Amazon Censorship

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…

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American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

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…

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“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

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…

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Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

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…

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

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.…

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“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

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…

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Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke

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…

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Life in the Confederate Army

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…

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Pearl Harbor vs. 9/11

(Piece originally written by Dave Martin in 2014) When asked the question, “What impresses you more about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their absence of intelligence or their absence of integrity,” a ready answer comes to mind, and it is clearly not the same for each. But in the case of Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I think you will have to agree that it’s a tough call. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw in the pages of The New York Times that Rumsfeld had essayed a comparison between the momentous events in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and in New York City, Arlington, VA, and Shanksville, PA, on September…

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JFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’

By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…

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NPRavda Features Double Agent Ruddy

​The late Wesley Pruden, when editor of the conservative Washington Times, once observed that, “At NPR all the guys sound like girls and all the girls sound like guys.” He was right on the money, I thought, but, curiously, that’s about the harshest thing I think I’ve ever heard said about National Public Radio from a right-wing commentator, or by any commentator, for that matter. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the rest of them regularly rip into CNN, MSNBC, the three major TV networks, and The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I don’t recall ever hearing any of them say anything at all about this very influential organization that is partially funded by taxpayer dollars. You have to wonder…

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The Carolinas, Jews, and China

Sidney Rittenberg died on August 24 of this year, ten days after his 98th birthday. He was probably the most famous American collaborator with the Chinese Communist regime of Mao Zedong (We are not counting Chinese government official, Israel Epstein, as American, although he had his book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, published during the crucial five years in which he lived in the United States). Like Epstein, Rittenberg got long obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post. They might not have been as glowing as Epstein’s, but they were far from being as negative as they might have been for this long-term leading turncoat and propagandist for the murderous Mao regime. Although the Times seemed to treat him with some approval by headlining…

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James Forrestal’s “Anti-Semitism”

(This article is adapted from Chapter 2 of my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. ​ Terms of Opprobrium “Anti-Semitic”, “conspiracy theorist” Throw in “isolationist,” too. We don’t need laws to limit out thoughts When labeling language will do. The year was around 2004, as I recall, and I was attending an in-house lunchtime lecture by a professor from Georgetown University at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington on the subject of President Harry Truman’s racial integration of the United States military. I beg the indulgence of the readers, but I have completely forgotten the professor’s name. I do recall, though, that he was quite obviously Jewish. During the question and answer period after his lecture I suggested that…

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James Forrestal’s “Breakdown”

Chapter 32 of Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley’s widely acclaimed 1992 biography of America’s first Secretary of Defense, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, is entitled “Breakdown.”  It begins like this: Forrestal was present at Louis Johnson’s swearing-in ceremony at the Pentagon on the morning of March 28 [1949].  Shortly thereafter, in accordance with custom, he drove to the White House for a final good-bye to the President.  To his surprise, Truman had assembled the entire Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other government dignitaries, and there followed a second ceremony, this one honoring the retiring Secretary of Defense for “meritorious and distinguished service.”  The President, beaming and ebullient, added his personal congratulations in effusive terms, and the audience warmly applauded the…

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James Forrestal, the Great Patriot

(Note to readers: The following article is the introduction to my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, with hyperlinks added.) Fear Factor The truth may be there to see. But it won’t, like magic, appear. You must seek it diligently, And not be restrained by fear. James Vincent Forrestal was born on February 15, 1892, in the town of Matteawan, New York, on the Hudson River in Dutchess County between West Point and Poughkeepsie. In 1913, the town merged with adjacent Fishkill Landing and adopted the name, “Beacon,” after Beacon Mountain, the most notable landmark in the small urban area. His father, also named James, had emigrated from County Cork in Ireland to the town in 1857 at the age of…

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YouTube’s Complete Corruption Revealed

In July of last year, we published an article entitled, “YouTube Censorship Really Hits Home.” In that article, we told of our discovery that some of our song parodies had been taken down from YouTube. I had collaborated first with the Cheverly Brothers to set four political parodies of Everly Brothers’ songs to music and then with Gary King, the video maker for Jim Fetzer, to make them into videos. Those videos turned out to be collateral damage in the taking down of Fetzer’s video channel by YouTube. Something good came out of the experience, though. Fetzer, as described in the article, had turned to the independent video platform, 153News, to carry his video channel. King had used his own…

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The Host & the Parasite

What public-spirited American would not want to read a book with the provocative title that its author, Canadian journalist, Greg Felton has given it, The Host & the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America? One potential eager reader who readily comes to mind is the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, as we can see from his widely attacked recent remarks before a gathering in Detroit: “To the members of the Jewish community that don’t like me, thank you very much for putting my name all over the planet … I’m not mad at you, ’causeyou’re so stupid,” Farrakhan said. “So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know they do, call me an antisemite —…

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The Ghost of John Morton

(This blog post is a draft of the opening chapter of a book that I am writing about the alleged New Year’s 2015 mass sexual assaults in Germany and the entire “Muslim Rape Epidemic” hoax narrative that this is part of. JR) The Ghost of John Morton “If the subject is seen to live frugally, tell him because he is clearly a money saver of great ability, he can afford to give generously to the King. If, however, the subject lives a life of great extravagance, tell him he,too, can afford to give largely, the proof of his opulence being evident in his expenditure.” John Morton, Lord Chancellor of England, 1487-1500 Though John Morton’s original formulation refers specifically to taxation,…

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Zionism Contradicts Judaism

New York historian, journalist, and lecturer, Alfred M. Lilienthal, was the leading 20th century American Jewish spokesman against the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. His views gained a wide audience in the United States when his essay, “Israel’s Flag Is Not My Flag,” was published in the September 1949 Reader’s Digest. The following is an excerpt from that article, which was written in the form of a letter to his mother: The plain fact is that we Jews are not a race and we should not let the Zionists persuade us that we are. Proof to the contrary lies in Palestine, plain for all to see. You had my letter, Mother, from my Army furlough there. I was…

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Demographics on the Ground

I live in the 10th Congressional District of Virginia, in the southwestern corner of Fairfax County, which on its eastern side is just across the river from Washington, DC. The Republican, Frank Wolf, was my Congressman when we moved here in 1983, up until his retirement in 2014. After 1982, Wolf won re-election by large margins every two years. His former aide, Barbara Comstock, a “moderate” Republican, succeeded him and won re-election in 2016, although, uncharacteristically, the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, won the presidential vote in the district by 10 percentage points. Noting the changing demographics of her district, Comstock had been one of the never-Trumpers in the GOP, and it had probably saved her in 2016, but the handwriting was on…

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