
Conspiracy realism…


On June 5, 1968, a few minutes after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while walking through a narrow serving area called “the pantry.” Kennedy had just won the California primary and was on his way to a room where print media reporters were waiting to hear him speak.
In early March, Lyndon B. Johnson had thrown open the race by announcing that he would not seek re-election because of the failure of his Vietnam policy. Kennedy emerged as a leading contender by energizing the youth wing of the party with his calls for sweeping social change.
Kennedy was in many ways a strange liberal icon because he grew up idolizing Herbert Hoover, was closest in his family to his father, Joseph, the millionaire business tycoon, began his career supporting Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt, called for victory against communism in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and oversaw a terrorist campaign designed to overthrow the Cuban government.
Nevertheless, by the latter part of the 1960s, Kennedy had evolved into a crusader for the poor and dove on Vietnam who was trying to ride the wave of the protest movement into the White House.[1]
Biographers Lester and Irene David wrote that Bobby was the Kennedy who “felt deepest, cared the most, and fought the hardest for humanity—crying out against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, championing the causes of blacks, Hispanics, and Mexican-Americans, and crusading against the suffering of children, the elderly and anyone else hurt or bypassed by social and economic progress.”[2]
After Kennedy’s death, the Democratic Party became a shadow of its former self, with six of the next nine presidents being Republicans. The Party in this period abandoned its core base—union laborers, minorities, and blue-collar workers—focusing instead on Wall Street.
Ethan Phelan Melzer’s secret life of hate ran deep. The 24-year-old private in the 173rd Airborne Brigade appeared to be just another young soldier, trying to find his way through military life at Fort Benning, Georgia. However, in his private time, prosecutors allege, Melzer had another, sinister side: He said he liked to perform macabre blood rituals; read obscure, gruesome tracts about torture and child abuse; collected violent iconography; and found like minds in the depths of Telegram, an encrypted messaging app so favored by extremists of all stripes that it is often referred to as “Terrorgram.” His handle was “Etil Reggad” — a near anadrome for “Elite Dagger.”
By Melzer’s own account, enlisting in the Army was a ruse — on the encrypted app, he wrote that he had joined up solely to gain knowledge of military weaponry and tactics. “It’s great for training,” he wrote, adding a cryptic remark about his base. “All of these places the vast majority deserve to be burned.”
Melzer repeatedly trash-talked the Army and described it as merely a means to hone his violent skills. “I’m not patriotic for shit,” he wrote to another radical who was considering enlisting in the Marines. Telegram chats disclosed by the government in court filings reveal his efforts to mask his true beliefs: “I fly under the radar already, act completely normal around other people outside and don’t talk about my personal life or beliefs with anyone.”
The young paratrooper said he was conducting what he called an “insight role” — both infiltrating and subverting an institution, one of the core tenets of the Order of Nine Angles, a secretive, nihilistic, bloodthirsty satanist-Nazi sect, to which, prosecutors allege, Melzer swore allegiance.
Once confined to the most obscure occultism, “O9A” ideology has spread like wildfire via the internet and the global fascist resurgence of the 2010s. Its cells, known as “nexions,” have cross-pollinated with the millenarian neo-Nazi worldview popularized by the wannabe 21st-century Tim McVeighs of the Atomwaffen Division, a group of American extremists who celebrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, venerated terrorists like Anders Breivik and psychopaths like Charles Manson, and have been connected to five murders and numerous bomb plots.
The key evangelical for O9A, the figure who facilitated this macabre wedding of apocalyptic death cults, is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a 41-year-old ex-convict, prolific satanist, publisher of manuscripts advocating murder, torture, rape, and child abuse — and a paid FBI informant since 2004.
Sutter’s O9A message is a lunatic mashup of vampirism, Columbine-style death worship, and edgelord posturing, specifically designed to lure in the lost, angry, and transgressive types like Melzer.
The Washington Post dubbed it “the smoking gun tape.” It was the recording that doomed the presidency of Richard Nixon. The transcript of a conversation that took place on June 23, 1972, when made public by Supreme Court order in July 1974, became the climactic revelation of the Watergate affair, proving beyond all doubt that Nixon used CIA director Richard Helms to suborn the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate burglars.
Fifty years after the botched break-in that transformed American politics, the gangsterly dialogue of the smoking gun tape is less shocking than Trumpian. Blackmail as a mode of White House politics? President 45 had nothing on President 37.
“We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon growled on the tape. “You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, [ex-CIA man and Watergate burglar Howard] Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”
Nixon advised chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on how to get the CIA director to kill the FBI’s probe.
“Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”
The June 23 tape was incontrovertible evidence that Nixon had obstructed justice. The last vestige of support for Nixon on Capitol Hill evaporated. Two weeks later, on Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.
But the “smoking gun tape” was not only the denouement of the Watergate affair. It was — and is — an unsettling glimpse into the dark heart of the Watergate scandal, and the workings of American power in the mid-20th century. The commander in chief voiced ominous threats that reeked of unspoken crimes to his intelligence chief, whose agency had employed four of the seven burglars. For the next 50 years, Nixon’s entourage, JFK conspiracy theorists, journalists and historians pondered the June 23 tape as a Rosetta Stone of Nixon’s psyche. What “hanky panky” was Nixon referring to? What did he mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing?” What story was going to “blow” if the CIA didn’t cooperate?
A long-overlooked White House tape provides the answers. The “hanky panky” referred to CIA assassination operations in the early 1960s. The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was the Agency’s reaction to its most humiliating defeat. And the story that might blow was the connection between those events and the murder of JFK.

An Iraqi man living in Columbus, Ohio, has been charged by federal authorities for allegedly plotting to smuggle foreign nationals into the United States as part of a plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush.
Agents from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, 52, Tuesday morning. He appeared in federal court at 2:30 p.m. and his case was unsealed at that time, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Authorities caught Shihab in a sting set up under the direction of the FBI.
In August 2021, Shihab allegedly intended to help who he thought was an Iraqi citizen enter the country for a $40,000 fee.
“Shihab provided specific instructions on how he would smuggle the person into the United States after 60 days. In October and December 2021, Shihab accepted tens of thousands of dollars for the purported smuggling. In reality, the individual was fictitious, and the interaction was coordinated under the direction of the FBI,” the DOJ said in a release.

On September 7th, 2001 I was on a business trip to New York as an employee of Sprint. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and I recall standing in a skyscraper on Times Square and looking down Broadway towards Lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers. Four days later I was hiking in Zion National Park when the world exploded into madness.
For years I had no reason to question the official narrative of that day, and accepted it without question. I was aware of “conspiracy theories” and alternative views, but I saw them as fringe and unimportant. My life revolved around professional advancement, small children, and personal dislocations.
The illegal and illegitimate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave me pause for thought. I remember giving Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt over the Iraq war, and dismissing the case made by peace protestors that the WMD pretext was fabricated. Clearly, I was wrong, and had been fooled.
Around the year 2010 I returned to the story of 9/11, and began to dig into these challenges to the widely accepted account. The more I looked, the greater was my concern. I could not be sure what had happened, or who really was behind the attacks, or what the real motive was. But I could not reconcile the hard data with the standard explanation given.
To believe the official version, you had to overlook a lot of very hard-to-ignore anomalies. The Twin Towers had free-fall collapsed, turning to dust on the way down, and leaving minimal piles of rubble (compared to their size) heaped upon molten rock that took months to cool. The suggested progressive collapse process breaks the law of conservation of momentum.
WTC7 also implausibly collapsed on itself due to “office fires”, with it being announced by the BBC before it happened. A secret engineering model was used to justify this unlikely and unique event. WTC6 had its core disappear, but that can be overlooked as unimportant. All the crime scene debris was hauled off to China for disposal rather than kept.
There was evidence of pre-planted explosives, and you could even see some going off prematurely on floors below the one that was failing. Multiple eyewitness reports also gave evidence of explosions before the collapse. The alleged aircraft flew implausible flight paths only to leave negligible debris. The towers were explicitly designed to withstand such an impact, yet both failed in exactly the same way.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon, another “aircraft” magically skimmed the grass only to disappear into a hold in the wall smaller than its fuselage, with no trace of impact of wings or engines. That wall just happened to have the audit team for the theft of trillions of dollars that had been announced the day before. The “crash” in Pennsylvania also (coincidentally I am sure) left no visible aircraft debris.
Speaking of money, the evidence of massive insurance fraud was self-evidently irrelevant. So was all the insider dealing in the stock market that presaged what was to come. All common sense questions about money and military matters could be overlooked, especially anything to do with the Saudis. Meanwhile, all this happened while the military stood down and no planes were scrambled. And just by coincidence (again) the CCTV cameras were all turned off at the Pentagon so there was no evidence to contradict the official version. Why so?
The biased and under-resourced investigation committee ignored reams of objections from military, pilots, architects, engineers, and first responders (who perplexingly seemed to be dying from conditions more associated with radiation poisoning). The patsy offered immediately and unquestioningly at the outset was accepted as the perpetrator. No alternative theories were entertained.
Nobody should ever consider this a pre-planned event, especially given decades of foreshadowing in the mass media. Indeed, the occult symbolism all over it — George Bush reading “My Pet Goat” for instance — is of no relevance whatsoever. We should automatically agree that the two wars and millions of dead that flowed from the official story are a price worth paying for our freedom.
Looking back it is hard to see how anyone can believe the official story, it is so ridiculous and full of holes. But a decade ago I still doubted myself, because to reject it raised two profound issues. The first was that our collective sense of reality was wrong, and our system of government was corrupt and criminal to its core, yet most people believed in it somehow. The second was why there was no objection from honest military people and no obvious counter-movement to depose these criminals from power.
These lingering questions meant I kept my views to myself and didn’t discuss them in my professional or public spheres. In the years that followed my first accepted “conspiracy theory”, I was involved in paradigm-busting and pioneering telecoms work. My expert colleagues were well versed in seeing through the nonsense of the mainstream ideology. Yet one day I suggested that the Apollo story was a bit off, and they looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
If you want to dig into the moon landing story, I suggest the wonderful essay series “Wagging the Moondoggie” by (the sadly departed) Dave McGowan. It is fabulous writing, and exceptionally funny once you dig into it. If the 9/11 story is tragically absurd, the Apollo one is astronomically comical. I cannot imagine any reasonable and rational person coming away from reading this and still having no questions about the offered version of events.

Special Counsel John Durham appears to have methodically built a case of historic consequence. It’s just not the case he has brought against bigshot Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann.
Jury selection begins in Sussmann’s trial on Monday, in Washington, DC. It will be the first trial to arise out of the Russiagate probe, which began over three years ago. That’s when former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr assigned Durham, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to investigate how, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign and based upon scant evidence, the FBI came to suspect one of the candidates of being a clandestine agent of the Kremlin — to the point of opening counterintelligence and criminal investigations targeting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
According to court filings in the Sussmann case, Durham has fingered the Hillary Clinton campaign as the culprit. The problem is that Durham has not charged that fraudulent scheme. Yet, he wants to offer evidence of the sweeping scheme in order to prove a comparatively minor and narrow offense — namely, that Sussmann lied to the FBI at a single meeting, on September 19, 2016.
Durham theorizes that the Clinton campaign concocted a political smear that Trump was a Putin puppet, then peddled the tale to a compliant media and to the FBI. This would enable Clinton to tout the “evidence” of corrupt Trump-Russia ties as so serious that the Feds were investigating.
Durham contends that the Clinton campaign left most of the scandal-mongering to its lawyers. Thus did Sussmann become central to the scheme, as did his law partner, Marc Elias. (Both attorneys have since left their white shoe international law firm, Perkins-Coie.) The deployment of lawyers in their schemes and scandals is a time-tested Clinton modus operandi, enabling them to claim attorney-client privilege to cover their tracks when controversy erupts and investigators start snooping around — a frequent occurrence over the last 30 years.
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