Did Thomas Merton Have a Love Child?

The late writer and peace activist, Jim Forest, was a good friend and regular correspondent with the notable Catholic spiritual and political leader, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.  Merton, in fact, dedicated his 1968 book, Faith and Violence, to the Jesuit priest and anti-Vietnam War activist, Phil Berrigan, and to his fellow activist, Forest. Forest’s 2008 book, Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, is, for the most part, an excellent introduction to the life and works of Merton.  It is a revised and expanded version of the book with the same title published in 1991, which was itself an expansion upon the much smaller Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography published in 1979.  The 2008 incarnation continues to be…

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Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February  14, 2023.  The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation.  The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

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Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind the belief that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution.  The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott.  For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background. The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me.  It is…

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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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Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998.  There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed.  No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days.  It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

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Important Assassination Movie Quashed

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations.  A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time.  This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner.  Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

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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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Untruths in Forrestal Book Review

The latest reviewer of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, one “Robert Buckley,” (kin to William F.?) en route to giving it just two stars—compared to the 4.5 out of 5 average of 205 customer reviews—has the following to say on Amazon.com: I agree with the other commenters who said that the book needs a good editor. There’s too much information of doubtful relevance. Martin makes a pretty good case that the Zionists had a motive to kill Forrestal, but as any lawyer knows, motive by itself does not prove a case. There must be other evidence.  Martin, for example, fails to give us any suggestion of how the “murder” could actually have been carried out. Forrestal was in…

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Godfather of Soviet Containment Is Cancel Culture Victim

In early 2020, I sent an email to 14 members of the history faculty of my alma mater, Davidson College, including one emeritus professor, whose primary purpose was to call their attention to a recent article by Laurent Guyénot entitled, “Fifteen Years before Kennedy, Zionists Murdered Forrestal.”  I have no idea how it was generally received, because only the emeritus professor responded, and, curiously, he ignored the main subject and chose to take issue with my take on the U.S. Civil War as he deduced from my article, “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech,” which I had alluded to in passing in the email. You can read about the episode in the beginning of my review article, “Life in the Confederate…

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Google, Tool of the Deep State

Was Vince Foster’s Murder over Pedophilia?   The work on this article began when I recently stumbled across a quite well-made video on YouTube by an outfit called Traditionalist Tolkienist.  It had been up since February of 2020, and if you can believe YouTube’s viewer count, very few people had watched it up to that point.  I began to wonder how the excellent video had remained so obscure for more than a year, so, as a first step, I did a search using the default search engine for my Mac computer, which happens to be Google, for the video’s title, “Vince Foster: The Deep State’s Worst Murder Cover-up.” At this point, you’ll have to take my word for it, but…

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CIA Election Meddling

In recent history, the only American president who has garnered anything resembling the bad press that Donald Trump consistently received was Jimmy Carter in the latter stages of his presidency.  Probably not coincidentally, Carter and Trump were both ushered out of the Oval Office after one term.  In the 24 years since George H.W. Bush was top dog for one term, we had three presidents in Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama who were smiled upon by the press.  Their gentle press treatment was exemplified by the conduct of their press conferences. Clinton was the best actor of the three, making it appear that he had chosen the reporter he was calling on spontaneously.  Bush wasn’t nearly as good…

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Bought Journalists: The Case of Udo Ulfkotte

MHB Report German author and newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte has been among the few prestigious mainstream journalists to tell the public that it’s being lied to by a large majority journalists and news organizations, most of which manipulate readerships for bribes and professional one-upmanship. Ulfkotte’s mea culpa was titled Bought Journalists, a German best-seller translated into nine languages, the English translation of which had to overcome unusual hurdles before finally coming to fruition.

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Vince Foster, Race, and Davidson College Snowflakes

It seemed like a good idea.  President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was a member of Davidson College’s graduating class of 1967.  He is listed among the college’s notable alumni on its Wikipedia page.  He died mysteriously, as you may recall, six months to the day after Clinton’s presidential inauguration, his body having been discovered lying behind a berm deep in a Civil War relic, Fort Marcy Park, off the George Washington Parkway across the Potomac River from the capital in Virginia.  My article, “Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol Quillen on Corruption” deals primarily with that case. One would think that the article might be of interest to my fellow graduates of the…

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Kavanaugh Stabbed Supporters, Nation in the Back over Vote

Looking back now at the great Presidential election theft of 2020, it becomes ever clearer that the best chance to bring it to a halt and reverse course was represented by the lawsuit of the state of Texas challenging the election result in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin (summarized in the American Thinker here).  Texas was joined by 126 members of the U.S. Congress and 17 state attorneys general in an amicus brief.  The suit and the brief argue, I believe very persuasively, that authority granted by the Constitution to the state legislatures in choosing presidential electors was usurped by the executive branch in each of those states, creating novel voting systems that virtually invited…

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Letter to William Styron about Vince Foster’s Death

The most famous former student of my alma mater, Davidson College, future President Woodrow Wilson, only spent one year there before transferring to Princeton.  Were it not for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, one might well say that the college’s most famous students never graduated from the college, because NBA star Stephen Curry has yet to do so and, like Wilson, the subject of this article, Wilson’s fellow Virginia native William Styron spent only one year at Davidson before transferring away, in his case to Duke. Styron had a curious special article in Newsweek magazine on April 18, 1994, that caught my eye.  It was about the mysterious death of the 1967 Davidson graduate, deputy…

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Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol Quillen on Corruption

Dear President Quillen, On June 1 of this year, you sent out a message to the Davidson College community in which you said “systemic racism” was a big problem in the country.  On June 10, a substantial number of others at Davidson went even further along those lines with their “Faculty Statement of Systemic Racism and Injustice.” I believe that I have effectively rebutted those claims as laid out in my October 15 article, “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke.”  But the recent presidential election has brought to a head a much more serious and demonstrable systemic malady that infects the country, and that is corruption.  Unfortunately, the academic community, hardly any less than the journalistic and entertainment communities and the…

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When Bill Kristol Heard the Vince Foster Witness Story

Guest article by Hugh Turley The headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation is located on the edge of Capitol Hill a block east of Union Station. I have attended quite a few functions there in their main auditorium to hear interesting speakers. They serve refreshments in a little anteroom where one can socialize with other attendees, often including the guest speaker. In this instance in the first week of March 1996, the speaker was the influential editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, William Kristol. I don’t recall his topic. I had been working with Patrick Knowlton, the key witness in the matter of the July 20, 1993, mysterious death of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel in president Bill…

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The Other British Forrestal?

Chapter Six of The Assassination of James Forrestal is entitled, “Britain’s Forrestal.” The title character is Ernest Bevin, who was Foreign Secretary in the British Labour government from 1945 to 1951. Bevin, like Forrestal, won the enmity of the Zionists by resisting their ambitions in Palestine. Zionist terrorists attempted to assassinate him with letter bombs in 1946 when Britain still held the Mandate for Palestine, governing control over the region that it had been granted by the League of Nations in 1920. Since Bevin was the leading opponent of the Zionists in the British government at the time, and since they attempted to kill him, the parallels between him and Forrestal would appear to be obvious. However, there are two…

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