In-Depth Articles – Heresy Central

The Pearl Harbor Betrayal and James Forrestal’s Death

2026-06-132026-06-13 David Martin

As told by Walter Trohan. If there were a major, influential news organ in the United States today that espoused the old fashioned America-first, anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, antiwar, limited-government conservatism of Rep. Ron Paul, it would look a lot like Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribuneof the early to mid-20th century. The closest thing we have to that now is on the Internet with web sites like LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, and, of course, Ron Unz. And if that news organ had a prominent, enterprising White House correspondent with contacts all over official Washington who was not afraid to challenge the President or anyone else, he or she would be a lot like Walter Trohan. Sarah McClendon was similar, but she had a…

What Did Anne Frank Have Against Americans?

2026-06-092026-06-09 David Martin

The book I had been reading was so interesting that I had finished it ahead of schedule, and the book I had ordered had not yet arrived. I began searching our empty nest for something to tide me over. What caught my eye in one of my sons’ vacated bedroom was the small volume, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Later I discovered that it had been assigned reading in the eighth grade, and the class was even shown the movie based on the book. Perfect. It’s relatively short, I had never read even one page of it, and here was the chance for me to catch up with the millions of other people who have read it. …

The Forrestal Murder and the News Media

2026-06-032026-06-03 David Martin

Fool’s Paradise Welcome to the American aquarium Where life can be lived without care. If you swim only where you’re supposed to, You won’t even know that you’re there. But thanks to my curiosity An upsetting thing came to pass: I followed the trail of a mystery And I discovered the glass. I wrote those lines in 1998. At that point I knew virtually nothing about James V. Forrestal, whom President Harry Truman had appointed as America’s first Secretary of Defense in 1947 after the creation of the Department of Defense by the National Security Act of the same year. I had recently read David McCullough’s biography entitled simply Truman, which has a short section on Forrestal’s decline and “suicide,”…

Confessions of a Murdering Sovereign American Hero

2025-10-07 David Martin

I was going through some old files looking for something else, when I stumbled across the touching, powerful statement that bears the title we see here. It comes from a newsletter of Sheila M. Reynolds, a name I don’t recognize. I do recognize the name of the author of the “Confessions,” Brian Mahoney. My recollection is that Mahoney got in touch with me after hearing me recite political poetry on the Jaz McKay radio show from the 50,000-watt station in Cleveland WWWE. Mahoney was apparently listening on his AM radio from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. For his protection, I never identified him by name, but my recollection is that it was he who called my attention to…

U.S. Ratchets Up Censorship

2025-09-242025-09-26 David Martin

Welcome to the Amazon aquarium, Where you can swim without care. If you only go where you’re supposed to, You won’t even know that you’re there. But thanks to my contrariness, An upsetting thing came to pass, Determined to showcase the truth, I discovered the glass. Here are a couple of customer book reviews of interest that are currently on the Amazon.com web site: He really cares a great deal about giving all of the various points of view… Having arrived at this subject matter by way of a recommendation of DC Dave (David Martin), I was a newcomer to the writing of the author Mike Campbell. I believe that Mr. Campbell is one of the most talented and passionate…

RFO Newsmax Has Huge Stock Price Increase after IPO

2025-04-022025-04-03 David Martin

The “IPO” abbreviation here is the familiar one, “initial public offering,” referring to the first sale of stock to the public by a company. “RFO” is one of our own coinage, meaning “rival fake opposition.” Newsmax made its stock available to the public for the first time just last Friday, and it has taken off like a rocket. When it comes to fake opposition to the long-dominant liberal mainstream media, it might be something of an exaggeration at this point to call Newsmax a rival to the big one, which is Fox News. I know that I find Newsmax quite boring and hard to watch compared to Fox, and the numbers at Adweek, though a bit difficult to decipher, tell…

Checking Microsoft Copilot on Thomas Merton’s Death

2025-03-082025-03-10 David Martin

Here is how Wikipedia describes Microsoft Copilot in its opening paragraph: Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on the GPT-4 series of large language models, it was launched in 2023 as Microsoft’s primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana. I had never even heard of Cortana, so after an email correspondent had sent me a snippet of his experience using Copilot to inquire about the May 22, 1949, death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, I decided to give it a spin on another death mystery that I happen to know a thing or two about, that of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who, according to popular lore, died of accidental electrocution by a…

The Korean War: A History

2024-08-282025-09-20 David Martin

A review If one were to read just one book about the fierce and very destructive war that took place on the Korean peninsula 1950-1953, this rather short (268 pages counting the endnotes) 2010 effort by Bruce Cumings, the retired chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, would not be the one that I would recommend. To the contrary, it would be just about the last book I would recommend if the reader were to go into the subject knowing very little. What it would be especially good for, though, would be reinforcing the leftist prejudices that the typical American college student takes away from his or her experience in higher education these days, particularly if…

Leonard Rawls, Wilber Hardee, and Hardee’s Restaurants

2024-04-182025-05-03 David Martin

Creating a Chain-Restaurant Foundation Myth Who founded the Hardee’s restaurant food chain? It should be a simple question to answer. What does Wikipedia have to say about that on its “Hardee’s” page? The first thing one might notice on the right-hand summary panel, even if he didn’t know it already, is that Hardee’s is a gigantic restaurant chain and that it was one of the earliest fast-food hamburger chains. The date of founding is given as June 23, 1960, while Ray Kroc hadn’t begun to turn McDonald’s into a nationally franchised chain until just five years before that, in 1955. As of February 2016, Wikipedia tells us, Hardee’s had 5,812 locations. In addition to the United States, it had restaurants…

Deep Roots of the Current Gaza Slaughter

2024-02-082024-02-09 David Martin

In our previous article about the napalming of refugees by the Israelis during the Six Day War, we quoted extensively from the 1971 book by the Canadian A.C. Forrest, The unHoly Land. That is also the primary source for this article. We must remember that the residents of the Gaza Strip are almost all the descendants of the people who were driven from their homes and their land in Palestine by the genocidal terror tactics of the colonizing, primarily European-origin Zionists in 1948 in the wake of the patently unfair UN partition of Palestine. We have been sold on the notion that this awarding of a majority chunk of Palestine to these Jewish refugees was a sort of payback for…

Genocidal Israelis Napalmed Civilian Refugees

2024-01-29 David Martin

We should hardly be surprised that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has found that there is a basis to proceed in the case brought by the government of South Africa against Israel for genocide in its attack on Gaza. Israel has a very bad record in matters such as this, most notably, in its ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. Less well known is its barbaric behavior during and immediately after the Six Day War of June 1967. At least those who are familiar with the event know that the Israelis shot up lifeboats and even dropped napalm on the deck of the USS Liberty during that war. Less well known is its use of napalm…

CIA Finally Pulling the Plug on Biden

2023-09-142023-09-14 David Martin

According to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, the signal to Traitor Joe Biden could hardly have been clearer: Make no mistake: Ignatius’ column is more than a suggestion- it’s a marching order. When American intelligence wants to put out a hit, they feed it to David Ignatius and today, Ignatius pulled the pin on Joe Biden’s 2024 run. He’s turning Washington’s whispers into a rallying cry. The American intelligence community has to tie up their loose ends. Even the media is falling in line: admitting the Democratic party is a dishonest monolith. A mob that can’t function when it’s fractured. The Biden-Kamala ticket is being cancelled in its entirety and the intelligence community is making a calculation. He’s talking about Ignatius’…

Amazon Censorship

2022-12-142024-06-05 David Martin

I posted this poem on my web site when the Internet was still in its infancy. Of Swords and Pens The pen may be stronger than the sword, But pens, like guns, can be bought. And battles of words, like battles with guns, Can be unfairly fought. Those who rule know all too well The power of the word, And so they ration carefully The ones that can be heard. In our land there’s little chance That virtue will prevail When “truth” is a consumer good And words are all for sale. That was on April 5, 1998, and the word battlefield has changed quite a bit since then. Back then, control of the airwaves, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and…

American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

2022-03-232022-03-26 David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article. It was right there on my AOL News. Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

2022-01-282022-01-28 David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice. He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music. Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more. The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

2022-01-072024-01-19 David Martin

One might think that the remarks of the well-known historian, Counsel on Foreign Relations member, Douglas Brinkley, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol Building, ostensibly mainly by people protesting what they perceived to be the theft of the 2020 Presidential election, would be embarrassing to the other members of his profession. To compare that relatively mild dust-up to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and even the Holocaust has to strike any sensible person as complete lunacy. We have noticed, though, that those who practice his trade in the United States, at least in our lifetime, are really not very much interested in anything so bothersome to them as the truth. Apparently, it has been the…

The Early Thai Reports, the Press, and the Abbey on Thomas Merton’s Death

2021-12-152021-12-15 David Martin

by David Martin and Hugh Turley The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print. Its Kindle edition as of this writing has 803 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Merton was a prolific writer. The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, lists 106 books that he authored, 42 of which were published before his mysterious violent death on December 10, 1968, while he was attending a monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand.…

“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

2021-10-252024-05-18 David Martin

His name is a simple one, but it is not a common one, and it’s not often in the news, so that makes it rather easy to forget. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to call it up. All you have to do it to turn to the “senior citizen’s memory,” the Internet, and search “dean of Cold War historians.” It doesn’t matter whether you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. They all agree that the native Texan, Yale University history professor, longtime George W. Bush friend and admirer and CFR member, John Lewis Gaddis is the man. When it comes to what Gaddis has had to say about a vitally important American leader in the early years of the Cold…

Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke

2020-10-152022-05-14 David Martin

I graduated from Davidson College in 1965. President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., who died violently and mysteriously in 1993, graduated in 1967. My senior year there I was the secretary of the Young Democrats Club and Vince was a member. At about the same height, we also matched up against one another in intramural basketball. I had known that the college had changed quite a bit since our graduation, but developments in the past two years have come down on me like a ton of bricks. Had Vince lived, I don’t think he would recognize his old college. Unfortunately, from all I have seen lately, Davidson is not all that atypical of colleges and universities…

Life in the Confederate Army

2020-03-202022-12-24 David Martin

Not Fighting for Slavery There is no chain so heavy or yoke so oppressive as that which men will unwittingly place upon their own necks, or bend their necks to receive, while being beguiled and led along by liberty shriekers under their pretended banner of freedom. – William Watson On February 16, I sent the following email to the 14 members of the history faculty at my alma mater, Davidson College, as well as to one emeritus history faculty member. They were all open copied. At the same time, I blind copied 148 members of my class. At the closing of the email, I identified myself as a member of the graduating class of 1965: My freshman English professor…