings. He was advised that, because of his association with The New American magazine (he was listed as a Senior Editor) and his years of functioning as a spokesman for The John Birch Society, liability for his possibly libelous intemperateness was shared by his employer. His refusal to cease the type [sic] writing he employed led to a complete parting of the ways. He insists he was fired. Officials of the Society and the magazine contend that he fired himself."

It's of interest here to note that this is the first time Appleton has ever publicly stated a reason for my firing -- after years of insisting that it was legally prohibited from doing so. Also of interest is the fact that the official letter of termination I received from Art Thompson said nothing about "possibly libelous intemperateness"; no variant of the word "libel" appears anywhere in that letter.

I learned of my then-impending termination from Bill Jasper on October 2, 2005. He didn't mention concerns about "libel." At Bill's suggestion, I called Art Thompson that afternoon. Art was flustered and inarticulate to the point of aphasia, but the term "libel" wasn't found anywhere in the word salad he presented to me.

The termination letter, as I've mentioned before, offered one charge and one specification:

"You do not understand that once you are a public figure everything that you say or do publicly reflects on the organization you work for, particularly when these things are in opposition to the position and principles of The John Birch Society and Robert Welch. Also, you do not understand that once we have rejected an article or nuance, you cannot go around us to post it elsewhere, identifying it as rejected material and publicly criticizing your employer for the rejection."

Art didn't specify what I had written that was "in opposition to the position and principles" of the JBS and Robert Welch, for good reason: He couldn't find a suitable example. So we're left with the apparently grave offense of publishing, on my own blog, "rejected material" in which I differed with JBS management in a matter of "nuance."

Once again: There was nothing about libel in that termination letter, the only legally relevant document in defining the reasons for that action. I was never "advised" that my association with the JBS could possibly leave them open to a counter-party suit in the event I was sued for libel -- a scenario that is equal parts fanciful, paranoid, and (owing to its consequences to me and my family) malicious.

To the best of my knowledge, Alan Scholl invented the "libel" rationale after the fact on October 3 in a communication with a JBS member, of which I have a copy. (It was in that communication, incidentally, that Alan first tried out the line that "Will Grigg fired himself.") And it was rendered entirely moot a few days later when, at the suggestion of a JBS member in the Deep South, I took steps to modify one blog posting about which concerns were raised after I had been fired to nullify any imaginable legal exposure to the JBS.

Here's where we find irrefutable evidence of incorrigible bad faith on the part of Alan and his sorority sisters in JBS management.

My friend called me up in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation. For a couple of hours he conducted telephone "shuttle diplomacy" between myself and Alan, who was acting on behalf of JBS management. It was Alan who expressed concerns about the blog entry in question. So, with my friend watching that space in real time, I made the necessary modifications: Problem solved! -- that is, if the "problem" was something other than a pretext.

My friend then called Alan again to explain that the problem had been fixed. Knowing how that call would turn out, I leaned back at my desk and awaited the inevitable. Sure enough, a few minutes later, my friend called back.

"Well, he's not going for it," he said in a voice laden with puzzled disappointment. "He says that this wasn't the real problem, that there were just too many others to deal with."

So Alan, liar that he's proven himself to be, moved the goalposts, as I knew he would. This is because the real issue was nothing I had written, as such. It was the fact that I wasn't willing to submit to the ultimatum Art gave me on October 2: I was to take down the Pro Libertate blog, apologize in writing for everything published therein, and promise, in writing, never to write or utter a word that wasn't pre-approved by Appleton.

They knew I'd reject that ultimatum. They invented a "problem" that could only be "solved" by firing me.

Is this the best they can do? Are these the best people the JBS can find to run the organization? (Obviously not; I know several others, both on staff and in the executive ranks, who would do a much better job.)

In assessing the question of truthfulness here, Dear Reader, consider this:

*One party to this controversy has never changed his story regarding the events surrounding the firing of Will Grigg (please forgive the lapse into third person); the other has changed their story several times.

*One party to this controversy has been candid about changing his mind regarding McManus's speeches, and specified the reasons why; the other simply pretends as if they have been consistent when the record demonstrates that they have been, at best, hypocritical.

*One party in this matter is calling for full disclosure of the McManus materials; the other has been reduced to the most puerile evasions in an attempt to prolong the cover-up.

From the JBS Memory Hole: "In Sade's Shadow"

2009-08-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

By way of preface --

It is an eloquent testimony to the perverse priorities of the, ahem, bold and intrepid "leaders" of the John Birch Society that they are devoting time, energy, and resources in the effort to scrub my name and writings from their institutional memory.

Fortunately, the decentralization of information in the cyber-age has a way of defeating efforts by tyrannical gate-keepers of all varieties, be they Chinese commissars, Iranian mullahs, or hypocritical, self-serving, authoritarian-minded, bureaucratic chair-moisteners at the JBS head office in Appleton.

While the gang running the JBS has done a decent job killing internet links to many of the feature articles I wrote for TNA, much of that work is available through other archives. From time to time, I'll re-publish selected articles here as part of an irregular series I'll call "From the JBS Memory Hole."

The first selection was originally published in April 2001.

In Sade’s Shadow
by William Norman Grigg

Western culture now lies in the pall of a vile movement to exalt evil as virtue. Yet this movement is but a shadow cast by the diabolic drive to build the total state.

In describing the prevailing worldview of our cultural elite, the terms "immoral" and "amoral" are both inadequate. A more suitable description would be "anti-moral." "Immorality" refers to the conscious violation of ethical principles that one accepts, but either cannot or will not abide; the term "amorality" describes the conceit that one enjoys an exemption from the moral laws that govern the rest of mankind. Isaiah warned: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness...." Adherents of "anti-morality" transpose good and evil in exactly this fashion, as a prelude to the abolition of morality altogether.

Not surprisingly, it is in the realm of mass entertainment that the influence of the anti-morality movement is most visible, and the glut of "bent" stories produced for public consumption offers a useful illustration of the movement’s impact. "Bent stories portray evil as good, and good as evil," advises Oliver Van de Mille, president of George Wythe College. "Such stories are meant to enhance the evil tendencies of the reader, such as pornography and many horror stories and movies." Other narrative models described by Van de Mille are "broken" stories — which accurately depict good and evil, but allow the latter to triumph — and "whole" stories, in which good is victorious over evil. "Broken" stories, such as 1984, can be useful if they fortify the moral determination of the reader. However, "bent" stories are innately corrupting and should be shunned.

Two movies in current release — one of them a critical success and commercial failure, the other a resounding commercial success despite an ambivalent critical reception — offer museum-quality specimens of "bent" stories. Quills, an acclaimed film version of the award-winning play by Gregory Wright, exalts the Marquis de Sade as a symbol of persecuted creativity and artistic integrity. Hannibal, the sequel to the multiple Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, makes a cultural icon out of a character of whom Sade would have approved: Hannibal Lecter, an urbane, seemingly invincible cannibal who is cast as the vindicator of good taste and the eccentric defender of truth and beauty. To date, Hannibal has grossed more than $150,000,000, suggesting that the market for "bent" stories is vast and lucrative — and portending ominous developments for the side of tradition in America’s ever-escalating culture war.

Maker of the Modern World

The Marquis de Sade, observes historian Erik von Kuhneldt-Leddihn, has been hailed as the "grandfather of modern democracy." His influence is primarily attested by the word that bears his name — "sadism," the practice of extracting personal gratification from the suffering of others. Although it is quite remarkable that an 18th century degenerate who spent most of his adult life in prison would be immortalized in our language, this doesn’t begin to account for Sade’s impact. As historian Geoffrey Ashe observes in his book The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality, Sade was "the first clear prefigurer of the world we now live in." His works of fiction — particularly his detestable magnum opus, Juliette — express in remarkable detail the outlook, tactics, and objectives of the revolutionary Left. Those who read that book, or as much of it as they can absorb without retching, cannot help but be astonished by the way in which Sade, as if through diabolical revelation, anticipated the modern world.

The book is a relentless barrage of scatological pornography, profanity, and blasphemy — something like what one would expect were Larry Flynt to dictate a novel under the influence of Tourette’s syndrome. Scattered among the vignettes of perversity can be found occasional soliloquies in which Sade’s characters give voice to the author’s worldview, including the central tenet of Sade’s anti-philosophy: "Were I to discover that my only possibility of happiness lay in excessive perpetration of the most atrocious crimes, without a qualm I’d enact every last one of them this very instant, certain … that the foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself, no matter at whose expense." (Emphasis in original.)

Despite the fact that Sade insisted that "Nature" demanded such an unconditional surrender to depraved appetites, he recognized that this could only be accomplished through the suppression of the conscience. More than a century before cultural revolutionaries, adapting Freud’s dogmas to the assault upon Western moral traditions, would denounce all restraints on individual behavior as "repression," Sade evangelized on behalf of the "liberating" effects of degeneracy.

"Modesty is an illusion," insisted one of "Juliette’s" tutors in blasphemy and perversion, "the result of nought but our cultural manners and our upbringing...." Conscience, Sade insisted, is likewise nothing but a reflection of "prejudices inculcated by training and upbringing.... Veritable wisdom, my dear Juliette, consists not in repressing one’s vices.... The true and approved way is to surrender oneself to them, to practice them to the utmost.... [I]t consists simply in reiterating the deeds that have made us remorseful, in repeating them so often that the habit either of committing these deeds or of getting away scot free with them completely undermines the possibility of feeling badly about them. This habit topples the prejudice, destroys it.... [T]his habit at length makes [the vice] wholly bearable and even delicious to the soul."

These admonitions bear more than a passing similarity to the "safe sex" and pro-homosexuality indoctrination inflicted upon inmates of contemporary public (government) schools — and Sade clearly anticipated this development as well. He urged that his disciples "create public schools where, as soon as they are weaned, the young may be reared; installed therein as ward of the State, the child can forget even his mother’s name. After he has grown up, let him in turn couple indiscriminately, democratically, with his mates and brethren, doing as his parents did before him."

From Sade’s perspective, the children raised by the State to become sexual predators would be only those considered worthy of life. "The embryo is to be considered the woman’s exclusive property … she can dispose of it as she likes," he wrote in a passage that could have been found in a Planned Parenthood press release. "She can destroy it in the depths of her womb if it proves a nuisance to her. Or after it ripens and is born, if she is for any reason displeased with it or irked at having produced it, she can destroy it then; whatever the circumstances, infanticide is her sacred right. Her Spawn is hers, entirely hers … [and] the mother may feed it or she may strangle it, depending upon her preference."

Unlike modern defenders of the "death ethic," Sade did not dissimulate the logical implications of his view that murder could be justified as a "choice": He was as unabashedly "pro-choice" regarding genocide as he was regarding abortion and infanticide. "If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than that to be had from eating a good dinner," he advises his disciples, "you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant’s hesitation." Anticipating radical environmentalism, Sade insisted that "Nature stands in not the slightest need of [human] propagation; and the total disappearance of mankind … would grieve her very little."

This is not to say that Sade approved of all forms of homicide. He wrote that hearing mention of God "rouses my ire.... When I hear His name pronounced I seem to see all around me the palpitating shades of all those woebegone creatures this abominable opinion has slaughtered on the face of the earth." Despite the fact that Sade played a role in precipitating the French Revolution (imprisoned in the Bastille prior to its "liberation" on July 14, 1789, Sade had propagated disinformation about the mistreatment of its inhabitants), he could not bring himself to approve of the Terror. As Geoffrey Ashe points out, the French Revolutionary Terror "did not please him at all, because the killing was being done from a bad motive, politics instead of pleasure."

But the "pleasures" pursued through sadism — which is born, wrote the Marquis, of "conquered repugnances" — are self-nullifying. "The perfected Sadist has to live on a mental level which very few could attain," observes Ashe. "He asserts freedom by the only nonconformity that is still open: trying coolly to beat horrific Nature at her own game. He has passed beyond ordinary enjoyment into a conscious, experimental stoicism of sex and violence, where every frenzy is self-induced and under control. He has no feelings as most human beings have them; no love, of course; no inclination to value anything for its own sake … except as it gives him greater pleasure.... He is entangled with nobody, has an exterminatory contempt for everyone except his co-Sadists, and is ready to betray even them."

The dramatic climax of Juliette captures the essence of Sade’s "exterminatory contempt" for all things decent and beautiful: The heroine, with the help of the Pope, performs a black mass in which a pregnant girl is murdered on an altar in the Vatican.

The Marquis de Sade as Exemplar

Although Quills has had little commercial impact, it was a "prestige project" and has garnered almost unanimous critical acclaim — as well as an Oscar nomination for Geoffrey Rush, who plays the Marquis. "I’ve never had a better time making a film," rhapsodizes director Philip Kaufman. "At every stage, we arrived each day brimming with anticipation, hugged one another and began dialogues that were heated, emotional, philosophical, and wonderfully silly.... The Marquis, we said, would have loved it. Hopefully that love we had has found its way onto the screen."

Screenwriter Doug Wright, who adapted his award-winning stage script for the film, explains that in assembling his screenplay he tried "to write with the same malicious glee de Sade himself must have felt as he catapulted his way through [his lost work] 120 Days of Sodom...." He praises Sade for creating "scenes so depraved — so preposterous — they set a new benchmark for perversity in literature" and insists that Quills is intended "to address critical issues in our time." The film’s publicity material defines those "issues" as the battle "between the brutality of censorship and the unpredictable consequences of free expression."

"I saw it as a debate about the forces of repression," observes star Geoffrey Rush. To embody "repression," the film’s creators seized upon the figure of Dr. Royer-Collard, the priest-physician who tried to treat Sade during his final days at the asylum of Charenton. Believing that not even Sade was beyond the reach of God’s grace, Dr. Royer-Collard treated his charge with solicitude and compassion. In the film, however, the doctor is depicted — in predictable Freudian fashion — as a depraved hypocrite who derives satisfaction from tormenting Sade, and who indulges in precisely the varieties of hideous perversity that the Marquis celebrated in his works.

The libelous caricature of Royer-Collard is given life by British actor Michael Caine who, boasts the film’s publicity materials, is "fresh off his Oscar-winning role as a far more benevolent doctor in ‘Cider House Rules.’" That "benevolent" doctor, of course, was a drug-addicted abortionist named Wilbur Larch who ran a combination orphanage and abortion mill. "I give [women] what they want — an orphan or an abortion," explained Larch. If a woman chose the former, her child was given a home at the St. Cloud orphanage until he was adopted; if the latter option prevailed, the child was killed and his remains were destroyed in a nearby incinerator. The "benevolent" Larch was a suitable symbol of Sade’s view that infanticide at any stage is a woman’s "sacred right."

Quills’ Dr. Royer-Collard, however, is a man without such redeeming "benevolence." "I like playing characters who are sinister, but I look for a way to give them some kind of redeeming qualities," said Caine. "But when I first read through my part [as Dr. Royer-Collard], I thought ‘this man is so evil, there is nowhere to go with it." In defining the doctor’s malevolence, Kaufman invokes a figure who has become an icon of evil for the Hollywood Left: "We spoke of his character in terms of being a Kenneth Starr-like man who pursues virtue unaware of his own lack of it.... I think the Marquis would have loved this depiction of hypocrisy perfected." And the real Dr. Royer-Collard, we suspect, would have prayed for those who have libeled his good name while extolling the evil Sade.

In his positive review of Quills, film critic Roger Ebert complains that Kaufman’s intended analogy with modern times "breaks down … if we seek a correspondence between de Sade and President Clinton, whose milder transgressions would have flown quite beneath the Marquis’ radar." Ebert is much too stingy in his assessment of the ex-president’s accomplishments as a sadist. Surely the Marquis would look with fond approval upon a politician who killed people in three countries — Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq — by ordering military strikes to divert public attention from the political and legal consequences of his sexual depravity. He would probably express similar approval for an electorate who would allow its president to commit such crimes and remain unpunished.

The Cultivated Cannibal

According to Premiere magazine, actors Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore were White House dinner guests of Bill Clinton during the production of Hannibal, the most recent cinematic treatment of novelist Robert Harris’ mordant cannibal and serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. Harris’ 1999 novel of the same name was an instant best-seller in spite of an ending that was almost universally reviled: FBI agent Clarice Starling (Moore), having zealously pursued Lecter (Hopkins), becomes the villain’s consort and joins him in cannibalism.

Lecter was a peripheral character in two previous films made from Harris’ novels, Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs. Having escaped from prison in the second film, Lecter is pursued throughout most of the third movie by a multi-millionaire victim named Mason Verger. Before being imprisoned Lecter had been a psychiatrist. While treating Verger and his sister (whom Verger had sexually molested), Lecter drugged his patient and then induced him to cut off his own face and feed it to a dog — an event that is reportedly depicted in vivid detail in the film. (Although he has read the novel, your author will not see Hannibal, nor will he see Quills.) As a result, Verger is disfigured beyond recognition.

"Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and vulgar," writes Harris in the novel, "it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us." Harris makes it clear that "wickedness" can only be found among those who are insufficiently "progressive." Thus he makes Verger, a drug-abusing incestuous child molester, a professed born-again Christian. In keeping with the well-established conventions of the entertainment industry, it is Verger — not Hannibal Lecter — who is the primary villain of the story. The secondary villain is Agent Krendler, Clarice Starling’s supervisor. Repeatedly spurned by Starling, Krendler seeks to sabotage her career. Predictably, Krendler is a reflexive "sexist" and "homophobe" (at one point he casually comments that Lecter’s refined taste in art, music, and gourmet cuisine suggested that he was a "queer"). Thus in both the book and the movie Krendler meets with a hideous end. Lecter captures and drugs the FBI agent and — while the victim is still conscious — carves up sections of his brain and feeds it to him.

The Marquis de Sade emphasized that in order to vanquish the conscience it is necessary to deaden one’s reaction to violence and depravity. That Hannibal was both a record-shattering print best-seller and a monumental box office blockbuster as a film attests to the fact that America’s entertainment consumers have been well-tutored in sadism. "Many still alive will recall when a movie like this could not be contemplated, let alone filmed and released," comments Roger Ebert (in an indifferently positive review). "So great is our sophistication that we giggle when earlier generations would have retched." In fact, the largely negative word-of-mouth "buzz" on Hannibal doesn’t criticize the film for its lurid, gratuitous gore, but rather because it is "boring."

In a remarkable review of the film for the cyber journal Salon, Charles Taylor echoes Ebert’s point. "Hannibal … represents what happens when mainstream Hollywood studios … adopt the tactics of exploitation films they once shunned, and do so with all the money and gloss at their disposal." Lecter’s urbanity and suavity are clearly intended to seduce the audience, rather than to reflect reality. "Hasn’t anybody noticed that real-life monsters like Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy … Ted Bundy, John List and Jeffrey Dahmer all tend to be bland and blobby and inarticulate?" asks Taylor. Lecter is charismatic, witty, and blessed with almost superhuman abilities — traits generally associated with fictional heroes.

Invited to dine with a cannibal: Trust me, you do not want to stick around for the main course....

Lecter is a man of "ferocious intelligence; cultured, literate and tasteful," commented the July 24, 1999 Manchester Guardian. "A man whose moral code is, at one level, completely at odds with society, yet a man who is consistently more attractive, intelligent and sensitive than many of the people who are out to get him." In this most recent — but not final — installment, Lecter "accomplishes nothing less than the final inversion of morality by wooing both the reader [or viewer] and the good guys over to his side.... No wonder his enemies are born-again Christians with a penchant for biblical language. And no wonder the literary editors are drooling over him.... Long live Hannibal. Just so long as one isn’t his next meal. What the hell, at least one would be consumed by a liberal cause."

Who Consumes Whom?

Los Angeles Times critic Eugen Weber correctly describes Lecter as the embodiment of Sade’s first rule of nature, which is "to seek my pleasure, no matter at whose expense." Sade’s "first rule" is broadly synonymous with what Lenin called the basic question of politics — "Kto kogo?" Typically translated as "Who does what to whom?" the Russian phrase can also be rendered, "Who consumes whom?" The essential assumption of Communism, which it shares with its sibling ideologies socialism and democracy, is that some people are entitled to consume others by using the state to plunder their wealth — and to liquidate those who resist this arrangement.

Hannibal Lecter, like the depraved characters given fictional life by Sade, glorifies the consumption of other human beings for individual gratification. It took the depraved genius of Marx, Lenin, and their disciples — and other practitioners of modern totalitarianism — to systematize such consumption as an ideology. It is incorrect to regard Communism as an economic philosophy; rather, it is a rationalization for total power and a means of mobilizing hatred toward that end.

Lenin defined the "scientific concept of dictatorship" as "power without limit, resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestrained by rules." Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci contributed a critical refinement to Lenin’s doctrine by emphasizing the need to undermine all moral impediments on the consolidation of power by a Communist elite. In order for Communism to triumph, wrote Gramsci, "The conception of law will have to be freed from every remnant of transcendence and absoluteness, practically from all moralist fanaticism."

Thus the destruction of "rules" — laws, customs, traditions, and institutions that are rooted in permanent standards of right and wrong — is a necessary prelude to the creation of the total state. This is the objective of the modern anti-morality movement — and the early Bolsheviks were occasionally quite candid about this aspect of their program.

"We reject the old systems of morality," declared the first issue of Krasnyi Mech (The Red Sword), a newspaper published by the Cheka (the ancestor of the KGB). "Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles.... Blood? Let blood flow like water … for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves...."

Not surprisingly, the ranks of the Cheka — the chief instrument of Soviet terror — were quickly filled by the most degenerate elements of society. "This organization is rotten to the core," observed Bolshevik official Serafina Gopner in a March 22, 1919 letter to Lenin. Those who enlisted to be the "sword and shield" of the revolution were, almost without exception, "common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape … practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money."

"The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately," reported a Bolshevik regional secretary in Yaroslavl on September 26th of the same year. "Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors."

A dispatch to Moscow dated October 16th informed Feliks Dzherzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that "Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance." Although they invoked the doctrines of Marx and followed the directives of Lenin, the depredations committed by the Chekists paid tribute to Communism’s little-acknowledged founding father, the Marquis de Sade.

According to Augustine, "A man has as many masters as he has vices." The desire of adherents of anti-morality, from Sade to his contemporary disciples in America’s entertainment cartel, is to dominate, not to liberate — to entice their victims into surrendering the moral restraints that are indispensable to individual liberty.

_____

*Part of that effort, as we've seen, involves blocking me from posting brief remarks on comment threads attached to current articles on the websites for the JBS and The New American -- and even, to the extent possible, preventing me for accessing the JBS website.

The former measure is meant to "protect" the JBS membership from my contaminating influence; since the latter ban can be easily circumvented, it's best described as a petulant gesture of pure, unalloyed spite, a product of adolescent resentment, and as such has the stink of Alan Scholl all over it.

Alan Stang: "He Never Stopped Punching"

2009-07-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

I first met Alan in 1964, shortly after the Goldwater defeat, and my initial impression held throughout the years: he was a fighter. He even looked and moved a little like a fighter, a bantamweight, and he never stopped punching. What a spirit he had. May he rest now in peace.

-- Lew Rockwell, commenting on the passing of Alan Stang, 77.

Alan Stang, who left us bereft of his company on July 19 to be with God, was a pugilistic patriot. His was the battered but unbowed determination of an underdog who knew that the only causes worth contending for are those considered "lost" by people who prefer comfortable servility to painful independence, and transient "respectability" over the honestly earned obloquy that is the inevitable -- albeit temporary -- reward of honest men in a consummately dishonest time.

As a bumper for his radio program "The Sting of Stang," Alan chose the theme from Rocky, which he regarded to be "among the greatest movies ever made." (I share that opinion, and would add that the final installment of that much-derided saga, Rocky Balboa, deserves mention on that list as well.) It was my privilege to guest host his program for a week about a year and a half ago.

Less than two weeks ago Alan called me and asked if I could substitute for him again while he traveled to California for a family gathering. With sincere regret I had to decline, because -- I believed -- my schedule simply wouldn't allow it. I now deeply regret not taking the opportunity to help Alan amid what he must have known to be the painful, dwindling final days of a well-lived life. Assuming that those now in God's company can be made aware of our doings, I wish to apologize.

Alan, please forgive me. I should have made the time to help you.

Alan, who had been the most prolific contributor to the JBS publications American Opinion and Review of the News before being cast down the organization's Memory Hole, was among the first to call me after I was cast off by the organization in October 2006.

"This is going to be a very challenging time for you," he said with the authority of someone who knows from experience. "It's very common for people who have worked for the Society for a long time to discover that it has a very well-earned reputation for treating ex-employees very badly. And of course long-term employees who are suddenly ex-employees find it difficult, even in good times, to parlay that line on a resume into a decent job."

Alan's words rang in my memory as I read a reply to a job inquiry -- one of scores of similar replies to scores of inquiries I made immediately after being kicked to the curb by Appleton -- that said, in essence, that while I was obviously a capable writer, my JBS background had left me "radioactive."

Alan likewise pointed out, long before I had the honor of speaking with him directly, that the people running the JBS seem to take a perverse pride in abandoning their wounded. This ignoble trait was also described in William Murray's memoir The Belmont Syndrome, his unpublished by vital memoir of working as a JBS coordinator in the 1970s.

"There are probably more former JBS coordinators than current ones," Murray wrote in 1979. "These wounded soldiers certainly don't want your pity, but have you really ever stopped to contemplate the magnitude of their plight? Many gave up promising careers to serve as coordinators, and their sacrifices were made consciously and willingly. When they leave the JBS staff, they enter the civilian job market with the equivalent of a military occupation stats as a machine-gunner. They're qualified for better things, of course, but their former occupation listed on their resume allows them to be night watchmen, night managers at the Holiday Inn, toll booth collectors on the parkway, or straight commission salesmen. Talk about burning your bridges!"

After he was cut loose by the JBS, Alan explained to me, he spent a lot of time "selling a lot of things" on straight commission. He had a gift for that profession -- it kept his family fed and clothed, after all -- but it was a scandalous waste of one of the larger writing and broadcasting talents of our time.

Murray, in The Belmont Syndrome, writes sympathetically of those disillusioned JBS employees who remain on staff out of a "rational fear of the predictale consequences of leaving" and seeking other employment with the three-letter Acronym of Doom on their resumes. That fear helps explain the emasculated behavior of people in JBS upper management: Their idea of boldness consists of ganging up to stab people in the back, rather than standing alone, when necessary, on matters of principle. In this they're quite typical of the corporate culture of modern collectivist America that is so perceptively satirized in Dilbert. But the JBS is supposed to represent something much better.

(Click to enlarge.)

Murray also referred to "tragic cases" of former JBS employees who can be found "attempting to rebuild their lives, while living with a deep sense of betrayal and grief."

He also found it tragically ironic that "the bad guys protect those who serve them well by rewarding themwith security and prestige in some CFR-dominated corporation, while the good guys unmercifully burn out their most talented soldiers, punishing them for their long years of loyal service by never attempting to salvage or rehabilitate them for an eventual returnto the fight" by helping them find suitable post-staff employment.

"At least the enemy retrieves its wounded," observed Murray.

The JBS, which boasts of being a beacon of truth and decency in a decadent world, is more inclined to shoot its own wounded and then to scrub them from its institutional memory or to demonize them outright. JBS management tried both approaches to Alan. At one time a decade ago, Appleton cultivated among membership the idea that he was, in the words of Erik Jay (nee Erik Johnson), former editor of The New American, "the devil incarnate." This was because he was publishing a website devoted to exposing precisely the institutional and managerial problems that eventually led to the "coup" of 2005.

Once the coup organizers were in place, they continued to treat Alan as a pariah, and dished out the same treatment to Kevin Bearly, Mark Horton, and others who had lost their JBS jobs trying to reform the organization.

In a scandalously terse and artfully buried obituary to Stang, JBS management correctly notes that he "never pulled his punches." More importantly, he never stopped fighting as long as God gave him breath, and according to his son Jay -- a former U.S. Marine who is a member of the Oath Keepers -- Alan surrendered that final breath with his hands lifted up to heaven, reaching out to embrace the Lord in whose firm and loving grasp, I'm confident, Alan's wonderfully pugnacious soul will eternally reside.

On the subject of the Memory Hole....

If you go to this page on the official JBS.org website, you will read a brief profile of John Birch, the "Patriotic Exemplar" from whom the organization takes its name.

As I recall, that essay was originally published in a December 1993 issue of The New American as a sidebar to this lengthier profile of Robert Welch, which was written by the estimable (and much-missed) Father James Thornton.

In the version on the JBS.org website, Fr. Thornton's authorship of that profile is acknowledged.

Oddly enough, there is no attributed author to for the brief profile of John Birch, which would leave the impression that it was an unsigned "house" or staff composition. It wasn't. It was written by Yours Truly, a fact that any honest organization would admit.

Perhaps the problem here is the prominence of this article as a brief introduction to John Birch and his remarkable life.

The folks in charge in Appleton really should either put my name on the piece, or replace it with one written by someone they're not so determined to airbrush out of the organization's history, ala The Commissar Vanishes.