mass media – Heresy Central

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

2023-02-062023-02-09 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

2022-12-142022-12-15 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

2022-06-252022-06-25 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

2022-03-042022-03-25 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

2021-10-252022-11-01 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.

CIA Election Meddling

2021-02-192021-02-21 David Martin

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…

Bought Journalists: The Case of Udo Ulfkotte

2021-02-172021-01-24 James Tracy

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.

Mask of Virtue

2021-02-032021-01-12 James Tracy

Over the course of many years George Soros has used philanthropy as a guise under which his panoply of front groups to use “social justice activism” against entire countries to enact “soft coup” regime change. Such tactics of late have been tied to the wave of rioting, violence and vandalism that has swept the US in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election. “O Mary … Defend [us] with your power against all enemies, and especially against those who hide their malice behind the mask of virtue.”-St. Maria Faustina Kowalska Memory Hole Blog Report is the official video series of http://memoryholeblog.org

Kavanaugh Stabbed Supporters, Nation in the Back over Vote

2021-01-292021-01-30 David Martin

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…

Manufactured Covid Lockdowns? The Covid Tracking Project

2021-01-202021-01-12 James Tracy

MHB Report States across America are now declaring severe lockdowns in response to a regular stream of disturbing Covid statistics. Yet who’s behind then number-crunching? The terrifying figures are generated by the Covid Tracking Project, an obscure entity operated by a group of biotech entrepreneurs and young statistics novices, and housed at Apple Computer heiress Laurene Powell Jobs’ far-left Atlantic magazine.

Nashville Bombing: Ten Questions

2021-01-062020-12-30 James Tracy

MHB Report (December 29, 2020) The December 25, 2020 bombing in Nashville Tennessee and its ongoing investigation prompts many questions on what exactly took place before, during and after the violently destructive event. Tellingly, such questions are deemed unworthy of consideration. For example, what are the potential designs behind this terrifying incident? In what ways may such ‘domestic terrorism’ be used by government and corporate media to intimidate the public and serve hidden political agendas? The public cannot anticipate that conventional news media will investigate and expose such events. Even so, they provide pieces to a complex puzzle that citizen analysts are left to make sense of.

Bolshevik Lives Matter

2020-12-232020-12-12 James Tracy

MHB Report (September 11, 2020) The communist revolutionary narrative playing out in the US today by way of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and ultimately their wealthy benefactors, has taken place numerous times throughout the world over the past two centuries. In most every instance the plan for wide scale political and social destabilization uses an aggrieved minority to inflict terror and destruction against established social, economic and political majorities and ways of life. Along these lines Russia and China’s communist revolutions resulted in wide scale religious persecution of Christians. After several months of destabilization and the approaching presidential election the US may be dangerously on the brink of civil war. MHB Report is the official video series of memoryholeblog.org

Lords of Fake News and Election Fraud

2020-12-152020-12-12 James Tracy

MHB Report (December 8, 2020) Pioneer journalist and media critic George Seldes authored a book titled Lords of the Press over 80 years ago. With a handful of media conglomerates controlling most of what the US public sees and hears, the observation couldn’t be more important today. Where does the buck stop in major news media? The Boards of Directors of these companies are ultimately responsible for the multitude of false and misleading news and commentary masquerading as “journalism” over the past four years–a stream of calculated misinformation that has culminated in what may be one of the most corrupt presidential elections in US history.