Mike Palecek, The Hoax is In
Mike Palecek
Mike Palacek, The Hoax is In (153News.Net)
Thank you, all.
The hoax is in.
It’s been in since Nov. 22, 1963.
It’s coming down to the wire.
Except, the hoax is in.
And by all appearances there is no way we can win without a miracle.
It’s Hail Mary time.
… My wife is busy making masks while watching “The News,” with Lester Holt.
Last summer, 2019, I was banned from my son’s house for July 4th after Jim Fetzer and I were handed defeat in a Madison courthouse over Sandy Hook.
And, not too long ago, I received this email from a friend from college after I sent to him videos trying to explain there were no planes on 9/11 and that the masks are just a zombie fashion show.
Greg said this in response:
Sorry Mike no time to watch your opinion and a few others, I’m sure I can find all kinds of opinions to the contrary, but I’ll use the mind the good Lord gave me to process quality print information and make my own decision and once again Dr. X and his wife Y are both Medical doctors on the front line with the VA system in Rapid City and their experience and opinion outweighs any internet you tube that any bone head can put out there. What happened to good quality journalism with fact checks and validation before putting misinformation out, we’re living in age of “everybody has an opinion, but they also have an asshole and I don’t need another one.
Jim Garrison complained to John Barbour one time about there being no one “on the planet,” to talk to.
On the planet.
I blame the press.
They not only lied, told fibs, they facilitated the murder of millions in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the enslavement of their neighbors, the dumbing down, the serving of toxic Coco Puffs disguised as The Nightly News.
They did this, but nobody realizes that or thinks about it, or lets it get to them or freak them out because they’ve got all this other shit to do.
What is supposed to be a source of enlightenment and means for discussion, information and discernment has become a cognitive jackboot tool for propaganda, oppression and deceit.
A case in point would be KFAN radio in Minneapolis, a sports talk station I have listened to for years, that often delves into other areas. I remember backing out of the driveway of a group home in Duluth after doing the overnight shift and hearing the morning show crew talking about the capture, killing and burial of Osama bin Laden at sea. The hosts regularly decry so-called conspiracies and ridicule so-called conspiracy theorists. Never daring to speak the truth they are de facto agents of the United States government and its military, complicit in murder and the conversion of the United States into a banana republic by deception.
“There are things out there we don’t understand.
Can’t understand. Could be the big guy, could be little green men, or just whatnot.
Proving to us we don’t know everything. But that’s not important.
What’s important is … a reasonable man, a sane man, a healthy man … when he encounters the inexplicable … forgets about it.
— Maurice J. Minnifield
And that’s what I did after I encountered a Sasquatch face to face on a hill in Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills in 1980, for about twenty years after I jogged down the hill.
… And I think it might be what we’ve done with regard to Sept. 11, 2001. It’s too much and we can more easily go about our day if we don’t think about it. Our newspapers, radio stations and TV networks are more than happy to facilitate, to enable our dysfunction.
A few years ago the terms deep state, and conspiracy theory were heard only in shortwave conversations between the coast of Maine, northern France and Alpha Centauri.
We hear it now from John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Chris Mathews and Aunt Emma.
That is because of the work of people like Mark Lane, William Pepper, Jim Marrs, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, Chris Emery, Mae Brussel, Kevin Barrett, James Tracy, James Douglass, Christopher Bollyn, Penn Jones and hundreds of others.
Oliver, Colbert, Maddow, Mathews and Emma had no choice but to twist like balloons, into demons and dragons, our new vocabulary words because the populace was actually beginning to understand the true nature of their history and their situation … and that could not be allowed.
Without the work of the so-called conspiracy theorists, nobody would be aware of the truth of the major events of our history, and none of these people were employed by the major media outlets of the United States.
We have learned nothing from these so-called major media outlets except not to trust them with anything beyond baseball scores, crossword puzzles, the July Bicycle Parade photos and Jello salad recipes.
These so-called journalists have taken their cue from entertainer Orson Welles, who fooled my mother, among others, with the fake news of an alien invasion, scared the hell out of them, caused them to jump into the Ford and drive around just to be doing something, not wanting to die as sitting ducks in their homes. … and thanks in large part to the likes of Maddow and Anderson Cooper, Lester Holt and dozens of others, we remain sitting ducks, driving just to be going, having no idea where we are headed.
After spending an afternoon at Unz.com reading a detailed expose of the CIA’s MK Ultra program and then something more about Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays, George Creel, one could imagine how it has come to this, how the so-called elite thinkers and doers of our society have focused and evolved their thinking as to how it might be possible to actually control a country and its people, a world and its inhabitants.
The motivation was riches and power, candy for breakfast, lunch, and supper, enough stimulus, apparently, to foment the classic all-American spirit required to pull off Dallas, 9/11 and since, all the way up to yesterday and tomorrow, the masking of the globe.
William Engdahl, in his book “A Century of War” explains that every war is about oil, money, profit, and only those who will do the actual dying and killing believe it’s even remotely concerned with freedom or patriotism or apple pie or baseball.
That might not be news to some people, but I can assure you it would be major news to anyone in my home town and you might want to call them stupid … but they can read. Many of them.
I remember this year, the Presidential primaries, around the time of Super Tuesday, when it looked like Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic nominee and we would have some hope for change. And then, poof, magic, it disappeared, we had Joe Biden and we were locked down in our homes and Minneapolis was on fire, just a few blocks from where my son lives. I wonder how something like that happens?
… Sister Ellen stalked into our third grade classroom, hands tucked neatly into the opposite brown sleeve. She was the principal at Sacred Heart elementary, and she only came to the classrooms to announce that the poorest kid in our class and his large family had run off a bridge this morning on the way to school, or lead us down to the gym for the Christmas movie and extra chocolate milk.
So on Nov. 22, 1963, when lean, tall, straight Ellen floated in just after lunch recess — pre-Vatican II sisters had no feet, legs, arms, no hair — we saw the Franciscan specter of death.
Later, Mom ironed while she watched the caisson and “Black Jack,” the riderless horse, on the black and white television in the front room.
This was Norfolk, Nebraska. The Norfolk Daily News and WJAG told us it was Oswald. We just assumed, along with the Omaha World-Herald, that the Warren Commission had been commissioned by God.
Then followed days and decades of lies.
Football on TV, and lies. Pot roast on Sunday, with lies. Turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving. White lies? Dark lies?
Through it all, through the fog of American cultural propaganda, some persisted, some wanted the truth, some like Oliver Stone in “JFK” in 1991, hit hard enough to make the ground quiver for a moment, crack in some places. But the fractures were quickly filled by volunteers with footballs, turkey, dressing, cranberries, credulity.
I’m not an expert at anything really. I am an expert in living in America. I am a Ph.D. in suffering through America, its propaganda, its holiday dinners, football afternoons, coffee conversations, newspaper articles, television news shows, entertainment shows.
I happen to hold several advanced degrees in American Culture — years and decades spent sitting in uncomfortable chairs wearing new Christmas pajamas, balancing a Jethro Bowl of cherry black walnut ice cream in my lap, seeking enlightenment by watching Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Dean Martin, Ed McMahon. All there is to see and know is what I can see in my peripheral vision while watching Big Red Football, Gunsmoke, Mayberry RFD, Happy Days, Bewitched.
And then going to bed convinced beyond any reasonable doubt there is nothing more. This is what there is. This is life.
That is all our Norfolk High School “U.S. History” books, all my parents, the parish priests, mailman have to tell us.
They were my Socrates and I was their Plato, and in our daily discourse I learned not to ask certain questions.
The amber waves of grain will roll right over you, your children, your house if you stand in their path in any meaningful way.
(I recall hearing Dick Gregory speak in Omaha. He said that as soon as you challenge “them” in any meaningful way they will roll tanks on your ass. I didn’t have any idea then what he was talking about. I think I might understand a little better now.)
We will kill you and you and your sons and daughters, grandmothers to get what we want.
What we want with all our heart and souls, more than anything else, is to eat Doritos and watch television in the dark while clutching the cushy pillow.
And no newspaper or radio station or TV station will ever talk about it.
Unless telling us that it never happened. The motto of the Norfolk Daily News:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is a success when everything everyone in Norfolk believes is false.”
We vote and we work and we worry about our children having Ho Ho’s in their lunchbox and friends on the bus, while those in charge create our own reality.
And while we’re studying that reality, they act again, creating other new realities, which we can then study too.
And we will believe them. Because not believing them means figuring out something else to believe. And we have things to do. We have lives to live.
And those lives mean nothing, less than nothing, because they are built, constructed — days laid down unevenly, brick by brick — on lies and murder.
And it goes on and on as if it will never stop.
What we need in America is a Truth Commission like they had in South Africa to heal their broken country. Our country is surely broken as well. We need to put certain people on the stand and we need to be allowed to ask questions. Those who are supposed to ask questions for us refuse to do so.
The United States of America is supposed to be based on the Constitution.
It is actually based on those in power being focused like a laser beam on doing whatever it takes for them to remain in power.
It is based in the shooting of Jack Kennedy. That is the Big Boom – The Big Boom Theory of the creation of this country.
It is based on the collaboration of the U.S. Army, FBI, CIA and Memphis police to murder Martin Luther King. It is also based on the shooting of Robert Kennedy from behind his right ear, where Thane Eugene Caesar was standing.
We do not make cars anymore in America but we do psy-ops like the Greeks and Romans did philosophy, astronomy and speeches and literature.
Forget about the Liberty Bell. Forget about Mount Rushmore. Forget about the Grand Canyon. They are as much window dressing as CNN or NBC News or National Public Radio. The Lorraine Motel in Memphis is our true Plymouth Rock.
Dallas’ Dealey Plaza is our real Mount Rushmore. The Ambassador Hotel pantry is our actual Grand Canyon. Waco is our Arlington Cemetery. Oklahoma City is our Yellowstone Park.
The woods near Eveleth, Minnesota where Paul Wellstone’s plane went down is our National Mall.
We have fake history.
Our junior high and high school history books should be in italics, handed out by the teacher on the first day with a wink: Remember the Maine – Pearl Harbor – Gulf of Tonkin – Waco – Oklahoma City bombing – moon landings – stolen elections.
My parents, Milosh and Isabel, were Czech and Irish. They moved to Norfolk, Nebraska from Winner, South Dakota when Dad got his big break to be an engineer for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.
They were true believers in the American dream, I suppose, though they wouldn’t have put it that way.
More likely they just believed in working and going to church and mowing the lawn and taking care of your car and watching the ball game or Bonanza if it was on.
Dad brought fish home and maybe a foul ball from the amateur games in Winner when he got a chance to go there and see his brother Jimmy, home from the Pacific war, now with a wife and his own family. Another brother, Albert, served with Patton and later went to South Omaha to work in a box factory. Dad didn’t go to the war because his job with the railroad was considered vital to the war effort. They said Dad was good enough at shortstop to go pro, but he didn’t. Maybe he had to work.
He hauled cases at the pop factory before the C&NW. They did the best they could. It’s sad, a sad state of affairs for a whole nation.
Everyone does the best he can and we end up bombing Hiroshima. Dad cuts the lawn each Saturday morning on his one chance to rest and there go a thousand people in Chile, mowed down by our own CIA.
Mom calls us in to supper and poof! Laos is toast.
Us kids sneak outside for another round of playing after supper. We play hide and seek, catch lightning bugs, tell ghost stories and leave the screen door open just a peep. A couple hundred intelligent poor people in El Salvador are hustled out of their beds and shot.
We suffered and bled along with the perils of Otis The Drunk, but did not have a clue about the people being murdered by our own government in Guatemala. And nobody told us. We weren’t supposed to know.
Freedom of the press, period.
Freedom of the press, question mark.
Do we have freedom of the press in the United States? Why didn’t we know in the 1960s in Nebraska the truth about the Kennedy and King murders?
This spring I read a book by David Icke in which he talked quite a lot about the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and what he feels led up to it and why. I doubt if there was anything he left out that he would have liked to include. There’s also David McGowan on serial killers and other topics, William Blum’s Killing Hope, Graeme McQueen on anthrax, Joe Bageant on Deer Hunting With Jesus, Philip Corso on Roswell, Mark Rudd on The Weathermen, The Burglary The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, by Betty Medsger, John Perkins, Confessions Of An Economic Hitman, The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh, by Wendy Painting, The Secret Team, by Fletcher Prouty, Mary’s Mosaic, by Peter Janney, The CIA As Organized Crime, by Douglas Valentine, Andre Vltchek, Exposing Lies Of Empire, A Lie Too Big To Fail, by Lisa Pease, The Martrydom of Thomas Merton, by Hugh Turley, also, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, by Jim Fetzer and Four Arrows, Holocaust On The High Seas, by Philip Tourney. Also, Truth Jihad, My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Lie, by Kevin Barrett, Break His Bones, The Private Life of A Holocaust Revisionist, by Bradley R. Smith … The Plot To Kill King, by William Pepper, JFK & The Unspeakable, by Jim Douglas, David Ray Griffin, A New Pearl Harbor.
There are lots of non-fiction books on the cutting edge out there.
Some do get taken down, cut off, by Amazon. It’s happened to several of the Moon Rock books list. If Nobody Died At Sandy Hook would not have been removed by Amazon it might have been one of the best sellers of all time and the world would be very different right now.
“There can be no free country without a free press.” — John McMillan, “Smoking Typewriters, The Sixties Underground Press and The Rise of Alternative Media in America”
… Also on the subject of the alternative press of the ’60s … “The Movement & The New Media,” by Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith … is about underground newspapers and efforts to silence them.
Dallas Notes newspaper: Office torn apart twice by cops, in search of “pornography.” Cops confiscated four typewriters, cameras, darkroom and graphic equipment, business records, books, posters, a desk, a drafting table, everything that could be ripped loose and carted off.
So, is there freedom of the press in the United States or isn’t there?
We, here, must think we do not have freedom of the press, that’s why this hour is labeled freedom of the press, I don’t think it would be called that, if it wasn’t a thing.
What I think would be interesting would be for the thousands of journalism professors in the hundreds of journalism schools around the country in the first day of class to tell their students about Jim Fetzer, about Kevin Barrett, Wolfgang Halbig, James Tracy, others. Give them an assignment. Tell them they need to do some deep-dive research, investigative reporting on these people and the issues they are covering and try to take their research even further, and because they are real reporters and are good people, real people, with real backing and budget and an audience to write these stories, get them printed, and do what a real journalist does. And that they should either attempt that or they should go home right now and get construction jobs.
Would Michael Hastings tell us he believes we have freedom of the press in the United States. Would Gary Webb tell us he believes we have freedom of the press in the United States? How about Karen Silkwood, Danny Casolero? How about Dorothy Kilgallen, Charles Horman, Alan Berg, Philip Marshal.
“I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray and not to tell the truth to the public.”
Udo Ulfkotte [cot]
… [and he’s also dead]
It might be tough for any of us here to get something printed in the New York Times or Washington Post. How about getting a job there and getting what we think is the truth printed in one of those papers. I would guess that every editor and reporter at those papers would laugh at the suggestion that they are controlled, that they don’t have the freedom to print what they like.
And they do print what they like. On each anniversary they tell us that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the three shots that killed John Kennedy in Dallas. That Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, that James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther, King Jr. in Memphis. And on each Sept. 11 they repeat the mantra that 19 hijackers flew three planes into three buildings.
These editors and reporters at these papers did not get those parking spots, mouse pads and pencil holder things because they are stupid. They know exactly what they are doing. The question is why.
From Diana Johnstone in her book “Circle In The Darkness”: The war salesmen and women in Washington had the institutional structure to “learn the lessons of Vietnam” and prepare means to prevent another such antiwar movement in the future. They had spies infiltrating the movement to study its mechanisms, they had permanently employed propaganda specialists, they had increasing symbiosis with mass media, they had think tanks, they had Hollywood.
From the internet:
The US government has unbound the legal regulations against using propaganda against foreign audiences and American citizens. The intention is to sway public opinion by using television, radio, newspapers, and social media targeting the American and foreign people in controlled psy-ops.
Wikipedia:
… The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior favorable to US objectives. They are an important part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic activities available to the US. They can be utilized during both peacetime and conflict.
Tom Brokaw, Jimmy Olsen, Peter Jennings, Lou Grant, Dan Rather, Stephen Colbert, Ted Baxter, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Murphy Brown. They wouldn’t lie to us. Right? And beyond that … they would undoubtedly do whatever it took to find a pencil stub, pad of paper, a match for that cigarette, grab their jacket on the way and get out the door to follow that little bit of a lead wherever it went, no matter what, right? No matter what.
As far as I know not even Jimmy Breslin told the truth about 9/11.
He didn’t know? Hmmm.
Well, how about Carl Bernstein?
He doesn’t know?
Hunter Thompson? Don DeLillo. Tom Hanks? … not even Nina Totenberg? Ray Suarez? Susan Stamberg? Tom & Ray from Car Talk?
George Carlin? Rush Limbaugh? Stephen King? Chomsky?
Bill Hicks presumably would have. Oh, well, yeah.
I seem to remember something about Jim Garrison through the fog of third grade, maybe something about crazy, not real, certainly not as real as Petticoat Junction, Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies, Johnny Carson or My Favorite Martian, who was far more acceptable in any conversation or comment than the Grassy Knoll.
Many years later I sent a letter to Johnny Carson, after listening to a tape recording of his interview with Jim Garrison:
March 2, 2001
Johnny Carson c/o Carson Productions Group
3110 Main St.
Suite 200 Santa Monica, CA 90405
Mr. Carson:
Hello.
I am originally from Norfolk, Nebr., graduated from NHS in 1973. Recently I had a chance to listen to the tape of your interview with attorney Jim Garrison. I don’t recall watching the live interview, but very well could have as watching your show before bed was our regular routine, as it was for many others.
As a fellow Norfolkan, I am curious as to why you treated Garrison as you did. I probably will not get the chance to contact you twice, so I will be frank right away.
You sounded as if you were acting as a spokesman for someone else. Really. Were you protecting the real killers of Kennedy?
Of course, you were. What else can I say, but that it is obvious now with almost forty years of perspective. The Warren Commission was a joke and Garrison was on to something.
Something frightening to be sure. But why did you have so much allegiance to the plotters and none to your dead president? Because he could not pay you from the grave? Is it as simple as that?
Thanks in part to you we have been forced to live in Disneyland since 1963, where everything is unreal, everything entertainment and illusion.
Please tell me, as I will never know myself: Is wealth and power worth the sublimation of the truth?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely, Mike Palecek
Johnny Carson’s Response:
March 9, 2001
Mike Palecek 702 6th Avenue
Sheldon, Iowa 51201
Dear Mr. Palecek,
I’m sending you a copy of a letter I recently received to make you aware that some ignorant asshole is sending out letters over your signature.
You should look into this.
Sincerely, Johnny Carson
We do know much of the truth about what has happened, what is happening.
We would like to know more and we would like more people to know what we know. Because, for one reason, it isn’t just about your opinion and my opinion.
There are not just opinions. There are facts and truth and there is real knowledge. And all that leads to actions, events. People die based on these. People live in poverty based on these. It matters.
… Finding the truth.
Unpaid volunteers seem to always pop up, sitting at the kitchen table late into the night working on the puzzle. The time-lapse hidden photography of the kitchen shows these gradually fading away and others taking their places.
And … if the internet is ever shut down, if Amazon only delivers power tools and Gummy Worms, wouldn’t we still find a way?
Without it didn’t we still have Mark Lane, Mae Brussel, Penn Jones, Mort Sahl, Jim Marrs, and many others?
Even in Nazi Germany there was The White Rose. Water finds its way. Samizdat.
But, the problem is … most people, at the Thanksgiving adult big table, if you were to mention most of this stuff, would say, say what?
And when Uncle Bill, in passing the potatoes across, says well, Bucky, and I suppose we didn’t go to the moon, either? it’s on … fight or flight, like Bob Seger in the truck stop, you can either laugh along with the others, plop the potatoes in Bill’s lap where they belong, or go smoke in the garage with the dogs.
This from Frances Shure:
… in modern Western societies, if a new idea is covered in a serious way on television or in the newspaper, then, and only then, is it considered “real.” Well, at least it becomes discussable in polite company.
That’s the problem, numbers, and polite company. If we could get the Thanksgiving adult big table we would have this licked. Who cares what Lester Holt, Rachel Maddow, or The View or Tom Hanks or Chris Mathews says anyway. It’s a free country, let them say whatever they want to their dozens of off-beat followers. I know, right?
Someone, maybe Alexander Berkman, maybe Shelly Tambo, said that for a long time it looks as if nothing will happen, that nothing can happen. And then all of a sudden, one day everything is different.
… And we wonder how we lost the Thanksgiving adult big table. Of course, we never had it, but still, we wonder why that is so.
And so we say everyone is stupid. They are so stupid.
Hmmmm.
I once drove my little car around practically the whole country on a book tour as an unknown self-published so-called novelist thinking I was going to spark a revolution.
I once ran for Congress as a beginning self-published novelist and the only job I had was a paper route for the Sioux City Journal. I think my bio read: former inmate, unpublished novelist, ex-seminarian, used to be newspaper reporter, has paper route.
And yet, I know about Building 7.
People just don’t get a chance to know what’s true because if you have enough money you can control the newspapers, TV and radio, and magazines and movies.
And so there you have it.
Frances Shure: The Death of Investigative Journalism:
“What is wrong with the Western media? Why have they not jumped at the opportunity to cover the scoop of the century — the wealth of crystal-clear evidence that proves the government has been lying about the attacks of September 11, 2001, for the past sixteen years?”
Shure continues …
“… Within her anthology Into the Buzzsaw, Kristina Borjesson’s article of the same name describes her punishing ordeal as she tried to report evidence contrary to the official assertions about the demise of Flight 800.
She opens her account with:
“I had no idea that my life would be turned upside down and inside out — that I’d been assigned to walk into what I now call ‘the buzzsaw.’ The buzzsaw is what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country’s large institutions want kept under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling.
“You feel like you’re being followed everywhere you go. You feel like you’ve been sucked into a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It gets harder and harder to distinguish truth and reality from falsehood and fiction. The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming. Walk into the buzzsaw and you’ll cut right to this layer of reality. You will feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don’t know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy nut.”
… I went to seminary in Saint Paul in 1979, had never really been anywhere, did not really know anything. I met Fr. Daniel Berrigan while I was in seminary and my life was changed. I’d never heard of Daniel Berrigan before I got to the seminary.
In any case, at that point I kind of became interested in life, in the world. At that point I began to learn about America. My hometown pastor, said no, no, stay away from him. But I didn’t. I protested at the White House, the Pentagon, back in Nebraska at Offutt Air Force Base.
I left the seminary because I felt I needed to go radically into what the gospel was calling for, working with the poor and fighting the military machine and war. I left and for a time I lived and worked at the New York Catholic Worker on the lower east side, then returned to Norfolk. Ruth and I were married in 1980.
I recall the first time I was arrested. It was at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha. I was in a large group. It was raining. I was seated on the cement, on the road, and it was tough. It was like breaking up with the United States, turning away, very, very difficult.
I eventually went to county jail, then federal prison for protests at Offutt. I served five short sentences, 10 days, 30 days, 50 days, 6 months, 6 months. I was released my last time from prison in May of 1989.
In my jail terms I was in the Douglas County Correctional Center in Omaha, the Lancaster County Jail in Lincoln, the Norfolk City jail for a brief time for refusing to leave the recruiters office at the Sunset Mall, protesting military recruiting … also Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, Terre Haute Penitentiary, was in the prison bus at Marion as we picked up a couple of guys, El Reno FCI, the Midland, Texas city jail on an overnight, overnight in Leavenworth Penitentiary. I remember we ate in the main cafeteria the morning we left, before anyone else was up and you just find yourself looking around and wondering if this is actually happening.
… Also, the Pottawattamie County Jail, Council Bluffs, as well as La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution, outside of El Paso, just over the river from Juarez.
When I got out of jail for the last time so far, I was working construction, knee-deep in wet concrete and I swear I had this epiphany, I remembered that I used to be able to write.
I slogged out of that driveway, on a mission, and went straight in the direction of journalism, newspaper work. And I really had high hopes. I read about the early newspapers in New York and the reporters who worked hard to find things out and tell the people and I wanted to do that.
At my first job I was the reporter, city council, sports, features, layout, everything at the Ainsworth Star-Journal in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. Ruth and I had a young son.
It was the time of the first Gulf War.
Well, I had just convinced the publisher to let me have my own column and wouldn’t you know it, that first column coincided with the launch of the war. In my column I said that I did not support the war, did not support the troops, and if you recall, support the troops was the mantra, the daily saying we all were supposed to recite as we took American communion, and yellow ribbons decorated the landscape, trees, stray cats, car antennas. The column was cancelled by the publisher because people complained and he said he had to please his readers. I thought that was anything but the way a newspaper should be run and I quit. We finally found a small paper to purchase in southeastern Minnesota in a tiny town near Rochester.
During this time Leonard Peltier was having his case heard by the federal court of appeals in Saint Paul and I assigned myself to interview him at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I drove there from Minnesota, parked in the parking lot where I had only months before arrived at Leavenworth in a prison bus at midnight in handcuffs in a rainstorm and I climbed those one million steep steps once again and went inside, this time as a reporter. I talked to Peltier and then went to Minneapolis to interview Nick O’Hara the head of the Midwest FBI office. O’Hara had months before pursued me in Omaha and likened me in the Omaha World-Herald to Charles Starkweather. I had taken refuge, sought sanctuary, in the Omaha Catholic Cathedral rather than appearing at a court date for an Offutt action as a way to draw attention to the Bishop’s support of the policy of nuclear deterrence practiced by Offutt and the U.S., threatening to kill. Rather than submit to arrest in the Cathedral, I fashioned a way to escape and was thus being pursued by O’Hara and the Omaha FBI office.
We won the Minnesota Newspaper of the Year Award for small newspapers in 1993 and went out of business the following year.
Later we were in Iowa. I ran for Congress, as a Democrat in the 5th District, first as a write-in, receiving eight votes. The next time I actually got on the ballot, won the primary and received 65,500 votes in the general election. The only encouragement I got from the Democratic Party was to quit, change my tune. I took out an ad in the Sioux City Journal, full page, that said shut down the national guard air force base, shut down prisons, more money for the poor.
During the campaign I walked from our home in Sheldon, Iowa to Sioux City to deliver a crossed-out tax form saying why I would not participate in the tax system and support the military and war.
That was the election of 2000, when Bush came to power, as he was supposed to, as he absolutely had to, as we could see from the scene we saw on TV of the Bush family gathered together in some room like a Russian royal family, knowing they were supposed to come to power, but by the looks on their faces, also wondering if maybe folks will figure this all out and they will instead be executed … before the Florida vote came in.
Of course not … it all went according to plan, setting the stage for 9/11.
Well … I also have to tell you …
There once was a radio show, really a podcast, but they called themselves a radio show … in America, and that show, the people in that show, thought of themselves as something like the French underground, with the crackly radios and the long cigarettes.
You might be in your basement or in your backyard, but still, you are The Resistance. … You are underground, with only a bit of wine left and a gigantic radio.
Everyone around you is gulping all your god-damned wine and speaking French in hushed tones, but somehow, you understand.
That big-ass radio just happened to be here next to the cigarettes when you got here, but thank God for it.
Because with it you found there were others.
… Tonight’s show is sponsored in part by a grant from … “The Paul Harvey Memorial Concentration Camp For The Journalistically Insane.”
In Tonight’s show we have The Committee To Waterboard Anderson Cooper … sponsored by Mr. Bubble.
We need to know what Anderson Cooper knows. He knows the truth about what is happening in America, more than we know. We need to convince him to tell us and in turn to save America.
And now the Committee to Waterboard Anderson Cooper, sponsored by Mr. Bubble would also like to waterboard Chris Hedges, Jon Stewart, Amy Goodman, Rachel Maddow, Mathew Rothschild, Stephen Colbert, Bill Moyers, Arriana Huffington, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Markos Zuniga, Noam Chomsky and Garrison Keillor.
Mr. Bubble wants to know why these liberal so-called radical writers do not ever mention the obviousness of 9/11, and while they may think they are radical writers and fighting the good fight, they are consciously skirting around the edges of the real issues like frightened waterbugs around a swamp and maybe they should just give up and get construction jobs. …
… When I was doing the Offutt protests my family lived with other people in what we called a Resistance Community, Greenfields, named after the Irish anti-war song The Greenfields of France. A friend of mine from those days, Kevin, we were best of friends, went to jail together, worked small construction jobs, sent me this letter in response to something from me telling him what I was up to these days.
Mike,
Unclear about what to say about the strange shit you are writing these days. … Sounds like you are a tool of the right wing gun freaks (Sandy Hook deniers) and the neo-Nazies (holocaust deniers). I’m not much of a conspiracy guy, personally, but would say that you definitely do write like you are part of a conspiracy and one with which I am very uncomfortable.
Your new friends are my enemies. You be good!, old Friend.
Kevin
And portions of a later letter: ” … I told you … not to send me anymore of this bullshit! …You and fetzer are freaks from the right wing fever swamps and I don’t want the SPLC or the FBI associating me with you and your … buddies. Sincerely hope [they] clean you assholes out to the last pair of socks. … Don’t ever contact me again. Ever!!! Kevin
… I don’t understand. Why is it wrong to take time to study all of this?
The truth about 9/11 and the other false flags ends the wars and the empire. Isn’t that something an anti-war liberal would want? 9/11 Truth brings money for the poor, healthcare, roads, candy for super, everything we ever wanted. That’s what I want. That’s why I think we do this.
Let’s picture a liberal, someone like me, a little taller, who has come across a new website on the internet and been up all night reading. He has just discovered new things about the JFK, RFK, MLK murders, has questions about the Wellstone death, the moon landings, Boston, Oklahoma City. He goes to his friendly neighborhood bookstore or library searching for something that will explain, tell him he’s on the right track. He’s listening to NPR while he looks through The Nation, The Progressive, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, searching for support, for validation, and he finds none.
Why is that? …
… It is very hard today to produce for mass consumption a meaningful movie, a newspaper, radio show, TV program, a novel, next to impossible. They have it all pretty well covered.
In about 2014 Jim Fetzer and I formed Moon Rock Books.
In December of 2018, along with Dave Gahary, we were featured in the New York Times under a headline that said CONSPIRACY KOOKS, LOSERS, ANTI-AMERICAN, SHIT FOR BRAINS, GET THEM!
What a night that was, of course, no sleep.
The New York Times?
No sleep the next day as well … all year.
I recall That Day, capital letters, in June 2019, in Madison, when Jim and I were handed our loss in court, charged with owing one million dollars.
After we left the courtroom I was in my car following Jim, headed to a restaurant for tacos. Jim got through the light, and I, my heart still pounding and my head full of a thousand thoughts, considered running the yellow. I was going pretty fast, down a big hill, the whole downtown Madison panorama in front of me. Jim goes through. I see the yellow light.
I think. I can make it. If I don’t, I’ll lose Jim and I will be lost forever, in Madison.
A million dollars.
My wife. My family. Shit.
At the very last moment I slammed on the brakes and to my great embarrassment was the focus of attention from people standing on both sides of the street, including the whole prosecution team.
I sat there as they crossed the street, waving and smiling, laughing. …
Jim and I had tacos and root beer and told each other how our wives would kill us and that probably already we were worldwide headlines, and not in a good way.
I said, we can’t win, Jim.
If we win, they lose, Obama, the FBI, all of them, and that cannot happen. …
… We have heard this over the years.
Is this the revolution?
Is THIS the revolution?
Marxism. Marx. USSR. Black Marias.
Socialism. Bernie.
Democracy. Democrats.
FREEDOM of Speech
Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich.
Vonnegut/Steinbeck/Bradbury.
Orwell/Huxley/Kerouac/Ginsberg, Bukowski, etc. etc.
Those writers and their books have been thought/said to be revolutionary.
We sometimes refer to them for some help dealing with today’s pain.
Fahrenheit 911.
Michael Moore? Stephen Colbert? Jon Stewart?
Not really.
Phil Donahue. Yes, maybe.
But where are today’s books?
Regarding novels, I would say they are in fact, nowhere.
That I know of.
Where is the investigative journalist who will get to the bottom of all of this.
And where would she publish?
THIS is the revolution. Right here.
That’s why we get what we get.
… “Jumpers” is a short novel, by me, about a guy attending an annual gathering of his high school friends at a local coffee shop. He is the only homeless person in the group. He holds them hostage there at their table in order to tell them the truth about 9/11, to make them think for a moment about those who leaped to their deaths from the World Trade Center.
This section is about the news media, on that day.
… Ten seconds. Nine. … Five. Showtime. This is your host. …
… And of course: they would come on the air as usual and have this regular news program and then have this happen and callers telling them what they saw and of course they saw airplanes flying into buildings. And others planted elsewhere saying it was bin Laden and then on the street telling that the buildings came down due to the heat from the jet fuel.
Of course. All of that is of course, a matter of course. And, of course it was believed, oohed, aahhed, commercials sold, brains dissolved, by burning jet fuel.
Something that would be so interesting to see would be the clips showing those meetings leading up to the early morning shows that depicted the 9/11 attacks, never asking how an airplane could dissolve into a building like that, without any plane parts, body parts or peanut bags falling to the street.
Never asking how a plane could disappear into the Pentagon like that, leaving behind no plane parts, body parts or peanut bags, never asking how a plane could disappear into a patch of ground like that, leaving behind no plane parts, bodies or peanuts.
This would be TV Worth Watching, to see how the whole thing was planned, before, during, and also now, after, because as far as the media coverage goes, it’s still the same day. Just as with the JFK, MLK, RFK, Wellstone operation and any other event they plan, they commit to a lifetime of lies and coverage.
It is actually very impressive. Very impressive. That is where the health care goes, and the roads and the bridges and the help for the poor. It goes to this expertise of starting war, making war and covering all of that up and keeping it going for basically forever. Because they have never-ever been caught.
And they do not intend to be. They are full-time, with benefits.
They do these things and then come out smiling the next day like the champs they are, going to work, to the theatre, to the ballgame.
They keep going and they will never stop. So very impressive.
You have to admit. They are different from us.
We could never do this.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
The United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered ten million Native Americans to steal their land. We are responsible for the war of terror. And yet we have no national shame as Germany is forced to endure because of its supposed acts in World War II.
For about 8 1/2 years I worked with Chuck Gregory to produce The New American Dream online radio show, every Thursday night.
This is from one of those programs:
And now it’s time for “My Big Fat American Book” with your host Charlie Rose.
As we zoom in on our host at his big round table, sitting all alone in the studio before tonight’s guest arrives, we are able to look over his shoulder as he writes notes for tonight’s show.
What is Charlie Rose writing?
Let’s have a look, shall we?
… What we really need is a manifesto or a great novel that will once and for all show us what we already know.
What we knew in our hearts in 1963 and every year and day since then.
There should be this essay or this novel that’s not too long, or maybe really long like a Russian novel that when we read it, we would all say, oh, yeah, that’s just how it is.
And then they would bring in all the high school history books and start going through them and start putting in the right stuff.
They’d put big teacher red pen marks through all the made-up shit like the moon and the Pearl Harbor attack and WMD and anthrax and the Gulf of Tonkin and Wellstone’s plane crash and put in the real stuff, the stuff they had in these other books in these big old cardboard boxes that they never were going to show us — like the old photos in grandma’s closet with her and grandpa drinking beer and smoking cigarettes sitting on top of the ol’ model A.
And the late night comedians would talk about real stuff, like what used to be in the high school history books and about how they used to talk about how one truck bomb did that to the Murrah Building and how they used to say that jet fuel took down those big NYC buildings and how we used to say a whole airplane disappeared into that little hole in the Pentagon and that little hole in the ground in Pennsylvania.
They’d say jokes about that stuff just as easily as Bob Hope used to talk about golf and airplane food and we all thought it was the funniest crap ever.
And then, all because of this one novel that said things everybody already knew, a bunch of people would walk to the CIA building and the FBI building and the Homeland Security Building and they would walk right in, because they paid for this piece of crap building anyway, and then they would walk over to the fence with the razor wire and they would cut it down and they would help the people through and they would put up this homemade sign, maybe with cardboard and crayons and tack it up on a baseball bat or a branch or a shovel and it would say “America” on it.
That’s what might all happen as soon as the person is born who will write this manifesto or clear, concise, inexpensive novel that will tell us all the things we already know.
And all we have to do now is wait. …
… Oh, hello … I’m Charlie Rose and this is ‘My Big Fat American Book’.
Tonight’s guest is the author of the Walmart, Target and Barnes & Noble big sellers, “Fifty Shades Of Vampire Blood,” “The Six Sexy SuperHeroes Who Saved Sacramento,” as well as “Biggest Kitchen, Bigger Hamburger and Brighter Bathroom.”
“We’ll be right back after a word from the good ol’ boys at Soapy Suds … Detergent.”
And so, what to say about freedom of the press in America. Again, those in the business would say to us, what are you talking about?
Diana Johnstone: “… the government rarely censors. Censorship is privatized. Free discussion is increasingly restricted by the informal imposition of a “common discourse” on a range of key issues … imposed not by direct repression but by social conformism.
The ones telling us about Covid are the same ones we trusted to tell us about 9/11, and Boston and Aurora.
They were the same ones we trusted to tell us the truth about World War II, Pearl Harbor, about Korea, about Vietnam. ... Epstein … George Floyd, Building 7.
This is Jim Garrison speaking to John Barbour in Barbour’s film The American Media and the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy:
“Without knowing precisely who they were… I think there had to be assurance, there would be, at least at the outset a few elements of the media that would be cooperative, from the beginning … because they had to start off with a certain momentum from the beginning, before reality started interfering with the building of the illusion.”
On Dan Rather’s News and Guts website:
“The long-awaited trial of 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, finally has an official start date.”
And so it goes on, apparently, forever.
As we also may note the BBC reporter pre-announcing the destruction of Building 7, as well as the Fox 14 video which shows the on-camera reporter announcing a shooting and then saying under her breath, “oh, that didn’t happen yet,” as well as the videos we saw years ago showing the fake shooting of the camera crew. There are others.
Penn Jones had this to say:
“The greatest criminal in this nation, we think, is a dishonest newsman. Newsmen have been given the highest gift a nation can give a group: a right. Newsmen have been given this right of freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the expectation they would report the truth as honestly as humanly possible. Ordinary criminals kill individuals, but dishonest newsmen are involved in killing a nation — in this case, this democracy.
“There are laws to protect the press’s speech, but none to protect the people from the press.” — Mark Twain
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul.
John Whitehead:
“It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.
“Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price — their lives.
“Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated.”
It was Thursday, Nov. 6. I was driving back from Duluth in the dark. President Trump was on the radio holding a press conference about the election. I don’t recall anything President Trump has done that has been worth a shit, but he was actually fighting back and I thought, I prayed that this might actually be the time when it happens, the revolution. Of course, it would not be televised, it never was going to be, but now “they,” capital T, would be exposed, and the corruption, the lies, all out in the open, at long last, and Trump would continue talking, about 9/11, all that he knows, all the others, right down the line. Because this can happen. That’s why we keep trying. It can happen here.
I repeated the following declaration many, many times on The New American Dream Radio Show over 8 1/2 years.
… The New American Dream means never having to say some question or idea is not valid.
We are allowed to ask any questions that we have … there are no wrong questions.
There is no hidden black military budget, there are no UFO files Americans cannot see, no JFK documents that will not be opened during our lifetimes, no destroyed RFK murder photos by the L.A. police, no evidence from Ground Zero taken away before we can even look at it — we are not the U.S.S.R. of the 1960s — this is supposed to be America. That is our dream, to become America,
The New America, the real hope of the world. …
We have a dream … of bringing the United States politicians, journalists and generals who have brought about these long wars and debacle to trial — and put on TV just like O.J. — every afternoon — so every American can watch … just like the McCarthy Hearings and the JFK funeral procession …
What we need is a New American Dream.
Not of new homes and toasters and microwaves, but of becoming the type of country we always thought we were.
Right now we live on lies. We subsist on lies, but it’s not really living.
911 was an inside job.
They all know that.
What we need in America is a Truth Commission like they had in South Africa to heal their broken country. We need to put certain people on the stand and we need to be allowed to ask questions.
Our country is surely broken as well.
The troops are not protecting us. That is someone’s spin on the day’s news – somebody’s advertising slogan — someone else’s sermon.
The troops serve the empire. They are not heroes.
They kill and plunder for the empire. American bases overseas serve nobody but the empire. The heroes in our country are the protesters, the ones who go face to face with the empire, those in the Plowshares Movement, The Truth Movement for example.
You have to know that Donald Trump knows the whole truth about the 9/11 attacks. He is complicit.
He has lied. He has continued the wars everywhere based on a lie. And he knows he is lying.
Trump lies right to our faces on national television just as Joe Biden will and Barack Obama did when he said that Osama bin Laden had been killed … and buried at sea. …
Osama bin Laden was buried at sea … and Jessica Lynch was rescued heroically, the U.S.A. does not torture, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,
George Bush won the 2000 election, see, there is a plane there in that hole in Shanksville, it went all the way into that hole and no, there is no blood and no bodies and no luggage scattered … or plane parts … and Osama bin Laden … was buried at sea.
Remember the anthrax letters, which said “Are You Afraid?” Those were not written with a rock and chisel like Fred Flintstone from the recesses of some cave in Afghanistan. Those letters came from persons within our own government.
Like a horror movie and the killer is in the same house with us.
These killers are right here, with us and “they” want us to be afraid.
“We cannot be afraid.”
And that’s the news from Moon Rock Lake, where all the po-lice and soldiers are thugs, all the Democrats and journalists are cowards, and all the Homeland Security-COINTELPRO lone gunmen are about average.
Thank you.
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