mass media – Heresy Central

Raymond Aron on Leftists

2025-03-112025-03-11 David Martin

Raymond Aron in The Opium of the Intellectuals: An honest and intelligent person can never become a leftist. An honest leftist is bad-headed, and a smart leftist is dishonest. If you don’t know the contradictory essence of socialism, you’re stupid, and if you know and follow it, you’re a liar. Null Set II Honest, intelligent, and a leftist, You know what’s occurred to me? Such is the nature of socialism, It’s impossible to be all three. This poem is my update of “Null Set,” which I posted in June of 1998: Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what…

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 Ballad of Patrick Knowlton

2024-08-202024-12-30 David Martin

Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster death loses conspiracy appeal Washington Times, January 9, 2001, p. A7 Before he’d arrived at the end of the line A little publicity would have been fine, Shedding some light and putting some heat Upon all those justices’ honorable feet. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the press erased. But they wait till the court in their wisdom refuse To give him a hearing to bring us the news. It’s a story, alas, that is getting quite old; A citizen’s wronged; then he’s out in the cold, And once it’s too late, the public is told. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the…

Illegal Israel

2024-03-042024-03-04 David Martin

More Money for Israel Fuel beneath a cauldron of hate At the heart of the Middle East mess; Protecting an ethnic-supremacist state, Defending its right to oppress. With the current wanton slaughter of Palestinians in which the state of Israel is currently engaged, it’s almost enough to give outlaws a bad name. Even NBC News puts the current death toll in the war in the small area of Gaza at 30,000, and anyone can see from the nature of the destruction of housing complexes, hospitals, schools, churches, and refugee camps, that most of the victims are Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children. The fact of the matter, though, is that Israel is, indeed, an outlaw state and it has been…

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’…

Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin

2023-09-022024-03-14 David Martin

Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigrozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who had led a mutiny against the Russian government, was no simple accident. In fact, word has leaked from U.S. intelligence that an intentional explosion brought the airplane down and that President Vladimir Putin was behind it. The CIA would have some familiarity with such methods. The contrived “accident” is right there in their assassination manual as an expedient form of secret assassination, allowing the perpetrator to deny responsibility for something deemed not to be a murder at all and attracting little attention. An airplane crash is not on their list of contrived accidents, but it takes…

Propaganda Press

2023-08-142024-12-30 David Martin

To the tune of “Rock N Roll Train” Keyboard warriors Big time liars Selling us a fantasy Loaded up with treachery Throw it out, pitch it Believable they’re not Yes, they’re adding to our rot Shout it out, “Screw it” Strike while irons are hot We’re tired of fantasy Seeing through treachery Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) One hard pounded drum La créme de la scum No shame in their perfidy Stooges for the Agency Shake ‘em, drop ‘em Believable they’re not We ought to make it for them hot See the light, tune ‘em out Come…

The Most Under-Reported Big News Story

2023-06-022023-06-02 David Martin

It’s definitely Tara Reade’s defection. One has to be a real news hound even to know that Joe Biden’s accuser has taken refuge in Russia. This looks like a very rational decision on Reade’s part to me. The very light reporting given to her allegations all along was a very bad sign for her, suggesting that she would never get any protection from our nation’s molders of public opinion. One could imagine reading about her unfortunate “suicide” almost any day. Had Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “DC Madam,” demonstrated Reade’s prudence, she would, in all likelihood, be alive and well today. While on the subject of underreported defections to Russia, we should not forget about John Mark Dougan, who used to have a Wikipedia page.…

Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

2023-02-232023-02-24 David Martin

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…

Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

2023-02-062024-02-12 David Martin

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…

The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

2023-01-312023-02-04 David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand? That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968. One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time. Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there. America’s…

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…

Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

2022-06-252024-06-02 David Martin

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…

Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

2022-04-222022-07-09 David Martin

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech. Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.” Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

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…

Important Assassination Movie Quashed

2022-03-042023-06-30 David Martin

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…

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…

Google, Tool of the Deep State

2021-06-252022-08-01 David Martin

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…

The Culture of Complaint

2021-04-022021-04-01 James Tracy

This video profiles the “executions” of three education industry workers’ careers to illustrate how the identity-based protests underlying today’s “culture of complaint” phenomenon has been in existence for centuries. A like-minded protest on false pretenses was used by the Pharisees and their followers to secure the most well-known public execution of all time.