The Return of the Tower of Babel:

Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World

Richard Grossinger

Substack Introduction

In the course of writing this book, I changed its trajectory many times. I finally came around to publishing it on Substack rather than in printed book form because it is too topical and fluid for standard publishing with its delay times—a year minimum from manuscript to finished book. In addition, I already have a series of titles in process at Inner Traditions: Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing came out in 2020. Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs came outin 2022. A new edition of my Homeopathy book (Homeopathy: The Great Riddle) will be published in 2024 under the tentative subtitle Nanoscience, Energy Medicine, and Life Code. This is the outlier text needing a different venue, and Substack is a community-building platform seeking fresh content in any niche.

         I have also been working collaboratively with a number of people who are joining me on Opera Jupiter, a portal opened by conceptual artist and painter Rachel Wolfe and sound practitioner Ruslana Remennikova (whose book on 12-stranded DNA and sound healing I am helping develop at Inner Traditions under my imprint, Sacred Planet Books). Ru asked me for my intentions with this project in its Substack form. They are:

1. To continue to provide a channel for my system. My system isn’t a conscious one, and I don’t know where it comes from. It has been the driver behind my work long before I realized it. For many years, I assumed that ordinary ambitions, aspirations, and aesthetics drove my writing. The system, as it has played out, has three major components: a cosmological zone in which I am developing a matrix connecting science, the occult, and cross-cultural views of the universe (with four major themes: healing, cosmology, embryology, and consciousness); a personal one in which I am telling my own story in its broadest ancestral constellation; and a political, pop-culture one in which I filter these themes through current events. This book emphasizes that component, though includes aspects of all three. For my most recent contributions, see The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos and Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing for the first component and New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale for the second.

In 2003, psychic Ellias Lonsdale channeled the description of my system that rings most true. He called it “a secret project, secret even to its author. It represents a complex mode of consciousness on a subtle plane that has been working its way into the world for millennia. Grossinger is carrying out one phase of it in a regular sense in linear time, but his inner self is doing the actual work in timeless reverie. And this is the only way the project is going to get done. Otherwise, it would continually have to defend itself against an external voice that keeps saying, ‘This is not happening; this is some sort of bizarre aberration.’ He is fighting both for and against something that won’t go away. He can drop it, and he can’t complete it. It has no grand fruition, nothing to do with the New Age notion that everything is supposed to cross and become magnificent. Esoterically, it is its own reality, its own truth, its own justification.”

This still rings true. I think of a conceit by poet Robert Kelly that I remember (roughly) as: “Blake said we must create our own system or be enslaved by someone else’s. Blake was enslaved by his own system.” I urge the same of you. My system isn’t an endpoint even for me; it is to help you create you own system and not be enslaved by current creed and dictates.

2. I want to put major current events in a different, less polarized frame. Healing and reconciliation must come in some fashion eventually because we are a wavelet of the expansion of consciousness in the universe. I want to celebrate its creative chaos, much as I have since my first political book, Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church, written in 1973 in the very different world of comet Kohoutek.

3. I want to reclaim aspects of my personal and professional identity publicly after my main outreach project, North Atlantic Books, was stolen by a cancel-culture coup and I was cancelled, my fourteen main books put out of print. Not everyone knows that I have no affiliation with the regime that took over the press. They tell people that I retired. I did not.

The Return of the Tower of Babel:

Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World

Richard Grossinger

“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” Genesis 11: 9, King James Bible

Table of Contents

Preface

Down the Rabbit Hole

Prologue

9/11/2001 to 11/8/2016 to 1/6/2021   

Chapter One: Trumpism

1. The Real Donald Trump, Shapeshifter and Grifter

2. The Dystopian Scoresheet of POTUS 45

3. Crook, Genius, Idiot, Magician, Fool

4. A Strange Energy

Chapter Two: QAnon

1. Millenary Religions

2. The Letter Q

3. From Pizzagate to Pedophilia

4. The Clinton Body Count and Other Dossiers

5. Crisscrossing Conspiracy Theories and Missing Witnesses

6. The Metamorphosis of Pizzagate to QAnon

7.  Layers of QAnon

8. Trump’s 5-D Chessboard

9. Guns, Gear, and Hashtags

10. QAnon and Anti-Vaxx

11. Donald Trump as Heyoka Shaman and Lightworker

12. Prankster Anarchy and Quantum Uncertainty

Chapter Three: Cancel Cultures

1. Right and Left Hands of God

2. The Sociology of Religion

3. Sex-Magic Interlude

4. Holy Ground

5. Health Freedom

6. Unsafe Operating Space

7. Race, Gender, and Identity Politics

8. Woke Campuses, Elite Education, and College Debt

9. Hegemonies

10. Punishment, Atonement, and Wetiko

11. The Incident

12. The Dismantling of the West

Chapter Four: COVID-19

1. Its Hour Come Round

2. A Statistic for Every Belief System

3. Bat-Vampire Loop

4. Paradigms and Their Shifts

5. Spike Proteins, Graphene Oxides, and Ethics by Default

6. The Vaccine Meme

7. Vaxx Sell and Censorship

8. The Future of the Genome

9. Coronavirus Treatments

10. The Vaccine is Not the Problem with the Vaccine

11. Technocracy: I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

12. The Source and Destiny of COVID-19

Chapter Five: Chaos Magic

1. The Origin of Magic

2. Renaissance Magic

3. The Ascent of Chaos Magic

4. Sigils

5. Egregores

6. Pepe the Frog

7. Donald Trump as Chaos Magician

Chapter Six: Saturnalia

1. Rogue Software

2. Stop the Steal

3. Show Me the Kraken

4. March on the Capitol

5. Saturnalia

6. Lose the Bum!

7. The Eighth Sphere

Chapter Seven: Ukraine

1. Fault Lines

2. The Maidan

3. Holy Russia

4. Putin: Rage, Martyrdom, Folly

5. War

6. The Real Great Reset

Epilogue:

The Big Picture

Endnotes

Preface

Down the Rabbit Hole

The Return of the Tower of Babel is an esoteric inquiry into the birth of the Aquarian Age and current events. I call it “The Return of the Tower of Babel” because Homo sapiens’ current civilization has come to resemble a mythical state of confusion and chatter in which bands and then tribes and then nations of hominids found themselves when encountering other bands with different customs, languages, and agendas. Of course, there was no actual original state of babble; the yammer of tongues and belief systems is archetypal more than historical. However, I propose that the current clutter of fake news, conspiracy theories, and propagandas represents birth pangs of a new genesis.

I call them “birth pangs of a new genesis” rather than “death rattles of a dying order” because I believe that everything that has happened on our world since its inception in a stellar spiral—the stages of creation described in Genesis 1 and 2, Hesiod’s Theogeny, the Finnish Kalevala, Hopi Túwaqachi tales, and countless other ancient and indigenous creation myths as well as the equally mythical Big Bang of astrophysics—is part of the universe’s evolution from one unknown and incomprehensible phase of knowledge, being, manifestation, and awareness to another. In that sense, it is optimistic and positive, even in its negative aspects, because it is a divine exploration of light and its depth, immensity, mystery, and ineluctable shadows. Because it is light—Buddha’s ground luminosity—it will eventually spread in radiance, revelation, and compassion, but not for a long, long, long time.

I call it Aquarian to mark it on an ancient calendar; belief in astrology is optional. All of the zodiac’s signs have their virtues and lesions, but we have come to mark our current precession from a Piscean to an Aquarian world as a breakout from rigid control by, paradigmatic systems to new freedoms of body, mind, soul, god, gender, and sound, though that does not mean that the transition will be pleasant, sunny, or even above water. We carry remnants of Atlantean karma, however we choose to represent or enact “Atlantis” temporally.   

Behind all secular or mundane occurrences on physical worlds sits a field of karmic and archetypal forces, expressing themselves in “earthed” elements and conditions. Astronomy, geography, and geology, as sciences as well as lands, are themselves outcomes of energies flowing from subtle planes into denser ones to general spheres and orbits for cosmic evolution. Biology’s two spiraling helices (comprising DNA, RNA, and their messengers and ribosomes) are a quantum channel between etheric and carnal bodies—between soul complexes and their foetally ripened seeds.

Political and social conflicts, economic disparities, and wars are the effects of astral polarity on sublunary zones and are as inescapable as the moon’s tides. That is, the vast astral sphere leans on the physical-etheric realm, imposing its dialectics, dichotomies, secrets, scandals, and general tumult. 

Money is a primal psychic phenomenon—from shells, beads, and coins to digitalized reserves and cryptocurrencies—an evolution of runes facilitating energy exchange as well as a symbolic arbiter of value and flow between individuals, communities, and polities.

Weapons are material projections of cords and tangles in our auras—unrealized psychic capacities and ancestral traumas.

Everything I discuss in this book will reflect one or another myth cycle, an attempt to align with a spiritual or metaphysical agency, or a violation of a covenant or shrine. You cannot breach or transgress a sanctified space without first entering it, so in the big picture a transgression is a phase of alignment and alleviation.

Just a few years ago, folks in solidarity or at clash at least knew the terms of their battle. Now alternate facts perturb all realities so that even minor disputes resemble hurricanes with nothing tied down. Yet few recognize the real problem because, like in biblical Babel, the disconnects are being generated many leagues beneath the semantics like from the bottom of a psycholinguistic Pacific or Jovian Sea. That makes the façade of disagreements somewhat moot—ex post facto surf—because you can’t disagree when you can’t ground the source of your disagreement. In the United States alone, polarization is off the rails on climate, race, election formats, health freedom, guns, vaccines, nativism, and parities of basic governance.

Despite imbedded translators and translation programs, we have forgotten how to talk to each other: no comprendo, ne comprends pas, lost in translation. The commons has been drowned in a clatter of weaponized rules, dings, snarks, and petty cyber memes that oblige obedience and cant in the service of one or another tribe, cabal, or deity. The 2020s reprise poet Matthew Arnold’s 1867 “confused alarms of struggle and flight . . . as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.”¹ He had no way of knowing how dark, ignorant, and armed they would become.

The current state of confusion includes an unwillingness to surf meanings, subtexts, and their syntaxes. People would rather sow antimony than synthesize new information and institutions or even enjoy lively company. In a polarized zone, you can’t fight without being turned dialectically against even your own convictions. There’s a reason why Bob Dylan’s joker and thief tried to get each other out of here, while along the watchtower otherworldly entities sent up flares and runes as they tried to optimize our possibility for spiritual freedom.²

The deceptively safe sixties and seventies in the U.S. were supported by cheap gasoline, First-Amendment-guarded seminar suites and cafés, and relaxed, recreational ennui. You could jive and parry without getting shot at, tasered, shamed, ghosted, cancelled, arrested, or starting a race riot. You could talk about climate and culture, identity and politics, superstorms and hyperobjects, stuff that is determining the future of the planet, without being contradicted before you were halfway done. You could complain about how baseball is no longer baseball. You could lounge on a spinning sphere in the nourishment of its six-dimensional day-night star and imagine magic, angels, cabbages, and kings.

Before you declare your allegiance to a sect, party, or belief system and toss this book as blasphemy—wait. Among unheard voices is a greater call in a new planetary dialect. It sounds like Babel because it is re-calibrating what Earth is trying to tell itself—the deeper mystery: Whole Earth in garbled choruses of Gaia mind as Revelation grapples with Apocalypse and photolysis. Despite the grapple and fuss, everyone has a part of the truth, which is why they hold on so tenaciously.

I am reminded of the last century’s Jeremianic balladeers: Barry McGuire wailing “Eve of Destruction,” Bobby Darin chanting “Strange Rain,” Dylan auguring “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall,” Phil Ochs defying, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” then mourning “When I’m Gone” (as well as covering Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”). We’re all Okies, and there are as many burgeoning Muskogees as there are tribes, bands, refugee camps, and arks across the planet.

First let me dispel some preconceptions. This book is not an anti-Trump diatribe. Donald J. is there, to be weighed on the same scales as everything else in the universe, gravity and mass on up (and down). As I scry for his static equilibrium, I have a partisan but not a biased eye.

Nor is this an anti-vaxx book, though I put COVID-19 serums and their memes on the same microbalancer. In fact, one should weigh every medicine, potion, preservative, pesticide, colloid, and lipid that they ingest, spread on crops, or feed to guileless pets, children, and their true selves. Ask: What is their molecular pedigree and etiology? What’s actually in them?

I am not holding a pro-Paris Accord, pro-Glasgow Conference brief either, though I’m glad folks are noticing the movement of glaciers, deserts, water, and firestorms and calling intelligence to counsel. I honor chaos theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and homeostatic feedback, too. Original dharma-bum poet Gary Snyder told a Nevada City audience—and I quote him thirdhand—”Mother Nature is a discursive lady, we don’t know what she and her mix of chaos and attractor systems have in store for us. Her magic goes deeper than climate change, floods, butterflies, and sunspots.”

To resign ourselves to mere apocalypse is a plea bargain; we’ve got far more karma to burn.

When I dive into QAnon in Chapter 2, I address it not just as a cult of hooligans, fanatics, and proud nut jobs. I honor the original Q of shamans and bards who initiated our species. My goal is neither to praise nor condemn, just to tell. I do see danger in weaponized facts, governance by conspiracy, and unabashed lying, but I believe that all such blowback has mythological roots as well.  

I don’t display my anthropology card often because I didn’t earn it in the trenches of Fourth World fieldwork (I studied Maine fishermen after failing at Hopi shamans), but with QAnon it counts for something: cross-cultural and subcultural perspective. You wouldn’t dismiss a Dakota clown ceremony, Australian Emu dance, or Dogon star myth as delusional bullshit or Babbitt baloney. “Cults” enfold nascent culture and carry encrypted myths.

Likewise, I don’t dis the QAnon creed as balderdash qua disinformation. It erupts from a core at which rogue “tells” are either right in principle or seeded by truth mysteries. In a cosmic cloud, the histrionic and cruel have their reason and position too. Every telekinetic particle does.  

Be patient. If you develop road rage, wait for what lies around the bend. As craniosacral founder John Upledger growled at me in the late nineties when I worried that the past life to which he was supposedly regressing me wasn’t real, “Fuck that! Humor me, will you!”

Humor me! To those who want to know my position in advance, where the rubber of my allegiance hits the road of peremptory fact, I’ll go with Rodney King’s momentary burst of heart energy: “Why can’t we all just get along!”

Why can’t we? That’s the question folks keep asking, Egypt after Egypt.

There is something about our era’s rigged threshold of Hobbesian chaos that portends an unlikely turning point, a realignment of forces in a cliffhanging ploy to get humanity through its shadow, a wetiko disease diagnosed by “Awaken in the Dream” shaman Paul Levy. It is time we awakened to our alchemical antidotes and medicines of shadow-work. That won’t be accomplished by therapy sessions, meditation retreats, or peace accords; it needs a millennial songline.

That’s the problem I encountered in 2019 at Hollyhock’s annual summer conference for gaming the future, before the pandemic changed its terms. Hollyhock is a Canadian retreat center on Cortes Island, British Columbia, similar to Big Sur’s Esalen. An unexamined Buddhist dystopian overlay of identity politics caused compassion practices, therapeutic exercises, and cultural theory to shear multiple ways, leading to a revival of apocalypticism, despite all the singing, dancing, virtue-signaling, and heart sharing.

“Climate” was our existential theme, sighted from multiple perspectives, beginning with the scary science—what was already “baked in,” as keynote presenter Karen Mahon, roots in Canadian government and Greenpeace Canada, put it, “in the next ten years—and the curve only exponentializes from there.”

We are going to cook, little by little and then by not so little.

After the politics came a medley of psychological and spiritual approaches and a mix of ceremonies and activisms. But we lacked a rain dance or even rain-dance faith. Though Cortes’ forest was damp, I felt as though I was on parched sci-fi Mars.

Panels, plenary sessions, and breakout groups took their various leads from medical entheogens, energy medicines, spiritual plant allies, gender morphing, emerging women in India, rescuing children from the slave trade, communications with the afterlife, and ways of grieving. Iraq War vets and ex-military narrated healing pilgrimages from suicidal despair to chanting icaros with shamans in the Peruvian rain forest.

For a closing ritual, our Ugandan leader choreographed a giant spiraling, chanting snake dance of the whole group. Two days later, I noticed how greater numbers of humans snaked similarly through security at the Vancouver airport, without cohesion, affirmation, or a concession of shared humanity. The airport helix was a shamanic snake too, but it worshipped tribal clash and asymmetric death pictures.

A billion-plus conferences across modernity has created an illusion that we are making progress by talk—yak, yak, yak, yak. Yet matters are as they have always been: land, space, matter, energy, and mortality—crucibles of creatures and systems. Power points, manifestos, and accords, each compelling in its moment, dissipate overnight or on return flights. Western eloquence palls before the masting youth of Thailand and Ghana, riding scooters through town, lighting trash fires. They, not we, will determine the planet’s future.

Our litany began among territorial bands, then metastasized through hot and cold wars of gods, religions, political and economic systems, land and property entitlements. We have still not settled original matters of ownership, territory, gender, power, privilege, or totem, so how can we address communism versus capitalism, Allah versus Mammon, China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine, techno-systems and ecosystems?  

Despite our epidemic secularism, we are being witnessed and guided by ghosts, ancestors, and angels from not just beyond science’s camouflage universe but the hidden altar of All That Is—all of samsara and all of nirvana. That’s the big picture. The path to awakening and species unity is by abyss and bedlam—no escape hatch or conscientious objection allowed. At its end is Tibetan rigpa, our innate joy and radiance, it’s who we are.The way is not clear, even to those who train to be clear—nor is it clear even how to dead-reckon mere survival, personal and collective. Absolute freedoms and forever chemicals vie in the biosphere with buck-stops-here tipping-point stewardship.

Given the battlefields and diasporas that birthed our species in the last Ice Age, there had to be such a moment. Tomorrow’s axiom is blinding as a proximal star. If you look at it directly, it cannot be seen.

                                     *

My first published work was Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which I wrote mostly in 1966. In the time since, I have written more than forty books, among them The Long Body of the Dream; The Slag of Creation; Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church: Planet Medicine: From Stone Age Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing; The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos; Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity; The Bardo of Waking Life: The New York Mets: Myth, Ethnography, and Subtext; Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness; and Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. I agree with those who have said that forty is too many. I have spent a disproportion of my allotted lifetime on writing (and watching ballgames), but I also think that you have to pass the hours creatively, joyfully, and safely. I wrote as a morning meditation, as prayer to the day-star, as an alternative to bullshitting and gossiping, and as parallel play with my wife Lindy Hough (also a writer), from our 1960s Selectrics in Ann Arbor to our 2020s laptops in California and Maine.

As for games, I wanted my teams to win because then they got to keep playing and evolving, as I evolved with them. I followed fiercely and cared for a reason not cited in the sports pages: time itself, a narrative that, when it ends, is death: death of the season, death of oneself or a part of oneself. Teams never return with the same roster, nor do families. As a pro star, I forget whom, once remarked, “If it’s the ultimate game, why do they play it again next year?”

From a portable radio at Camp Chipinaw to a satellite dish on Blake Street and later internet subscriptions for my teams, I listened to or watched countless “ultimate games” in the climactic rapture of my nature. I massaged their numbers in the papers, online, and in monkey mind. I conducted daily prayers to a totemic Ka’aba faintly resembling the one at Mecca.³ 

                                                  *

In fall 2020, I began writing a book about Trumpism, chaos magic, and weaponized information. Donald the First was still in high office, though he was about to lose a November plebiscite that he didn’t concede as a fair match. He would set up court in exile at Mar-a-Lago, though not before attempting an American Coup (as in American Sniper, American Kids, and American Pie).

“Chaos Magic” was my original context—as a driver behind a flamboyant mountebank’s unforeseen ascent. POTUS 45 was a payoff of shamanic rituals and psychic forces outside ordinary politics.

In February 2020 in my longtime role as a writer and publisher, I began to curate a new imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, which oversees the largest current archive of Earth’s spiritual traditions. Apart from my book-acquiring, I was asked to give editorial feedback to John Michael Greer, an Inner Traditions author of a forthcoming title on Donald Trump and chaos magic.

Chaos magic was at the outer fringe of my knowledge base. I was well versed in Aleister Crowley and Thelemite ceremonies—the ritual projection of will. I read Magick in Theory and Practice in college in the 1960s when I was too callow to realize than Crowley had written an occult version of my physics textbook.

I was more nuanced in the shamanic genealogy of magic. See any of six editions of my book Planet Medicine in which I tracked the topic from late 1970s through the early 2000s. My prior (1975) doctorate in anthropology began in 1966 as an inquiry into myth and religion inspired by Winnebago tricksters, Maori wairuas (spirit ghosts), Ndembu voodoo masters, Hopi kachinas, and Navaho pourers of sacred sand. Once I got through my thesis defense and seven years of teaching college, I gave up on academic politics and continued the inquiry on my own.

More recently, I studied grounding cords, protection roses, change-history, and aura reading with Sethian attorney John Friedlander (he has a degree from Harvard Law School that he earned during years in which he also sat with Jane Roberts while she channeled interdimensional entity Seth).⁴ I was a bit cloudy on the chaos brand per se. I knew that it came from a mix of instruments and incantations on seventies Camden High Street, London, among other pre-Beatles locales.  

In the late 1960s, close friends of mine collaborated with underground film-maker Kenneth Anger and musician Mick Jagger on an early chaos-magic rock video, Invocation of my Demon Brother, before either term was officially coined. Rockers then believed that the magic was in the music and the music in them. This pre-“chaote” fusion of camp culture and pop sorcery took place under the auspices of consciousness-altering drugs and incipient punk tropes.

That presaged by fifty years the link between Donald Trump and ritual voodoo. For Team Trump, chaos magic wasn’t a deck of punk-voodoo tropes, geeky techniques, or ceremonies near the echelon of Nazi satanic rituals in Bavarian forests; it was a borrowed Julius Evola stunt from the playbook of intellectual hitman Steve Bannon whose “occult” credentials ran from Naval Warfare officer in the Pacific fleet to Seinfeld promoter, Biosphere 2 manager, and Breitbart media hen.

For masonic templar Greer, however, it was a real ceremony, and it had worked.

Another Inner Traditions author, Gary Lachman, wrote an earlier text on traditional magic in the context of Donald Trump and state power. He included Vladimir Putin’s Russian rendition, which led to a follow-up Inner Traditions title on occult traditions in Holy Russia. Gary was my tutor on politics and magic, and his work is quoted throughout my sections on chaos magic and Trump.

The Greer manuscript was published in late 2020 as The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power. Inner Traditions catalogued it this way: “John Michael Greer goes beyond superficial memes and extreme partisanship to reveal the magical and occult forces that spawned the unexpected presidential victory of an elderly real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star and which continue to drive the deepening divide that is now the defining characteristic of American society.”

That p.r. proved prophetic. Magical and occult forces were sowing new realities.

Greer, as a freemason, went beneath Trumpian sigils into ancestral runes, but his trowel was different from mine. An enthusiast of post-modern populism and its origin in national spiritualist revivals, he was an overt cheerleader for the decline and fall of the capitalist West, which spurred his love-hate affair with the King. He was a bit like an academy historian rooting for a cultural revolution that might send him to Siberia.

In October after working with Greer, I decided to take my own shot at the topic. I first read two of Greer’s other sources, the afore-mentioned Italian philosopher Julius Evola and Romanian historian Ioan Couliano.* By then, I was less focused on the fusion of magic and politics, a gloomy, enervating proposition—Lachman’s book is aptly entitled Dark Star Rising—and more on the role of evocation and ritual in awakening a sleeping giant capable of healing civilizational wounds.

I am not a doomsayer or nihilist, though I dabble in the apocalyptic tropes of our time. My old friend Chuck Stein—we go back to freshman year of high school—proposed recently, “We are an invasive species.” He proffered that even though he is a Buddhist practitioner and devotee of reincarnated lama Namkhai Norbu—meaning that he is a student of the dharma, purity, and emptiness—so I take his words to heart, though he is also subject to capitalism’s inadvertent capitalization of its own maudlin self-critiques.

Once I began writing about politics and chaos magic, I found a companion topic: the coronaviral pandemic. Trump and COVID-19 were joined at the short hairs from the moment the virus arrived by jet from Mainland China in California and slipped past customs. It burgeoned through the 2020 Presidential campaign, overriding other topics as it overrode medical systems and supply chains.

In pandemic spring (2020), I collated an Inner Traditions anthology, The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical. For Babel, I rewrote my opening and closing transmissions into a chapter. As I followed the virus through 2021 into 2022, the chapter grew and morphed, and continues to morph. It now is a book within a book.

  I introduce vax and anti-vaxx under QAnon in Chapter Two, a harbinger of my fuller analysis in Chapter Four. Go to both places for the full imbroglio. I can’t sort it—no one can—but I capture some of its tiers of contradictory criteria. The fact is, our materialistically oriented society is in no position to issue verdicts on either nano or subtle realms—and viruses, vaccines, and vital energies encompass both.

In excavating COVID, I tried to lay down an objective lesson plan, though I have biases regarding the nature of disease and cure going back to the first edition of Planet Medicine in 1978. In my interrogation of non-Western and alternative healing systems, I side with energy medicine, vitalism, and the esoteric (or etheric) basis of all illnesses and their cures. I believe that natural immunity, etheric vibrations, and embryogenic fields are senior to the most advanced technological and pharmaceutical interventions. We exist not only as molecular algorithms under Darwinian constraints but because a vital-energy vortex touched down here. As the anthroposophists have it, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and, together, they recapitulate cosmogeny. The egg recapitulates nature’s evolution and together they recapitulate the cosmos.

The vital force was identified by healers long before the Common Era: Greek physicians with their hot compresses and geometry of vital energy, followers of the Chinese Yellow Emperor with his roots, ground shells, and thorns, and the Cree shaman (and his First Nations colleagues with their spirit allies, vision quests, and medicine bundles). It is still our once and future clinic, though the medical establishment has lieged itself to computer science and biotech. A key theme of this book is that the takeover of medicine by a profit-based technocracy—of agriculture too—literally trumps Left and Right, vax and anti-vaxx.

I didn’t want to plunge my readers directly into Trumpworld—it’s a La Brea tar pit as well as surefire brawl between fans and detractors. (Amazing, isn’t it, that Kellyanne and George Conway can raise sane children together? But such is Babel.) Yet nailing the orange shapeshifter—an international obsession and cottage industry—is critical to sounding where we are as a nation, world, and genome. The dude didn’t drop in from Nowhere, though he remade its palindrome Erewhon. He is Earth’s collective golem or “ghola,” to borrow Frank Herbert’s vogue noun from a sci-fi Dune world. A ghola is an artificial human constructed from the DNA of a dead individual, a far more salient danger in the world of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and CRISPR technology than when Herbert invented one of Earth’s great alt-planets. 

Despite his defeats, the King in Orange is not leaving any time soon. He is as immune to removal as any vampire or malefic madonna. My take on him is different from the rest—yeah, everyone says that!—but I hope that you read past my opening scenery to more substantial oracles and enigmas. Mary Stark, my literary executor, was the first witness to my dilemma. She wrote:

The early part of your book is a bit confusing because it sounds like current material, but a lot pertains to a past presidency and even the lead-up to that—almost like a slightly outdated diary of musings/observations. Those observations are still pertinent, though one gets caught up trying to figure if your chapter is an up-to-the-minute reading of our current predicaments or more of a retrospective.

Trumpian drama plays that way. We don’t know if it’s in our rear view and receding or if, as comedian Chris Rock hauntingly put it between Election 2016 and Inauguration 2017, we’re still in line to board the roller-coaster. We may still be in line.

I didn’t want an outdated diary, so I decided to introduce the King in Orange with a personal preamble.

Then comes Act One: Entry of Trump, troupe and trope, cluttered cast and scenery. The thirteen percent of the U.S. electorate who voted for both Barack Obama and the Donald were among the confounded in Babel.

As I delved further into Trump and chaos magic, I encountered its deeper driver: QAnon. I separated its occult elements and synchromysticism from its agitprop politics, deferring full chaos magic till I laid firmer groundwork. QAnon is the larger entity. Trump was its harbinger.  

In mapping conspiracy theories, I am neither a supporter and apologist nor a debunker. Instead, I interrogate them culturally, psychologically, and metaphysically in framing of (1) other cargo cults, (2) the alphabetic origins of the letter Q, and (3) the trendy QAnon Trio: Transgression, Conspiracy Theory, and Synchromysticism.

Pedophilia and satyriasis are Q’s one-two punch of “transgressions,” inseparable from pathologies of eros and gender throughout human history. Because I wrote about sexuality in a different, unpublished manuscript, Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, I grafted some of its passages into an ensuing chapter on identity politics where I continued to deconstruct sex magic.

Most books on QAnon either celebrate it as a new sect of evangelical Christianity or mock, denigrate, and demonize it as propagandized Right Wing twaddle. The pro-QAnon selection includes titles like QAnon: The Awakening Begins (by Anthony Tolle) and the anonymous QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening. Countless related titles have been banned from the internet.

Conversely, Amazon.com’s monstropedia heralds the negative side, starring the umbrella QAnon: Everything You Need to Know About the World’s Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory by James A. Beverley, and the pull-no-punches Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump. For Operation Mindfuck, the publisher offered a quote from Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, “Voltaire suggested that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. . . . Robert Guffey’s razor-sharp postings illuminate how a collage of Shaver mysteries, Discordian prankster politics, and recreational conspiracy theory played out as a dissociative American fugue.” That’s a fair response to the low end of the Q emanation.

The high-end reality is thornier and more complex. Rolling Stone columnist Eric Levai described a Burning-Man-like miscegenation of millenarians, merry pranksters, neo-Nazis, evangelicals, libertarians, Hells Angels, hooligans, and meta-MAGA heads at a modern “Renaissance fair.” Levai writes:

On a beautiful California afternoon, people screamed, “Lock (Fauci) up!”, danced to bizarre QAnon pop anthems. Political candidates manned booths, while people played carnival games. Someone dressed as Batman posed for photographs, and the director of “Plandemic” was praised as a hero. The “People’s Convoy”—the motorists who did slow laps around Washington D.C. to protest covid policies — rolled in and set up shop, blaring their horns until my ears were bleeding. Everything felt strangely . . . boring, an absolute mismatch with the violent froth of extremist ideology, conspiracy, and aggression blaring from the stage.⁵

His subtext is that the marching band of Q opens brilliantly and terrifyingly but wears quickly like a sofa in a brothel.

The August 15, 2021 Sunday New York Times Book Review praised Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko under a heading that reflects the generic progressive-media view of the creed: “The Dangers of QAnon: An alarming movement that is growing in power.” Critic Seyward Darby japes, among multiple banderillas, that “QAnon offers people a false sense of agency and community in an uncertain world. Believers collectively analyze ‘crumbs’ of cryptic information. . . . When they reach conclusions, followers feel smart, superior, and united.”

That’s the collective diagnosis of educated intellectuals and literati, my original home team. Darby laments that the authors “don’t discuss how racial identity may have informed the participants’ [e.g., stormers of the Capitol] ‘psychological distress’ over ‘changing culture and eroding social norms.’” Darby added, “The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were overwhelmingly white.”⁶

Condescension by identity politics misses the hermeneutics as well as actual depth and danger of Q. 

In Chapter Three, “Cancel Cultures,” I continue to track millenary aspects of QAnon, which leads to my deconstruction of the Democratic Party’s anti-spiritual cosmology and concomitant loss of Kansas (and much of the American heartland and exurbs). At the same time, I critiqued the Right’s religiosity and American exceptionalism. Yet its circumstantial alliance with alternative medicines—it is more truly a sponsor of commercialized Christmas, nativism, and the rights of the unborn—gives it a ring of health freedom along with a strategically rowdy political incorrectness. Throw in Bannon’s meme magic, calamitous Iraq and Libyan wars, inglorious Somalian, Syrian, and Afghan exits, inflation, food and housing shortages, opiates and fentanyl, and you have a Uranian recipe for revivalism.

Through 2016 I have voted straight Democratic since coming of age, but neither side is now my home team. I am oddly more welcome these days in in the redneck camp than my own. Though neither Regnery nor HarperOne would publish this book, Regnery could publish it, whereas Harper and Penguin can’t even look at it. Exploring QAnon with neutral curiosity and analyzing mass vaccination as anything other than the lone authorized path out of the COVID-19 pandemic are nonstarters for the former free press. 

Numerous holistic practitioners, energy healers and lay shamans have likewise found themselves in the company of belief systems that most of them would have deemed opprobrious and shameful just a few years ago. New dialectics have led to crisscrossed energies, unlikely bedfellows, and mismatched grails.

“The Plan,” “The Storm,” or “The Great Awakening,” as envisioned by QAnon and its affiliate militias and oath keepers, may turn out to be far more enigmatic than either guns or roses when game time arrives. Players and rules are changing sides and parties by the second and meme. Where will you be when it counts?

Having introduced exiled medicine men and women in Chapter Two (QAnon), I follow them through “Cancel Cultures.” On a downward spiral, ritual magic is allied with fascism and a Nazi death cult. On the upswing, it points to a revival of natural religion and medicine to counter five hundred years of materialist reductionism. This is a crucial dialectic in the chapter on COVID and its vaccines when I discuss the rise of a technocracy.

Whichever way QAnon’s apocalyptic utopianism goes, Dylan’s “times they are a-changin’” wheel is still in spin and is going to be for a while.

As Chapter Three’s barometer, I used a conceit by which Rabbi Michael Lerner distinguished two different “hands” of Yahweh: mercy and power. Each of them have partisans on both the political Left and political Right. I go beyond Michael’s 2004 analysis, taking into account dialogues that he and I had subsequently and leading to the current gridlock of identity politics and cancel culture, which has left American campuses, corporations, and free speech in tatters, and not just American.

This chapter has a personal arc. My wife, Lindy Hough, and I were cancel-cultured from our own publishing company after fifty-five years of developing it from a sixties college journal (Io) through phases of growth, life support, revival, and transformation into an indy mind-body-spirit imprint (North Atlantic Books). It was taken over, I tend to say (in symbo shorthand), by zealots, opportunists, and language police, though there were only five or six of them, so the categories overlap. They were straight out of a Gen X punk-immaculacy, anti-intellectual wrecking crew though, like everyone else, they had an alt-narrative in which they were good guys and liberators. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. . . .” pretty much describes the silent majority of staff, board members, and fellow Berkeley publishers. After all, Lindy and I had white privilege­—felony enough.

I thought of our press as a magical, initiatory vessel; it took us a lifetime and much of our own money and donated time to create: a nonprofit organization based on a coalition of indigenous and avant-garde arts and sciences. The occupiers converted it into a counter-initiatory boutique. In the process, they vandalized fifty-plus years of careful archiving with race-and-gender censorship while meretriciously—most of them are white—displaying their own pronoun preferences (almost all straight he’s and she’s)—with “they-them-theirses” like their home-team emblems, waving fake tomahawks and Black Lives Matter banners, too.

We had no excuse. We hired them and gave them jobs and salaries and didn’t think “lord of the flies”, Jack and Piggy, at the time. But in a world in which every tenth human is a sociopath, charm and “shining on” gets mistaken for emotional intelligence and camaraderie.

They used virtue-signaling to camouflage old-fashioned robbery— identity theft and home invasion, taking what isn’t yours. They wanted our brand and cashflow, money and reputation they didn’t earn, so they used neo-woke race theory, the sort of tactic, writ large, that helped elect Donald Trump and squander a Democratic majority, but what did they care? They were never after social justice, just its cover.

In the “Cancel Culture” chapter, I propose that a lot of the new race theory and social-justice stuff that has become legion in the neo-liberal West in the 2020s—listen carefully because this is a subtle point that I have to put on a Columbo-and-the-Dream-Team thinking cap to get right—are actually revivalist expressions of White Power. White bureaucrats, academics, and ambitious posturers ally with Black, and sometimes Native American, chicano, and other minority bureaucrats and opportunists, none of whom care about jazz, hip-hop, reggae, street art, world fusion, Basquiat, Baraka, medicine bundles, emu totems, Stew, self-discovery, and indigenous or magical arts. Instead together they create the myth of critical race theory, White fragility, White appropriation, and the 1619 Project’s correction whereby they legitimize and valorize each other in order to keep tuitions, grants, salaries and other doles flowing or, in our case, use a social-justice, inclusion meme, combined with ageism, to take over an organization and steal its bank accounts and endowment.

This dude and Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement lady should go to the prom or partner in crime together because they provide the grease for each other’s scams. 

Not that that there isn’t systemic racism too—and plenty of it. I discuss that as well, but as a curable miasm and opportunity, not as judgment or false-flag red meat for the oh-so-woke.

On top of it, our crew created their own replacement history in which newcomers were told that Lindy and I invented our nonprofit (Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences) to steal money from Native Americans. By 2019, pathological lying wasn’t considered pathological, or even lying (if in the service of salvation politics). We see its equivalents now throughout the world of liberal arts, liberal politics, and progressive culture. Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger were nothing special. We met as Smith and Amherst students in 1963 three weeks before the JFK assassination, and our long collaboration became mid-to-late roadside carrion in the Trump era.

For a while, I regretted my mistakes, which were legion, like don’t hire people who don’t support your mission. I have since taken in the bigger picture, that we are in a time when energy is drawing its antipode—the more radical the energy, the more fascist and anti-Christ the backlash.

The kidnapping of our “child” is why I was starting a new imprint at the invitation of Inner Traditions’ publisher, Ehud Sperling. Prior to that, my West Coast staff had viewed his Vermont press as the enemy. Decades prior, missed by me at the time, the San Francisco Bay Area’s brief Whole Earth Catalogue renaissance was hijacked by redneck hippies, book bundlers, and tech capitalists. They were too young to have been part of the counterculture that spawned Bookpeople, Shambhala, and the communes of northern Vermont. They wanted to make bucks, not ecocities. They had no pretense to Whole Earth anything.

“We”—and I include myself and Lindy—joined them and became the bad guys, cutting the decks unfairly with our author and copublisher colleagues, taking more than we deserved because manipulable databases and software made it simple and blind. From non-MBA backgrounds, we were happy just to start a successful business, so we adopted community standards, not realizing that we would get old and be hoisted on the same petard by the next Cultural Revolution.

Two of Ehud’s initial comments on the matter—“Racist, sexist; they’ve seen nothing like two angry Jews!” and “My pronoun is motherfucker!” spoke to everything I hadn’t ever wanted to be affiliated with, on any of its counts. I was, proudly (to name-drop and virtue-signal) Ishmael Reed’s buddy and partner in hoodoo and Barbary Coast Distribution in the 1960s and ’70s; a reader at Andy Hope’s 1976 Tlingit-Eskimo powwow in Anchorage; a long-time pro-Palestinian, anti-Seder Jew; and the adoring father of a film-maker and novelist sometimes dubbed the “Queen of Queer”—but it was everything that had become necessary for my survival. Our daughter wrote at the time:

It really is just boggling to me how this entire company that you and mommy made could be suddenly not yours anymore. I guess it has to do with the structure, that the board essentially owns it. And I guess you knew it wasn’t “yours” in the way that I, your child, would think it was. But I really am just stunned. You actually seem to be taking it well, I guess with something this awful various survival strategies come to the fore. Of course it’s not piercing like it is for you, but because I literally grew up inside the company, lived with it my whole childhood, have never not known it to be my parent’s company and proud of it—it is a loss for me too. 

I am so sorry. 

love,

mj

Ehud himself had started in Israel (to which his near forebears had fled from 1930s Berlin), but he came of age and adolescence in the projects of Washington Heights and Queens. He was no Zionist “white dude.” Another comment of his spoke to the real issue: “What’s race except the Indy 500?” My chapter likewise challenges race as bait-and-switch for class and lifestyle. We’re all red blood and white bones beneath a climatologically mutating ectoderm.

In Chapter Four, “COVID-19,” my goal was to get under ideological façades and excavate the political, cultural, linguistic, and epidemiological woof of a mutating pandemic with its also-fungible culture-bound responses. In The Corona Transmissions, I cast COVID-19 as a psychopomp—a facilitator of bio-diversity and planetary wake-up call. That was a bit of utopian embellishment, but I stand by it, from Kristin Flyntz’s “Stop. Just stop. / It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. /We will help you.” to Emily Shurr’s “NO ONE CAN DO THIS ALONE. We need each other. / And the good news is—we HAVE each other!”The current “COVID” chapter, expanded through 2021 and 2022, is designed to the bumps and curves in the virus’ ongoing epidemiology and epistemology.

I have tried to unravel various memes packing them, notably the vaunted V-word. While I present opposing views on mass vaccination, the fact is, from either plank any airspace to the opposition is heresy. A documentary filmmaker I know visited his native Berkeley in late 2021 and attempted to gift a copy of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health to a childhood pal. “He was ashamed to be seen looking at it,” my friend told me. “He hesitated to touch and open it as if it was contaminated with poison or the virus itself. But when we went into another room and he actually read some of it, he was glad to have it—and without a paper trail. He left with it under his arm.”

At the same time, anti-censorship City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco refused to carry or special-order the book.

On the other side, many anti-vaxx folks have treated vaccination like a Left Wing tattoo rather than a scientific litmus.   

Given the political, ecological, and economic plight of our species, the virus-vaccine brouhaha is a bait-and-switch, distracting us from far deadlier plagues, asteroids, and hyperobjects on the near horizon.                            

My cardinal topic, “Chaos Magic,” is set three chapters past its debut in Trumpism. That lets me derive it from four table setters: Trumpism, QAnon, identity politics, and scientia (the prescientific fusion of magic and science). My chapter opens with a history of shamanism, telekinesis, and street (or forest) magic,then goes to the advent of the chaos brand, which I track by two principal agencies: sigils and egregores. These lead to the King in Orange with his MAGA sigil and “Stop the Steal” egregore. As these toggle into autonomous tropes, they trump Trump himself.

In the following chapter, I interrogate Stop the Steal and briefly consider E.T. intercession in the 2020 election, if only as a glass to look through at more elusive krakens. I end at January Sixth’s Saturnalia, the March on the Capitol.

But then Vladimir Putin sent the Red Army into Ukraine in an orgy of clan murder, urban demolition, and petty revenge that will take centuries to sort and assimilate. Aiming missiles at markets, hospitals, theaters, and apartment complexes brings Trumpian vanity and Soviet authoritarianism to their shared consummation. QAnon, COVID, and identity politics didn’t evaporate with the invasion of Ukraine; they evolved, so I added a seventh chapter on Eurasian fault lines, Holy Russia, Putin, and The Great Reset.   

I consign all these hexes, poxes, and flaps to the entry of Aquarius and the Year of the Ox, leading us from Trumpism, Putinism, Xiism, and Bidenism—are they finally that different?—to subtle bodies, angelic guides, and energy dragons.

                                         *

Early on, I named this book Reading Gateway Cards: Opening the 2020 Portal. Since I was writing in the context of Inner Traditions, I put my inquiries into a psychospiritual container that included the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, animal consciousnesses, cryptids (like sasquatches and sea monsters,) psychoids (like leprechauns and undines), UFOs, bardo realms, and telekinesis. To my editorial colleagues, the container proved more appetizing than its Trumpian and Q contents, so I stripped it off and turned it into a companion book: Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs (Inner Traditions, 2022). The two texts converge at roughly the same prognosis: Earth, its solar system, galaxy, and supergalaxy have moved within the cosmos to a new zone of space, which is meaning to awaken us from a trance longer than recorded history.

For my other gateways, see Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Chapter One: “Planet” (1. Big Bang, 2. Ice, 3. Climate); Chapter Two: “Genome” (1. Cells, 2. Microbiomes); Chapter Three: Dreamings (1. Butterfly Dreaming, 2. Aboriginal Dreamings, 3. Octopus and Crow Dreamings, 4. COVID Dream Animals); Chapter Four: Meta-Science (1. Fields, 2. Quantum Mechanics, 3. Life Among Stars); Chapter Five: Unidentified Flying Guides (1. UFOs, 2. Meeting David Wilcock at Noniland, 3. Psychoids); Chapter Six: Incarnations (1. Afterlives, 2. Ghosts, 3. The Scam of the Being of Light, 4. Reincarnations, 5. Time); Chapter Seven: Practices (1. Phenomena and Phenomenology, 2. Buddhism, 3. Exercises, 4. Initiations); Epilogue: Camouflage Cosmoses, Callings, and Codes (1. Technocracy, 2. The God Code, 3. Bandwidths).

Endnotes

1. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” in Dover Beach and Other Poems, p. 87.

2. Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” Columbia Records, 1967.

3. Baseball material adapted from Out of Babylon, Book Four: Universal Forces of Light, unpublished.

4. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth.

5. Eric Levai, “QAnon, the ‘People’s Convoy,’ and Neo-Nazis Mingle at L.A. Anti-Vaxx Rally,” Rolling Stone online, April 16, 2022.

6. Seyward Darby, “The Dangers of QAnon,” The New York Times, Book Review, August 15, 2021, p.21.

Prologue

9/11/2001 to 11/8/2016 to 1/6/2021    

“When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1

In September 2001, Lindy and I flew JetBlue from Boston to SFO. Three days later, Saudi and Yemini jihadists armed with utility knives hijacked two West-Coast-bound planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon—the extent of their aeronautic skills. A fourth hijacked plane, United 93, was wrested from its abductors by passengers and crashed unpiloted into a Pennsylvania field, now a cenotaph to a Satanic rite conducted in the transportation hub.

We awoke to 9/11 on Pacific Daylight time. The satellite technician who came to restore codes lost by our four-month renters remarked after turning on the receiver and staring, “Boy, we must be pissing some people off!” Still my favorite unrehearsed response.

At the time, three days seemed safe leeway. As the lesion of those planes continues to tear time, three days have come to feel like three seconds—whew! Those weren’t just terrorist deaths—casualties of Wright Brothers flight—they were sacrifices on an Inca altar. Pond-hopping may distinguish twenty-first century jets from nineteenth-century ocean-going vessels and stagecoaches, but the generations of vehicles, each based on wheels and gears, Roman wagon trails, and the bending of time, are not that different. Modernity’s journeys may be epic in terms of molecules burned, electrons moved, distances covered, and destinies shuffled, but, for all the hoopla, underlying karma doesn’t change.

Every flight is a ceremony, a sweat lodge, and an odyssey through an underworld presented celestially. Consider US Airways 1549 from New York/LaGuardia to Charlotte/Douglas (January 15, 2009), which encountered a flock of Canadian geese at 3,000 feet. The plump fowl were sucked into both jet engines, converting rotors, blades, and assorted metal parts and fasteners into salvage, casting an eerie silence over the Airbus. Captain Chesley Sullenberger glided it safely onto the Hudson River.

                                         *

November 8, 2016. Lindy and I stayed with friends in Windsor, Connecticut, en route from New York City to Portland, Maine. After our hosts left us for an election party, we followed the returns with a poet from Hartford. We saw Yeats’ falconer unable to call his falcon; we heard the opening notes of a ceremony of innocence drowned. “Mere anarchy” had been loosed upon the world.

I didn’t know then that our hosts had cast absentee ballots in Florida for Donald J. Trump. They returned at 2 a.m., celebrating.

They are good, generous people—working-class, community-oriented, crystal and salt-lamp mavens. They saw a benign magician and working-class hero; I saw an ascended slumlord and John Wayne Gacy clown.

I learned later that a left-wing friend in Maine voted for him too. “I held my nose,” she said, “but Hillary was more dangerous.”

I went to bed in the a.m., thinking, ‘This is going to be terrible, but we will get through it. We survived the Cuban Crisis.’

I was eighteen then, and that was a single hit-and-run in the ocean, nuclear winter canceled by a phone call.

No cable would cancel this deluge, from degradation of worldwide ecosystems—seas and rainforests—to weapon-pollinated clusterfucks in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Kashmir, Ethiopia, and Central America, fascist mange spreading across India, Israel, Brazil, Belarus, Hungary, the Philippines, and the Emirates.

        On August 10, 2016, I posted on Facebook:

Note to Republicans:

Telling yourself that you can stage-manage four years of a Trump presidency without major catastrophe to the country and the world is like kidding yourself that you can persuade Mohammed Atta to land the plane safely.

It had arrived, the darkness that does not precede a dawn, late and ahead of time, because magical thinking could no longer postpone it. As forests combusted like matchsticks, hurricanes reminded us of 900 miles-per-hour vortices elsewhere in our solar system. While shamans and witches tried to dance life back, rain-forest activists were jailed and executed, jungle tribes and their habitats obliterated. Jets dumped metallic particles into the atmosphere, making a Google/Amazon cloud in an attempt to control the climate, two birds with one stone.

This is the darkness that precedes not a dawn but the birth of a radically new order of things.¹

For now, it is the Age of Donald Trump—whatever it really is—an interlude of gangsta, graft, grift, and queer, of “Make Love as War.” Love is treated as unavailable content, encrypted by multiple operating systems, transmuted by tweeting, sexting, tribal correctness, and cancel culture. Bye-bye “earth angel, earth angel, / the one I adore.”²

It is also the opening—breach birth—of the so-called Aquarian kalpa. Trump may not have been the herald summoned—no alchemical Whole Earth steward he, no seventh samurai or Zen master. But he was the samurai ordered—all six feet, three inches, 244 pounds, 2 billion dollars, playboy pedigree, sclerotic swagger, and golden mane. Columnist Charles P. Pierce nailed the ascent of a hollowman in Esquire:

In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

 These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.

Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.³

It is not as simple as that, but it also is. Pierce nailed. it When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.

At Auld Lang Syne 2019, Janus hung “their” harbingers: 150-degree days, economic decline, domestic terror, tribal diasporas, epochal floods. In 2020, “they” added a pandemic, closed borders, social distancing, death waves, a watershed election in the United States, supply-chain cleavages, a revaluation of currencies, nonfungible tokens—a transmogrification of goods and facts. These lay on a pre-Aquarian cusp, as ghosts of dissolving realities multiplied, starboard to stern. They served a prophetic function, to startle and alert, to re-engage us in a cosmic view of who we are.

For Janus’ appearance in 2021, celebrated on January 6^th in honor of the old calendar, the hollowman’s followers stormed the capitol and tried to take back their imaginary America, though they never got out of Caesar’s Rome, Mission: Impossible!, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. Was the battlefield on new Earth or on old Mars? Do we even remember after The Chessmen of Mars, Martians Go Home!, Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, The Martian Codex, War of the Worlds, and Stranger in a Strange Land? We are again “only eggs.”

A lesion opened between the election of Donald J. Trump and the firestorms of the American West and Australian outback. It featured a boom economy that felt like anything but. The Inuit spoke of a shift in the Earth and Solar System’s orbits: “The sun is in a different place now,” their elders said. “Everything is tilting northward. The winds are fitful, weather unpredictable.” They checked with elders from other tribes who agreed, something celestial is happening.

‘Oumuamua, a cylindrical object of unknown scale and anomalous trajectory, acceleration, and origin, whipped through our system in 2017, changing speed and albedo, and was gone before astronomers realized that they had a black swan. Too late! It was well on its way toward Pegasus.

On September 6^th, the anomalous artifact broke the planetary orbital plane from the direction of Vega, twenty-five light years away, reaching perihelion on September 9^th, and was gone in a month. When Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested that ‘Oumuamua’s behavior flagged a technosignature rather than another primal rock—debris from another civilization, a photon-driven sail several kilometers long and a few millimeters thick, a camera probe?—he was all but excommunicated from the guild of astrophysics. Messaging is strictly regulated in academe.

Where was NASA with its asteroid watch? It was busy tracking the location of Apophis in 2029, but can it tell where Earth is now?

COVID-19 filled the spreading lesion. Only a bit of it, but it gave a sense of how its gaps will be filled—not by plagues alone but by shadows from this overwrought, rootless civilization.

Now restaurants, pedestrians, and ports no longer look like themselves. Duration can’t be counted by gears, pendula, or cesium ticks; it is distended, becoming longer and deeper, while stalling out in some precincts and whipping by like the solar wind in others. Heraclitus’ one-way river is clogged with wormholes, eddies, switchbacks, and the sorts of relativistic relocations that make mere Proustian—even Einsteinian—déjà vu quaint. No wonder Outback, Dark, Manifest, Stranger Things, and The Sandman with their assorted Wiccans, demons, and tuxedo-wearing vampires stream across Netflix’s zeitgeist. We are rolling over epochs among standing stones, buzzing rocks, callings, and forbidden archaeologies. Remnants of Atlantis and Lemuria envelop common cities from the Emirates to Puget Sound. The old past is a time capsule, a ghost town of dumps and deserts, inhabited by movie armorers and stuntmen in a lesion somewhere between Rust and Songbird.

Cosmic distances have been warped too, space-time reorganized by orbiting Webb eyes from the farthest galaxies to crossing town. Urban zones drift apart, while individuals—Hong-Kong to Capetown, Buenos Aires to Boise—sit in a virtual chamber, connected by Zoom, where they trade cryptographies, databanks, blockchains, facial recognition, and passports, and conduct magnetic-resonance Reiki. Unnamed entities loiter on earth’s dimensional frontiers, watching, imposing new rules and meanings.

Endnotes

1. In 1970, poet Robert Kelly said to me, “We are living in the darkest West, in the dark that does not precede the dawn but the birth of a radically different order of things.”

2. Cleveland Duncan, Curtis Williams, Dexter Tisby, Bruce Tate (The Penguins), “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine),” Dootone 1954.

3. Charles P. Pierce, “This Vicious Buffoon Is a Vessel for All the Worst Elements of the American Condition,” Esquire online, October 3, 2018.

Chapter One

Trumpism

1. THE REAL DONALD TRUMP, SHAPESHIFTER AND GRIFTER

In June 2015 on the staircase of Trump Tower on New Holland’s Fifth Avenue, Donald John Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United Colonies in front of hired actors, posing in game-face—or was it a WWF  (World Wrestling Federation) parody? He wasn’t expecting to win the Republican nomination, let alone the Presidency. He entered the race as a business venture, stunt, publicity scheme, dare, and revenge against NBC for not valuing his Celebrity Apprentice show enough to pay him what he thought he was worth.

           That’s how Melania and the rest of the clan viewed it; the Presidency itself would be a bother, and no one wanted to move to down-market D.C.

           Is that true? Like everything about Citizen Trump—before, then, and to come—motives and explanations are subject to reinterpretation and deconstruction at myriad levels. That afternoon, he spoke about the GDP, our corroding infrastructure and nuclear arsenal, Mexico stealing our jobs, China “killing” us, his own business prowess, and his lame opponents. He threw in what was to become his signature nitwit meme: “Not good!” It would later slip slide into “So sad!”

           It sounded almost real, as kitschy as Ronald Reagan forgetting that he acted, not fought, in World War II. That Trump was playing a character was par for his course; the issue is whether he turned into the character, always was that guy, or merely found “him” more lucrative than prior personae so went full makeover. Actor George Clooney remarked that, before Donald ran for President, he was just “a knucklehead who was always chasing girls.”¹

           I believe that showman Trump was playing a Reality role and was as stunned as the rest of the planet that winning the White House proved easier than buying a golf course in County Clare or flipping debt on the Jersey Boardwalk. I think that “daemon” Trump knew all along—POTUS was in his soul’s plan—the metaphysical document that folks sign before each incarnation. With his “gang” colors and Make America Great Again motto, he was playing a politician in a rock video while that guy was performing chaos magic, enacting an Aleister Crowley-like ceremony. It would raise him to imperial status—not grand hotelier or media sultan but King of Earth.

           Make America Great Again may have been a corny slogan, a fatuous maxim in eight beats (Make A Mer I Ca Great), but MAGA was a sigil, casting a spell at martial red.

           I am not saying that Trump thought any of this, knew the terms of ritual magic, was trained by magicians, or read magic books (he didn’t read). I am saying that his third eye, or “belly” (where he located his djinn), knew. Perhaps entities on other planes enlisted him for their own purposes. Either way, Trump acted from higher intelligence.

           Outsiders didn’t get it—they still don’t. It was a rite more than a campaign stump or rally. Its tactics were psychic and mantic, its tools those of a vodoun or exorcist: spells, hexes, egregores, mesmerism, dog whistles, and switchwords. By infantile, often two-syllable epithets and baby-word voodoo, he hexed and macerated rivals: Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary, Old Crow Mitch.

           He bewitched, bothered, and bewildered Big Game opponent Hillary into self-sabotage while mobilizing his own base at a scale surpassing any mere “ad buy.” Her “deplorables” meme lit a cord in the underclass, inverting its charge, as did all subsequent insults and aspersions aimed his way. They were gifts, priceless recruiting tools—for Trump was a master of absorbing and reversing energy. Barbs became jolts of psychic juju that ended up pinning their originators with stunning efficiency.

           Game on!

           Mark Twain sized up the ploy in his day: “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Or was it Abraham Lincoln? George Bernard Shaw? Rick Barry?

Hillary and husband Bill were already in politico-erotic collaboration with “the Donald,” so she didn’t have social distance or moral escape velocity needed to avoid complicity. They went to the same parties, aspired to the same lodge, shared Jeffrey Epstein as a buddy and airline host rather than a psychopath best kept at arm’s length. The Clintons toadied Trump for campaign contributions, while Bill bonded with the Donald in a “boys will be boys” club.

           That made them both his “bitches.” As Trump liked to recall, he bought them for chump change.

           In the 2016 Presidential debates, Hillary denounced Donald with only marmish chiding as if the match were croquet or tiddlywinks rather than mixed martial arts or shootout at O.K. Corral.

           She should have remembered Mao’s oft-retweeted tweet: “A revolution is not a tea party.”

           What ground could Hillary claim when hubby and Donald were bankers at the same bank, devotees of the same sex cult? No wonder she didn’t land a blow, just love slaps.

           She was also playing backward: Libya, Osama, the Balkans, Lena Dunham, Barbra Streisand; he was bobbing and weaving outside time: Alexander, Napoleon, Mao, Putin, John Gotti, Rupert Murdoch, Aristotle Onassis.

           She was more dangerous.

Shock jock Howard Stern, Trump’s former Gotham friend and co-conspirator, like Clooney cast him as a misguided playboy who sought mainly adulation and boobs. The Donald had everything he needed for a life of “forever fun” with a muse of mischief, yet ended up with major tsuris* from overreaching, then needlessly doubling down.

           To Stern, his pal should get out while he could. “I do think it would be extremely patriotic of Donald to say, ‘I’m in over my head and I don’t want to be President anymore,’” he told a reporter in May 2020. “It’d be so patriotic that I’d hug him and then I’d go back to Mar-a-Lago and have a meal with him and feel good about him. . ..”²

           It would also have turned out safer. The full extent of his criminal activities would not have been exposed to the constabulary, IRS, and Justice Depatment, let alone the world. He could have stayed knucklehead “Fun Donnie,” more Hugh Hefner than a hybrid John Gotti/David Duke.

           But was Stern’s fellow swinger the “real” Donald Trump, or was that a cover for Fred Trump’s true son, a Bavarian fascist yearning for return of the Third Reich, a banana-republic despot siccing troops on protestors in Portland, Oregon, and Washington D.C., egging police to bash “Antifa scum” with the blood lust of a spectator at gladiatorial games? Was it a publicity stunt gone awry, a party boy hijacked by his own scheme, or was it the molting of a sadistic Peronista from a libertine pupa?

           Was the guy who “loved” women so much he couldn’t resist grabbing and forcing kisses on them a latent pedophile or (yikes!) a necrophile?

           The range of Trumpiana and secondary phenomena is a haunted house in which poltergeists, common spooks, and assorted zombies and wraiths manifest, vamoose, and reappear in a séance of curtain calls and fiendish visitations. This is not a simple phenomenon nor what it appears on its chain of platforms.

           MAGA rallies and motorcycle parades, like the Sturgis, South Dakota superspreaders, evoke, on one hand, good old boys whooping it up, buffs of NASCAR, ’bama football, rasslin’ morality plays, and the Church of the AR15; on the other, they reverberate with nightriders and KKK grand wizards, Goths and Visigoths, Crusaders and Mongols, Tartars and Cossacks, brownshirts and Red Guards. They rise to a cryptomnesia of paramilitary militias, Partia Fashiste Shqiptare, tattoos of Stations of the Cross and Archangel Michael, black-and-yellow hooded t-shirts with 6MWE: “Six million wasn’t enough.” It may have looked like punk patriotism, recreational anti-Semitism, and macho styling, but so did Hitlerjugend haircuts and armbands at first.

A view of Donald Trump as a chaos magician aware at some level of his mojo is presented in scholarly detail by hermetic historian Gary Lachman, famous also as a founding member of the genre-bending rock group Blondie (for which he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006). In Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Lachman draws an evidential link from “power-of-positive-thinking” minister Norman Vincent Peale, at whose Marble Collegiate church on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Donald and his father Fred, davened, backward to Italian occultist and esoteric philosopher Julius Evola, forward to an Evola-shaped 2016 Presidential campaign. Peale’s church was no mere midtown drop-by; Trump married Czech-American businesswoman Ivana Zelníčková there, then eyed his second wife, Marla Maples. Lachman writes:

           For Peale, prayer is a “manifestation of energy,” a scientific allusion that the founder of the prosperity gospel, Prentice Mulford, also made when he compared thought to a substance which “in the chemistry of the future,” will be recognized “as much as the acids, oxides, and all other chemicals of today.” If faith can move mountains, according to Peale the right prayer applied in the right way is like a laser beam, a tightly focused current of faith that can achieve its end with pinpoint accuracy.³ 

           Call it churchy prayer or Thelemite magic—for people like Peale and Crowley, the distinction was a Middle Class hogwart. “God” was a high energy for personal use. Trump may not have been a thaumaturge or Peale scholar, but he understood affirmation, hypnotic recitation, the tactics of optimism, and theocratic authority; he imbibed them from the master. When, as President, he complained about the negative attitude of Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, whiz kid Fauci seemed puzzled, but Trump’s gripe was straight out of Peale’s playbook: “Accentuate only the positive. The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.”⁴ To worry or doubt was to cede power, “weak-weak-weak” in Trump’s lexicon. Fauci’s gloom and doom, even during a full-blown pandemic, was, to Donald, more dangerous than a virus.

           Positive thinking is not an insignificant weapon—its power runs from telekinetic waves in a heavyweight boxing ring to telepathic voodoo in the World Series of Poker. A lifetime of Pealean practice and parental encouragement taught Donald to behave more warrior-like than soldiers who had been on actual battlefields. His tantrums intimidated five-star Generals, senators, FBI agents, physicians, Stanford and MIT scientists, grunts who won purple hearts and stars under fire, and scholars with post-doctorate degrees. All wilted before a colicky bairn’s piques and put-downs. This was no mere stage magic; Trump used his positive energy manifestation at hypo-gonadic size like a puffed-up frog.

      He was a rare and deadly fusion: a petulant toddler with the emotional intelligence of a five-year-old and a ruthless tyrant with the finesse and street savvy of a killer, a crudely charming svengali and a sociopathic buffoon. At the smallest provocation, his discomfort and intemperance boiled to the surface, already weaponized. People with such lack of control and early trauma rarely get very far, though exceptions prove the rule: Caligula, Napoleon, Joseph McCarthy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. 

           Taking the formula for Trumpism back a generation to Evola, Lachman noted that Trump received teachings more nuanced than he was capable of processing, predigested for him by his one-time capo and strategist Steve Bannon:

           “To know very well what one wants, to fix and will its plastic image without interruption . . . is to gather a system of occult forces into a power of realization. . . .”  Evola seems to have anticipated Trump’s “controlled neurosis”: “Thinking is realized as power when only one thought dominates the mind and directs it unfailingly toward only one purpose.”⁵

           That was guttersnipe Bannon’s game. When unsure or under attack, raise the ante, threaten with antlers or belly bump, never back down—never apologize. Say, “I’m going to bury you or kick your ass into oblivion for the next hundred years!”

           Bannon’s Evola cited a “transcendent influence . . . embodied by an elite or leader possessing an authority that is unconditional, legitimate and impersonal.”⁶ Trump believed in this sort of hagiographic superpower as well as his own “superior genes.”⁷ To himself, he was a preternaturally exalted leader, a stable genius, heir to the divine order of kings.

           He didn’t regard his odyl of thought as propaganda; it was good genes, disciplined will, and targeted intention. The trenchantly secular Left never caught on. They kept thinking they had the dude cornered when it was the other way around.

Endnotes

1. Oma Seddiq, “George Clooney says Trump was just a ‘knucklehead’ who was always ‘chasing girls’ before he was president,” Yahoo Business Insider, October 11, 2011.

2. Ed Mazza, “Howard Stern Tells Trump Voters What the President Really Thinks of Them,” Huffington Post, May 12, 2020.

3. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 25; internal quote by Horowitz, One Simple Idea, p. 89.

4. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 4; internal quote by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal, p. 43.

5. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 124; internal quotes by Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduction to Magic, pp. 252-253.

6. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p.134; internal quote by Julius Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 97.

7. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 100.

2. THE DYSTOPIAN SCORESHEET OF POTUS 45

With imperial disdain, Trump overrode any functional platform or pragmatic governance. Flaunting power while putting on “the best show ever” were his lone objectives, as the Presidency became another ministry for a faux-third-person fascination with himself. He believed that brand and performance art were more imperative than what politicians and intellectuals deemed consequential. The power of the media was too sexy and robust to waste on selling opiates or Toyotas. If you had captured its jinni, you might as well play for the whole pot.

           I share “Trump exhaustion” with most of my readers. He is a passing fad who will someday be a mouse that once roared. Despite fascination of some with his twenty-first-century élan, he is a fusty throwback, freeze-dried in the eighties, from the Brylcream hairdo and Nielsen obsession to Y.M.C.A. theme music, Eastern European trophy wives, golf totemism, and former Mayor and police chief Rudy Giuliani as his personal attorney—why not Hunter Thompson’s fictional Raoul Duke as Rudy’s legal assistant?

           Unfortunately, we are stillborn in Seinfeld-Cosby Land, so we have to keep deconstructing the Trump regime and its haunt of a commander. Whether you are Republican, RINO (Republican in Name Only), Democrat, independent, or an AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) Green New Dealer, you are either for or against him or can’t calculate the float. But that’s only his policies, the camouflage hiding the real stuff, the reckless narcissism. He likes the title President and its perks without understanding that it’s actually a job and you’re supposed to put in full workdays.

           I am talking here about the man when you turn out the lights. Only Melania is there and not even her. Trump is an exemplar of a phase of collective consciousness, an energy field driven by recreational vandalism and autocracy. Monster and mobster, the King in Orange gave his slumlord father a voice and dominion he never dreamed of when he hazed young Donald into being the son of a son of a bitch, a mission at which Fred Trump, Jr. failed before dying young (age 42) of alcoholism and probably parental abuse.  

•Donald T. eradicated “factuality” with a barrage of fabrications, fibs, hornswoggles, ordinary and diabolic lies, conspiracy theories, simulated outrages, fake news, claims of fake news, displays of faux innocence, and plain making it up on the fly to suit whatever narrative he was fabricating or alternate probability he wanted to be true. He was a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth while cancelling either, providing plausible deniability from any angle and for any constituency—the sort of guy who flatters and charms while signing papers for your execution.

           He made the plausible “d” work, over and over. They could never nail him. 

           The “lie” was a life-long art for Trump, part of the “deal.” In his pre-presidential career, he fibbed, cheated, and bullied to try to get more than he paid for and erase his myriad mistakes, so that a loss became as good as a win because he could play it as if he had won and make it stick; e.g., sting another party with his bill, counter-sue, or flip the narrative and its energy. It didn’t matter if his victim was a plumber, painter, city, state, country, or planet; he bluffed and berated, denounced, maligned, and litigated until he got his way or made his adversary absorb an asymmetric cost—call it the anti-Buddhahood of Fred Trump, Sr.  

           Donald was such a practiced, proficient, and compulsive liar that polygraphs may not have worked on him; his nervous system no longer psychophysiologically recognized a lie as a lie.

           He overvalued or undervalued assets by self-chosen occasion, stiffed contractors, the City and State of New York, the State of New Jersey, banks as if they were chiffon playthings, and the IRS. He blew off his own signatures on documents as if forgeries, converted bankruptcies and litigations into revenue at others’ expense, and sued like a tinker’s dam. He considered all of it fair game. He took this act to the White House where he performed it, unabashed and unconcerned, in public gaze. Courtesy, sincerity, and fear of blowback were fool’s errands to him. This was the new take on old traditions that his political predecessors completely missed: reconsecrate the Book of Lies. He faulted his Vice-President Mike Pence for being too “honest,” especially when he refused to help overturn the 2020 election results.

           Trump had no trouble breaking with perceived precedent; he reveled in it. During the 2016 Presidential debates, when Hillary intimated that not paying fair taxes made him a cheat and crook, he responded with, “It makes me smart.” Once again, she had handed a hitman a loaded gun.

           When Trump said things like “It makes me smart” or “I know the system is rigged because I use it,” he was telling his future base, Proud Boys and Deplorables, that he was an insider who would confirm their suspicion that the State was corrupt and, furthermore, that he was in a position to blow it up. That made him a dream candidate, a lone ranger come true.   

           Donald J. inverted reality to such a degree that “truthing” meant lying. He prevaricated so concertedly and persistently and with such feigned conviction that he stamped his immaculate deceptions onto the world: Obama’s Kenyan birth; a “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; another perfect call with Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensburger; the least racist person in the room; a stolen election. Poet Don Byrd wrote, “He is not a liar. He is the lie itself.”⁸ He is the lie as Hermes-Thoth is the alphabet and Neptune is the sea.

           In the Netflix series based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, the Sandman is Dream or Dream of the Endless. When he comes into contact with humans or throws his sand, dream states occur. Trump is Lie of the Endless. After contact with him or possession by his presence and trident, previously honest and honorable or at least trustworthy people start dropping outrageous fibs if they had lost the distinction between truth and lies or any motivation to make it. After contact with Trump’s aura, lie states just occur.                                            How theophanic! Donald doesn’t lie to convince people of false facts, he creates facts in order to valorize and make merry the lie, he demonstrates the validity of lying to gain power: yes, he is the lie itself. His underlying nihilism and Trick-or-Treat! mischief sowed morally relativistic disorder, as it empowered his fabrications, creating “alternate truths” and “fake news,” raising gross deceits into fight songs and anthems.

           In fact, he openly urged MAGA enthusiasts to create “irrefutable” evidence and run it up flagpoles. It played in a heartland weary of polite losers like John McCain, Jeb Bush, and Mitt Romney. The real Republican base cared more about kicking ass than constitutional democracy, so they flocked to his candidacy of lies like fish to long awaited holy water.

           Trump took his conduct up the ladder to the Supreme Court, supposed bastion of judicially balanced scales, where he found Clarence Thomas as malleable and oreo a stooge as house halfback Herschel Walker. (BTW, anti-trans Thomas is the ultimate trans. He thinks that because he likes his penis and has a white hag wife, he can hide his BTWS—black to white supremacist—makeover.)    

           With weaponized lies, every future Democratic President became instantly illegitimate, though the implications didn’t sink in until after the 2020 election. There was no way for a Republican ever to lose an election—either you won or you claimed fraud, then provided alternate electors. Every generalissimo, autocrat, and dictator knew that.

           For Evola, when conducting magical operations, truth and consequences are immaterial. British magician Aleister Crowley epitomized the canon: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,”⁹ though he stipulated that you not infringe on the will or spiritual freedom of others.

           Trump had no such scruples.

           Quoting moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, Lachman made a distinction between weaselly fibs and outright fuckery:

           “Trump’s eyebrow-raising tweets and other public statements are not examples of his lying but his bullshitting. . . . The bullshitter “is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true.” He is indifferent to that. “His goal is not to report facts” but to “shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way. Where the liar knows the truth and respects it—he does not want to get caught in his lie—the bullshitter couldn’t care less about it. He isn’t interested in the truth . . . he is interested in the effect that his bullshit . . . in hip-hop lingo, “fuckery” . . . has on his audience. In other words, like positive thinking and chaos magick, in what works . . . Norman Vincent Peale’s belief that ‘attitudes are more important than facts.’”¹⁰

           That’s what Trump kept telling his Republican colleagues after barging into their club. He said, in effect, “I’m on the Red Team now, and I’m going to teach you how to win. You must be willing to lie, cheat, steal, suborn, blackmail, shame, even murder; there are no rules or ethics anymore; there is only winning. It doesn’t matter if you destroy the planet because winning is more important than living.”

           That reductio ad absurdum is vestigial eighties Asperger’s. A pragmatic member of Congress told Carl Sagan then, “If you think nuclear winter and the extinction of humanity is enough to move people in this legislative body, you don’t understand it.”

           Once you decide to supersede God, you can destroy and re-create five planets before lunch—and still order your meal on time.

           Lachman compares Trump’s “lies” to those of Vladislav Surkov, former political advisor and aide to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, which he dubbed political theater, a synthesis of “Soviet control and Western entertainment,”¹¹ to be admired as political dashboard, mutable beliefs, shapeshifting personae, and ideological chameleonship.¹²  “[I]t was all a joke, a kind of postmodern art project. . . . It was so ‘obviously’ over the top that if you took it seriously, you had been ‘punked.’”¹³ That was before the tanks rolled into Ukraine; then even the fawning plutocrats were shocked.

           Trump mastered his own shell game with a genius worthy of Houdini and Groucho Marx. He could flash a “you’re an idiot if you take that seriously!” look when he was totally serious.

           The Trump-Russia connection, touted and demonized by Nancy Pelosi and other Dem pols, was both more and less than it seemed. Trump had been hanging out with Russian oligarchs for so long that he had turned into one; he didn’t need their sponsorship or shenanigans. He was a Russian asset at so deep a level that all the Steele dossiers and compromising videos, fake or real, were red herrings, prematurely titillating. His base didn’t care if he raped or killed—he boasted that could shoot some asshole on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for him—plus they had nothing against Russians: Better Red than Dem. Better a macho Joe Stalin Orthodox Commie than a faggot Elizabeth Warren Socialist.

           Putin and assorted oligarchs groomed Trump so skillfully that no one realized he had been groomed, let alone himself. They didn’t need a Manchurian candidate; they supported his building projects and businesses, tacitly and with faux godfather kisses, turning him into their boy toy while he imagined he was driving the Hummer. He was Putin’s president as much as a malleable child groomed by a pedophile is an amenable queer. 

           Lachman correlates Bannon’s and Kellyanne Conway’s sendups of Trump to Surkov’s projection of Putin himself as “a kind of magician, transforming him from macho outdoorsman and commando to postmodern tsar and global leader, star of the nation’s most popular reality-TV show. It was ‘factual entertainment,’ a blend of “show business and propaganda, ratings and authoritarianism.”¹⁴ Like Trump, Putin bought into it, deciding ultimately that Peter the Great and Joe Stalin had nothing on him. He could beat them both in judo, and Elon Musk too. Poor Ukrainians!

           Again, Trump didn’t need Putin to model such tactics or blackmail him into compliance: there was no Russiagate because it was all Russiagate. He boogied into a de facto Manchurian candidate without a blink; he had been boogying that way for decades, perhaps with real Russkie mob patronage and loans. He may not have performed chaos magic at Surkov’s echelon or with Putin’s élan, but he had a low bar to meet: madmen-mesmerized Americans.

           Weaponizing lies was Mob-genre chaos magic. Manifesting the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth from bankruptcies, calumnies, omertàs, and spare parts was voodoo of the highest order!

• Donald John blew off civility, impartiality, good faith, fairness, separation of powers, judicial independence, and broadly held tenets of common, civil, and constitutional custom and law. Shakedowns, extortions, threats, and shaming were quicker and more efficient. Like any aspiring strongman, he ignored process and tried to impose his personal will. Like any small-time hood, he didn’t let a mill of interest go uncollected.

           He had neither tolerance nor aptitude for democratic institutions, peer collaboration, or collegial compromise. He was a born oligarch. “Mafia” was the lone hierarchy he knew or respected. He didn’t understand why, since he won the presidency and that was better than don of a family or business, he couldn’t sic the IRS on his enemies. His ultimately-dismissed chief of staff John Kelly was surprised that when POTUS asked for someone’s proverbial throat to be slit, he presumed it would be done. That’s how hierarchies and service with advantages work.

           To Trump, democracy was Mafia Lite; it had to be because troop hierarchy was the first law of nature, practiced by alpha males in gorilla troupes and baboon bands and by war chiefs in tribes and duchies from time immemorial. Constitutional rhetoric was useful mainly to candy-coat borderline or outright unconstitutional schemes—it was verbiage to cover snatch, dragoon, and grift. On Al Capone’s turf, you get only what you pay for, in blood and loyalty.

           Despite its legacy of democracy, America’s corporate royalty proved as frightened of and corrupted by this guy and his base as Mexicans are by their own narco-lords and hitmen. They not only wouldn’t put him in jail for blatant crimes of using his office for racketeering and outright treason, they won’t even disqualify him from running again—Repubs and Democrats alike bore their plaints and warrants on eggshells.

           Whatever else you think or choose to believe, the U.S. elected a mafia family to run the country. A goon squad must have been what they had in mind; they had seen enough Sopranos and Godfather re-runs and Italian and Mexican operas to know.

           When Trump came up short in the 2020 election, his instinct was straight out of Mario Puzo’s pilot Godfather novel: make people know the price of not acting out your bidding, give honest citizens a choice between doing their job and what is right or risking your fury and their lives. Innocence, fairness, compassion—“James Stewarts” in “wonderful lives”—none of that mattered to him. They were cruelly sacrificed on the altar of Trumpian extortion and the need to appear almighty, impregnable, and in control.

            Trump’s own court bureaucrats blew him out of office only because most Americans still paid lip service to impartiality, truth, and fairness in 2021. We’ll see how that plays in 2024.

           Addressing a gathering of Republican donors at the Hilton Hotel in McLean, Virginia (March 2022), the last pre-Trump Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, laid out the stark historical landscape: “[He] told the crowd that he has a chart in his Senate office tracing the history of civilizations over the past 4,000 years. He said it is a reminder of how they can rise and collapse, and of how unusual American democracy is in global history. From the Mongol Empire to the Roman Empire, Romney said, autocracy is the chart’s ‘default setting,’ with authoritarian leaders at every turn. ‘We are really the only significant experiment in democracy, and preserving liberal democracy is an extraordinary challenge.’”¹⁵

           We’re the four-leaf clover, the blue-green waterworld among molten Mercuries, airless Marses, and Jovian gasballs. Trump wasn’t just a throwback or passing asteroid; he is the default setting, with a lot of dead kings and khans, and cyclonic Red spots in his sails. He knew autocracy as well as he knew his name.

           Among Carl Jung’s archetypes are hero, sage, artist, puer (child), animus and anima (female and male romantic infatuations), shadow, rebel, magician, lover, ruler, trickster or jester, caregiver, and everyman. There is also “king.” Like each of the others, it has both beneficent and malign expressions. Trump’s royal entitlement came at a time of widespread global authoritarianism—politicians, rulers, and bosses expressing aspects of an ascending archetype. Trump stepped right into imperial atavism, and mass consciousness matched his move. That’s how he could get away with claiming to be second only to Jesus: he was a manifestation of the archetypal high king.

           MAGA’s “A” and “G” (for “American” and “Greatness”) meant dispensing with nuisances of democracy and replacing them with Trump family rule, hoped-for succession by Don, Jr. In Trump’s view, it was not only the divine right of kings but homage to his stable genius. Once judges and companies reported directly to King Donald, the enlightened monarch, America would run efficiently again, while tithing to the golfing crowd would lift all boats (whether it did or not). His praetorian guard would put down any uprisings.  

• Fred Trump’s boy delighted in recreational cruelty and strategic shaming; he routinely mocked, disparaged, baited, trolled, and belittled. His food-fight mentality and skillset were made for a social-media world of tweet wars and revenge porn under internet camouflage. He shined!

           “People are very vicious,” he proposed, both privately and publicly, a guiding sutra, along the lines of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” only different. In other words, be what other people are, only do it better.*

           He sentenced individuals to digital equivalents of stocks, pillory, and draaikooi. No schoolyard taunt was too menial to sling, no caricature too crude, infantile, or heinous to snatch in wounding an enemy and chirping like a rooster.  In his own words, you had to “punch back ten times harder.” At a motivational seminar hosted by self-help guru Tony Robbins, “[Trump] told the crowd that paranoia. . . and how to hold a grudge. . . [were] crucial to success. ‘You have to realize that people are very vicious. . . . When a person screws you, screw them back fifteen times harder.”¹⁶ (On other occasions, he upped it to “a hundred times harder” and “five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even.”) Scale was stretched by endemic meter, but endemic to what? What fuels an eternal engine of spite and rage?

           Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump gave a preview of his ingrained conduct by mocking a disabled reporter who had once challenged him in print, doing a childlike imitation of his Parkinson’s tremors, then denying that’s what he did. It was a grade-school routine—looking around the room for an imaginary perpetrator of a sneaky impertinence— straight out of Buddy Hackett’s tummler repertory, but meaner. His fans went crazy just like when he pretended to be a rasslin’ referee pounding the mattress or pageant judge sampling the butts of beauty contestants—they thought him so much more honest and entertaining than Politicians Central, so much more the way they would be in his place. “Vote the guy in!” they shouted. “Keep the show running.” He took that casino to the jackpot.

           “Look at that face,” he declared of primary opponent Carly Fiorina. “Would anyone vote for that? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”¹⁷

           Tossing unfiltered brickbats at rivals changed the rules of the game and left his foes scurrying to imitate him and catch up. Good luck at that! “Sandbox” was Donald’s chosen weapon. His Republican imitators look either lame and ridiculous or like crude humorless hectorers. Trump brought a veneer of outer-borough charm and dry mafia wit.

           A cowardly ruffian who surrounded himself with goons to carry out his whims, Trump crowed repeatedly, after ordering the execution of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (January 7^th, 2020), as if he had done it with his own bare hands, a reprise of his response to the assassination of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadiin a less antiseptic showdown. “He died like a dog!” Trump boasted, as if he would have died differently in the same circumstances. But that’s bullyhood 101. In the Iranian rubout’s aftermath, Trump feared the long hand of Revolutionary Guard retaliation, so he doubled up on his bodyguards, and hightailed back to D.C.

           While campaigning a few years earlier, he dissed Naval officer John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”¹⁸

           That he could mock a survivor of the Hanoi Hilton gave him hex power over the entire Vietnam narrative, including his own bone-spur deferment. He didn’t need to get captured like West Point stooges; he could bribe the North Vietnamese up front, and isn’t that what finally happened? And they us? Falling dominos hardly matter in transnational capitalism— just erect another hotel or lay concrete for another plaza.   

•Usually overlooked is a harbinger of Trump and his MAGA creed of vulgar magic: Hunter Moore and his 2010-2012 revenge-porn website called isanyoneup.com. Moore’s trajectory remarkably paralleled Trump’s just six years earlier. Starting as an afficionado of naughty nightlife with a goal of getting as much sex as he could from admirers and fans—another knucklehead after ass—Moore found revenge porn so profitable that he course-corrected. He encouraged nudes and mementos from all sources but highlighting romances gone bad (hence the term “revenge porn”). When he couldn’t get enough of those to fulfill the potential of his site by volunteer revenge seekers, he collaborated with a tech-savvy colleague to hack cell phones and steal women’s private photos—a crime.

           With unlimited merchandise and the shock value of mainly women finding intimate private pictures of themselves suddenly gone viral, Moore’s revenge porn turned into a delivery service of “Daily Hate”—smears, curses, taunts, and diabolisms solicited for all images—as Moore blew off decency as well as suicidal consequences with folks whose images he stole by spyware, declaring himself proudly a “life ruiner.” In fact, he revelled in the misery, discomfort, and shame he caused.

           Do you see the proto-Trumpism? As Moore’s site “views” exploded into the mid-millions, just to get on isanyoneup men and women (eternal adolescents) took selfies or had themselves photographed masturbating, shoving bottles and other objects into their orifices, and brushing their teeth with urine or feces. One woman snorted coke off Moore’s erect penis.

           Something about the deep ontological basis of limits is elicited by the attempt to eradicate them altogether. The only way finally to do so is by creative masochism, which is never creative. On the nether side of dignity and a standard of personal elegance is only a court jester and a harlot.   

           What Moore also demonstrated was the power of internet bullying and cultism, and he took erotic sadism and sexual abuse out of the closet. His pre-internet forerunners included Jim Jones at his People’s Temple and David Koresh with his Branch Dravidians. But Moore blew past mere religious devotions and guru fetichism and founded a sacred bullying cult, which made him an idol to others, especially moody young male devotees. He became near untouchable. If anyone challenged him or reported his behavior to investigative agencies or the media, he sicced his followers, called The Family, on them. They threatened to murder Moore’s foes, rape their daughters and wives, and burn down their houses. It was a half-camp neo-fascist foreshadowing of MAGA and Trump’s numberless band of enforcers, and it even worked for a while.

           Moore wasn’t as invulnerable as he presumed. A persistent L.A. parent (Charlotte Laws), a former Marine cybersecurity entrepreneur (James McGibney), and the FBI collaborated to close down isanyoneup, put Moore in jail for a few years, and take him permanently off the internet. His cult was dead, but the model had proven its worth. It only needed a master Life Ruiner and Twitterer to take it to the top. 

           Trump not only taunted; he specialized in extortion and sadism. Like Moore, he dehumanized adversaries to the point of putting their lives and the lives of their families at risk. He encouraged threats, badgering, and real-time violence by fans. If Right-to-Life vigilantes could gun down abortion doctors, why couldn’t Donald’s groupies hound and intimidate his foes, especially from the anonymity of the internet?

           Moore was a nobody hiding in his mother’s basement in Sacramento; Donald was king of New York. Moore was a porno-maniac, a bottom-feeder and groupie collector; Donald was a fascist gourmand.

           To the Donald, it was more a rich man’s game than a real thing. There was no real thing. Or his life was the only “real thing.” “Imitation of Trump” became like the fifteenth-century canon Thomas á Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ”: if you imitate the son of God, you will become like him. If you imitate Donald, you can win votes from his base and become a player in his reign; look at Lindsay Graham, Matt Gaetz, Marco Rubio. The Papacy proved more powerful than monetized pranksterism.

•Donald didn’t discriminate non-white races, tribes, or cultures from one another, as he incited systemic violence against Muslims, Chinese, and assorted ethnic mongrels. In America, that meant generic Middle Eastern and Asian because (per Hollywood) Pakistani, Lebanese, and Bangladeshi actors were interchangeable, as were Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, and Chinese Americans or Mexicans and Syrians, Armenians and Turks, Sikhs and Taliban.

           He encouraged random attacks against Jews, Arabs, Brazilians, and Russians, down-market landsmen of folks that, in the international arena, he recruited as co-conspirators. He played it both ways, cozying up to those he was betraying. Since people are innately vicious, that’s what you have to do. 

           He had no real allies or friends, as he had no full human identity. He was greed, revenge, apathy, indifference, and sloth personified, even as he was the embodiment of mendacity. He wore these masks until they grafted themselves onto him like a puppet in a Noh play. He was jaws, gut, and genitals attached to an algorithm. His neurotransmitters registered happy hormones instead of guilt at any random and collateral damage he caused. They fed his energy field and temporarily assuaged his OCD and ADD.x

           His Baby Huey megalomania, vanity, and greed fused into a single compound emotion: schadenfreude, the joy of witnessing and causing the pain, downfall, and humiliation of others. That’s one of the hungry ghosts of the Tibetan bardo-after-death as well as a circle of Dante’s hell.

•After the 2020 election, when every other avenue of outrage had been blocked and he had been talked out of recreationally bombing Iran and told he couldn’t declare martial law to nullify Biden’s victory, he spent his last days in office rushing executions of Federal prisoners. He didn’t want to risk their survival into a more lenient regime. The power to kill excited him. Push a button, some dude dies, and you hold the moral high ground too. What a buzz!

           Murder by hire was Donald’s inclination. He was a mafia don with the blood lust of a hitman and sadist.

           I’m not sure he even understood death or made a distinction between executing someone and firing them. He may grokked the finality intellectually, but the personhoods of other people had no meaning to him, not as value equivalent to his own. Why not kill when you can get away with it? It’s what tough guys do.

•He valorized perverse and brutal behavior while ridiculing empathy, leniency, and good will, shattering all pretexts of grace, sportsmanship, and neighborliness in American life. He made it cool and vogue to cheat, steal, bash, infringe, and pamper his most nefarious impulses. Using the bully pulpit, he metastasized his tactics through the legislatures, school boards, workplaces, classrooms, social media, bar rooms, forums, iPads, playgrounds, and playing fields of America. He triggered a pandemic of rudeness, road rage, umbrage, gaslighting, vilifying, and acting out, by rhetoric or gun. His power to effect that so spooked the Republican party that it reduced most of them to his submissive stooges. MAGA replaced the Republican brand. He imposed his private pathology on America because he could. With SNCCy chairman H. Rap Brown, he declared violence as “American as cherry pie.” As ironical too.  

           Bringing out uncharted layers of recreational cruelty and retribution in a nation he proposed to make great again was, in fact, a Satanic nobility he sought. He exposed the dishonesty of the progressive Left with its social-justice affectations and inclusionary gimmicks. Under their frocks, he knew, they were just as callous, vicious, and “it’s collateral damage, so who gives a fuck?” as himself. He offered them a heroic dose of their own medicine—and the poor and disenfranchised hillbillies loved it! He gave a voice to a voiceless underclass as well as to those who believed that skin color as a hard signifier transcended all other personal attributes.

•He didn’t understand empathy, compassion, mercy, humility, mindfulness, the Four Noble Truths or Eightfold Noble Path. They didn’t compute, and he wasn’t curious as to why they did to others. He consigned the lot—the humble, pious, merciful, and moral—to “chumps.”

           His Studio 54/gangs of New York/supermodel mind didn’t grok that karma wasn’t New Age bunk. He thought it was someone else’s shtick when, at root, it’s a force capable of igniting suns and sometimes whole universes, to enact its liege. More acreage than a Scottish golf links. . . .

           He didn’t recognize his own plump and growing bundle of karma because calibers of responsibility and conscience didn’t register. It was ripening inside him and would fission till slaked, perhaps a million solar years from now in some other universe. Orson Welles of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons augured Trump’s death-bed script:

           And now the Donald was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life. He was occupied with the first really important matter that had taken his attention since he came home after the Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime between then and today—all his buying and building and trading and banking and conning and cheating and lying, that it was all trifling and waste beside what concerned him now. For the Donald knew that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as a Trump—not sure of anything . . . . ¹⁹

           Psychic teacher John Friedlander put the real denouement in explicit terms:

           The point is not the person with the most toys or the most money wins or whatever that phrase was in the sixties or seventies. The purpose is to engage life, to engage this drama, to engage this conversation. Those systems that go too far the other way make that category as if it were real and lock you into a sense that if you were in pain, you just simply haven’t figured out the right technique.

               That’s not the way things work. The Dalai Lama didn’t get exiled from Tibet because he didn’t understand creative visualization; he got exiled because life is rich and complex and deeply meaningful. Even horrors like that are rich and complex and deeply meaningful.²⁰

           That’s how karma ripens, minute by minute, lifetime by lifetime. Trump may have understood creative visualization (the Norman Vincent Peale version), but he didn’t grasp the richness, complexity, and paradox of reality, or its accumulation of psychic debt, so he was profligate. He destroyed individuals, reputations, lives, and institutions from sheer spite—an absurd misjudgment of his own exemption and invulnerability or of how much free karma anyone has to burn. He is carrying a shitload for his next incarnation.

•The self-declared “stable genius” was undeterred by his own ignorance, just as he was undaunted by his non sequiturs, puerile vocabulary, and lack of nuanced knowledge on any topic or polity. He told the FBI and CIA that he knew more about Kim Jong-un than all their research because he could read him like an eligible dame at first glance, a stranger across a crowded room. His guides were in his belly. Belly was both microcosm and macrocosm, Book of Knowledge and Book of Law. In 2022, he would claim clairvoyance on its basis.

           At a summit of nations where mutual tribute and respect were de rigeur, Donald asked Turkish Premier Recep Erdogan about the movie Midnight Express, as if his country fit on a Hollywood poster or in a tin can. According to foreign-affairs specialist Fiona Hill, “Some leaders . . . would get angry in meetings or on calls when Trump obviously had no idea what they were talking about. . . . [E]veryone knew that Trump never paid attention to his brief.”²¹ During tête à têtes with Trump, foreign leaders made intentionally inaccurate claims to gain an upper hand. But Trump also threw people off their strategies by his absolute ignorance. It’s hard to defeat a cipher

•Trumpism was sourced in a game show with no competing curriculum. Its game-master was trapped in “gangs of New York” synth-pop. The buck never stopped, just new contestants and more hoopla. In a landscape of made-up realities and interchangeable parts, proficiency was consigned to one-upmanship. Trump relegated the U.S. Presidency to a WWF-like morality play, presuming that ratings were the main goal, even as real children were locked in cages, families were deported or went hungry, or hid from the ICE police, and 400,000 were dying of a pandemic. Ratings werethe goal. If people voted for you, you got the sort of power that would have made John Gotti green with envy. When other Republicans worried about cozying up to White supremacists, Donald reminded them, “Those people vote.” End of discussion.

           Trump admitted that he watched the little red light on the media cameras and adjusted his one-liners to keep it on. Comedian Aziz Ansari named it: Donald produced content. When Barack Obama said, “There’s no red state America, there’s no blue state America; there’s the United States of America,” that was rhetoric. When Trump said, “I hate Mexicans,” that was content.

           In private, politicians like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Matt Gaetz conceded (post-2020) that it was all a performance—staged villains, simulated bombast. They too came to prefer Reality Shows to actual governance because they believed there was still enough slack in the vault, and showtime is more entertaining and gainful than trying to get shit done, which backfires anyway because it is used politically against any fool who attempts it. As long as they could print money, they might as well substitute play for governance because that’s what their fans wanted. They went crazy over this stuff at MAGA rallies, a High-Church version of WWF tag-team.

           Trump correctly gauged where the conversion of television into the internet had taken the American mind and its attention span: into epidemic polarization and divisiveness. Getting “likes,” “shares,” and followers was like keeping the red light on. Being an influencer was more important and lucrative than cultivating a skill or doing anything. Trump not only brought Rasslin’ to campaigns, he reduced campaigns to carnivals.

           The ploy was so effective, Donald boasted, that he could beat George Washington with Abraham Lincoln as George’s running mate. Why not? Cartoon villainy and cyborg phantoms trump—literally—Socratic debates. Neither Washington nor Lincoln took that into account.

• Americans were already in a “Truman Show” bubble. They didn’t understand what life was like in Juarez, Mogadishu, or Sanaa—how hard it is to achieve a working democracy, how easy to break. They wanted to be flattered, hoodwinked, regaled, amused, more than they wanted to be challenged or free.

           Over the border, women were being kidnapped off common paths by Zeta gangs. Children were wandering homeless on the streets of Beirut. Glaciers were melting, coral reefs dying. Countries in Central America were failing. None of that was real or likely to affect them or their children and grandchildren. That’s how the revolution, on the other side, always starts.

           In Shawn Triplett’s viral Reddit photo, a Kentucky movie theater was left intact by December 2021 tornados except where the rectangle of the screen was ripped out. The photo depicts the relationship between two realities: a dark room with cushioned seats for an imaginary audience that looks into bright devastation and debris. The trope is ineluctable; we can watch climate change, the flooding of coastlines, and the bombardment of Aleppo, Mariupol, Dresden, and Zhytomyr as if on an open installation.

           Beasts of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga’s feature film of doped child militias in Sierra Leone, begins with a screen-less t.v. chassis, lacking guts and tube, through which children watch each other cavort with UN protectors while the so-called “Native Defense Forces,” a child army under a nameless pedophile commandant and his lieutenant Two I-C approach the village.

•The Trump White House had a Playboy Club feel to it, not even so much the players—after all, the Clinton White House had a Playboy feel too, the Midwestern rather than the bicoastal version. Beyond Bill, though, were real diplomats and bureaucrats; the Playboy Club feel was Donald’s actual gaze. It turned everything around him a tad debauched and tawdry, sometimes more than a tad. There was himself, Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, and assorted other “dirty old men” as well as his own sons and all of their wives, ex-wives, and mistresses, but that wasn’t the issue as much as the fact that beauty pageants and sexcapades caught POTUS 45’s attention-deficit attention more than the Federal Reserve or Earth’s geography, let alone international diplomacy. He was more interested in who Hope Hicks was sleeping with than with what she did in her job.

           Other presidents might have fantasized secretly, but Trump never saw the problem with making his prurience overt, public and senior. He turned a brutal North Korean dictatorship into innuendos of gay coquetry between him and Kim Jong-un (including missiles as penises for the Rocket Man masturbator) and expected everyone else—meaning real diplomats and intelligence officers—to buy it as the true state of things on the ground and a way to avoid a Korean war. It was only insofar as it befuddled everyone, including the North Koreans, who tried but were unable to play it to their advantage. 

           Like a cartel warlord, Trump governed by patronage—his “king” archetype. It proved to be his most limiting and damning provinciality and made everything else he did, however global or puissant, small-time. Putting daughter Ivanka, sons Donald, Jr. and Eric, daughter-in-law Lara, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Donald, Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, in positions for which they had no aptitude, qualifications, or training, he turned diplomacy into slapstick, foreign affairs into beauty pageants. He paraded stooges, pansies, and amateurs across a dais where they got eaten alive by surviving pit bulls of the world’s fiercest rings. He even wanted to make Ivanka president of the World Bank because “she’s good with numbers.” That’s the mark of a dictator so isolated that he trusts no one except his kin and in-laws, and them only so far. With a limited talent pool, being good with numbers was the only necessary qualification for managing global economies.

           Trump didn’t care about diplomacy as long as he got good prices for weapons of mass destruction, accumulated personal favors, souvenirs, gifts, and classified documents for later redemption, while shitting on landscapes and troublemakers in the good-for-nothing Third World. 

           Some Republicans may have made their peace with a 2024 rerun of Donald for his Wall Street merits and court appointees, but do they want to bring back a supporting cast of Don, Jr., Ivanka, Jared, Lara, Eric, and Melania? Can the world survive a second regnum?

•POTUS 45 operated solely by “what’s in it for me?” The purpose of any endeavor was to further his interests, feather his nest, inflate his self-esteem, bolster his power or popularity, or dishonor and discombobulate his opponents.

He wanted to be President for Life and assumed it was one stunt or coup away. Everything else he had tried had worked; he had sued or bluffed his way out of any mistakes. His enemies were exhausted and in retreat.

           The Presidency was his personal possession, he believed, like a bought bimbo at a strippers’ club. It was the ultimate prize in a life of trying to make the hollowman less hollow.  Journalist Bob Woodward explained this after he released his recorded discussions with a boastful king who treated him like a and royal scribe:

           Trump said: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.”

Woodward wrote: “The voice, almost whispering and intimate, is so revealing. I believe that is Trump’s view of the presidency. Everything is mine. The presidency is mine. It is still mine. The only view that matters is mine.”²²

           He believed he had committed the perfect crime or won the lottery forever. He was surprised that there was no failsafe measure to keep him in office. He went to Plan B: lie and keep lying so relentlessly that fewer and fewer people remember the truth.

           The majority of voters, and a super-majority of Republicans, began to think, maybe you did win, else why all the fuss?

           Outlast everyone! Pull out all the stops. No one knows where you will quit because you never actually do. It worked for Putin and Xi with much less effort.

•Donald loved a pageant, so he adored the January 6th surge. Outrage on his behalf suited his mien of sacred martyrdom. Once he was no longer President, he wanted the country to fail, even go bankrupt, people to starve. Lots of great visuals there! If he could sabotage America without getting caught or personally harmed, he would watch successive disasters unfold with glee. It served a vibration somewhere between diabolic and trickster archetypes. On January 6th, 2021, he become the Devouring Mother.

           It is not uncommon for politicians to root against the opposition. Both political parties do it covertly. Sometimes a pol expresses the agenda openly, like Mitch McConnell’s intention to make Barack Obama “a one-term President.” Trump took it a step or five further. He made destroying the country a patriotic duty, to get his revenge on the commie Democrats and pandering RINOs, to stymie economic recovery under usurper Biden—collateral damage and casualties be damned. His motto was “No one steals from me!” That is, no one lives to enjoy it. Trump is Mothman-meets-Al Capone.

           No bridges or roads should get repaired or potholes filled unless they fell under his watch, scored on the virtue sheet of Donald or registered to his patronymic and brand. Confirming his legacy as master builder, the only one who knew how to get it done right, was more important than getting it done right or whether it was done at all.

           Trumpism became the new patriotism: MAGA replacing not just party but nation. Because in his mind, “Donald” was more substantial and important. He would sacrifice every last scintilla of national unity to build his personal Trump brand.

           While in office, he so wanted to get back at Blue states and sanctuary cities that he proposed yanking criminals, murderers, rapists, and Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang members from among illegal immigrants and depositing them in San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and New York. Mafia 101. Then watch the mayhem in the daily crime reports, the bloodier the better—more WWF.

•His conflicting wimp and strongman personae led to venerating the planet’s extant dictators and tyrants: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping.

           That the only question Donald ever asked was “What good will it do me?” elicited—from the Emirates to North Korea to Ukraine—the counter-ask: “What’s it gonna take?”²³

           The “art of the deal” dealer was getting back a penny, if that, on the dollar, but he didn’t give a shit as long as the penny was his and the dollar came out of someone else’s pocket. Tilting the playing field was his highest pleasure, at any real cost.

           That’s why it wasn’t hard to believe that he took top-secret, even nuclear-weapon-oriented documents from his closing chaos at the People’s House to Mar-a-Lago. Was it to sell to the higher bidder, U.S. enemies included (‘they’re not my enemies’), or to use as leverage or blackmail or for some other nefarious purpose? Or was it just possessiveness, a lack of confidence that his Presidency was real and not a dream. That goes back to his not understanding the job and its duties in the first place, so his time in office flew by while others did the work and distracted him from big-time damage.

           Like the raven in a Robert Kelly poem, Donald cawed, “feed me because I cry louder. . . . / because I am alive & make noise. . . / because I can crack the cheap bowl of your sky with my shriek. . . . / because I am hungry / & cry louder than any other.”²⁴  

            That he did—louder and to more flocks than any other vertebrate. He was the archetype of a hunger that can never be sated. To put him on a tree in Chiapas and a raven in the White House clarifies the rebus.

•He had no use for “the greatest generation.” 

           In an original Star Trek episode, Captain Kirk fissioned into two “Kirks” from a transporter malfunction as he was being beamed back to starship Enterprise from fictional planet Alpha 1777. One “Kirk” arrived docile, indecisive, and ineffective; the other was a swaggering, over-sexed wildman.²⁵ Yet the Enterprise needed both qualities—fiery inspiration and humble integrity—in one leader.

           While the parallel is inexact, Trump’s goal was to split “Captain America” into clashing nations that he could manipulate at his whim: Proud Boys and Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, a compliant beadledom and a rabid, racist mob.

           Yet without both Americas—Red America and Blue America, hillbillies, rednecks, African Americans, immigrants, and First Nations bonding in platoons and foxholes against a common enemy—the U.S. wouldn’t have stopped the Nazis at Normandy or the Japanese imperial army and navy at Guadalcanal and Corregidor. It couldn’t have saved France, England, Belgium, and the Philippines. Today’s America, without a common culture or moral compass, can’t win a border spat with Mexico, let alone World III. (Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, like Grenada and Panama, were corporate police actions and Halliburton subcontracts.)

•By trivializing melting glaciers and making a joke of mistaking weather (cold snaps) for climate (wind and ocean currents), Trump gave his followers an alibi for blowing off the catastrophe they were foisting on their children and grandchildren: millennials and Zoomers.

           The few times that he paused to take in the big picture, the world in which he was performing, Trump didn’t believe that climate change was fake. His first caporegime, Steve Bannon, was CEO of Biosphere 2, an apocalypse-driven experiment in underground prepper living for the elite. Bannon has spoken with eloquent precision about primary and secondary effects of greenhouse gases.

           Trump’s stance came down to, it isn’t happening, but even if it is, we can’t do anything about it—it’s caused by sunspots and Chinese coal—so those with enough wealth might as well enjoy food, sex, and private jets while they can, and dig underground shelters for brief overrides, and let’s not inconvenience my base otherwise.

•He added insult to injury by offering to purchase the glaciers from Denmark and turn Greenland into a golf course once they melted (scale aside, imposing his brand on antediluvian tundra. Then, of course, he passed it off as a joke. That was sheer eighties’ cant: the idea of climate as jokeable or trivial. Remember those early ice-blue billboards recommending lemon colas as the remedy for global warming.

           That hid in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, how seriously the King took buying a whole freakin’ subcontinent. “It’s just gigantic!” he enthused. It is: 3.2 times the size of Texas. It would be a mega real-estate purchase, a 51^st-State guarantee of President for Life and proof that a debt merchant and carny was the perfect choice for American CEO. Climate makeover was an investment opportunity, a convergence of fake denials with actual gluttony. His racist afterthought was to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland like in a board game. The Danes were not merely unamused; they were so flabbergasted they barely knew how to respond. When someone approaches a complex situation with an unnuanced parody of it, that’s a crisis in diplomacy, especially if he’s President of the United States.

           That massive ice floes could be bought and sold cheaply, a penny on the dollar, was pure Trumpian fantasy, another Reality show in lieu of reality. Reality is ecospheres, gravity, orbits, canyons, icebergs, and continental drift. Musing about building a golf course on the site of millennially melting ice is akin to musing about drinking bleach to kill a virus or building a casino on Mars or calling any female Native American politician Pocahontas or declassifying documents by breathing on them.

           This Loony Tunes version of reality comes from watching too much “Tom and Jerry,” “Donald Duck,” and “Heckle and Jeckle,” while attention-deficiting your way through a baccalaureate. The Trump MAGA cabal, whatever else it was, was an indictment of a pabulum school system, a cult made up of graduates of Little Red Schoolhouse madrasas who saw the world in a Popeye-versus-Bluto fashion and assumed that anyone who viewed it differently was an elitist phony.

           This is a characteristic of gangsta culture in urban ghettos, too. You don’t like someone, some jerk pisses you off and disrespects you—zap them, shoot’em dead. Reality is a series of one-liners in a sitcom: “superfly” noir.  Death isn’t really death because life is only a facsimile of life, a series of fun tropes. Then you’re dead.

•Behind Donald’s casino was a shadow play against a hyperobject bigger than those Kuiper Belt planets that start at Pluto and Makemake and end somewhere short of the heliopause with dark silent Planet X and Zecharia Sitchin’s 12^th Apostle, Nibiru.²⁶

           The massive gravity of that ice is real as well as mythic, as well as Norse in the Old Icelandic/Greenlandic (or proto-Indo-European) sense, so we better be ready for what Green Land holds in its frozen rivers and melting seas and gorges as well as its payback for dissipating Gaia’s wealth at Neptunian scale.

Greenland is not for sale because it can’t be for sale, any more than the woodlands of Quebec were for sale. Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland represent a sixteenth-century crossing that broke Mediaeval Europe’s cosmographic barrier—which had been on default setting since Augustine and Plotinus despite Irish and Norse transatlantic fisheries—and plunged it into mystery realms of Homer, Hesiod, lost continents Doggerland and Sundaland, and Ultima Thule. The likes of Columbus, Cabot, and Cortez (and Shakespeare of The Tempest) made it stick.

           The subsequent de-indigenization, de-forestation, and un-shamanizing—deconsecrating—of the land led to the current Queens-Atlantic City-Mar-a-Lago techno-fascist wannabe police state, loading a dose of retro capitalism and warlordism into American cosmogony. Now meta-Norse Sagas stretchfrom the Russian oligarchy and weaponization of the Arctic to Jair Bolsonaro’s torching of the Amazon like some petty arsonist putting global oxygenization on the grill of a narco-state or anti-narco-state—they’re interchangeable throughout Central and South America.

           Greenland remains an amulet, a “green” dowsing- and stepping-stone crystal, a symbolic and actual iceball, set ticking in the Pleistocene. It is as endemic to the Solar System’s elemental spiral as the Jovian moon Callisto. It fluctuates in a phase of “crossing” from raw nucleic-acid comet to pre-Cambrian palindromic biome, from Old World to New, from hominid to Homo sapiens, from Holocene to Anthropocene, from hunting and gathering to farming to urbanization and dwarf eco-tourism.

           Trump called the response of Denmark’s Mette Frederickson “nasty,” another of his overused infantilisms, but it wasn’t nasty enough given what it is at stake: the planetary thermostat, the North Atlantic turbine, traces of ice found not so long ago as far south as Argentina.²⁷

•Trump’s 2022 joke about finding out who in the bureaucracy leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion that overturned Roe V. Wade—suggesting that the reporter or publisher of the paper be threatened with prison and “becoming the bride of another prisoner very shortly”—betrayed five things as well as the fact that Trump found prison rape humorous more than reprehensible: 1. He had his own sexual fantasies about being a prisoner’s bride, perhaps in a female bastille, or imprisoning someone, perhaps a guy in a homosexual fantasy; 2- He had a horror of being imprisoned, appropriated, and violated himself (not of being sent to jail for his crimes but finding himself there without explanation, held by his enemies, perhaps Iranian Revolutionary Guards); 3- He handled both the horror and the kinky desires by putting them in a joke and pretending they had nothing to do with him except for his delight in sick humor; 4. He tended to hide his most private fantasies by blurting them out and projecting them on others; 5. He never read Freud on jokes and the unconscious.

•Trump dubbed the Mueller investigation and inquiry into his affairs as not only a witch hunt but the greatest witch hunt in the history of—pick one—the “nation,” “world,” “universe.” (He called it a witch hunt because of the same cliché-driven speech defect that said “Pocahontas” every time he thought “Elizabeth Warren” and “Old Crow” every time he thought “Mitch McConnell”).

           It was a witch hunt, though secular pols didn’t understand that the witch was a witch. They were after a Putin-backed Manchurian candidate when they should have been after something more wiccan and dangerous.

•Trump covered his crimes, excesses, betrayals, outright stupidity, and gluttony in transcendent divinity, “Orange Jesus,” as one Republican lawmaker called him off the record. He could be an atheistic, philandering, stone-casting, hate-mongering Christian. He could be a White Supremacist racist who did more for African Americans than any other president except Abraham Lincoln. He could cage and deport Latin Americans, yet increase his Hispanic support. He could levy farm-bankrupting tariffs on China, Canada, and the EU, yet maintain a farm-belt following. He could be a greedy slumlord, yet come off as a working-class populist—but so could Joseph Stalin. He could be a rich, greedy, self-centered crook, yet get consecrated as a saint and hero by the very folks he swindled. He could wave the “God” flag while eradicating Christic energy on Earth. That he was a blasphemer and pedophile enhanced his Christian status.

           For all his anti-Communist hoopla, he was the risen Pig of Orwell’s Animal Farm, a textbook oligarch and Erdogan wannabe.

           When asked by a foreign journalist what a redneck was, Donald replied, “Like me, except poor.” In so doing, he epitomized one definition of “classless” while subtextualizing the other; neither had class, manners, or empathy.

           “The greatest trick in history,” said police officer Mike Fanone, a Trump supporter who was tased and nearly killed while defending the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, “was Donald Trump convincing redneck Americans that he somehow speaks for them. He will destroy this country simply for the sake of his ego. . . .”²⁸

           For all the triumphs and satisfactions he brought to his fans, they should never forget: he will cancel you, your spouse, parents, and children as quickly as King George would wop a serf or Vladimir Putin would poison his rivals or aim missiles at apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals in Grozny and Mariupol. He is not your friend because he is no one’s friend.

•A yard placard in Indiana, a parody or covenant (it hardly mattersz), declared, “God Bows Down to President Donald J. Trump, Declares He Is Perfect.”²⁹

           Bussa Krishna, a thirty-six-year-old man in India was so stoked by Trump’s ascension that he had a life-size statue of him constructed as a shrine in his garden. Shree Krishna explained, “Instead of praying to other gods, I started praying to him . . . my god, Donald Trump. My love for him has transformed into reverence. Every Friday I fast for Trump’s long life. I also carry his picture and pray to himbefore commencing any work.”³⁰

           That’s the effect Trump had on West Virginians and Wyomingites, though it took a Hindu to explain divinity and guru worship to Christians.

           When Trump became ill with COVID-19, Krishna, in tragic couvade, died of non-COVID causes.

•POTUS 45 showed how ephemeral, vulnerable, and shallow our institutions of governance and sociopolitical norms were, that a crime family could swing more swag than a two-hundred-year-old justice system and two millennia of common law. A Queens and Jersey hood, an overblown Tony Soprano, wiped every rule of law, sanction on payola, emoluments, and extortion, and traditionally accepted limits and separations of power, while converting pretty much the entire Republican Party to his bent with the ease of “get that shit outa here, I’m MAGA man!”

           Trump didn’t compromise or dishonor the Presidency. He exposed how paltry it always was. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan did their parts, but Trump iced the cake and put a maraschino cherry on top.

           That he was able to bully or seduce pretty much every politician, judge, diplomat, and foreign leader showed that the whole planet had declined to the level of a corrupt ward.

Endnotes

8. Don Byrd, Facebook post, January 14, 2021.

9. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XXII.

10. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 74-75 and 208; internal quotes from Henry G. Frankfurt in Time Magazine.

11. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 142.

12. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 138-139.

13. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 155.

14. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 142; internal quotes by Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True, p. 50. Lachman believes that Pomerantsev is a pseudonym for Vladislav Surtov.

15. Robert Costa, “Romney warns of ‘extraordinary challenge’ to preserve U.S. democracy,” Yahoo News, March 15, 2022.

16. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 72.

17. Paul Solotaroff, “Trump Seriously: On the Trail with the GOP’s Tough Guy,” Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015.

18. Rebecca Kaplan, “Trump: McCain Only a War Hero Because He Was Captured,” CBS News online, July 15, 2015.

19.  Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, text altered to replace Major Amberson with Donald Trump

20. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 83.

21. Bryan Metzger and John Haltiwanger, “Fiona Hill says autocrats like Erdogan got mad when Trump ‘had no idea what they were talking about’ on calls,” Business Insider, October 5, 2021.

22. “Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’,” theguardian.com, October 24, 2022.

23. Mark Danner, “The Con He Rode in On,” The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2020, p. 36.  

24. Robert Kelly. “On a Picture of a Black Bird Given to Me by Arthur Tress,” in Richard Grossinger (ed.), Ecology and Consciousness, p. 31.

25. Richard Matheson, “The Enemy Within,” Star Trek, season 1, episode 5.

26. See Zecharia Sitchin, The Earth Chronicle Expeditions.

27. This is a reference to Edward Dorn, “North Atlantic Turbine.”

28. Molly Ball, “The Good Cop,” Time, August 23-30, p. 43.

29. Pluralist, “Liberals Mock Conservatives for ‘God Bows Down to Trump’ Sign—Then They Learn Who Put It Up,” February 18, 2020.

30. Lee Brown, “Indiana Man Prays to Life-Size Statue of Donald Trump, ‘His God,’” New York Post, February 19, 2020.

3. CROOK, GENIUS, IDIOT, MAGICIAN, FOOL

Don’t underestimate the King in Orange or the horse he rode in on. Give him credit and cut him some slack—hipster credit and redneck slack. Trump was far more than a rich playboy boasting of the triple he hit after waking up on third. He was brilliant in recognizing what other politicians missed: a night of trick-or-treating without rules, a war that can never be declared so cannot be ended by a truce, a reality that was never real so can be replaced overnight, the triumph of body-snatchers and people of the lie.³¹ He saw the world as witchcraft and ascended as a warlock. This was his genius, and everyone who underestimated or dismissed him proved their parochial dorkhood.

           Donald J. Trump changed America forever. It might well have happened anyway, but—credit where it is due—he pulled it off pretty much solo. The rise of a flawed businessman—more truly a super marketer and influencer than a shopkeeper, entrepreneur, or financier—was a brick through a plate-glass window. The glass was twenty-first-century civilization with its social clubs and markets. The brick was the one that everyone secretly wanted to throw, even Trump haters and Never Trumpers. Modernity had gone terribly wrong, and its coverups and resets were creating mass neurosis, insomnia, and addiction.

           He had the arrogance, chutzpah, and leverage to get it done. He shattered pre-digital norms of campaigning and conceding elections (why ever concede if all realities are virtual?); he derogated pre-internet uses of public money, information, rules, and playbooks (make it all crypto and digital and raise as much as you need off the Presidential seal). He imposed a mafia mentality on the world and got, mostly, buy-in, even from Democrats, even by China. And that was all his followers and fans wanted—someone big, rich, mean, vulgar, and grandiose enough to show them how it was done. They needed an oaf but a consequential oaf to tip the scales. It didn’t matter if he was domo of The Apprentice because the revolution would start on t.v. anyway. 

           Leonard Cohen put it best and, at the time (1988), it was oracular: “Everybody knows that the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost. . . .”³² No matter what side you thought you were on. . . . Trump knew that the good guys lost, so he ran the football down the throats of the defense, proving, as McCain and Romney couldn’t, that nothing could stop a stealth candidate. The real constituency—the base—heard the dog whistles and showed up; now no Republican can blow his nose without a bow to MAGA. Political stunts have trumped campaigns. What started as a sideshow has become the main, in fact the only, event.

           Most anti-Trumpers conflate their critiques and parodies of Trump with Trump’s parody of himself, so they read the “deplorables” meme backwards. The deplorables see beyond their own reflection in Trump; they see an attack on the veneer of a fraudulent civilization that “done them wrong.” Trump may have created the MAGA meme, but the monster mash preceded him and will eventually “trump” him.  

           Once the glass was smashed, he became a casualty of his own regime change. The base knew it or will. Hurricane Donald will one day be a footnote to a tropical depression of cyclonic force.

Many of the attributes Trump displayed were already in play around the globe: seizing and holding power extralegally, casual murder and disposal, private and irregular militias, sanctioned theft and dispossession, genocide, enslavement, and strategic vulgarity for control, corporate prostitution, and rigged elections. He brought them to the U.S. as a sequel to Reality shows and Rasslin’ matches, and for that he expected to be coronated Strongman for Life. He had all the prerequisites: insatiable appetite, narcissistic vanity, vacuous extravagance, inextricable clutter, consumption for its own sake, deep malice, and a knack for shapeshifting. He was so good at shapeshifting and skedaddled between personae so fast he didn’t have to defend any of them. He made each misdeed a “witch hunt” or victimless crime in which the victim came out better for Trump’s involvement. He operated above the law; he couldn’t be convicted of a felony.

           His pitfall was not to distinguish magic from magical thinking. He was a top-notch magician by instinct but a magical thinker by habit as well as by education (or lack thereof), and by entitlement and estate. He thought that he could control reality as well as create it, thereby violating the magic laws that gave him power.

           He had the same raw charisma as Hitler, Mussolini, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Ayn Rand, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Werner Erhard, Mao Zedong, and countless other messiahs, pop stars, and athletes, to make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves—“the sense,” wrote Lachman, “that they belonged to some larger reality beyond their everyday lives. This is why all attempts to explain Hitler’s success through economic, class, or some other ‘rational’ reason are ultimately inadequate. They leave what we might call the ‘existential’ element out of their reckoning. . . the desire . . . to be free of the burden of giving meaning to their lives themselves.”³³

           A gunman who decides to assassinate a judge or shoot up a classroom desperately seeks to give consequence to an inconsequential life. Trump had the venom but too much power and privilege to ride a cheap glory train. A 2022 summary posted online under the name Advocatus Peregrini captures Donald’s hillbilly elegy:

           Talented and well-practiced in every vice, a stranger to compassion or empathy, a liar and a cheat so complete in perfidy that he has elevated his dishonesty to hold it up as an ersatz moral principle, violent, so long as he can order someone else to do the dirty work, grotesque in body, graceless in action, in possession of a wounded self-regard so colossal as to smother any spark of grace, treasonous, not only to country, but to every ally he has ever had, the poisoned fruit and rankest flower of racism and contempt for women, and utterly devoid of shame for his moral and spiritual bankruptcy.

               That is your leader. That is to whom you give your money. That is who you follow and laud. That is whose banner you willingly carry. Why? Because he is a mirror, not a lighthouse. You see yourselves in him. He is what you would be, if you had inherited money and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame.

               No, I do not ‘respect your choices,’ nor do I admire your loyalty and dedication to this miserific, demoniac vision. You have demonstrated not only a lack of civic virtue, loyalty to the Republic and to the rule of law, but a willingness to engage in violence and sedition at his slightest expressed wish. And you will never, ever admit you were wrong.

               Because you see your dark, twisted, resentful dreams in him. And to renounce him is to renounce yourselves.

               But he was always a trickster—never forget! It was never just greed and vulgarity; it was the archetypal shadow, the hollowman reflecting a collective emptiness and insubstantiality. When the citizens of a materialistic culture experience the vapidness and meaningless of their circumstances, they look for an Orange Jesus to make them feel relevant and fulfilled.

           Meanwhile, trickster Trump encompassed the anthropophaginian and wetiko side of his own archetype. A jackal is a Coyote too.

           At times, the trickster flashed canny perspective on his feats and limitations. He was dangerous partly because he knew how to go sane and ha-ha when necessary, with tinges of humor, self-satire, and gruff charm, to allay concerns among both pro- and anti-Trump camps. Then he would flip on a dime back into a careless, reckless maniac.

           After announcing a third Presidential run in 2022, he performed the following wiggles; they represent a thespian brilliance and are exactly how he persuaded almost half the country to vote for him. They are second nature, like survival tricks of a zebra or hare:

           When inviting recreational anti-Semites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes to dinner played badly with a portion of his base (while usefully stoking another portion), he laughed it off with a wink to the White Supremacy wing, saying, ‘I barely know them. I’m just a jolly good fellow and a generous host.’

           Of course, these were not his actual words, just my send-up of them.

           When NFTs of himself as a superhero were put on sale as cryptocurrency and raised a quick million and got him lots of the attention he craved, he pshawed, ‘It wasn’t for money. I’m an art lover. They were entertainment, a new Warhol line of modern comics. I loved me with a slimmer waste line. Didn’t you? Aren’t I cute?’

           When the Senate Select Committee of the January 6^th storming of the Capitol tied that event to an actual many-pronged attempt to reverse the Electoral Vote, prevent Joe Biden’s certification, and appear before Congress himself like Alexander the Great, he tried to put back the wedge, ‘It wasn’t a coup. It was a political protest that got out of hand.’ Wink.  

           The act wouldn’t fool a Pelican Bay warden, but it befuddled a planet.

My thirty-year-old niece Franny viewed Trump’s Reality game from a Millennials’ perspective: You want to be a taxi driver, sign up with Uber and run your own cab service. You want to manage a hotel, register with Airbnb, rent your house and live somewhere else. You want to be a pop star; you don’t need to sing or act: get a website, build an Instagram following, do weird shit like give away money and hand random strangers keys to cars, saying, “Now it’s your buggy, guy.” You want to be a cop or Green Beret; get an AR-15, stand in front of a business threatened by looters pretending to be social-justice marchers—no age limit—militias in Rwanda, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone proved that children could be more ruthless than adults.  

           “Maybe a surgeon like my father you need actual qualifications,” Franny said, “but a lot of things, no.”

           If you want to be President, be a Reality star first. Then be a Reality President. Your supporters don’t care if you’re qualified. What they want is the appearance, the show. The world’s businesses run mostly on their own like meteorology: winds, cloud banks, supply chains, vortices. Or they used to.

           Trump was the ultimate preacher for a lazy, alt-right Weltanschuuang—you don’t have to do any work—let robots and lackies do it. You get liberated and rich for the price of admission; you are rewarded with everything you want, because you’re American and we are Making America Great Again.

           What MAGA offered was a Betsy Ross version of the New Age bestseller The Secret: how to manifest, effortlessly and gluttonously: freedom, happiness, wealth, and all the guns, goods, and fornication you want. As Americans Made Great, you deserve it—in Trumptalk, “like no one else.” You didn’t have to earn anything; you were baptized in red, white, and blue heaven unlike those illegal immigrants who are always trying to sneak and barge in.

           Despite the bankruptcies, vulgarities, adolescent antics at beauty pageants, and shouting “You’re fired!” on The Apprentice— as well as his performance as a WWF referee pounding the canvas like a lunatic during a bout,* he became a numinous figure to his clique of followers, what they most adored in a leader:a blend of Christian pulpiteer, Atlantic City emcee warming up the audience, and storm trooper leading a Hitler youth meeting. It wasn’t any of those either, it was a mimicry of their movie versions.

           As the big boy badda-badda-binged across stages, preening and flaunting decorum and COVID safety, deriding those not in his cult, he bragged, “See. This is your kind of President, not a stuffy politician or moralist but a man’s man, a sexy bus-driver/sanitation-worker sort of dude.”

           It worked. If Thomas Jefferson could be president of the American Philosophical Society and Union, found the University of Virginia, and father six children with slave Sally Hemings, starting when she was a child, Trump could put his Presidential stamp on morality.

The miraculous successes and breakthroughs with which POTUS 45 is credited by admirers and acolytes amounted to (1) a whopping tax cut favoring corporations, the .1% of the populace, and himself; (2) an indiscriminate rescinding of already inadequate environmental and economic regulations, assuring greater income disparity and swifter degradation of water, air, life forms, and energy needed for a sustainable biosphere and survival of his grandchildren, and (3) zero-sum geopolitical threats, tariffs, sanctions, surrenders, and bribery. That’s it. He did far more to empower, insulate, and deepen than to dismantle the Deep State. He waved the white flag and handed over to the Taliban and Big Pharma more than they asked for—he was not much of a details guy or measurer of sand. Even the COVID-19 vaccines had the Trump trademark: repurposed technology rushed to market. Plus, he shared their brand with Bill Gates and other Deep Staters.

           Trump “unleashed” the economy and lowered unemployment by riding a rebound, an Obama tailwind out of the 2008 mortgage crash and recovery while feeding the fires of greed with cheap money and cheaper labor. 

           Though Modern Monetary Theory downplays a debt apocalypse, Trump didn’t create wealth; he created the negation of wealth. What he brought to the Presidency was a talent to turn value into loss and then borrow against it. He had done it his whole life and little else, so he played Atlantic City Bunco.

           He provided Absurdistan-like incompetence and imperial-scale waste, notably in the area of pandemic control—he couldn’t have done a worse job if his goal had been to wreck the health system and kill as many people as possible. Nor did he put an immediate ban on travel from China, as he boasted. He halted some travel and certainly not travel by the virus or its carriers.

           His beloved wall, a masterpiece of rhetoric over effect (plus instant obsolescence), was no obstacle to advanced tunneling, rappelling, workarounds—and graft. He never prioritized building an effective brick-and-mortar façade. The euphemism and Potemkin version were sufficient.

           His concentration camps were faux bureaucracies, meant for optics not justice, or even injustice. No wonder they lost children. After the show, everyone was expected to disperse peacefully. To where?

           Drone swarms would have accomplished more barrier control at a fraction the cost.

           Meanwhile cyberattacks from state and non-state actors dwarfed the border flow, which was mainly poor people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Venezuela fleeing mafia-like conditions in Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina autocracies and narco-states created by American corporations. 

           Buffaloed by Erdogan, Trump abandoned the Rojava Autonomous Zone and Kurds, the lone true warriors against ISIS. Intimidated by Bolsonaro, Putin, and Xi, he sold out Midwestern farmers, Uighurs, polar bears, and a nation he claimed to be restoring to greatness. Currying favor with Benjamin Netanyahu and the oil kingdoms, he betrayed the Sahrawi of the Western Sahara as well as tribal peoples everywhere—all for the penny on the dollar. Flattered by Kim Jong-Un, he gave away his Korean bargaining chips for a bromance and pretend love letters. Esoteric scholar Jon Graham said, “It wasn’t the Nuremburg Rallies; it was “The Price is Right.”

           Yet patriotic politicians, Right Wing intellectuals, and MAGA loyalists continue to fall for and inflate these banal, simple-minded, uninformed moves—clown money, wrecking-ball deregulation, institutionalized fascism and racism, a cult of personality, and warlordism, using the U. S. military as private gang bangers and gutter punks—as if they were acts of revolutionary genius: yay Orange Jesus.

There were really three Donald Trumps and a fourth, mystery one I will get to.

The first was a warrior for the working class. Former White House press secretary and chief of staff to Melania Trump, Stephanie Grisham, put it this way: “There are all these people who, I think, feel such gratitude that he gave them a voice, that now they’re willing to do anything to keep that feeling of somebody is fighting for us.”³⁴

           He invaded the space of Aristox politicians long insulated from the effects of their policies. That gave him a following among Tea Partoers and prior Grand Wizardries and Klans, a huge constituency flying under the radar that most Republicans missed until Trump delivered it. When the last gasp of the old GOP nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney as its Presidential candidates, it didn’t recognize a populist, revanchist cult that had already replaced them. Then they fell in love with it and, since it was in love with Trump, they married him.

           The fly in the ointment was, he was also an Aristo, and his vigorish approached that of the entire GNP (Gross National Product).

           The Deep State that the first Donald Trump professed to be attacking was an oligarchy with which the second Donald Trump was in full collaboration. His base wanted him to take on the beast, and he did with rhetoric and a mix of faux and false-flag strikes. Most of the time, though, he preferred playing the King in Orange, an old dead Hebrew God on his coat of arms, while secretly deepening the power of the global elite of which he longed to become a full member at last.

           You also can’t get past the fact that the symbolic leader of the anti-vaxxers was a de’Medici-like patron of vaccines and a germophobe who was first in line (covertly) for a jab. This is a contradiction out of which there is no weasel, though Trump tried by declaring himself (and a reticent Bill O’Reilly) for both vaccination and freedom of choice.

           Ultimately, he was acting out of entrepreneurial vanity and ambition not courage or commitment. Volodymyr Zelenskyy whom he tried to bribe with an absurd mafia routine, was more authentically courageous. Trump, bloated with bravado, read the futures of the two as inaccurately as the Bushes misread the futures of themselves and the Pauls (Ron and Rand). The Z man was in ascendance. The D had peaked.

           Though his routine of lies to cover prior lies worked as well as could be expected, they were finally as transparent as a hand in the cookie jar. In a world of Babel, Joe and Hunter Biden (and Jared Kushner) had their hands in the same Ukrainian, Chinese, Saudi jar—there are no innocents abroad. Not even Zelenskyy, for there is a national Ukrainian cookie jar too. But the former comedian was more Captain America than the American Reality star. Zelenskyy came straight out of Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko troupe and took charge in a real war.

Yet MAGA has created a political force so great that it terrifies and chastens what once were Republicans and intimidates even the U.S. Justice Department. The former Republican Party doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone, with gone guys like Paul Ryan and gone gals like Lynne Cheney. They got replaced by an insurrection that began as a Moral Majority and Freedom Caucus. RINOs rule it now. The official party name is MAGA.

           The new “RINOs” aren’t the fiscally conservative, internationalist throwbacks on whom the name has been pinned. They are the ones who took their place on the Republican ballot.  Now there are only ants in the pantry and lice in the headpiece.

The third Donald Trump is an idiot savant, a political and public-relations genius who could not see past his personal greed to the engines of power he was greasing and could continue to grease if he wanted real action and had something more substantial than self-dealing and brand-building at stake.

           He surfed to power on a wave of populist clairvoyance and revenge porn, but he was too narrow-minded, narcissistic, and selfish to take a further risk. Most narcissists are too narcissistic to realize they are narcissistic or grok what narcissism is. Count Trump in. But he is also so narcissistic that he thinks that everyone is just as narcissistic and it’s normal—no big deal.

           Reality Show won out. It had won out so long ago that he had no bandwidth for anything else. He was parading across an eighties ring like Rocky Balboa while Atlantis was rising. He was stirring demon hounds while patting them like cartoon pups. That was never going to end well, for the Trump Corporation, for American democracy, or for the world.

Trump spoke about the follies and stupendous waste of Iraq and Afghanistan wars though, once in office, he sank into the same military-industrial sinkhole.

           He oversaw an economic boom and, while his methods may have been duplicitous, self-serving, and “plagiarized,” he exposed the neo-Liberal fraud of spreading wealth while featherbedding bureaucracy and their own expense accounts. “Supply side” and trickle-down may not have worked, but neither did the welfare state, so MAGA used two wrongs to make one of them seem right.

           Just print the money and let the Fed sort it out.

           Payola inked during the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in shedding plumbers, electricians, truckers, carpenters, clerks, teachers, bulldozer-operators, and nurses. Everyone wanted to sit at home on their computers, day-trade, buy cryptocurrency, Zoom, then check the snail mail for the next government check. But wait till the infrastructure crashes and folks need to find someone able—and willing—to hook a hose to a pump, run a crane, or solder a wire to a hot source.   

           With so much of the populace lounging before screens, living in virtual realms, participating in virtual romances, the world is losing its meaning. At this rate, the rooms will flood, the lights will go out, gangs will take over, and the immune response will be nada. That will serve the Aristo takeover; they will buy all the contractors, handymen, and doctors.

Endnotes

31. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie. Peck, a Christian psychiatrist famous for the bestseller The Road Less Traveled, describes clients whom he could not improve by therapy. They were angry, vindictive, and sociopathic, and routinely wrecked lives around them. When confronted with the Cross or Christ’s name, the incurable patients changed voices, hissed, cursed, and writhed, screaming things outside their personality or frame of reference. Everyone in the room had a conviction that they were in the presence of personified evil. This was a wake-up call for Peck: the devil was real! 

32. Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, “Everybody Knows,” from the album I’m Your Man, Columbia Records, 1988.

33. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 51-52.

34. Grace Panetta, “Stephanie Grisham doesn’t want your forgiveness. She says she just wants to stop Trump from getting a 2nd term,” Yahoo Business Insider, October 11, 2021.

4. A STRANGE ENERGY

My fourth Donald Trump is based on an esoteric view of what is happening in the cosmos at large. Here is a version relayed to me from a psychic who received it:

           A strange force that doesn’t belong here is being ejected from the Earth, but it is trying to take with it the essence of what this planet is all about with it, to excise its imagination, hope, spirit, and freedom from our DNA. People are so asleep they are just letting it happen.

           What does POTUS 45 have to do with this, either way?

           Well, whatever else he is, he is psychically a cipher, totally permeable, so the force is using him as an unwitting double-agent to help carry out its plan. Since he has no ontological reference point for himself, let alone for an external agency using him, he doesn’t recognize this, but he knows that something big is happening and he needs to be a part of it. He can’t distinguish his own energy or desires from those of an alien entity, so he can just as easily do its bidding as his own. That is why he keeps changing his mind about various things. He doesn’t really care about the issues; he cares only about earning accolades and attention, plus the alien agenda is nonlinear in relation to us.

           Dragging out the 2020 Election was never actually about trying to win, it was about delaying long enough that the force might actually steal the Earth’s essence and transport it to its own planet.³⁵

           Stories like this can’t be taken literally. They apply to the same reality in which sunken continents like Atlantis and Lemuria are not land masses but frequencies of manifestation through which souls pass en route to phases of incarnation. They can never be truths, so they remain truth mysteries.

At the same time, Citizen Trump activated a deep immune response to the theft of which he was the agent; he discharged antibodies through our collective psyche as the fiercest embodiment of masting miasms and systemic torpor. That how homeopathic medicines work; they use the disease—the virus, toxin, or state of soul loss—as the catalyst of its own cure. Trump was simultaneously an alien agent and “the Earth strikes back,” the malignancy and its homeostatic tipping point.  

           The vastness and vapidity of Trump’s own materialism made a lethal diagnosis and immune response equally inescapable. Because Trumpism is too big and egregorious to deny (not egregious, but egregious too), he had a commensal effect, like that of a gall on Gaia. Galls are abnormal microhabitats on leaves that provide food for herbivorous insects; in this case, the cecidia feed our chakras and DNA strands, sparking latent and primal curative energies.

           The evening before the 2016 election, futurist and post-academic sociologist Daniel Pinchbeck and I hosted a psychic symposium at the Alchemical Kitchen, a countercultural nightclub on New York’s Lower East Side. One of my group exercises was to send sincere healing vibrations to both candidates. Another was to visualize the contender you disliked the most and erase him (or her) from the universe—then what would change? From the audience spoke actor Tony Torn, Daniel’s best friend from childhood: “Nothing would. The same energy would recreate him in some other form.”
           Whether alien or intrinsic, Trump was never erasable, renounceable, avoidable, accidental, derailable, or a statistical mistake. He was inevitable and irreconcilable. He didn’t have to be vested; he simply was. We had no way around him, only through him. So, we set his pathology where it would be most trackable and remedial —everyone did, supporters and detractors alike.

           He evolved from Howard Stern and George Clooney’s randy bambino and eternal schmaltzy candidate into a fully armored neonate. With his international clones and complaint cronies, he manifested a centuries-long buildup of mendacity, hypocrisy, colonialism, resource theft, eco-numbness, spiritual cynicism, disingenuousness, and hominid entitlement that was approaching boil as well as anomaly gridlock. His grandeur was the bloated opulence of royalty in a post-royal world. He was exactly what we had to overthrow, so we “elected” it to rule, to reveal itself, to understand who and where we were.

            We were experiencing it as something else until the washup of Trumpism and Brexit, Modi and Bolsonaro, on various seashores. They churned the collective rot, stimulated our vital force, tripped our superpowers, lit our qi and coction. None of this could have happened under quaint Clintonian corruption with its go-go girls and amenities.

  How can a guru activate kundalini by a look, tap, or blind hug, and open the third eye? How does a latency unleash an anime-like superpower? How do Spider Girl and Moon Dragon make ships and weapons out of thoughtforms? That’s the nature of Trumpian mischief, shadow work, and resurrection.

  All the people we had thought we believed in—their good intentions, or whatever they were—led to the same raw deals and dead ends, even after the grand epiphany of Barack and Michelle. Before the Obamas cashed in, the Clintonistas sold out their supporters. Chuck Schumer poses now as one of the good guys, but when it came to incinerating Branch Dravidians in Waco, he was Attorney General Janet Reno’s first enabler.

           Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City followed.  

            The Donald was the breakout, the awakening that having to deal with him provoked. So many shadows had accumulated in the scrim, acts accruing collective karma. The mass has to be transmuted before humanity could take its next 5-D ascent. Ultimately, we will need the energies Trump stirred to do away with the current blight and begin an Aquarian awakening. 

           Shortly after the 2020 election, Don Byrd wrote, “Trump somehow is the heroic charisma, the great individual.  Perhaps the Maximus now manifests as this degenerate creature. I can only think if there is to be an earthly restart it must be not as an individual or a collective but as a syndicate. Perhaps for the single intelligence or subject, the only object is all possible conspiracy theories.”³⁶

           “Maximus” refers to the collective human of Charles Olson’s epic poem. I will address “all possible conspiracy theories” next. 

Endnotes

35. Ellias Lonsdale, personal communication, December 2020.

36. Don Byrd, email, November 23, 2020.

Chapter Two

QAnon

1. MILLENARY RELIGIONS

What is QAnon? Where did it come from? How did it turn into a vogue neo-Christian religion rivalling Baptist and Pentecostal denominations in the United States? It acquired not just a fanatic following but spread like wildfire across prior borders of politics and demography. As Idahoan as a gun in every pantry, it nonetheless cracked France, Spain, England, Italy, and Germany (to the horror of progressive Euros). It has proven as virulent as a coronavirus, infecting Flower Children and neo-Nazis alike, garnering more loyaltythan family or country. It maintains zealous conviction even in the face of inconvertible counterevidence. It has turned spouses, friends, siblings, parents, and children into deep disciples and screaming meemies unable to recognize each other.

           While conceding the allure of conspiracies and alternate truths and the addictive nature of the internet, QAnon is still a whopping overachiever.

           I define QAnon as blend of chaos magic, synchromysticism, and millenary religion. Its celerity comes, in part, from search organs’ propensity to churn up endless overlapping and synchronous data while branding and metastasizing it. Add prosecutorial overreach and guilt by association.

           Chance propinquities are inevitable; then they get turned into “evidence.” It’s circumstantial, but what isn’t these days?

           In elevating synchronicities to revelations, QAnon has struck a deep truth in the cosmos and reality itself while missing its actual profundity in an effort to mobilize and usurp it. Note that a mix of palindromes, puns, and coincidences lies at the basis of nature itself, hence life and DNA’s winding synchronized staircase.

           Like magic and divination, Gary Lachman has pointed out, QAnon “moves with the fusion and fluidity of modern life . . . ,”¹ rearranging and exponentializing fractured data in alt-right channels like Breitbart and Newsmax. “Rather than defeat the Progressive Left through direct political action,” Lachman continued, “the idea was to change the culture . . . to allow in what had hitherto been unthinkable. It was a media version of chaos magick’s aim of dismantling our ‘existing cognitive habits.’ It led to a far-right version of the ‘new normal,’ a cultural milieu that aided and abetted the rise of Trump.”²

           Since every truth contains its opposite, every lie does too.

           For its adherents, QAnon created a new reality, changing the way that the world could be looked at. Yet, at its foundation, is the oldest tool in humankind’s arsenal. Weaponized myth to enforce political goals is at least as old as pharaohs’ uses of The Egyptian Book of the Dead and its shape-changing gods for social control. As Lachman noted, QAnon is a social-media application of chaos magic. It was neither necessary nor sufficient to launch MAGA, so they matriculated together.

          When I began writing this chapter, QAnon had a greater component of creative myth—more imaginality and less fuckery and paranoid autopilot conspiracism—than it does in 2022. Since Trump’s march on the Capitol, it has been increasingly hijacked by its own radical nihilist fringe, turning it from borderline divination into cult vandalism and revenge porn (see Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al). Initially driven by the subconscious fusion and fluidity of its own archetypes, it has turned stagnantly incendiary, the political equivalent of setting land mines and improvised pipe bombs. Conspiracy myths, when manipulated to provoke, inflame, and target individuals or groups, lose their revelatory power and psychospiritual legitimacy and become low-grade agitprop and propaganda. There is also a difference between theophanic bullshit and plain old bullshit.  

           Yet even as agitprop, QAnon is a fair oracle of the modern Weltanschauung and shuffle. Where innate mythmaking meets myth-adorned disinformation, the two miscegenate and yield mongrel sprat. Now three “QAnons” have coalesced and calved at conscious, subconscious, and unconscious phases of contradictory agendas: (1) weaponized slander and hyperbole to counter an elite class that uses so-called “real” information to its own baked-in and disingenuously exploited advantage; (2) an emergent myth cycle to explain an expanding realm of mystery and synchronicity that haunts modern life under a veneer of reverential materialism; and (3) a millenary religion driven by ancestral déjà vu.

I will start with millenarianism. In social science, millenary movements are spiritual, cultural, and political belief systems and sects based on collective faith in magical intercession and an imminent transformation of society. After the Götterdämmerung, a purer, more divine world will emerge and prevail. The German Third Reich and the short-lived Islamic State in Syria and the Levant were millenary, but so were the Sioux ghost dance and Melanesian cargo cults.

           By comparison to organized religions that spawn cathedrals, mosques, temples, and pagodas, millenary movements tend to be short-lived, fluid, nonlocal, and diffuse. They more resemble UFO landings: spontaneous revelations initiating a swath of witnesses. Naziism was a millenary spell that sent tanks and Luftwaffe across Europe.

           The cargo cults of the Melanesian Island chain and the late-nineteenth-century Ghost Dance of Native America, which stretched from the Great Basin to the Plains, define the category. Christianity from Christ’s teaching and crucifixion up to Paul and the papacies was a protean millenary movement that turned into a progression of full-blown religions that barely resembled it, but that was millenary too.

           The Ghost Dance emerged from a traditional spiral dance among Northern Paiutes of Nevada during which they summoned spirits of their ancestors to join them in the circle ceremony to help them combat better equipped intruders. In the dance’s millenary phases, special clothing was tailored, including colorful ghost shirts revived a century later in hippie boutiques. Worn into battle, these tunics were said to repel bullets, a tragic overassessment, on this plane anyway, for indigenous transactions with the White World.³

           Ghost dances are not always quaint, impotent, and weaponless. Daesh was a post-modern totalitarian caliphate with orc-like tanks, Satanic prayer flags, and public sacrifices

           Cargo cults began in Melanesia around the same time, with radii in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. These were likewise responses to the incursion of a technologically superior invader, one with remarkable “cargo.” Disciples believed that such a spectacular cornucopia must originate with their own ancestors and be meant for them. In societies based on gifting and ritual exchange, goods crossing supernatural boundaries are implicit, if rarely encountered. That belief made it seem that great ships with larders of tools, culinary delights, swords, firearms, and tchotchkes belonged to them rather than the heretics who “stole” them.⁴

           The cult peaked in Melanesia during the Second World War when uniformed Japanese and Americans arrived in flying machines with canned foods, weapons of mass destruction, and portable houses. That these vehicles came, spirit-like, out of the skies, and some of the cargo was air-dropped in remote regions for later pickup added to locals’ suspicions regarding their real nature.

           Islanders’ debates with soldiers and, later, with social scientists had a ritual quality in which an outsider, keen for cooperation, tried to level about the true source of the cargo, while tribespeople or villagers nodded with winks at each other, as though to acknowledge a deception of which all parties were aware. QAnon advocates have exhibited some of the same behavior in regard to COVID masks, neuralinks in vaccines, and hijacked voting machines.

           In Mambu, a study of Melanesian cargo movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge transcribed a millenarily altered creation myth. After begetting soil, sea, fish, and coconut fronds, a demiurge diverts his attention to more synthetic objects:

           Tuman started work on a boat. Having made it and had some practice in it he went off to see Ambwerk, to show him the boat. Ambwerk was surprised, and to his question, Tuman replied, “I invented it myself. And I made it on my own . . . .

               Tuman made a motor car, a motor bike, and a large ship with tall masts and a siren which went ‘Whooooo!’ Tuman’s ship was so big that it broke his older brother’s jetty and they had to secure it by ropes passed around coconut palms . . . .  Tuman made an aeroplane, canned goods, cloth, and all sorts of things . . . .

               Now, if it had been the other way about . . . you white skinned people would have had yams, and we black skinned people would have had paper and all the other good things.⁵

As noted, millenary religions aren’t limited to Third and Fourth World cults; they are a generic response to conquest and marginalization. Ethnologist of religion Vittoria Lanternari captured the motivation behind a wide range of cargo cults in the title of his book: Religions of the Oppressed. That’s what many of these sects are spiritual awakenings in response to political marginalization.

           The Brothers Tsarnaev from Chechen oblastwere millenary loners. They had zero terms for dealing with mysteriously arising energies outside their failed Americanization. A sell of jihadist propaganda, online and from family, and trips overseas, spawned paranoid fantasies while convincing them that their visions came from Mecca and Lahore. That turned them intoBoston Marathon bombers.

           Without having read Crime and Punishment or the Koran (at least carefully), Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were shoppers at an international cargo-cult mall where they were sold fancy yarns to ensure compliance with capital agendas. Yes, those homemade bombs were compliance, for they expedited reactionary holy wars.

           Such is the case for thousands of youths, from Somalia to Yemen to Chechnya as well as in Belgium, France, England, and Germany, including those who defected from Europe to join the Islamic State—no job, no honor, no ceremony for coming of age, no way to discharge testosterone, to roam prairies with wolves and owls, to cultivate spiritual freedom and meaning beyond street drugs and ragtag Euro football.

           ISIS may have been Sunni blowback from the U.S. invasion of Mesopotamia and Babylon, but it was designed to look like a hip-hop version of Arab spring. Young Muslim women—Egyptian, Palestinian, Detroit, Frankfurt, and East London girls—secreted themselves onto commercial jets, snuggled in SUVs across biblical lands, snaked through Tunisia and Turkey into Syria in the same general spirit in which young people crossed Arizona and Utah a few decades earlier singing, “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” They too thought, “You’re gonna meet / some gentle people there.”⁶ Maybe not gentle—after all, they were conducting jihad—but respectful, pious men.

           Instead, the women were sacrificially raped and widowed many times over. They had joined ISIS not to explode idols or eradicate kafirs, nor to impose sharia, and certainly not to kidnap and serve the violation of heathen sisters. They sought a kingdom of love as devoutly as those pilgrims caravanning to Haight-Ashbury. Both encountered the laws of karma and deficiencies of millenary orders.

I learned about millenary religions in 1966 as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Michigan. A survey course that addressed political, socioeconomic, and religious structures across the indigenous world included a module on “messianic cults.” These creeds proved far more ubiquitous than I realized, pervading Africa and the Middle East, playing roles at both ends of the slave trade and dotting rainforests of South America with entheogenic religions.

        Ghost dances may also have forged the songlines and Dreamtime that consecrated the Australian outback during transoceanic migration waves from Stone Age Asia.

           The American frontier hatched its own cargo cults, including a durable one that originated in the 1820s with receipt of supernatural golden tablets by Joseph Smith in upstate New York and culminated soon after in a community migration to the Great Salt Lake of Utah where its members established a more traditional parish: Mormonism, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

           My fellowship required a summer of fieldwork, so I wrote up a millenary project based in Hotevilla, Arizona. I had read Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi and knew, from a mutual friend, that Waters had blended Mormon and Hopi eschatologies. In a Hopi Great Reset called Túwaqachi, a soon-to-emanate Fourth World would replace our fading Third one. Eons ago, led by Spider Grandmother, the traditional Third Universe—including all of Eurasian and Pueblo history—arose through a hollow reed we now know as the Grand Canyon; it will pass through a smoke hole into the next dimension where it will redeem and complete itself.⁷

           My attempt at penetrating the cult as a twenty-two-year-old was brief and abortive, though I did encounter a remarkable conjunction of the shimmering Blue Star kachina that danced in the sky over Arizona mesas and UFO messages received by U. S Air Force pilot Mel Noel whom I had recently heard speak in a meeting room in the basement of a Detroit bank.

       I won’t forget the delight of Hopi children calling out to caravans passing through their land en route to the Summer of Love in San Francisco: “Heepees!” Hopis (short for Hopituh-Shi-nu-mu, “Peaceful People”) and peace-signing heepees were spiritually as well as phonetically kin. In a pre-internet era these seemingly chance links foreshadowed QAnon’s brand of synchromysticism.*

           On my one successful day in the “field,” Lindy and I drove to Hotevilla and parked in the sand. An older man approached us, gesturing toward my “passport,” Book of the Hopi carried openly in my hand. Introducing himself as “David Monongye, keeper of the Fire Clan tablets,” he beckoned us follow.

           We entered a stone hut, dirt floor. There, Paul Siwingyawma made his mark in my book, smearing a muddy finger across his name, as he declared, “Hopi people will rule the next millennium, the Fourth and Fifth Worlds. Great wars are already beginning. The Blue Light kachina visits our mesa, that’s the first prophecy. There will be whirlwinds, dust storms, lightning, meteors; planets will fall.”

           Monongye nodded. “This is the truth. The book you carry is the whiteman’s version of the knowledge that has been in our hearts longer than your people have had ships.”

Endnotes

1. Phil Hine, Prime Chaos, p. 1.

2. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 99.

3. See James Mooney, The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890.

4. See Kenelm Burridge, Mambu.

5. Kenelm Burridge, Mambu, pp. 159-60, 165.

6. John Phillips, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” Ode 103, 1967.

7. See Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi.

8. Valis, “The Cryptic Cosmology of Synchromysticism,” Reality Sandwich, April 24, 2008.

2. THE LETTER Q
I attribute a portion of QAnon’s appeal to the enigmatic letter “Q” (all the more potent without its guardian “u”). In Romance languages, “Q” is a signet of primal mysteries. According to poet-mythographer Robert Graves in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Q entered the Welsh tree-alphabet with the wild crabapple whose fruit it signifies: “quert” or “ceirt” in old Celtic dialects. “Q” is what a Semitic-Celtic Adam and Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge⁹ in the Garden of Eden and swallowed in their plunge onto the Physical/Etheric plane and set the beginning of astronomical time.¹⁰ As spiritual evolution descended to fuse with physical evolution ascending, homunculi of Adam and Eve were exiled into bones and fur.¹¹

           “Adam” and “Eve” were not actual persons but states of consciousness, etheric seeds or patterns of mentation with aspects of DNA God code. The apple and its eternal query were, and still are, archetypal and foreshadow all subsequent Q’s. The “Q” of latter-day QAnon may be hermeneutically shallow compared to a primal alphabetic “Q,” but its Celtic influence remains. Q is a very old letter with a legacy of rune, enigma, and intrigue.

           Blending mythology with semiology, Graves proposed that the original Ogham—Old Irish, Pict, and Welsh—alphabet was a lexicon of trees representing riddles of nature as well as graphemes in a forest of pre-Druid magic. Unlike the logo-syllabic pictographic notations of Ur and Egypt, the tree alphabet was a futhark or runology with magic vibrations.¹² Its arboreal letters included silver fir (A), birch (B), hazel (C), oak (D), alder (F), hawthorn (H), rowan (L), ash (N), willow (S), and, of course, apple (Q).

           Latin asked a litany of inquisitive “Q’s”: Quis: Who? Quid: What? Quantum: How Much? Quinam: Which? Quando: When? Quam: How? Quanam: By What Way? Quia: Why? Quoties: How Often? Quot: How Many? Quotus: Which in Number? Quorsum: To What Place? Qualis: What Kind? Qua: Where? Quin: Why Not?¹³

           Quantum physics speaks currently to Q mysteries: primordial quests and primal questions. Quasars—quasi-stellar objects—are cryptic light sources at the origin of space-time. Quarks—from the rhyming of James Joyce (to Muster Mark in Finnegans Wake)—are elementary particles of matter. In “quark,” Israeli particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann heard the cry of a gull and “quarts” (as in three glasses of ale for Joyce’s bar patron). With his backing, “Quark” bested its rival, “Ace.”¹⁴ The gull, to me, asks the quert’s eternal question: “How? How?” even as the owl asks “Who? Who?”

           QAnon has vestiges of “Q’s” Druid splendor and bears its rogue disobedience. Devotees in Q garb flaunt their own forbidden quert in search of tabooed knowledge. It may, at times, be a fake Q, a mock apple, or a Guy Fawkes mask, but that doesn’t forfeit its genealogy or species riddle.

           Gematria, which assigns an alphanumerical value to each letter (A is 1, B is 2, and so on), can turn names and sentences into numerological divinations. As the seventeenth letter of the English alphabet, Q inherits some of 17’s numerology: victory, business success, end of old relationships and patterns and the beginning of new ones. It synchromystically fits.

Endnotes

9. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, pp. 251-254.

10. See Arthur Edward Waite, The Holy Kabbalah.

11. See Karl Poppelbaum, Man and Animal.

12. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p. 252.

13. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p. 252.

14. Johanna Mayer, “The Origin of the Word ‘Quark,’ Science Friday, July 24, 2018.

3. PIZZAGATE AND PEDOPHILIA

Historically QAnon originated in Pizzagate, a less pervasive cult.¹⁵ With roots in earlier conspiracy plexuses, Pizzagate made its debut in March 2016 when spear-phishers hacked the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign manager. The stolen messages were circulated by WikiLeaks.

           Then after seven-term U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop was seized by the FBI late in the 2016 Election cycle, Pizzagate proponents inundated 4chan and other social media with the “news” that the NYPD (New York City Police Department) had used it to decipher a pedophile ring linking sex with children to multiple members of the Democratic Party. It didn’t help that Weiner had been convicted of sexting with minors, of sending photographs of his penis to a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina, or that his wife, Huma Abedin, was a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton and vice chair of her campaign.

           According to Pizzagate aficionados, Podesta’s emails contained encrypted messages between high-ranking Democratic Party officials, implicating them and various Hollywood stars in an international human-trafficking and child-sex ring. The interpretations may have been malicious, but they were powerful synchromysticism: meme magic has a life of its own. Lachman explained:

           The interphase between the “fake” world and the “real” one, between jokes and seriousness, looked wide open. And this is where ‘meme magic’ comes in. Meme magic is when what happens in cyberspace has an effect on the “real” world. This is an updated techno-literate take on the old magical belief that what happens in imagination can have real consequences. Thoughts are things. According to meme magicians, internet memes are too.

               Users began to notice odd synchronicities between the bits and pieces of pop culture they posted about on the net and events in the real world. They called this “synchromysticism.”¹⁶

         One of the restaurants implicated in Pizzagate was Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria and live-events venue on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., where Satanic rituals were purported to be taking place. The “conspiracy” was called Pizzagate, by the way, not because of Comet Ping Pong’s menu but because Podesta’s emails had p.s.’s with non sequiturs like, “For the such-and-such party in Washington, we will obtain the pizzas from our usual source in Chicago.”

          “Too bad there weren’t any pizzas at the fundraiser” is hard to construe innocently if you decode “pizza” as pedophile slang for “underage girl.”

In meme magic, malfeasance is rarely so explicit. You have to decode texts in the way that Melanesians had to decipher “canned goods” and “aeroplanes.”

           While synchromysticism is the stiletto of political hooliganism by conspiracy theory and a driver of false flags, it is also a way to read the universe through a glass darkly. Opposite agendas and truths merge and become indivisible as they fluctuate across a threshold in which thoughtforms and memes are simultaneously both substantive and fungible. That is one of the effects of astral polarity, which I introduced in the Preface and will address again under chaos magic. For a form of cargo-cult telekinesis, we—our minds and internal dialogues—are the glass.  

           Consider a nineties experiment by Princeton University’s Global Consciousness Project: Random-number generators were put in place at arbitrary sites across the planet to see if a psi (psychic) energy field got generated by large numbers of persons being drawn to the same focal point. Researchers plotted the cumulative deviation of a chi-square from chance expectations. Statistical quantities equal to the summation over all variables of the quotient of the square of the difference between observed and expected values were then divided by the expected values of the variable. You don’t have to follow this to get the point. Data showing no effect continued in a random path around the horizontal line of expectation, a statistical “drunkard’s walk.”

           Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, these generators stopped laying well-behaved white-noise eggs (with an occasional standard deviation) and went off the charts: z-score permutations well outside statistical fuzz. The weirdness began several hours before hijacked planes arrived at the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

           It was as if, on 9/11, the noosphere, the collective mind of the Earth, not only rippled but looped in time, going backward and forward from the moment of first tower impact. The anomalous dataflow, peaking a few hours after the crashes, was the biggest flood of deviations recorded by Princeton’s generators.¹⁷

            Mindstreams may be as subtly charged as electrons—Norman Vincent Peale proposed as much—so meme magic tries to conduct and apply that force. While coming from divergent, antithetical cultures, Peale and meme magic meet in magician-thug Steve Bannon, though the confluence of synchromysticism with Trumpism was unforeseeable and heteroclite, which made its ambush all the more effective. Folks had not watched agitprop and disinformation hex at internet scale. Eventually Pizzagate would metastasize into QAnon. Trumpism plus QAnon became like fascism with dada.

Initially, Pizzagate gossip spread on Twitter and web imageboards 4chan and 8chan as a quasi-computer-game: real-world Dungeons and Dragons. Lachman recounts that 4chan was anime- and manga-oriented, fissioning out of “an earlier internet board, Something Awful.” He wrote:

             When Christopher Poole, a fifteen-year-old anime fan and Something Awful user adapted his Japanese bulletin board software, 4chan was born.

               Soon into its existence 4chan became a kind of breeding ground for a form of pop nihilism characteristic of postmodernism, although the teenagers . . . most likely never heard of postmodernism. Millennial “whateverism” slid into a peevishly sour irony, a kind of personal “plausible deniability” aimed at everything at large. . . . It was a kind of cyber Fight Club scenario with a shared ethos “to hate, to deny, to shrug, to laugh at everything as a joke.”¹⁸

           It looked like punk vandalism and slacker fatalism, but its delivery was sibylline, like a mass Delphic oracle of riddles. Posting was marked by competitive political incorrectness, including—why not?—anti-Semitic and racist jibes. These weren’t always straightforward, as anonymous posters could switch identities at will. People might post the opposite of their beliefs to express frustration, outrage, obnoxiousness, or the sheer fluidity and absurdity of reality. Eric Bogosian’s script for the play (and movie) SubUrbia captures aughts relativism’s roots in early slacker culture:

             Jesus Christ, nothing makes a difference in the first fucking place. Nothing ever changes, man. Fifty years from now, we’re all gonna be dead. And there’ll be new people standing here, drinking beer, eating pizza, bitching and moaning about the price of Oreos and they won’t even know we were ever here, and then fifty years after that, those suckers will be dust and bones, and there’ll be all these generations of suckers trying to figure out what the fuck they’re doing on this fucking planet, and they’ll all be full of shit. It’s all so fucking futile!¹⁹

           Postmodern nihilism flows out of slacker whateverism, then turns into Millennial cynicism and—I am guessing, down the road—Zoomer rage and payback.

For 4chaners, solving synchronicities became an addictive, obsessive recreation, plied all the way down to hidden messages and gematria in the random numbers their posts were assigned. The thing about numerology and alphanumerical codes is that, while numbers themselves may be arbitrary—willy-nilly, all over the place—the ones you notice contain messages for you. Gematria is also manipulable, so many QAnon followers juggle words in sentences until they generate magical “evidence” for their own portents or Satanic acts of their enemies.

         Lachman cited the “odd coincidences between the crash of German Wings flight 9525 in 2015 and a scene from the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises”; these suggested to 4chaners “that their posts were somehow responsible for the crash.”²⁰ That the Wings plane was ditched intentionally by a despondent copilot locking the pilot out of the flight deck during a toilet break was ridiculed by posters as synchromystic Theater of the Absurd.

           Coincidences were later noted between not only the crash site and Batman’s speech returning Gotham “to the people in The Dark Knight Rises,” but both of them and Donald Trump’s inauguration speech.²¹

           Without an effective parascience of the liminal, synchronicities are hard to explain—obviously mainstream physics is no match for psi effects and has nothing to say about bizarre propinquities except that they are statistically probable, mere coincidences. They also provide a human portrait of how quantum realities get put together under the rationalist cloak that stretches from Aristotle and Newton to Planck and Einstein, then to dark matter and the primordial roots of causation. QAnon is an alt-right “tao of physics” as well as a stir of slacker divination, chaos magic, and quasi-Jungian symbols of transformation.

While some threads of 4chan activity passed as Left-Wing anarchism reverberating Occupy Wall Street and (later) Antifa—8chan was pure alt-right, promulgating Bannon and Breitbart memes: white supremacy, Democratic satanism, neo-Nazism. The Podesta “epidemic” of pedophilia eventually coalesced with a medley of conspiracy theories ranging from 9/11 inside jobs—LIHOP (Let it Happen on Purpose) and MIHOP (Made it Happen on Purpose)—to stuff as far afield as interstellar espionage, Government-hoarded immortality pills, and mind-eating amoebas injected into people’s blood with vaccines. Everyone suddenly had fifteen minutes of being Philip K. Dick, though it was not always speculative alternate realities, benign conjury, or even divine paranoia. In revanchist hands, it turned into ordnance-laden paranoia. Comet Ping Pong was almost certainly a victim of weaponized synchromysticism rather than a pedophile front. 

           Among the most touted hexes was the re-casting of Sandy Hook, Lakeland, and other school shootings as “false flags”—scams orchestrated to spur public support for confiscating the guns of so-called “law-abiding citizens.” Manipulated videos of the “events” along quasi-synchronistic connections among the victims’ families (for instance, that one Sandy Hook father was an actor once and wasn’t crying when he should have been) were used to “prove” government “frame jobs.”

           This wasn’t synchomysticism at all; it was faking synchromysticism to create false false flags. (Jumping on false flags while placing Rocky Horror time bombs was known as “false flag wanking.”)

           “Sandy Hook as conspiracy” crosses any reasonable threshold for legitimate meme magic. A Government or Deep State tactic of fabricating murders of school children for agitprop is so disproportionate and unlikely that claims about it amp “perverse” to the point of sociopathic—but then that is what weaponizes them. They get charged by the rage of the marginalized guns-and-religion subculture. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, the unconscious is as reckless as it is ruthless.

           Alex Jones, the main perpetrator of the conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a false flag (no children were killed) was less a synchromystic sybil than a pathological liar on the Asperger’s spectrum who couldn’t tell the difference between making up stuff for R & R or fun & profit and criminal fuckery. The hundreds of millions of dollars he generated out of his Genesis Communications Network proved that he was far from stupid or alone. Nothing makes an autistic sociopath feel more at home and loved than paying company. Ask Donald Trump.  

           The fact is, any gun-confiscation false flag, implausible as such a State conspiracy is, would have to be far trickier and less problematic than staging bloody massacres at real schools. It’s well beyond the limits of the most unlikely Mission: Impossible plots. If you want to confiscate guns, there are far simpler false flags with far fewer moving parts.

           At the same time, Jones’ use of actual murdered school children to wank a myth shows how deep the pathologization of information has become. Some QAnon inebriates later extended the Sandy Hook false flag to fresh absurdity by claiming that 2021 Kenosha teen gunman, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “murdered” child from Connecticut who returned eight years later in Illinois with a new name, new mother, and false biography! Apparently flipped politics too. Once you engage in meme magic, anything remotely possible—one in a trillion trillion—can feed fabulism, as long as there is that “one.”

           While appropriating shootings in schools was contemptible, the underlying drive to negate an adversary’s memes and weaponize one’s own is an effective, if obtuse, strategy to counter others’ weaponized facts. Mythmaking is meta-political, based on a belief that ordinary fact checks don’t get at the true scale of collusions, which are disguised by endless plausible deniabilities and faked decorum. Hermeneutic and Quixotian in this respect, QAnon marks a 9/11-like shift in the psychic field. The plaint that its ploys are political—everything’s political!—does not negate their import: everything’s psychological and psychic too.

           Since Jones was both autistic and sociopathic, he felt no empathy, so his adaptation of an actual tragedy to advance his politics and business model seemed fair game, as fair as what his acolytes perceive as the Deep State’s no-holds-barred war on their own interests and beliefs. That’s why Jones and his supporters ended up crying “free speech,” e.g, “we didn’t shoot any children; we just used them for an alternate reality to rally our base and raise funds.”  

           To miss the residual torment and blowback of that was sociopathic too.  

           Pre- and post-Pizzagate archives blossomed with many other anti-bourgeois tropes: E.T.s in the Deep State, an alien control panel on the Moon, human-alien hybrids, and dimension-hopping spacecraft warehoused in Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base, Area 51, the Army’s supposed UFO debriefing “dark site.” Debris ostensibly salvaged at Roswell, New Mexico, was not a weather balloon, and legendarily gave us fiber optics, stealth aircraft, ESP psy-ops, facial-recognition software, Alexa, iPhones, and alien autopsies, and would have given us interdimensional travel if we had been advanced enough to back-engineer the ships.*

           At this point, Right or Left Wing becomes irrelevant. After all, it was Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, who unsealed the UFO files.

The “lunar control panel” originated with David Icke, a one-time Hereford United Footballer, sports broadcaster, and Greens Party spokesman who circulated an exposé that he said he had channeled from outer spheres: Earth had been taken over by extraterrestrials in collaboration with its own world governments. Icke’s “X files” included interdimensional reptilian beings, the Archons, whom he identified with the Anunnaki of the Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian creation myth—the same interplanetary “gods” that amateur philologist Zecharia Sitchin transposed into rulers of Nibiru, a far Kuiper-belt planet with a roughly 3,600-year elliptical orbit and a rap sheet of genetic manipulation.

           These sorts of factoids drive whole burgeoning cosmologies. Former U.S. National Security Advisor and high-level Afghanistan commander Michael Flynn, ostensibly trained by pros to distinguish facts from fabulisms and psy-ops, went from Deep State suspicions to rigged voting machines to selling his own QAnon merchandise. That’s how contagious meme magic can be.

           The 2020 Christmas-day suicide bomber, Anthony Quinn Walker, blew up a chunk of downtown Nashville, as well as himself, to warn America about lizard-like extraterrestrials disguised as former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Senator Lindsey Graham, Madonna, Britney Spears, and the late Bob Hope. These shapeshifting clones were deemed either Deep State doubles or vampire-like metamorphoses of pedophiles, Greys, and blood-drinking politicians who had taken over the government, Democratic Party, and much of the Republican Party too. They were also responsible for 5G cellular technology’s mind-altering electrical grids and chemtrails from spiked jet fuel that spawned COVID-19 in a plot to depopulate the planet and subjugate what would be left of humanity. It was the ultimate Bill-Gates-themed extravaganza.

       In August 2021, a forty-year-old California surfing school owner tragically took his two-year-old son and ten-month-old daughter to Mexico and stabbed them to death with a spear-fishing gun—a macabre pun—because he believed that his wife has passed down “serpent DNA” that would turn them into monsters. In other words, the DNA had incorporated an alien “code” that would plant them as double agents.

           A different brand of conspiracists believes in WiFi-based takeovers of individual brains with a goal of scrambling landscapes and terrifying folks the way that Deep State hitmen do in a Dean Koontz thriller.

           The complexity of these scenarios shows how actual psy-ops have been cloaked by paranoid fairy tales, either synchromystically or as intelligence agencies attempt to waylay and dupe citizen inquiry. The increasing violence of the tropes also indicates a breakdown in consensus reality as well as a confluence of science-fiction and horror genres with an increasingly ragged and wounded reality. What is camouflaged in our late-onset bubble is the disintegration of meaning itself, a playback of Jack Finney’s 1950s sci-fi invasion of body-snatchers. Anthony Quinn Walker’s paranoid suicide was a repurposing of Finney’s Santa Mira pod-people, panspermia beans that became clones of humans they replaced but without psyches or souls. It took little more than half a century for a metaphorical invasion to turn into a national fad and cargo cult.

           At its time-adjusted scale, the Roman Empire was beset by equivalent synchromystic alchemies and apocalyptic divinations. But as collateral damage piles up, it stops being a game, in Caligula’s Rome as in Trump’s America.

           Pedophilia is not wrong, either biologically or politically. It grounds a regressive sexual orientation—an orientation all the same. A psychologist friend who has worked with pedophiles in prison systems in both Washington State and Maine told me, “It is not a treatable disease; it is a hardwired atavism. It may be a crime, but it’s incurable; it can’t be fixed.” 

           QAnon’s transfiguration of pedophilia rivals the 1980s alien-abduction craze during which thousands of people reported kidnapping, experimentation, surgery, rape, and sometimes insemination by dwarf-like Grey intruders—an invasion that evaporated as suddenly and mysteriously as it began (23andMe might still look for those half-breeds). Yet it sent innocent schoolteachers to jail and still smolders under the surface.

           QAnon is a more ripened yield of the collision between new technologies and prior meanings and values. Factories and laboratories change scientists’ psyches, a credo of Renaissance alchemists: you become what you produce. At the same time, in a conscious cosmos, just about anything can eventually emerge from anything else. Freudian psychology meets biological transmutation, or Jungian archetypes meet Heisenbergian muons. I discussed this matter in Bottoming Out the Universe.

           After Skinwalker Ranch, a legendarily haunted property in northern Utah, was purchased by an Aristo entrepreneur, investigators equipped with Trifield electromagnetic-strength meters and gamma-ray detectors scoured the 500+ acres for signs of aliens, shapeshifters, were-cats, and wormholes under an umbrella of good ol’ boys’ scientism and cowboy astrophysics.

           They found a reflexive energy field twenty feet down and five thousand feet up. As a visible UFO fluttered overhead, a cow lay down and died. Two alpacas were bitten by vampire hounds, and ranch hands and scientists were sickened by radioactive waves. Yet nothing overt ever manifested. It was as if an alien intelligence or their own collective unconscious was playing with games with their incursion into its zone.

           Likewise, at the bottom of QAnon’s pomp and circumstance is a deeper conceit: the hijacking of our bodies by a cahoots of aliens and traitors in an attempt to subjugate or steal our planet, either for oligarchs or E.T. Greys (or by Earth quislings and cosmic conquistadors in collusion). QAnon’s “Amber Alert” of lost children and vampire pedophiles is more truly a sublimation and code for a relationship between trafficking in children and trafficking in souls that stretches from the Right-to-Life movement to Ridley-Scott-like stowaways in vaccines and WiFi waves.         

           On the Left, “aliens” and pedophiles double as metaphors for what corporate medicine and food have done to our health freedom, food security, sanity, and personal autonomy.

Endnotes

15. My discussion of Pizzagate, QAnon, Jeffrey Epstein, the Barr family, and COVID-19 (see the rest of this chapter) is culled from online sources.

16. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 88.

17. The discussion of random-number generators is adapted from my book, The Night Sky, pp. 367-368. There have been numerous geek critiques of this experiment.

18. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 86. The internal quote comes from a qz.com URL: how-the-isolated-boys-of-4chan-turned-a-meme-into-the-president-of-the-united-states.

19. Eric Bogosian in Richard Linklater (director), SubUrbia, 1996.

20. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp 88-89.

21. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.

4. THE CLINTON BODY COUNT AND OTHER DOSSIERS

More mundanely (and prior to QAnon), Pizzagate hosted a medley of assassination-related conspiracies involving JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and RFK—consecrated conservative Right scapegoats. Some of these plots were super-conspiracies, with multiple overlaps and triggers, encompassing the murders (rather than suicides or accidental deaths) of Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and UFO investigator John E. Mack.

           While the secret governments and bogeymen tended to be Democratic or Left Wing—part of the New World Order reset—the greater treason was ecumenical, Right and Left wings together: paramilitary Three Percenters with phaser-bearing Trekkies, Flat Earthers with anti-AMA naturopaths. Folks crossed aisles to declare jointly: some really bad shit is happening!

           Not every devotee ate every pie or sang every ballad, but masting synchronicities fed a cascading alt-history.

           Empowered by his guy winning the Election, on December 4^th, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, set out to investigate the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, halt its pedophiliac blood fests (ostensibly in the basement), and free the children. While conducting this operation, he ended up firing three rounds from an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle inside the building. No one was injured, but Welch was sentenced to four years.

           Arsonists subsequently tried to torch Comet Ping Pong, as the owners were deluged with death threats. It was Roger Rabbit gone amok: post-modern cartoons invading civic landscapes.

           My Sacred Planet author, Canadian medical anthropologist and fashion model Samantha Treasure, dubbed them “cyborg phantoms”—liminal cartoons and sleep-paralysis-like hallucinations of Mickey Mouse, Fred Flintstone, Betty Boop, and dead pop stars like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and John Kennedy, Jr. They were transformed into liminal guides and archangelic sorcerers. What began as Disney-like fantasia in the 1950s turned the GOP into election grifters by 2020, and everyone either signed the spiritual agreement or left.

In a related gauntlet dubbed the “Clinton Body Bag” or, somewhat less ghoulishly, “Clinton Body Count,” Bill and Hillary or their agents were alleged to have murdered half a dozen or so colleagues who held compromising information on them. The centerpiece of this cabal was the so-called “contract homicide” of Deputy White House Counsel and long-time Clinton associate, Vincent Foster. After Foster’s body was found in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, in 1993, each of five investigations concluded that the gunshot wounds to his head were self-inflicted. he was declared a suicide.

           The Government’s autopsies were dismissed by online wankers who agreed that Foster was killed to keep him from testifying against the Clintons. As Presidential candidate and then as President, Donald Trump encouraged innuendos about Hillary and Foster, avowing in disingenuous hush-hush, “He has intimate knowledge of what was going on. . . and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”²²

           He meant that Foster had inside dope on Whitewater: blackmail and illegal investments vis à vis a real-estate development near White River, Arkansas, that involvked the Clintons and their partners, James and Susan McDougal.

           Additional alleged “body bag” “victims” included C. Victor Raiser II, National Finance Co-Chairman for Bill Clinton’s campaign, who, along with three others, died in a “suspicious” plane crash (1992), and Mary Mohane, a White House intern fatally shot during a robbery (1997) at a Starbucks in the Georgetown suburb of Washington where she was assistant manager.

           On July 10, 2016, the murder of Democratic political operative Seth Rich in the Bloomingdale district of Washington D.C., put Pizzagate on steroids. After Rich left a party with his girlfriend—in other versions, alone or with a woman from a bar—he split from “her” at 4:19 a.m. en route to his lodgings. He was found in the morning with two bullet wounds in his back, his watch, wallet, and phone untouched. Police attributed the killing to an aborted street robbery.

           Conspiracy theories vary, but the main one identifies Rich as a Russian spy leaking Democrat Party secrets to the Kremlin and responsible for the Russian hack of DNC (Democratic National Committee) computers. That, among other perks, absolved Republicans and the Trump campaign.

           Once a template is established in people’s minds, even far-flung evidence tends to fit. Why did the pilot make that turn? Why was Rich not robbed? Conspiracy theories are expanding universes that implode from imaginal seeds into full-blown multiverses.

           In fifth grade during our lunch breaks, my P. S. 6 friend Phil Wohlstetter and I tried to solve crimes around 83^rd Street and Park and Madison Avenues in midtown Manhattan. Having read numerous youth detective series—Hardy Boys, Ken Holt, Tom Swift, Jr., Rick Brant, Nancy Drew—we were well trained. We were amazed when objects we found on sidewalks and in gutters or garbage cans fit together and led to occupants on the rosters of nearby apartment buildings, just like in the books.

           Phil and I were precocious conspiracy theorists.

           Endnote

22. Doug Wintemute, “The Strangest Conspiracy Theories Supported by Donald Trump,” Nicki Swift, November 23, 2020.

5. CRISSCROSSING CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND MISSING WITNESSES

Rich’s murder capped the Clinton Body Count until the suicide by hanging of financier Jeffrey Epstein in a New York City prison on August 10, 2019. The belief that this wasn’t a suicide spread beyond Pizzagate into mainstream media. The FBI conducted forensic analyses and interviewed Epstein’s New York City prison guards regarding their actions and timelines. All accounts pointed to escape by suicide, but that didn’t dampen conspiratorial zeal. 

           As noted in the previous chapter, the Clintons and Donald Trump were entangled through Epstein long before the 2016 presidential campaign. In his heyday, Epstein paid, blackmailed, and sometimes impounded young women, some of them runaways, to assuage his sex addiction and to broker prestige by providing his harem to politicians, executives, professors, scientists, and at least one prince. Planes full of randy progressive influencers flown to Epstein’s “island of babes” was a dark burlesque, suggesting that pedophilia, while displaced, wasn’t entirely fantastical.

           “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told a New York Magazine reporter piecing together a story eventually headlined “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.” “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”²³

           How young?

           Assorted somewhat dubious “witnesses” claimed that Donald and Bill participated in recreational rape and sexual bondage of minors. According to logs, both did fly on Epstein’s aircraft, apparently visiting Little Saint James Island in the ironically named Virgin chain, Clinton on twenty-nine occasions, not a virginal portfolio. On Little Saint James, Epstein conducted orgies for himself and rich and famous guests. Microsoft head Bill Gates, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, concert violinist Itzhak Perlman, and physicist Murray Gell-Mann were alpha males who accepted Epstein’s friendship and, in some cases, Caribbean vacations. Any deeds of pedophilia or other crimes of passion by them or other Epstein buddies are either unfounded rumor or guilt by association, neither confirmable nor refutable, though Gates’ 2021 divorce from his long-time partner Melinda stirred gossip of an extended “honeypot bromance” between the Microsoft mogul and Wall Street pimp. This plot tying pedophilia of the elite to genocide by vaccines incubated a golden egg that later QAnon devotees would hatch into a full dragon. Gates himself malformed into a superhuman villain of cartoon proportions and changeling aspects. Conspiracy theories build archetypal villains whose real-world proxies may or may not be victims of character assassination. There are “Bill Gateses” on the loose even if Bill Gates isn’t one.

Proponents of Right- and Left-Wing “Pizzagates” converge in an unsolved meta-mystery. During the 2016 election run-up, a woman using the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” filed a $100 million civil lawsuit twice, accusing defendants Trump and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein of having sexually abused and raped her at parties held at Epstein’s Manhattan home in 1994 when she was thirteen years old. In the complaint, “Johnson” said that the men threatened her and her family with bodily harm if she didn’t comply with all of their “disgusting demands.”

           According to the filings, “Johnson” was an aspiring model in ’94 when, after a string of unsuccessful meetings with agencies in New York City, she was at a Port Authority bus terminal getting ready to make a cross-country trip back home. Instead, a female stranger told Johnson how she could make money and modeling connections by attending parties. It was at these parties—allegedly featuring other underage girls and wealthy patrons—that Johnson says she was forced to sexually gratify the future POTUS on four occasions, each an escalation of depravity.

           After their supposed final encounter, in which Johnson claimed she begged Trump to no avail to wear a condom, the complaint states, “Trump grabbed his wallet and threw some money at” the plaintiff and suggested she get an abortion.²⁴

           Just before November Election Day, “Johnson” dropped her case, citing concern for her safety, and vanished. Subsequent attempts to locate her, more persistent after Trump was elected, went cold.

           But was she even “real”? The story itself oscillates between a suspiciously contrived bibimbap bowl and the special of the day in 1994. “Johnson” existed mainly as an intentionally blurred color frame in her lawyer’s taped interview meant for evidence. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Trump’s Russia ties, was offered the full, intact video by a “Never Trump” Republican. It is not known if he accepted, yet the plot is thicker still, rippling through time while looping events precognitively.

           Epstein started his professional life in 1974 as a prep-school teacher at Dalton, a prominent private school in midtown Manhattan. Students during his tenure included Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Prudence and future actress Jennifer Grey. Four years later, Mariel Hemingway was cast as a seventeen-year-old Dalton student courted by a forty-two-year-old character played by Woody Allen in Allen’s film Manhattan. (Allen would get ensconced in his own pedophilia tangle).  

           Donald Barr, father of Trump’s most compliant Attorney General, William Barr, was Dalton’s headmaster in the mid-seventies and is said to have participated in the hiring of a twenty-one-year-old college dropout to teach math. Epstein proved popular with students as a professor who wanted to be one of “them,” dressing in bell bottoms, a striped T-shirt, big chunky belt, and platform shoes.

           Prior to his Dalton stint, elder Barr wrote Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale. The more than slightly lascivious science-fiction novel centered around an intergalactic pedophilia ring run by oligarchs on the planet Kossar. The book’s “hero,” John Craig, an Earthling in his thirties, was travelling aboard an interplanetary passenger vessel when it was hijacked by space pirates who then sold Craig into slavery on Kossar. The human colony, run by seven elites, six of them male, amused themselves by torturing captives. The only female oligarch, Lady Morgan Sidney, proved a rapacious pedophile and super sadist, yet Craig fell in love with her, or maybe with “her high breasts and long thighs.”²⁵ Or maybe Donald Barr fell in love. 

           A reverse-spin “Pizzagate” zigzags from the relationship of Epstein and elder Barr to arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and his nephew Jamal Khashoggi (murdered and dismembered allegedly by agents of Saudi Crown Prince Bander bin Sultan Al Saud), from there to media mogul and reputed British spy Robert Maxwell, Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine (Epstein’s partner and procurer), and orgies on Little Saint James, which was purchased by Epstein after he put his math to better use as a financier, hedge-fund trader, and super-pimp, perhaps a gay gigolo, too. It crosses the Right-Wing Pizzagate at the afore-mentioned Clinton-Trump frolics. The red-haired teenage girl raped aboard a spaceship in Barr’s novel resembles the blurred red-haired woman claiming bondage and erotic sadism as a thirteen-year-old against “defendant Trump” fifty years later.

           As with Phil Wohlstetter and me on our lunchtime forays, any “telltale” indicator, even if prochronistic, becomes part of the code. Malleable myths turn into media realities. I have no idea if any of the above has an amplituhedron of fact, but its facets cast a “mystery truth” through a crystal darkly. In a world dominated by corporate media and pop culture and overseen by crony capitalism—as we approach the Hopi Fourth World, UFO singularity, a climate tipping point, and Icke’s Lion Sleeps No More—new global cargo cults are emerging. With them come a dissolution of prior societal benchmarks, shared realities, consensus veridicalities, and common ethics.

           Pizzagate, MAGA, and QAnon are, each in its way, attempts to place new yardsticks on a deranged landscape. Resembling a computer game like “The Matrix,” they stretch from migratory tribes in Africa to high rises in Hong-Kong and are less about how we govern ourselves, or let ourselves be governed, than how we create governing mythologies. Robert’s Rules of Order have been pushed aside by geocaching, hooliganism, and patriotic fibs.Cultural historian Charles Eisenstein analyzes how a zeitgeist got projected onto the commons by a long legacy of secrets and lies:

             The routine mendacity of politicians over the last few decades has desolated the civic commons, once a rich domain of broad agreements about what is real, what is important, and what is legitimate. We can’t blame only the politicians of course. From corporate PR campaigns to intelligence agency psy-ops, from internet censorship to government secret programs, we are awash in lies, deception, secrets, half-truths, spin, fraud, and manipulation. No wonder we are so prone to believe in conspiracies. Their building blocks are everywhere.²⁶

           Much like test-tube hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon in a biotech lab, they lead to exotic chimeras. If Earth’s power brokers cower before an approaching pole shift (metaphorical or magnetic), what can we expect from the powerless?

Endnotes

23. Landon Thomas, Jr., “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York Magazine, October 28, 2002.

24. Raheem F. Husseini, “Wait, ‘Katie Johnson’ actually exists,” Sacramento News and Review Archives, October 17, 2019.

25. Donald Barr, Space Relations.

26. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

        6. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PIZZAGATE TO QANON

Launched by a ping on 4chan (October 28, 2017), a meta-wave engulfed Pizzagate. A self-declared “high government official” identifying himself as “Q” and claiming a high-level security clearance posted that he had access to classified information about Donald Trump’s enemies in the Deep State, implying the corporate sector, high tech, and Hollywood. Because of the platform’s anonymity, the poster could have been a person, an alias, or a group sharing a Q insignia. He tossed some bait, riddles, and clues. After a while, it became a tsunami.

           QAnon soon spread to alt-right websites, including provocateur Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Jones, as we saw, routinely weaponizes fake information and conspiracy theories on behalf of Right-Wing causes. His interest was never veracity; it was the selective empowerment of information, at which point disinformation becomes another form of gonzo journalism. Jones was heir to Hunter Thompson, George Kimball, and Jonathan Zap, none of whom would have gotten within ten yards of him in their primes. But if you go deep enough into sixties counterculture, twenty-first-century meme magic bubbles embryonically. 

           QAnon may have begun as MAGA paranoia and loyalism, but it vested as a full revolt, nonpartisan, against Aristo abuses of power and exploitation of the underclasses. By calling out, simultaneously, exploitation of children, sex trafficking, and a corporate World Government, it won over some patrons of the Left under a banner of health freedom, food security, and personal sovereignty, along with augury of a Luciferian Deep State with plans to bar-code, enslave, and depopulate Earth—to remake our species as corporate drones. The twentieth century had already shown the consequences of deregulated secularism and the “Death of God” brand—at Coniston, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Wounded Knee, Kigali.

           From the alt-right, QAnon leveraged Pizzagate into a global sex-trafficking ring run by pedophiles in the Satan-worshipping Democratic Party and equally satanic Hollywood, serving the jet set and corporate glitterati. Celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres were implicated along with usual suspects Bill Gates and philanthropist George Soros. All that, while undermining a great white warrior coming to the rescue. . . .

           Pedophilia topped out at the so-called Adrenochrome Conspiracy: the belief that Aristo necrophiles drank the blood of murdered children after terrifying them so that they would produce more adrenalin, an anti-aging tonic for decadent liberal ghouls. Alex Jones, in rare gonzo form, proclaimed the “satanic pedophile globalist new world order and their walking-dead reanimated corpse Joe Biden.”²⁷ That sort of inspired scat raised him to rapper status in the QAnon world.

           This is no marginal fantasy, either. In 2022, it was promulgated by former CBS and Fox reporter Lara Logan, who mourned that younger and younger children were being kidnapped, brought to the United States, and horrifically abused like foie gras geese for longevity potions, and not just in the dark web or underground but by members of the Biden administration.

QAnon’s eclectic blend of self-satire and serendipity was as fluid as a Bororo myth cycle in Brazil and Bolivia—see Claude Lévi-Strauss’ tetralogy, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man, for how widely and variously an etiology can morph. Like Pizzagate, QAnon could expand to encompass JFK assassination theories, alien abductions, reverse-engineered UFOs, monuments on Mars, vaccines, and Deep State enemies of Donald Trump, all under the alphabetic dominion of Q. In the hubbub, traditional political affiliations were ditched and betrayed. People were shocked to discover the fungibility of fact and the susceptibility of their relatives and colleagues to fabulisms and fuckeries.

           Like myths and fairy tales, conspiracy theories escalate until they match the archetypes at their collective psychic source. With anal or oral libidinalization, they often devolve into either coprophiliac or necromantic folklore.

           Myths in the primeval rain forest were just as associative, heterogeneous, and libidinal, though without internal-combustion engines or the internet, they took millennia to accomplish what now occurs in an afternoon, albeit with flimsier roots and less cohesion.

           QAnon acolytes sang the crime slates of (mostly) Democratic operatives at federal, state, and local levels. One chorus of both “Democrat and Republican Paedophiles (sic) prosecuted to date” called Q “a mirror reflecting accurately the [sad] state of human consciousness,” then names names (I won’t). Ostensible public charges against identified politicos included “unlawful sexual activity [and] delivering the drug LSD . . . molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography . . . having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter . . . offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him . . .  exposing his genitals to an 11-year-old girl . . . six counts of raping his daughters . . . . soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year-old girl . . . providing alcohol to young adults during a game of strip poker that included a 16-year-old boy at a camp for underprivileged children run by the mayor . . . .”

           This archive (from which I have synopsized less than a quarter page) goes on for eight full pages. It would take the resources of the FBI to track down each of these accusations, locate its source, and confirm or rebut.²⁸

           It is striking that, almost weekly, another politician (if we count all levels of government from Federal to states, counties, cities, local boards, etc.) is exposed for gay or straight pedophilia or taking some sort of asymmetric sexual license. Transcending party politics, the rap sheet goes from JFK to Andrew Cuomo as licitly and unempathically as from J. Edgar Hoover to Donald J. Trump. As I write today (March 24, 2022), Elliott Cutler, a Maine politician with strong social-justice credentials and a psychiatrist wife, who received widespread liberal support while twice running for governor, was arrested for possession of massive files of child porn. As I write again (October 19, 2022), a GOP candidate for a Maricopa County Community College District government board in Arizona, Randy Kaufman, was caught by police masturbating in his parked truck near a preschool. The pedophiliac location may have been incidental, but the urgency to jack off in his truck rather than go back to the safety of his bathroom is inexplicable without plausible explanation. He was looking at his cell phone, a possible alibi for the preschool aspect. His response to the officer: “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I’m really stressed.”

           That’s the generic politician’s insanity defense.

           Kaufman suspended his campaign but said, “I will never stop fighting to protect the United States Constitution and the values that make America the greatest country in the world.”²⁹ 

           His equally weird opposing impulses are located in the same libidinal drive.

The pornographic, necrophiliac psychosis is ubiquitous, beyond ordinary diagnostic “manuals.”

           On the Right, “pedophilia” is also a dog whistle for communism, gender fluidity, abortion, and foes of Christmas.

           On the Left, pedophilia advocates look past Q’s Dem hit list—they are used to online flap-ups and altered rap sheets—and latch onto actual epidemics of sexual slavery, ritual satanism, and general abuse by the privileged and powerful, not just of children (animals, genes, and ecosystems too), and not just sexual (coerced labor and irregular military induction)—part of an unregulated flow of capital. This larger civilizational crisis has roots in globalization, commoditization, materialism, technocracy, and shallow objectifications of desire.  

           Catholic priests and other ministers and mullahs used their “divine” authority to sodomize with impunity for decades. They have been joined by clerics, administrators, Boy Scout leaders, movie actors, doctors, coaches, trainers, and even baseball pitchers—some of them actual pedophiles, others preferring erotic bondage and sadomasochism without realizing that, at core, these are pedophilia proxies.  

One poster (I will leave him anonymous), after citing alleged videos of Joe Biden (called “Briben” in the rant) touching nine-year-olds, called former President Clinton “Kill Bill,” claimed John F. Kennedy, Jr. is still alive and about to return, and extolled Black Lives Matter in the context of pointing out that “over 6 million Congolese were raped, tortured, and murdered so that big tech could use child slave labor for coltan, a mineral rich in elements niobium and tantalum essential for the production of portable electronic devices.”³⁰ Even if you don’t take this rhetoric literally, it is sprinkled with facts. Cobalt for solar panels and electric cars is mined by children in Africa and turned into batteries in China. The hyperbole, like high oratory of potlatches on the old Pacific Northwest Coast, is ceremonial. Plus, things have to be stated mythologically for them to have any traction at all these days.

           When QAnon tried to expose a Great Reset in which the international order converts money to digital algorithms while controlling populaces through vaccines and financial access, it functioned as its own Great Reset. While a CRISPR-infatuated medical establishment is flirting with body-snatcher territory, the belief that every biolab on the planet is neuralinking humans into cyborgs verges on batshit crazy. One woman characterized the conversion of her formerly sane kid brother as a cultish mind swap requiring a deprogrammer’s intervention:

            “The banking system here in the U.S. has already collapsed,” he told me. “They are just trying to figure out how to tell everyone. We, as a race of human beings, for 4,000 years going back to the Sumerians, have been used as food by the elites. It’s about to come to an end. They got rid of the race that was using us as cattle. They drove them out of all these tunnels―there’s a tunnel from Washington, D.C., to LA that takes half an hour on a bullet train. There’s a whole fucking society that lives underground. In Australia, there’s [a tunnel] all the way around the continent and it’s being used for human trafficking and organ harvesting and basically using human beings like cattle. JFK found out about it 50 years ago, and it’s taken 50 years to drive them out. And it’s now over. The Catholic Church, the military industrial complex and Wall Street have fucked us for the last 200 years.”³¹

           If her kid brother didn’t believe all this—who knows where the unabomber lurks?—I’d call it a brilliant QAnon self-parody or a post-Ginsberg “I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by madness” rap poem or one of Maine Country-and-Western singer Dick Curless’ “loser’s cocktails.” It is a perfect Martian, fluid, Great Reset hypertext.

             Why does this also sound like inklings of an unspeakable truth? Its transpolitical revelations signify how implicated every government and its politicians are, not just Americans, Russians, Chinese, Vatican, Kims, and Saudis but Kiwis, Al Qaeda, Taliban, mullahs, caliphates and tribal casinos, all cutting backroom deals while tapping international, sovereign, and mafia flows (with attempted “false flag” papal assassinations and kidnappings of Vatican girls thrown in). They don’t all buy into anything, but they all honor, uphold, and manipulate the international money system, making currency a placeholder for transactions of every ilk and kind, Earth’s ultimate meta-reality, a landscape more reified and enthroned than the waters and grasses on which it is basted as well as based.

           Individual conspiracies may be entangled or twisted fabulistically, but a global power and debt network does keep an overpopulated, pharma-addicted planet on tenterhooks, carrot-and-sticking them between promises of eternal prosperity and terrors of one-and-done extermination, whether by comet, supervolcano, sea rise, starvation, tsunami, currency conversion, or nuclear warhead.

Endnotes

27. James Crowley, “Joe Biden ‘Will Be Removed One Way or Another,’ Alex Jones Tells Pro-Trump March,” Newsweek, December 12, 2020.

28. I won’t name this source except to note that I previously thought of him as working-class Left Wing and knew him years ago as a spiritual teacher, vision quester, mixed-martial-arts boxer, singer of Sikh ballads, and personal coach of substance. Now I don’t know if he is savvy enlightened or a casualty of mind parasites.

29. Sebastian Murdock, “Arizona GOP Candidate Arrested for Allegedly Masturbating in Truck Near Preschool,” Huffington Post, October 19, 2022.

30. Sue Muncaster, “My Gentle, Intelligent Brother Is Now a Conspiracy Theorist and His Beliefs Are Shocking,” Huffpost Personal, January 26, 2022.

7. LAYERS OF QANON

QAnon as a myth is different from QAnon as a creed of devotees, even as QAnon, a Right-Wing authoritarian cult, differs from QAnon, the anarchist rebellion against all authoritarianism—or much as Antifa qua Greenpeace, Malcolm X, animal liberation, and health freedom is anti-fascist activism, whereas Antifa qua Symbionese Liberation Army, “Black Lives Matter” mansions, and smash-and-grab mobs is more like Red Guard fascism.

           Each QAnon—from rogue gutter to high church—draws some strands of its legacy from the sixties. On the Right are the Tate-LaBianca murders, Hells Angels at Altamont, the NRA, and opiate culture, leading to Tea Party militias, MAGA motorcycle rallies, and the march on the Capitol. On the Left are Woodstock, Liberation News Service, Chicago Seven, kidnapping of Patty Hearst, Earth Day, and Rainbow Family gatherings, leading to Redwood Sitters against Pacific Lumber, Burning Man, Friends of the Eel River, cannabis farms, and wildlife corridors.

           Alex Jones represents the high-church InfoWars branch of QAnon for whom school massacres, climate change, COVID-19, and Russia invasion of Ukraine are inconvenient trespasses against Julius Evola’s emerging Golden Age, which most parishioners know only in its rebirth as MAGA. Jones and his colleagues try to elide counter-narratives, true as well as fake, as forbidden or subversive knowledge. In a similar spirit, the Chinese Communist Party replaced reincarnate lamas with politically indoctrinated stooges—they didn’t believe in reincarnation anyway. But myths don’t get eliminated; they get composted in new myths. Even as they are crushed like neutron stars, their contents bubble back up from black and white holes elsewhere. The power of Q’s hermeneutics is the fluidity and paradox of consciousness itself. Think about it: the crisis of consciousness precedes humanity, precedes cats and lizards, crows and octopuses, precedes even pond scum. It is the central conflict of temporal being in an uncompleted universe. I discuss this topic in depth in Dark Pool of Light and Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms.

           In any society, linguistic group, or civilization, irie fables, parables, creation myths, allegories, and watchtowers attempt to reclaim their lost innocence and push back against the cannibals. QAnon is just another post-modern “religion of the oppressed.” As a cathartic response to emotional and spiritual transgression, like other cargo cults and ghost dances of yore, it is a platform of ceremonial outrage and “hail mary” rebellion that allows groups to posture, threat-display, and grieve without needing to know exactly whom or what they are warding off. Proxies and aliases do fine. You can no more know the real perpetrator than you can solve the tetragrammaton. Devotees may be variously hyper, airheaded, sensory challenged, gullible, or in trances of propaganda and hooliganism, but the cult itself matches, in the psychic sense of “lights up,” a hole in the planet’s heart. QAnon is a way to strike at the minotaur without getting trapped in labyrinths of intellectual sophistries and red tape: corporate hierarchies, spinning death balls, and voicemail prompts. Our civilization has made an atavistic rabbit hole out of a futuristic bullet train.

           I am well aware that many of my friends are so averse to QAnon that the word alone gives them the willies. Science-fiction author Jonathan Lethem wrote me, “I don’t envy you the QAnon subject—it pains me even to type the word.” In the cargo-cult syndrome, lesions between believers and non-believers always conflate the wrapping for the package.

            I reminded Jonathan of Philip K. Dick’s Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS), a beam of pink light transmitting dense packets of esoteric information, leading to entire sci-fi futures, some of which we are living now.* [Footnote: *Jonathan not only considers Dick one of his literary mentors, he coedited a book about him and curated an anthology of four Dick novels.] QAnon is no VALIS, but it serves as a down-market download of outré energies and conduit for imp and trickster entities. We are meant to turn away. The question then is whether we drink the Kool-Aid as intended or convert its purple into a potion like fictional Paul Atreides on Frank Herbert’s worm-immunized Arrakis. 

           Any real redemption means facing the drivers and ramifications of Q because, as Walt Kelly’s cartoon possum Pogo proclaimed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The slogan for Earth Day 1970 is an epigram for the climate crisis of 2020. Greta Thunberg, as the Zoomer face of Cassandra, accused: “You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. . . .  I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”³¹

           QAnon is, of course, mostly anti-climate-science—better to burn as a cyborg phantom than fall for a Green New Deal. Greta has been “outed” alternately as a time-traveler from 150 years ago (based on a lookalike in an archival photograph) and a puppet for fake Green corporations. I won’t try to resolve her rebus. The ultimate message transcends factions; there is finally only one Earth and one alarm—one encounter, one chance. We don’t have to know which house or which fire. As World War II-era artist Jean Cocteau told a riddler who asked him what he would save from his own burning home: “The fire.”

Endnote

31. Greta Thunberg, “’You did not act in time’: Greta Thunberg’s full speech to MPs,” The Guardian, April 23, 2019.

8. TRUMP’S 5-D CHESSBOARD

In the 2020 Presidential crusade, QAnon “blew up,” as in “hit the jackpot,” getting widely disseminated on Instagram and TikTok. Young people and anti-government watchdogs, whatever their politics otherwise, welcomed its irreverent energy. Simultaneously supporting Greta and believing in reptile aliens fused into a new worldview. Acolytes likewise could embrace both Burning Man and Black Lives Matter, as they took contradictory Q’s to the streets of Minneapolis, Manhattan, and the outskirts of Area 51, demanding interplanetary justice.*      David DePape, the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco house in apparent hopes of killing her and instead clubbed her husband Paul almost to death with a hammer, was a side-switching Green Party burner and nudist activist who flipped into a conspiracist, Holocaust denier, and supporter of the January 6^th Capitol Riot.  He once had a nudist girlfriend, who was also a pedophile and tried to kidnap youngish boys. The DePape alter who broke into the Pelosi house was anti-transgender, viewed Democrats as pedophiles, and claimed a plan of financial elites to convert currency systems for gaining control over humanity during a Great Reset. His ideologies mixed like muddy swales during an urban downpour.

           Under Q’s mutability, Donald Trump evolved from a chan grub to a 5-D ascendant butterfly without intervening molts, e.g., from a corrupt, cologned businessman and pimp-like womanizer into not just a major American President like James Madison or Woodrow Wilson but the first Holy POTUS, a shamanic lightworker fighting the pedophiliac cabal, a mortal second only to Jesus Christ. That supplanted rumors that he indulged in recreational pedophilia himself.

           Despite his avarice, sadism, prurience, and sociopathic metastases of self-interest (which were dismissed as misdirects or clever camouflage), Trump became the ultimate good guy, as ethical and compassionate as he wasn’t.Under his coif-over, Fifth Avenue suit, red tie, burger-cola fat, and black Isotoner gloves, phantom-cartoon Donald spawned an Arnold Schwarzenegger body in Superman costume or priestly robes, leading a bikers’ brigade in leather and helmet, bowling over COVID-19 defensive backs en route to a goal line, among Christ and his Apostles, beside Moses at Sinai, in a boat with George Washington crossing the ice-filled Delaware, and in a Green Beret despite his lack of military service. He was consecrated as a Christian gladiator with a yellow halo, hunched weary and beleaguered over his desk while being lifted by a hologram of Jesus.

           In this evolving scripture, Orange Jesus was planning a day of reckoning, “The Storm,” during which tens of thousands of bad guys would be arrested in coordinated nationwide raids, held accountable for their vile deeds, and executed. Eisenstein wrote: “In QAnon’s mythology, the locus of evil is the Deep State, an elite cabal interpenetrating government, corporations, banks, and other elite institutions, and the champion of Good is Donald Trump who, with superhuman subtlety, foresight, and skill, wages a 4D chess struggle against them.”³² That quickly became 5- and even 6-D, as a playboy mafioso ascended.

           The cargo cult turned into him a combination of Pat Tillman, Father John Murphy, and Winston Churchill.

           In 2022, after announcing his intention to run again in 2024 and dining theatrically with art-nouveau anti-Semites (a performance piece noted in Chapter One), Trump contracted with a firm called NFT INT LLC to produce commemorative NFTs, digital trading cards of himself as a superhero. NFT INT LLC has no website and lists itself in a mall in Park City, Utah, next to an Asian restaurant and vape store. These self-parodies of parodies of his narcissism how, again, how deeply and unconsciously it is projected onto a world that he thinks overtly or innately admires, if not adores, him. It is a lonely mogul’s regression to a three-year-old’s performance to dazzle Mommy.)

           I sounded out an old friend, said to be a closet Trumpian, on her moral contradiction. Not so closeted, she oozed, speaking for her husband too, “We just love him.”

           Taken aback by their fervor—these are sophisticated, educated people from liberal backgrounds, though Catholic church-goers—I asked, “What about his behavior with women?”

           “We pay no attention to that,” she cooed. “He picks unnecessary fights, but that’s who he is.” She responded as if he had committed immaculate rapes.

           Even as Trump’s flaws got whitewashed away, his “virtues” were polished to Arthurian sheen. He was said to have feigned collaboration with the Russians to enlist elite muckraker Robert Mueller. Mueller was expected to use his investigative platform not to expose “Russiagate” but to unmask the Deep State pedophiliac conspiracy and, in a series of lightning raids, arrest George Soros, Barack Obama, and the Clintons to keep them from staging an Aristo coup d’état.

           This is the fare of Superhero Comix—or in QAnon lore, “the greatest Military Intelligence operation of all time.” It is also reaction formation.*

Why was Trump’s divinity so unassailable? How did he get scrubbed of all faults and valorized with virtues reserved for Purple-Heart warriors and authenticated martyrs?

           It was partly because the white working class and hillbilly counterculture had no substitute hero, no fallback power broker and made mage in their camp. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate: a rich asshole basking in the adoration of plebes and peasants whom he would instruct his guards to remove if one of them strayed adoringly onto the grounds of Mar-a-Lago.

           A former pussy-grabbing profligate and philandering super-sinner was sanctified in Christian circles as a religious object, a sociopolitical signifier, and a relic like the fingernails of a martyry or Jesus’ blood and foreskin. Facets of his former persona that disqualified him from rectitude elevated him to demi-god status. The fact that his wealth and echelon were, to a large degree, misbegotten put him in a mythical lineage of brigand deities who came to the rescue of Christianity. To believers, he was a reincarnation of Zeus, not Ronald Reagan. A timeless god beats a 1984 movie star any day. Plus, a false god is better than no savior at all.

           Meme magic and synchromysticism cut through Deep State defenses like Thor’s Ragnarök sword.

Up to the inauguration of Joe Biden, supporters of POTUS 45 expected him to singlehandedly reverse the 2020 election. That’s why so many acolytes showed up at the January 6^th rally, many of them traveling long distances and budgeting money they could ill afford. Some of them were armed for a constitutional apocalypse.

           After electoral voodoo failed, they awaited a Supreme Court stay of November’s fake election with dramatic exposure of illegal ballots. “Because we have so much trusted this plan,” explained QAnon theorist DeAnna Lorraine in a video posted by Right Wing Watch, “we always think he is playing 5D chess. So anything that looks questionable, we think okay, it’s a strategy, he’s playing 5D chess. We don’t have anything to worry about.”

           In 5-D, ostensibly the theosophical causal realm and higher, all hell breaks loose. Synchronicities, superheroes, and triple agents overlap with group souls and atmans. Lorraine expected a hologram-like descent to disrupt the January 6^th confirmation by the Electoral College or at least before a January 20^th inauguration that couldn’t happen because, reaching down from 5-D, the Lord would intervene.

           Trump had promised a “wild day” on Jan 6, 2021, so folks gathered, preparing for his resurrection and a full-fledged ghost dance, a second Trump term granted by intercession of Vice President Mike Pence in collaboration with Congressional Republicans, state legislatures, and the courts. As the decisive hour approached, a fractious mob descended on the Capitol, driving lawmakers from their chambers. The riot came from inside the building too: Congress provided 180 or so Republican co-conspirators.

           It had the appearance of a banana-republic coup but, like Trump’s Presidency (and life), it was the Reality Show version, high in theater, costumes, backpacks, and. cell-phone videos.

           My grade-school classmate Phil Wohlstetter was among those rounded up and taken into custody at the national stadium during Augusto Pinochet’s junta overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile; my friend almost lost his life at age twenty-nine. After the January 6^th storming of the Capitol, he posted on Facebook, “I don’t think they were there to stop the actual ritual—just to disrupt it. I thought it was a performance that said ‘we’re here, you can’t ignore us.’ Riot, in other words. More riot than insurrection or coup.” He attached a photo of the streets of 1973 Santiago in fire and smoke: “This is what a coup looks like from my front-row seat.” The January 6th Proud Boys’ and Oath Keepers’ coup turned out to be more intentional than Phil realized; only it was the movie version, making it no less real to its “Ronald Reagan, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood”-anointed participants.

           The January 6th raid was the apotheosis of Trump’s performance art, its Helter Skelter max. Even his chaos magic, though, only went so far because he wasn’t a real practitioner, he was only using it, the way he used everything. Like all ‘magick’ that diverges from “humble petitioning of divine and elemental forces, enabling transformation of oneself and the world,” wrote astral-plane practitioner William Mistele the next day in a Facebook post, “this low-grade form of faith seeks to control others. It can mimic truth and light, yet it remains twisted, impure, inferior, and impatient for results.”³³

           Lacking anchorage, it fizzles out. Trump tried to jimmy it over the line, as he watched, gloated, cheered, and rewound highlights at safe distance—he claimed later that the Secret Service wouldn’t let him join the march, one instance when he apparently wasn’t lying. It was a dangerous moment for the republic, but POTUS’ malignant narcissism damped a looming constitutional crisis and converted it into kitsch: a series of press releases and secret memos, culminating in an amateur-hour press conference in industrial Northeast Philadelphia with a synchromystic backdrop of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a crematorium, and an adult film arcade.

Endnotes

32. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

33. William Mistele, Facebook post, January 7, 2021

9. GUNS, GEAR, AND HASHTAGS

In a surge of mainstreaming during the 2020 election cycle—many voters had little idea whom or what they were supporting, nor had they dowsed policies past posts and tweets (nor did they much care beyond dog whistling)—two nitwit QAnon ladies were elected to Congress: gun- demagogue Lauren Boebert from Rifle, Colorado, and pine-cone Marjorie Taylor Greene from the seventy-five-percent pro-Trump 14^th District of northwest Georgia. The latter pledged to “kick that bitch Nancy Pelosi out of the House,” then reconsidered and thought a bullet to the back of her head would be more reliable.

           These ladies were soapbox philosophers and bored agitators more than Madame Defarges, gunnists more than shooters. But don’t chuckle or sell them short. A species that could elect Adolf Hitler to lead a civilized technocracy could still put a Taylor Greene in the White House. Kitsch candidates have turned efficacious very fast, from Reagan to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

           Gunnism is my name for a branch of American philosophy—not reality from the barrel of a gun but the gun itself. When you carry it, you carry meaning and respect; you are in the discussion. The French had Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of existentialism, America has Wayne LaPierre, Jr.’s. It suits a nation so whiplashed that that its civilians occupy clashing surrealisms as walking sovereign citizenships. Philosophers need to be armed, “conceal” or “open” carry, because strange crimes, Deep States, and proxy police actions might break out at any moment.

           Guns mark a pathologization of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Depressed, aggrieved, and otherwise disoriented individuals attempt to rescue terminally depressed egos, rage paralysis, and incel-like envies, as well as their hypothetical manhood and meaning itself. In a world overrun with Kardashian sisters and strutting bands of rival gorillas, they opt for going out in a blaze of apocalyptic pseudo-macho disindividuation.

           Guns are nothing special otherwise, even semi-automatics. They were once firesticks that blacksmiths forged from a combo of Mediaeval explosives and flaming arrows, which had their own forerunners in Stone Age spears, slings, and bolos. 3-D copiers and latter-day electrons have replaced sticks and stones, but the lethal projections are unchanged. It’s still voodoo, with bullets instead of thoughtforms. Except that bullets are externalized thoughtforms.

           It may have seemed oddly worth it in a manic fugue, however disproportionate, for them to earn a brief adrenalin rush of power, freedom, identity, and self-worth at the price of extinction or life in prison as well as at the expense of other lives and their own empathy.

         Timothy McVeigh certainly thought so—168 people worth—as did pilots who committed suicide by crashing planes full of passengers. That’s the sociopath component. Sociopathy is modernity’s most severe pandemic, at least ten percent of the species and spreading. States of isolation and alienation are so profound and unbearable these days that only acts equally profound and unbearable can resolve them. 

           Among mistaken notions regarding gunnism are that guns don’t kill people, people do—that motivated criminals and mass murderers will always find a way around any legislation and procure or create weapons of opportunity, guns galore; therefore that a good guy with a gun is the only protection against a bad guy with a gun. That doesn’t take into account the random geography of battlefields and fog of war. A good guy who packs a pistola has to be in the exact right place at the exact right time or he is going to end up dead or killing someone other than the bad guy. George Zimmerman was not a good guy when he shot Trayvon Martin, and there are more George Zimmermans than Tonto-friendly lone rangers.

           In 2022 at Uvalde, Texas, more than 140 “good guys with a gun” failed to stop one eighteen-year-old amateur with a new-bought AR15.

           Proliferation of guns may not in itself lead to killing sprees and murders—the Ted Cruzes of our American mediocracy disingenuously insist so—but it creates an energy field with high morphic resonance, leading to not only copycat shootings but escalation of piques into murders and massacres.

           You can’t create an amateur civilian arsenal without super-charging its psychic projections. Gunnism’s latent dragon energy is prevalent and addictive. There is a reason why pointed guns and aimed rifles form ghost visualizations and personified entities in Americans’ minds; they rouse suicide and revenge fantasies in folks who have never held, let alone fired a weapon, and never will. Those phantom guns infest the noosphere where they hypnagogically fire millions of times an hour.

           The Second Amendment also didn’t say that anyone could have any weapon they desired. It didn’t guarantee eighteenth-century militia members canons and cannonballs; the founders didn’t foresee machine guns and ammunition clips.

           The gun lobby and its political beneficiaries know all this; they are being self-servingly duplicitous. But self-serving duplicity is the guiding mantra of our time. Some people repeat all day, “I am loving kindness.” Others go to shooting ranges or rage silently. None of these devotions alters a deranged landscape.

Second Amendment catechists Boebert and Taylor Greene may have been disinformation hounds as well as publicity mavens, but in the strange way that truthing works, they delivered contrarian apologues at the QAnon portal. After all, “The oracle whose lord is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs.”³⁴ Those priestesses flashed oodles of signs. Unlike proverbial blind squirrels who find only occasional nuts, after a while the nuts seemed to make their oracles less blind—for instance as regards health freedom. Taylor Greene exposed Fauci’s disingenuousness on COVID origins, masks, and vaccines, yet detractors misconstrued her comments about her “blood purity” (by which she meant “no graphene oxide”) as racist and fascist. She was also right, more or less, about Israeli lasers; only they weren’t in outer space or focused to set forest fires—a synchromystic confabulation—they were unparalleled in taking out drones and missiles and much desired by Ukraine.

           Driven into corners of ritual fabulism by Trumpian tautologies, these women and their courtiers had no way out finally but to curtsy and quoin, turning agitprop into exposés of QAnon’s own revanchism. Only Donald Trump (so far) is able to flash-dance waving fuck-you mudras.

           The two Q Congresswomen and their colleagues were lovers of freedom and frontier, but not spiritual freedom, eco-frontiers, wildlife corridors, or urban resilience under climate change. Theirs was freedom to weed out all multicultural, multigendered sprigs along with indecorous lineaments of the natural world: dandelions, crows, weevils, fantastic fungi, and all. It was freedom to impose AR-15 nihilism and cancel culture (meaning “cancel nature”). They were not friends of mushrooms or embryos; they may have been anti-abortion, but they were also anti-children: children of the poor and non-white. Their support of the right to life was limited to the period from conception to birth. They worshipped the fetus like a Christian relic; that is, until it became a person. They advocated extermination of mycelial networks and indigenous saloons in favor of clearcuts, factory farms, malls, and fashion salons. They were against the homestead and commune, against solar panels, cohousing, sylvan heat breaks, and liberated creeks—and, of course, against official Green New Deals. They were for the coal- and pipeline-powered exurbs of Red State noir.

           Try driving any rural highway these days in America. Me and You and a Dog Named Boo have been rescinded—with them, old McDonald, his hen, and the bright red Georgia clay; the square dances of the midlands, the hospitality of “the house we live in,” the purple mountain majesty and Woody Guthrie fruited plains. Camaraderie and village have been supplanted by not just a homophobic, xenophobic simulacrum—that would have been bad enough—but utter weirdness: Fox News 24-7, NASCAR, duck dynasties, gun consecration, the mega-church of the used-car lot, and Wal-Mart, Home Depot, rifle ranges, Proud Boys, ritual murders, shootouts, lizard cults, ghost dances.

           No one could inhabit this land.

QAnon gear became prominent at MAGA rallies, folks sporting wearing red and black Q patches and speakers leading crowds in chanting the QAnon motto while holding up one finger in salute for “Where We Go One, We Go All.” The acronym was the source of the hashtag: #WWG1WGA.

           Donald Trump declared Marjorie Greene a rising Republican star, by which he meant a deferential disciple. His guileless vanity matched his child-like malapropisms: anyone who supported him ascended in his pantheon, and vice versa. During his 2020 campaign, he retweeted or referenced Twitter accounts affiliated with QAnon over three hundred times: banana-republic radio.

           Q claims of deciphering secret messages in Trump’s speeches were exploited by Donald’s advisors, who scoured 8chan and the dark web for cues and then transferred words like “tiptop” from posts there onto his teleprompter so that he could fake synchromystic telepathy.

The fellowship of “Where We Go One, We Go All”—if applied to permaculture, cleaning microplastics and other garbage out of ocean gyres, restoring coral reefs, and feeding the homeless, plus the rest of a possible indigo platform—would be truly WWG1WGA. But nothing that selfless can emerge from maudlin martyrdom.

           The legendary “First Earth Battalion,” a 1970s Army thought experiment, envisioned a generation of soldiers with extraordinary skills and the ethics of samurai monks. As Earth stewards, they would use their talent and training to defend rainforests, oceans, endangered species, bee-hives, coral reefs, indigenous band, refugees, and children. The Army developed a prototype in the 1980s, naming it, alternately, Jedi and Trojan Warrior, as squads of Green Berets were converted to vipassana, aikido, and service.³⁵  

           Fact is, no one knows what it will take to turn this vessel around with its thawing permafrost, sea and sky metallic dumps, Chernobyl and Fukushima irradiation, drained and chemicalized soils, and paved-over woodlands—probably a rain dance of Q proportions, a combination puja, thoughtform, and prayer.

           But the hashtag is right: “Where We Go One, We Go All.” We are in nigredo and circumambulatio phases of a planetary alchemy. Like the passengers in the Netflix serial Manifest, we need each other to solve the riddles and get past our collective death date.

         Endnotes

34. Philip Wheelwright (editor), The Presocratics, p. 73.

35. Richard Strozzi Heckler, In Search of the Warrior Spirit.

10. QANON AND ANTI-VAXX

As COVID spread in 2020, the pandemic fed a QAnon narrative of Aristo control and Deep State disinformation. Masks and social distancing were seen as harbingers of much worse. Conspiracists had long been expecting the government to suspend freedoms under a potpourri of ruses. COVID-19 provided a dream scenario qua paranoia pretext, especially since the virus might itself have been leaked from an Aristo-funded lab. In QAnon lore, the vaccines weren’t developed to combat a virus; the virus was invented to speed universal vaccination, infiltrate blood, impose mind control, and take down health freedom in the name of national security—see the Chinese Communist Party for a model.

           Textbook art of war: If you want to control the masses, threaten them with a deadly plague, then invite them to be “saved” by government science—then get them to browbeat their neighbors into compliance—herd immunity as civic responsibility.

           Initially some doctors, even a few mainstream doctors, dissented, sparking a debate as to whether masks were effective or, for that matter, healthy. Rational people can and did disagree—even microbiologists and MDs, even employees of Pfizer, Moderna, and other high-church bio-labs—not only about vaccines’ virtues and risks but contagion of viruses and disease theory itself.

           An open forum didn’t last long. Once actual vaxxes entered the picture, QAnoia leaped from modified messenger RNA to proprietary graphene oxide with tracking by magnetic nanoparticles, to techno-slavery by “serpent” DNA, as COVID vaccines were implicated in a perfect storm of mind control, surveillance state, and sterilizing Earth’s populace selectively.   

           In 2021 when governments were eager to get buy-in and folks were tugged by alternate facts, QAnon put anti-vaxx on steroids. Where progressive materialists saw a pandemic abated by brilliant science—biotech wizards repurposing mRNA and adenoviral DNA into miracle drugs—QAcolytes saw a Deep State fish tale driven by Aristo eugenics. Aspersions like this proved far more damning than a mere circumstantial link between DPT shots and autism. 

           Congress’ rescinding of pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines—an earlier Bill-Gates-driven technocratic privilege—reinforced suspicions about takeover of populations through their bloodstreams. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro remarked, with disingenuous sarcasm, that Pfizer could turn people into alligators and they wouldn’t be liable. While he was conducting ecocide and genocide otherwise, the statement was essentially accurate—they could.

           Urban myths around ingredients of COVID vaccines turned exclusion of entry to stores and transportation hubs without masks into arrest unless a scanner read phosphorescent nanoparticles in your blood, soon to be a near reality in China.

           Anthony Fauci was a perfect foil and talking head. A nerd Aristo who could hide his Asperger’s superiority behind a Mr. Rodgers poker face, Fauci wasn’t Mengele, as QAcolytes charged, but he could have played the part if he had been born in a different place and time. The dude could make a lab doing pretty much any shit look like legitimate science—from Dachau to Wuhan to Foster City.

           Conspiracy theorists spread a related rumor that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was taking out Cypriot citizenship as a preemptive escape route from mandated vaxxing. An “informed medical source” posted and re-posted an urgent plea, alleging that Schmidt had “insider knowledge” about “an imminent military CyberOp.” Hardly insider! Operation Warp Speed was Donald Trump’s tour de force down Main Street and Broadway. His administration’s FDA suspended normal drug approval phases and gave Pfizer and Moderna, on top of “no liability,” emergency-use authorization (EUA) for their vaccines. In order to get EUA, they had to prove that there was no other treatment for the virus, so effective drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were vilified, then mocked. QAnon gave an ideal foil for.the CDC, but then the CDC provided just as ideal a pretext for Deep State disinformation; they lied shamelessly about valid pharmaceuticals. Trump tried to play it both ways: champion of both hydroxychloroquine and Emegency Use. It is up for grabs whether he didn’t understand the distinction or overrode it opportunistically. 

            Johnny Vedmore, a Cardiff, Wales investigative journalist and alternative musician (his group was called “Bomb Alaska”) put early vaccine shill in more reasoned terms:

           Whilst a DNA vaccine will change your DNA permanently, an mRNA vaccine will not . . . . However, the mRNA vaccine does bind with part of your DNA to alter the proteins being produced. . . .

               Just because someone doesn’t fully understand the process involved shouldn’t mean they should be demonized and forced into taking this experimental combination of nanoparticles. In fact, individuals should reject the vaccine until companies explain how it works and if there are any long-term side effects. . . . This is a basic principle of self-preservation that trumps any risk of a virus, especially a virus that has proven to be just a little bit more deadly than the common flu. . . .

               Fundamentally speaking, all our liberties and freedoms are of little concern if we’re dead or crippled. Don’t let them shame you into giving over your precious and delicate shell to medical scientific experimentation by companies that are incapable of taking accountability for their actions.³⁶

           Vedmore’s yawp was one of the earliest warnings, and it foreshadowed what was to come. But the response to vaccine skepticism wasn’t reasoned debate; it was swift and comprehensive reprisal marked by bans across social media and disparagement and mockery in the mainstream press. THE ANTI-VAXXERS HAVE GONE FULL QANON, read a late November 2020 Huffington Post headline. Author Jesselyn Cook went on to editorialize:

           QAnon rhetoric has been seeping into anti-vax pages all over social media in recent months. Devoted adherents of the conspiracy theory have weathered tech giants’ sweeping crackdowns by infiltrating other communities that exist on the platforms, then poisoning them with disinformation. This has transformed the large ecosystem of anti-vax communities online into radicalization pipelines for QAnon.

               “The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless,” Larry Cook, the creator of “Stop Mandatory Vaccination,” warned in his final Facebook Live video. “It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet.”

               Over Cook’s right shoulder was an image of the American flag atop the QAnon slogan, #WWG1WGA. Over his left was the letter Q, decorated in stars and stripes. Comments poured in from viewers thanking him for “awakening” them to the “truth.”³⁷

           By sliming anti-vaxx advocates with cartoon-like caricatures while branding any interrogation of vaccines with a scarlet Q, journalists like Cook delegitimized all discussions of the role of vaccines, nanoparticles, and new untested drugs in the future of humanity. No wonder Cook was wiped from the platform.

           While much of QAnon’s rhetoric is hyperbole, embargos of information that let academic and government agencies disseminate dogma as vetted science are an increasingly popular tool to politicize and weaponize medicine. Censorship of vaccine discussion legitimizes rather than marginalizes QAnon. Even with the agitprop and exaggeration, it is pointing to a truth as inconvenient as climate change: “Follow the science” has come to mean “Follow the scientism.” It leads down a cyborg-rabbit rabbit hole to the corporate biotech version of mock turtles, mad hatters, and queens with guillotines. I have a whole chapter on COVID and vaccines coming up, so I won’t belabor the topic here.

           In Wonderland’s disarmingly sunny press releases, all counterevidence is dismissed. As a group of dissident scientists noted, “Differing viewpoints . . . are swiftly labeled ‘disinformation,’ but in fact represent principled dissent based on a large and growing body of scientific evidence.”³⁸

                       Science journalist Charles Seife addressed journalistic nepotism in a Scientific American newsletter:

             Documents obtained by Scientific American through Freedom of Information Act requests . . . paint a disturbing picture of the tactics that are used to control the science press. For example, the FDA assures the public that it is committed to transparency, but the documents show that, privately, the agency denies many reporters access . . . and even deceives them with half-truths to handicap them in their pursuit of a story. At the same time, the FDA cultivates a coterie of journalists whom it keeps in line with threats.³⁹

           Disinformation is a growing peril as science and medicine become more doctrinaire and the technocracy extends its political and military power, forming Blackwater-like alliances between corporate health and corporate weaponry. Missiles and medicines come out of the same capitalization and factories. Drugs and loony bins have been routinely used in non-Democratic polities to eliminate, stow, and disenfranchise opposition. Science is a militarized technocracy’s best weapon and camouflage or cloaking device, as it subverts the Left more than the Right.

           Censorship doesn’t apply to just viruses and vaccines but pesticides, fish farms, and planets in the Kuiper belt too, and it goes from the FDA to respected universities with direct and indirect pressure from transnational corporations and their funders and shareholders.

           The internet harvested what the Gutenberg galaxy sowed: a conversion of information into commodity. In 2016 when the California Institute of Technology found evidence for a gigantic ninth planet “in the outer reaches of our solar system, the Caltech press office decided to give only a dozen reporters, including Scientific American‘s Michael Lemonick, early access to the scientists and their study. . . .” Seife continues:

             It is not hard to guess why [some] journalists . . . were excluded. “It wasn’t that they were not good enough or not liked enough,” [Vincent] Kiernan [a science journalist and dean at George Mason University] speculates. “There was a real effort here to control things, making sure that the elite of the elite covered this story and covered it in a certain way, which would then shape the coverage of all other journalists. It’s very clearly a control effort.”⁴⁰

         This is now an ordinary and anticipated practice, not even considered corrupt. As Donald Trump put it, it’s not unpatriotic, just “smart business.” Entertainment wars with territorial and political branding have turned science-as- truth into science-as-marketing. Enter QAnon.

Endnotes

36. Johnny Vedmore, “Pfizer’s Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine—What You’re Not Being Told,” unlimitedhangout.com, November 18, 2020.
37. Jesselyn Cook, The Anti-Vaxxers have gone full QAnon,” Huffington Post, November, 2020.

38. Harvey Risch, Robert W. Malone, and Byram Bridle, “Forcing People into COVID Vaccines Ignores Important Scientific Information,” The Federalist, December 14, 2021.

39. Charles Seife, “How the FDA Manipulates the Media,” Scientific American online newsletter, October 1, 2016.

40. Charles Seife, “How the FDA Manipulates the Media,” Scientific American online newsletter, October 1, 2016.

11. DONALD TRUMP AS HEYOKA SHAMAN AND CHRISTIC LIGHTWORKER

Let’s review opposite factions of QAnon. For those who need some cheerful theme music about now, try a YouTube clip of Lou Christie (of “lightning striking again” fame) putting his tenor into a doo-wop of “Two Faces Have I”:

           Face One: Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, White Supremacist militias, Newsmax, and the alt-right: yayayayayayahay ya hahaha yayayayahay, yayayayayayahay.

           Face Two: curanderos, gonzo journalists, and the holistic left: yayayayayayahay ya hahaha yayayayahay, yayayayayayahay.

           Both faces signify Totem Trump. As he soars ethereally, Christie croons, “I pretend that I’m carefree (sha-la-lee) / but I’m living a lie-ie-ie. Then: “Two faces have I, / one to laugh and one to cry”⁴¹

           To the Proud Boys et al, he is a military commander, head-basher supreme, crusader for Christ and Christmas—a servant of God grounding Christic photons from the angelic sphere as he tries to save Earth from pedophiles, communists, and Deep-State Satanists. He is divinely ransomed, impressed into service by Jehovah; the beloved prodigal son foretold by prophecy, pardoned for his failings like the infidel kings of the bible. He defends Judaeo-Christian culture and the unborn, the Second Amendment, and the covenant of the gun. His candidacy is a matter of sacred intervention.

           Bye democracy, hello theocracy.

Meanwhile to holistic healers and “crazy wisdom” shamans, he is a “white buffalo” stampeding CDC sheriffs. He defends astrology, entheogens, homeopathy, theophany, off-label drugs, vegans, and energy healers, whether he knows it or not.

           The shift by a wing of the counterculture to the political Right may have been expedited by the pandemic, but it was implicit back to SDS freedom marches on the “social justice” side and “mystic crystal revelation / and the mind’s true liberation”⁴² in the “cosmic consciousness” world. Through a succeeding half-century, threads crossed and re-crossed under the hoedown. Dancers found themselves with new partners. A sliver of the free-love, anti-war, Buddhist ferocity-and-compassion aspects of the “Aquarian awakening” ended up in the QAnon camp, accused of backsliding by their estranged “Black Lives Matter” partners.

           Truth is, the Summer of Love was never aligned with the political Left despite a half-century’s thrall of mutual convenience. While not every holistic healer and spiritual seeker flipped to Trump—in fact, very few abandoned their progressive belief systems—enough did to provide some hippie yin for Proud Boy yang. To Laura Matsue, a self-described evolutionary astrologer, ayahuasquero, life coach, and yoga and meditation teacher: “Donald Trump is a heyoka empath indigo child lightworker Starseed. Our local Tribe discussed this at length last night in Ceremony. Not only is he a heyoka, he is a KING Heyoka, which is EXTREMELY RARE, and completely appropriate for these extraordinary times we are traversing.”⁴³

           Heyokas are sacred clowns among the Dakota and Lakota (Sioux) nations of the Great Plains. The heyoka does everything backwards. He rides his horse facing the rump and wears his clothing inside-out. One heyoka continually ran around the village with a hammer, tapping on curved things—eggs, bowls, wagon wheels—to make them symbolically straight. Like Trump, the heyoka violates norms in order to wake people up, mirroring their behavior back to them in an extreme way so that they can see themselves.

           Charles Eisenstein added, in an exchange of emails, “Or you could say, an incarnation of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god, who shows up to disturb the hubris of order.”

           According to anthropologist Paul Radin, “Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, he who dupes others and is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil but is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.”⁴⁴

           “. . . through his actions all values come into being. . . .

           This is the archetype behind Trump’s borderline personality and shapeshifting jackal behavior. Suggesting drinking bleach to kill the coronavirus was heyoka-like—but it also touched on an authentic healing modality. MMS (Miracle Mineral Supplement), developed by former aerospace engineer and gold miner Jim Humble, is a 22.4% solution of sodium chlorite in distilled water that, when mixed with any one of several food grade­—not industrial—acids in the body (similar to those already introduced to public water systems), oxidizes into chlorine dioxide. A further product, MMS2 [calcium hypochlorite, Ca(ClO)₂], turns into the same hypochlorous acid the human immune system naturally produces to kill germs and pathogens—bacteria and viruses—and clumps poisons out of living systems.⁴⁵

           You can drink bleach to cure COVID-19, as Trump’s belly informed him. But he skipped crucial steps in his free-connection Pocahontas, Diet Coke ADD mind. Extemporizing like a royal fool in the company of Fauci and band, he did his heyoka clown routine, and the peanut gallery loved it—their favorite loopy-rich uncle gaslighting the stern school marm.

           It was more than that. Fauci represented the unacknowledged politicization of science. Trump was tossing idiocy at him—trickster potions, clown cars, and detergent ads—hoping to knock him off his high haunch. To Fauci, having gotten rich was a perk of hard study and education; to the MAGA crowd, it was nerd-Einstein chicanery. Trump always thought it more manly and American to be a plain old-fashioned crook—or trickster.

           Endnotes

41. Twyla Herbert and Lou Christie, “Two Faces Have I (One to Laugh and One to Cry),” Roulette Records, 1963. There are many YouTube versions of the original song. In addition, this one of Christie on an oldies tour captures a latent aspect of the song and the singer’s spirit and legacy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBtBHaEq4js. 

42. James Rado and Jerome Ragni, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” from the musical Hair, Soul City, 1968.

43. Laura Matsue, Facebook post, 2020.

44. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, p. ix.

45. Jim Humble, “MMS: Frequently Asked Questions.”

12. PRANKSTER ANARCHY AND QUANTUM UNCERTAINTY

By the 2022 mid-terms, QAnon had reached the decadent phase where a lowest common denominator converges with a state known to pornographers: you can only carry debauchery so far before it augments and degrades into foibles and follies. A lack of true imagination seals the fate of all cults and harems. If your imagination is fueled solely by fantasies of power or revenge and manifests as hysterical howling and apoplectic scatology, it stalls out at those moods’ intrinsic limits. 

 Re-awaken America rallies, ostensibly to celebrate conservative Republican candidates, no longer have effective containment or patience for mere politicking. They turn into temporary autonomous zones with their own rules and requisite behavior. In late October in Manheim, Pennsylvania, such an autonomous zone developed. To a crossover QAnon/MAGA cast (headlined by Michael Flynn, Eric Trump, pillow magnate Mike Lindell, and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano), voting-machine-hacking satellites and ballot mules were not a matter of speculation. It was simply how many, how sophisticated, and whether it was just the Dems and Deep State or also lizard aliens. Journalist Zachary Petrizzo logged the proceedings:

 The day’s activities kicked off with a prayer asking for Trump’s eyes to be opened so he could be shown when to ‘implement divine intervention.’

‘You will surround him, Father, with none of this deep-state trash, none of this RINO trash,’ the speaker—who led the prayer—yelled as attendees thrust their hands into the air.”⁴⁶

This was a portable, branded God—a collective collation of orc values and curses packaged as prayers.

MacDonald’s, a mere toxic burger chain of the Green Left, was demonized on the Q Right as a key operative within the Deep State. When organizer Clay Clark asked the crowd what gender Michelle Obama was, in unison as if they had done it a hundred times before, they chanted, “Male!”

In a video of Roger Stone, furious about not being pardoned by Donald Trump, Stone called Ivanka “an abortionist bitch daughter.”⁴⁷

More cheers and hoots.

 Beyond Ronald MacDonald incrimination, Clark outed a “war on food” that would soon lead to Deep State demon chains serving “insect burgers.”⁴⁸ The mix of mashups here among food totemism, agitprop, green new deals, and future diets for a small planet defies categorization. Petrizzo continued:

Doctor Stella Immanuel, best known for her belief in demon sperm, urged attendees to pray that both satellites and voting machines be destroyed.

“We need to pray and crush… the demonic satellites. We need to send a holy ghost virus into their computers, to destroy them, so they will not function, or until our election is over,” she said, to the crowd’s applause.⁴⁹

 Interesting how ubiquitous the holy ghost is and magical in conflating one style of ghost and virus into another! Eric Trump, after telling the audience that the country was in the worst shape ever, even worse than ever before, invited them to pop a beer, make some popcorn, and watch his father talk about election fraud in America, a vested entertainment value. Petrizzo added:

But perhaps the craziest message of the weekend thus far was from Julie Green, a self-identifying prophet, who told the crowd she had a message directly from God.

“Says God, you can’t stop my son, who is the rightful president,” Green said on Friday evening. “He is on his way back, and how he takes his position back on center stage, you will never see that coming because you won’t see me coming. And I am with him.”⁵⁰

American cornball hucksterism devolves into its next available manifestation or chaos state: full-blown millenary religion.

Finally, with QAnon, one must look past literality. Its acolytes don’t care about facts, they are fighting indoctrination itself, a line of false assurances incubated in corporate cookers and tenured academia going back to Hiroshima, and likely as far as the Renaissance when Aristos allied with a smug, witch-burning Establishment.

           In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued a notorious papal bull, Vox in Rama, indicting cats for Satanism and witchcraft, leading to mass feline killing and torture. Rats multiplied in packs, then herds; Black Death followed.

           QAnon’s evangelical faction would have sided with Gregory but, if there were any precocious anti-technocracy rebels then, they would have been pro-puddy-tat all the way.

           The current rebellion against a One World hegemony parallels a Left-Wing forebear: eco-activist Murray Bookchin with his social anarchy, libertarian municipalism, environmental decentralization, and new alchemy.The canon from the anarchist conspiracist alt-Right oddly echoes late sixties’-through-early-seventies’ flower power, grassroots activism, and prankster Dadaism, vide: yippies, Diggers, Bread and Puppet Circus, and the neo-pagan clowning of Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm. The goal then was theater, divination, revelation, and kicking hornets’ nests. The goal is still theater, divination, and revelation.

           Times have changed, technology, media, and the political compass have changed, the uses of language and reality have changed, the roles of Second Amendment militias and nonviolent peaceniks have flipped, but the impulse to toss up gateway cards and tell new fortunes is the same.

           Cats have been fully exonerated, Trieste to Topeka.

The greater cultural war is rooted, as all wars, in the control of information, capitalization of desire, and territorial imperative. So if you dismiss QAnon for its racism, propaganda, hyperbole, and slander, you close a wound around a septic cyst. The release of putrefaction should be transpolitical. Laura Matsue spoke for every side and faction when she wrote:

           We are in a collective dark night of the soul,

               We are in the darkness of the birth canal of the new earth.

               We need to activate our connection to the Divine assisting forces by speaking to them through prayer and listening to their guidance through meditation.

               Pray for the people who hold so much hatred in their hearts that they feel they must subject others to their pain. Pray for yourself too and how that feels for you as well. It’s crazy, it’s messy, but it’s necessary. The hostile forces must be known and their roots pulled up. . . .

               The Divine light is bringing up all that MUST be revealed. And it cannot be any other way, just like how you can’t love and light your suffering away. This is not the time to try to spiritual-bypass—this is the time to be a warrior who can enter the storm with the light of your heart guiding you home. . . .

               The mass awakening is already here…it’s happening now and it is happening all over the world. . . . It is very beautiful and exciting and all different sorts of people from all walks of life are finding unity in the midst of it. What a time to be alive!⁵¹

           She meant close to the opposite of what I would by the same sutra. She saw lightworker Trump as a king vibrating at gold-orange but, more to the point, she saw something.

           A coven of mediums asserts, fantastically, that Earth is splitting into two planets on a higher plane. For those who stay attuned to the subtler frequency, things will improve; they will ascend into the real 5-D, an Aquarian hologram. Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Musk, and the rest will sink onto a denser probability.

           For the present, it is as if our planet is passing through a double slit and we are in two universes simultaneously. It feels like that.

        QAnon may be understood, in part, as a refusal to be reduced to academic paradigms about reality, human potential, and the frequencies of an angelic or God code. Physics’ impenetrable unified field theory and cosmic catastrophism and biology’s genetic determinism and quantitative, algorithmic basis for life drives medical catastrophism and transfers shamanic and spiritual authority to doctors and health bureaucrats. People don’t break out of such chains by rational discourse and reason, especially when those remanding them use their High-Church intellectual and economic force. Enter Q with a conspiracy-theory theory. But this is me talking and I’m just as high church and unwelcome in Q circles. There’s lot of QAnon that’s an ugly attempt to bully and browbeat folks who won’t cooperate with fascist agendas—and I have known these bullies since childhood in grade school and summer camp, so I have an instinctive aversion—but other aspects represent my reaction to mendaciously benign authority.Plus, I have my own sacred Q rogue operation, and as an anthropologist, I leave all totems a wide berth.

           QAnon is not just conspiracism gone amok or political mischief. It is a buzzing of higher-dimensional bees at a crossing of dimensions—delirium and mirth before a grand descent, sparklers and Roman candles before tossing the grenade, a nursery rhyme at the opening of a dirge. It is also smoke and mirrors camouflaging a hyperobject, a heyoka jig preceding a debut of new gods. On its surface, it is intentional disinformation and “kiss my ass” hooliganism, but under that quilt is outreach to the hidden irrational, and yes feminine spirit of Gaia.

           Endnotes

46. Zachary Petrizzo, “Pro-Trump Tour Flies Off The Rails Over ‘Demonic Satellites’ and ‘Deep State’ McDonald’s,” Yahoo News, October 22, 2022.

47. Zachary Petrizzo, “Pro-Trump Tour Flies Off The Rails Over ‘Demonic Satellites’ and ‘Deep State’ McDonald’s,” Yahoo News, October 22, 2022.

48. Zachary Petrizzo, “Pro-Trump Tour Flies Off The Rails Over ‘Demonic Satellites’ and ‘Deep State’ McDonald’s,” Yahoo News, October 22, 2022.

49. Zachary Petrizzo, “Pro-Trump Tour Flies Off The Rails Over ‘Demonic Satellites’ and ‘Deep State’ McDonald’s,” Yahoo News, October 22, 2022.

50. Zachary Petrizzo, “Pro-Trump Tour Flies Off The Rails Over ‘Demonic Satellites’ and ‘Deep State’ McDonald’s,” Yahoo News, October 22, 2022.

51. Laura Matsue, Facebook post, 2020.

Chapter Three

Cancel Culture

1. RIGHT AND LEFT HANDS OF GOD

On April 6, 2008, speaking at a fund-raiser in San Francisco during the Democratic primary, Barack Obama characterized white working-class residents of former midland industrial centers, as “bitter” and “clinging to guns or religion.” He meant well (or well enough). He understood that they were disheartened by the decline of their once-vital culture. He also assumed he was speaking privately.

Hillary Clinton responded with a politician’s reflex opportunism, “I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”

Her campaigners in North Carolina handed out stickers: “I’m not bitter.”¹

Eight years later, she called the same people not just “bitter” but “deplorables.”

Opportunism has a short memory if any at all.

After his election, Obama was demonized by a birther trope that cast him as a Muslim born in Kenya with a fake Hawaiian birth certificate—perhaps the first sprig of MAGA disinformation. It wasn’t meant to be true, just convincing enough to fool the people who wanted to be fooled like the reverse of plausible deniability. The decidedly un-radical Harvard-educated lawyer also was vilified as the most radical man ever to hold high office, meaning that he was the most black. A Mississippi hillbilly interviewed by Congressional daughter Alexandra Pelosi let the real cat out of the bag, “It’s not because he’s black, but he’s a half-breed.”²

The mulatto grudge goes back through many haplogroups and diasporas, most recently to the West Indies slave trade and West African kingdom of Dahomey, resettled in exile in Africatown beside the Scotch-Irish kingdom of Mobile, Alabama. Or in the secret lives of TJefferson and Sally Hemings. Whites and blacks weren’t even supposed to be able to interbreed, though they had long ago disproved the Neanderthal myth.

After the 2020 Election, Obama tried again, explaining Donald Trump’s appeal among Dem-branded Latinx, despite his overt disparaging of Mexicans, as a cultural and religious icon. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican conspiracy theorist and populist in his day job, framed his grievances in Yale Law School irony, “Ah yes, those Hispanic evangelicals. So backwards. Clinging to their guns and religion, you might say. Barack Obama still the most condescending corporate liberal in America.”³

Evangelical conservative Hawley may have been an armchair rebel and latter-day Cotton Matter—and his 2021 insurrectionist fist-pump was as “homeboy” as Michael Dukakis in a tank or John Kerry windsurfing—but he struck an inconvenient truth about Democrats and the corporate elite.

Since the 1980s, Rabbi Michael Lerner, publisher of Tikkun, a Jewish interfaith magazine, has been developing a thesis—as much a lament and call to arms as a theory—as to why white working-class folks choose, in increasing numbers, to vote Republican against their own economic self-interests. His inquiry picks up where political historian Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? left off.

 Lerner’s signature book, compiled in 2005-2006 before the problem got as baked in as it would become, summarizes its premise in its title: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (Lerner followed in 2019 with The Love Revolution, a utopian blueprint for blending progressive politics, social justice, environmental activism, and new technology, which he subtitled A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World).

For Rabbi Lerner, “Left” and “Right” represent opposite emanations, “hands” or powers of God, each worshipped by factions of either party (not to be confused with the Left and Right political wings who worship them—I’ll get to those next).

The Right Hand of God is His aspect as Warrior Deity, Lawgiver, and Clan Chief. He is Jehovah—or Zeus—of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Revelations. He governs by power, fear, punishment, proclamation, coercion, and commandment. He is revealed and outspoken, static as a Forever chemical. He proclaims, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” His theme song is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” for “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”⁵

The Left Hand of God is His aspect as Creator Deity, Magician, and Emanation of Compassion and Love. He is Yahweh or Changing Woman*—the Christic vibration and Hindu ground luminosity—the deity of Genesis, Psalms, Luke, Gnosticism, the Vedas, Dzogchen, and Teilhard’s noosphere. He is profound and merciful enough to emanate a universe and creatures to experience it and to reveal His Own blind spots. He is mysterious, silent, evolving. He rules by mercy, humility, vulnerability, nonviolent communication, and emotional intelligence. He says, “Let there be light,” and there is. His hymn is “Rock of Ages”: “. . . when I rise to worlds unknown.”⁶

The antithetical energies and stations of God get conflated with His secular powers and propaganda—and not just by evangelical Christians. The Right Hand of God has been imposed by Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan as religious patriarchy. A more militant form of Right-Handed sharia law was levied by ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Hindu pogroms have trampled Muslim enclaves in rural India. Genocidal Buddhism sponsors religious pogroms in Bangladesh and Burma. The Russian Orthodox Church consecrated Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Each of these represents a different energy from Rumi’s psalms, Yogananda’s shaktipat, Christ’s turning the other cheek, and Tibetan tulpas, though they dibs the same basic scriptures. 

  On the Republican right, Lerner identified God’s Right Hand with religiosity, individualism, exceptionalism, xenophobia, and a zeal to impose corporate Christianity—capitalism—on the rest of the planet, e.g. “men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.” The endgame of this jihad, as preached by televangelist Pat Robertson, “is to rule the world for God.”⁷ He meant, for American capitalism and God’s Right Hand.  

  On the progressive Left, God’s “Right Hand” adjudicates his universe by the laws of science or, more accurately, codifications of scientism—a modern religion that has replaced open inquiry into nature with its own fixed canons and laws. UFOs, faith healing, and yetis are excluded. Liberal modernists worship what Lerner called “technocratic rationality . . . flattening the way we experience nature and each other. . . [and judging] every activity, every institution, every social practice as rational, productive, or efficient only to the extent that it produces money or power.  . . . The scientistic worldview holds that everything that can be known is known through empirical observations, through sensory perceptions, and any claim we make about the world that cannot be validated or falsified on the basis of such data is meaningless. . . .”⁸

   This sort of scientism proposes a surrogate theocracy with high technicians its popes, academics its priests. In a revised “Genesis,” God is a physicist, microbiologist, and ecologist who did throw dice—algorithms—to make a universe. There are no shamans, magicians, or supernal forces because how could there be when there are only atoms? See my books Dark Pool of Light and Bottoming Out the Universe for how far I have been able to bottom this out.

 By privileging scientistic orthodoxy, the Left not only brushes aside academic critiques of science but enigmas of creation and the mystery of consciousness, presuming (with secular science) that molecules juggled long enough under natural selection—13.8 billion years after the Big Bang or, locally, 4.5 billion—can cook up just about anything.

Among progressives, social and ecological activism mark the pinnacle of eco-spiritual practice—David Attenborough’s cinema is as revelatory as the universe gets. Yet “nature” is also taken for granted as an elitist devotion of the informed.

    Scientism became the predominant world religion for one reason; it delivers the goods: cars, trucks, planes, elevators, electric lights, food, dams, missiles, bombs, antibiotics, the internet; in other words, whole economies and the sole practicable basis of social and economic justice. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” takes on fresh significance in a world ruled by the makers of smart phones and tablets. Still, machines do not address the fundamental criteria of existence, nor do they sustain an ecosphere.

      Lerner called out science’s provinciality and hubris: “Secular people often think that scientism is simply saying what it means to be rational in the contemporary world. . . . [but that] is merely because we live in a world dominated by the religion of scientism.”⁹ The God of No-God dismisses all magic and meditation along the lines of Karl Marx’s Opium des Volkes—“opiate of the masses.”

   Religion, on other hand, tries to evoke the mystery, healing power, and innate joy of existence in a divine creation. A mosque, temple, or cathedral feels like a holy zone for a reason; a hidden universe has been molded from outside in, signified in stone and glass. Sacred geometry, group prayer and song, and filtered tinted light turn a warehouse with spires into a refuge, a tangka, a sanctuary, an echo chamber, a creative visualization, a Platonic solid, and a mandala—in all, a portal for attunement with the Divine.

     Materialists ignore those aspects. Most twenty-first centurions attend services out of habit, ethnic fidelity, or social obligation. Yet many suspect they are inside a mystery, the presence of something foreign, majestic, and still unknown.

By the political Left, Lerner meant registered Democrats and Greens, also the labor movement, the women’s movement, environmental and peace movements, and affiliated NGOs, nonprofits, and progressive affinity groups.⁴ By the political Right, he meant the Republican Party, Conservatives, Libertarians, populists, Christian evangelicals, remnant Klanners, and the eponymous Moral Majority (and eventually the Tea Party and alt-right).

             For America’s political evangelicals, free markets and trickle-down wealth are religious tenets. Moneyedness is a form of godliness, a measure of merit.¹⁰ It runs an ordained current like coins placed in the mouths of corpses in ancient Greece to pay for bardo passage across the River Styx.

The effects of unequal opportunity and racial or class bias spawned a much older caste system in India in which fortune is presumed to have been earned by past-life karma. For how material wealth might be translated into actual spiritual energy, check out Be Here Now, Baba Ram Dass’ 1971 account of his conversion to Hinduism. At its crossroads moment, Neem Karoli Baba greeted Richard Alpert, Ram-Dass-to-be, as he arrived at his ashram in India in a Land Rover, led there by a devotee: his words: “You give me the car?” Alpert called it the fastest hustle he had ever heard, and he had grown up among shillers of Jewish charities. It was more likely the pundit’s psychic reading of Alpert’s unconscious longing for salvation and the dharma. 

In Christian prosperity congregations, currency “flies” into a magical vat that multiplies by God’s grace like those five small barley loaves and two little fish in a biblical lunch pail, cold-fissioning food for five million. Evangelical services feature abundance hymns, glossolalia, and dancing with poisonous snakes twirled around shoulders and torsos. “Raising” money is tantamount to pumping Holy Spirit. The lucre may end up in the coffers of mega-church moguls like Robertson, Joel Osteen, and Kenneth Copeland, but it is counted as guerdon not grift. Money worshipper and swindler Donald Trump, though a serial sinner, entered the evangelical camp as a prosperity preacher, using his kinked creation of wealth to beguile the Bible Belt.

 While these sects inspire mystical jubilation, they too often turn it into cultural supremacism and social entitlement. Instead of, Lerner charged, tracing the source of a “spiritual crisis to the selfishness and materialism that marks corporate America’s bottom-line mentality and their own patriotic capitalism, the Religious Right choses to make an unholy alliance with the political Right.”¹¹ It sponsors a trickle-down economic cult, while dismissing “the deep spiritual yearnings of the American public,”¹²in the process putting “a sanctimonious religious veneer [over] its  own basic selfishness and materialism.”¹³

    The “faithful” are willing to sack social services and deplete the environment from a belief that the heavenly cornucopia will transcend irreversible eco-damage and feed and shelter the flock until the Second Coming. This beatitude recalls former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi’s spoof of financial firm Goldman-Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”¹⁴

The politicization of religion by evangelical denominations gives the Left fair cover for its techno-religiosity. In lieu of godspells and holy hymns, the progressively politicized Left Hand provides safety nets, social justice, globalism, and a Green New Deal.

The Right’s politicized Left Hand extends religious freedom and forgiveness.

Neither side dares confront its dethroning of the Divine, placing blame on the other. The Right indicts science, the Left religiosity. Like religious and secular Jews debating nuances of the Holocaust in Nathan Englander’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” they each kill her again.

Endnotes

1. Fernando Suarez, “Clinton Says Obama Is ‘Out of Touch’ With Middle Class Americans, Calls Comments ‘Elitist,’” CBS News, April 12, 2008.

2. Alexandra Pelosi, “Shockingly Stupid Republicans: What’s the Matter with Mississippi?” YouTube, March 15, 2012.

3. Josh Hawley@HawleyMO, Tweet on Twitter, November 25, 2020.

4. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 13 fn.

5. Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1861.

6.Augustus Montague Toplady, “Rock of Ages,” The Gospel Magazine, 1775.

7. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p 8.

8. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, pp. 1, 2, and 131.

9. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 132.

10. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 97.

11. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, pp. 103-104.

12. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 14.

13. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 6.

14. Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010.

 2. THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

All religious institutions, science included, evolved out of Stone Age practices. Hominid ceremonies were converted into band cosmologies and then tribal rules of order. That’s how Homo sapiens took to worshipping life and death, heaven and earth. Social and spiritual totems are inseparable. Early twentieth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim declared as much in an aphoristic passage:

When the Australian [Aborigine] is carried outside himself and feels a new life flowing within him whose intensity surprises him, he is not the dupe of an illusion. . . . Religion . . . before all  . . .  is a series of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it.¹⁵

Durkheim was a sociologist through and through. He overlooked psychic and telekinetic sources of revelation, but he found the origin of institutionalized religion. The original deity was a clan, its totem animals and ancestors. “Obscure but intimate relations” still describes the ecstatic ceremonialism of NASCAR, biker rallies, shooting ranges, and militia trainings by Wolverine Watchmen and Oath Keepers. What they are consecrating is a sigil, lodge, and pedigree. In the absence of more “mystical” practices, nativist politics and symbols are as sacred as the world gets. This remains the case in many ordinary traditional churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Though Donald Trump’s espousal of fundamentalist Christianity was an opportunistic stunt—conversion to a bible he never read and a church he never attended (when, for instance, he waved someone else’s holy book in a photo-op against Antifa)—it galvanized an ancestral coven of which Trumps were long-time members. It was a Charlie-Chaplin, Mussolini-esque imitation of Barabbas—Idi Amin lite sans irony—but it worked for the so-called “Moral Majority.”

On the Left, the sacred lodge is the revolutionary party or activist collective, beatified by long struggles for suffrage and unions. These institutions feel sacred because they are; that is, they vibrate at a spiritual frequency in their believers’ minds and chakras. A distinction between culture and religion is as tangential in the Bible Belt or union hall as it was in the Aboriginal outback. To attack guns, as Obama found out, is to blaspheme working-class faith; it is being literally sacrilegious. Likewise, when fundamentalist rabblerousers trash butterfly preserves, elephant sanctuaries, and endangered beetles and fish, they are being sinful and profane, to DNA as the trident of God.

In either case, the flow of sacred energy and spirit is located in group solidarity and traditional loyalties. When psychic energy ebbs, sacrisity replaces ethers. God is ditched—on the Right for trickle-down Law and Order; on the Left for a “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” feminist deity. Each uses its idol to supplant the Christic energy field earthed by Jesus of Nazareth and Buddha of Lumbini.

While the Right substitutes patriarchal rules and regs for revelation and compassion, liberal progressives replace biblical affirmations with social-justice maxims. Placards that proclaim, in commandment-like scrolls, “Black Lives Matter,” “News Isn’t Fake,” “Science is Real,” etc. are God Team colors, equivalents of crosses and mezuzahs. For all the gospel they transmit, they might as well be saying, “We Love Love and Hate Hate.” Flourishes of triumphal virtue-signaling are meant to conceal propaganda. As they sit adversarially in yards and on windows, they deliver vitriol more than “love.”

  Lerner mourned that the Left “robbed itself of a discourse that would allow it to proclaim the spiritual principles and transcendent values that underlie its humanistic commitments.”¹⁶ By claiming instead, “My [religious] views are ethical, not spiritual,” the woke implied that “ethical beliefs are epistemologically better grounded.”¹⁷

The Right’s use of the King James translation of ministerially approved and re-sorted gospels as divine channeling robs it likewise of spiritual vitality.

Meanwhile, God’s Right Hand remains inherently martial, apocalyptic and punishing, poised to wipe out His enemies, chasten sinners, and obliterate even His own Creation in an Endtime, climate catastrophe, or blue shift. His activation lies in a jealous Reptile brain, prone to nuclear arsenals, threat display, and retribution. It has no “worlds unknown,” no shamanic transmissions or Upper Heavens, no “you raise me up / so I can stand on mountains.”¹⁸

Jihad alone satisfies alt-Right Yahweh and alt-Right Allah, piously self-righteous entitlement and proselytization. The Godhead of kibbutzes, conversion therapies, and boot camps, discordant as each of these are from each other, merge in disdaining vulnerability, visions, and sacred wounds. Parishioners invariably hail Barabbas and vote to “crucify the faggot.” Holdouts and bystanders fold into the mob.    

If Jehovah needed to raise an Army—and clearly He did after the Holocaust and rebel dawn of Israel—He could forge the Hebrew alphabet into weaponry and mass-produce the finest planes, pilots, and tanks under Eden: F-35 fighter jets, paratroopers, surface-to-surface missiles, surface-to-air defense lasers.

 The Jews who brought their Zionism to Israel didn’t hate Palestinians; in fact, they couldn’t tell Palestinians from Philistines, Iranians from Persians, Caine from Abel, Ham from Abraham, history from myth. They weren’t returning from a diaspora or atoning Nazi death camps. They were Tisha B’Av imposters, throwing tantrums before the universe, accusing blind galaxies of Jew-hating while covering for their own emotional terrorism, land theft, and deeds of obscene barbarism. The Right Hand of God is, as Durkheim proposed, the collective representation of a clan and its totemic pantheons, hallowed land, and moral authority.

Endnotes

15. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p. 225.

16. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 149.

17. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 151.

18. Augustus Montague Toplady, “Rock of Ages,” The Gospel Magazine, 1775.

3. SEX-MAGIC INTERLUDE

The conflation of sex and power has generated mating rituals from the Darwinian dawn of society to Freud’s civilization and its discontents. Libidinal energy precedes church or ceremony, driving species evolution. We won’t understand our pagan gods until we recognize how ancient fishes and frogs worshipped them too.

Shallow morality is rooted, to a degree, in the sanctimonious suppression of desire, activating the second chakra and its kundalini mischief. Ideational religiosity turns into either stringent taboos or just as stringent orgies. Incursions of the shadow are inevitable by what psychologist Carl Jung termed “enantiodromia”: any repressed fixation activates unconscious expression of its antipode, either as enforced austerity or bacchanals that are equally austere. 

Donald Trump was admired, even worshipped, by evangelicals for his valorization of pussy-grabbing because their own evangelism left them susceptible to the same covert fantasies, and they knew high clergy when they saw it. Before becoming guardian of the unborn, protector of Yule, and a flag-waving agent of Jesus, Trump favored porn stars and outré acts, camouflaging misogyny in de facto rapes. He turned repulsions into infatuations. He became the poster boy for a lust as ontologically rigid as the monastic rejection of sex. The incongruity gave him numinous powers as well as license to pursue whatever his attention deficit fancied.

His late-onset piety, as duplicitous as it was rapacious, typified the Right’s vampishly Christianized kink-and-tantra, like a “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” sendup or Hugh-Hefner-run nunnery, e.g. a Playboy mansion with monastery-like regulations, required devotions, and sacrifices to the pontiff. Add lady mules running cocaine and you have a full-service temple of bondage, sadomasochism, and lust. Even the Virgin Mary turns into her profane parody. Wiccan author Emily Shurr nailed the pedigree: “It’s a saga of old Southern families, millennia of patriarchal domination of women via financial control, fearmongering, erotic power dynamics, and sexual and emotional abuse.”¹⁹

  The most egregious such cult in the contemporary West, Ruland and his son Warren Jeffs’ FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) commune as well as its polygamous offshoots, fled the secular constabulary from Utah to border-town Arizona to Eldorado, Texas, before the authorities closed in on the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) ranch and cenotaph. By then, Warren had acquired close to eighty wives, many of them underaged. In one recorded episode in the FLDS vault—pedophiles apparently like to make titillating records of their conversions—he raped a compliant twelve-year-old virgin in the company of several of his sister wives. The girl was compliant because she thought she was participating in a religious ceremony, with the prophet himself no less.  Jeffs kept praising the lord and commending her for her obedience in increasingly audible excitement. If it seemed like sacred ecstasy, that’s because it was.

Sexual megalomania—offering to raise, heal, or bless through own’s own orgasm is a form of “spiritual bypassing”— using religion to flout conventional ethics. The parson becomes the perpetrator. By making the Holy Spirit either a fellow truant or a paper tiger, a lecherous priest or yogi is can practice sex-magic as religion. Clergymen like the Jeffs performed sexual rites in cloaks and collars, in effect ordering children to masturbate or suck off “God.”

Imbalances of prerogative lead to shallow moral perspectives. Men I know, rad guys advanced in Buddhist practices, empowered by shrines, sacred dances, and qigong, decide that they can solve any woman’s problems by their tantra. One young lady lured from a psychedelic festival to a supposedly Buddhist compound, told me, ten years after, “It was the ultimate creepshow.” A perfect trope for sexual megalomania. In wasn’t in her vocabulary in her mid-twenties; by her wry mid-thirties it spoke itself. Gurus act as if they had siddhis to grant by osmosis.

Anti-queer ideologues and preachers come out of their closets with sexual behaviors far kinkier than the everyday queers they revile from the pulpit. Randy Buddhist lamas and Hindu pontiffs are guilty of the same casuistry, gentrifying sex by asanas.

Claims of special dispensations are used by “pious” Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jihadists, Daists, and Hassids alike. Pundits and priests far more advanced than most (in the seven or nine bodies of incarnation) use religious versions of the same dopey lines as any pickup artist at a bar. Yet a shallow perspective is just as unhealthy for them, inviting incursions of their own unexamined neuroses and failed sublimations. From pedophile priests to lecherous politicians and corporate harems, the shadow arrives on cue.

In 2020’s docket alone, madrasa president Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife were unmasked seducing Liberty U students while engaging in ménages and voyeurismes à trois. Evangelical mayor Rudolph Giuliani was pranked into arousal and near exposure by an actress under the direction of faux Kazakh journalist Sacha Baron Cohen.

 Devout Christians like MAGA disciples Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan clothe pederasty and lechery, theirs and others’, in five-hundred-dollar suits, smarmy comb-overs, and laical “service.” Behind every Jim Jordan stands a Larry Nassar or John Wayne Gacy. As Gaetz put the matter with Trumpian triumphalism, “I’m a politician, not a virgin.”     

There is a reason why officials who write the strictest laws protecting women from sexual abuse often turn out to be their most flagrant violators. New York Governors Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo knew who and what they were legislating against.

I heard abuses on the Left called out in 1990s workshops at Morehouse, a commune in Lafayette, California, dedicated to rebalancing male and female roles in courtship, romance, and the working world. Teachers routinely preached against sham feminism and sexual megalomania, warning that men kid themselves that their attraction for some females gives them authority to grade—assign social status—to all women, hence to define roles of women in not only mating rituals but workplaces and society at large.

“Women are judged by men according to their fuckability,” one facilitator declared, adding nuance to the f-word. “No matter whether the women are their mothers, daughters, or sisters; no matter their age, from children to great-grandmothers, no matter how feminist and socially conscious the male, women are rated and given status by how fuckable men consider them. They are denied status on the same basis. All women, all men. Equal rights, laws, and pieties notwithstanding.

 “Watch out especially for men who claim they are above this,” he added. “They use their claim of being feminists to disguise their appropriation of women. Feminist men are among the most devious practitioners of male prerogative. And don’t trust a man who supports equality only for women he finds attractive.”

Fuckability reflects Donald Trump’s view of womanhood as well; for instance, when he dissed Carly Fiorina, sizing up his early political rival in the same way he viewed Natasha Stoynoff (after she aged) and other victims who accused him of sexual assault and battery—he said that his accusers had to be dissembling because they were too ugly for him to fuck.  

  What goes for feminist progressives plays for conservative priests and coaches and Southern put-them-on-a-pedestal idolaters of womanhood or Middle Eastern patriarchs clothing their harems in burqas. The bikini and niqab arise from the same idée fixe: the power of female seduction. It is implicit in honor killings, concubines, and sexual abstinence alike. Facial and bodily coverings install a patriarchal agenda—males trying to hide and protect property rights and properties. Women use the same principle to court and commoditize their fundamental claim to the same property: e.g., Julianne Hough who“flaunted her epic fashion sense with an iconic fall ‘fit,’ a see-through, barely-there knit dress and undies with side and center cut-outs”; or the irrepressible Britney Spears “who showed off her sculpted booty while in a boat.”  

Yet fashions are complex and counterintuitive. Modern Muslim women, even when raised on Western couture and hip-hop, seek exemption from the male gaze, not just Islamic patriarchies but the Western sex trope with its strip clubs, fashion models, and fish-netted waitresses. They exit its autocratic standards of desirability, uses of their bodies and lives, and cheapening of erotic holiness.

 And it is not just a “male” gaze—it is the gaze of rival women, the gaze of capital itself. Masks and robes reclaim and restore female power in enantiodromias that go back to Ice Age forerunners of Paris and Helen, Zeus and Hera.

Jeffrey Epstein was the shadow of Woodstock, which was possible only because Woodstock didn’t realize it had a shadow. Epstein couldn’t tell the difference between free love and appropriated sex—between consensual communalism and carrion capitalism, or where he crossed lines from love to prostitution, prostitution to commodity, or mere rape to pedophilia. That he cultivated illustrious co-conspirators shows how admissible and matter of fact the hexing of desire has become.

 The same view blinded a young Wall Street broker to his engines of theft. His initial transactions depended on fake collateral, pyramid schemes, and bait-and-switch. They were not only legitimate, they were how the system worked. Bernie Madoff crossed a line without knowing it, too.

 The path from Aquarian communes to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-slavery compounds on Little Saint James runs through Studio 54, Timothy Leary  

“pronging bunnies” at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club, the San Fernando porn industry, asteroid bastilles on Barr family planet Kossar, and Sunni blowback from Bush family “Shock and Awe.”

In declaring Yezidi, Christian, and Shiite women “sabiyya,” the ISIS caliphate turned them into transactable property. Sabiyya­ could, by a version of sharia, be sexually appropriated, sold, beaten, or given as gifts. When Islamic judge Haijji Salman bestially and repeatedly molested twenty-one-year-old Yezidi, Nadia Murad (as recounted by her with the precision of a virginal holy woman in her memoir The Last Girl),he still couldn’t muster enough lust to feel what was happening, so he turned to further humiliation and enforcement of status, having her gang-raped by his servants. She described one of them setting down his glasses with more care than he handled her body.

Salman was creating a hell realm. He knew it, but he didn’t know how to stop himself. False spiritual ideology had blinded him to actual spiritual pataphysics.

Is this stuff dangerous? You bet it is. Sanctions, taboos, and rituals are observed for a reason. Any demon who knew you in a past life suddenly has a license to visit you again and carry on business you and he pursued.

 You can’t forcibly extract elixir from a star. You can’t take Athena and Aphrodite without encountering Circê and Shiva, for goddesses round-dance in rings. Each contains a vast and fierce a universe inside her, and that universe—her origin and shrine—is the arena of encounter. Men are inured to the power of the feminine as they are numbed to the actuality and depth of the archetype and the price of intimacy. The vestal chalice of female vulnerability turns into a prison of their own karma.

You’d think that Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell would have paused to weigh the pitfalls of turpitude as they persevered in luring, buying, and imprisoning underage girls by a single routine: Epstein turning over semi-naked on a massage table. According to police and FBI reports, they repeated this sterile ritual seven hundred to a thousand times, probably more! The number is meaningless; it was eternal return.

Neither of the pair recognized a broken ceremony, a craving that was never slaked, a disease calling for a different medicine.

They also didn’t assay the karma of misbegotten intimacy. Those nubile ducklings matured into angry swans. Traumatized by their rapes, many of them proved more sentient than their abusers about what had gone down and the price to be paid.

 Hefner was cannier than Epstein. He built a temple for his satyriasis, branding and monetizing it, not allowing any aspiring bunny to sleep in the house without honoring his totem. He called his pathology “romance” and himself a “romantic” (or “playboy”) rather than a rapist or pedophile.

 Men, and some women, without Epstein’s or Hefner’s wealth and sycophants, use Instagram, Snapchat, ice-cream parlors, and church socials to recruit victims. Unnatural lusts fed by capital imperatives lead to pathoses of commodity obsession and cycles of unrequited arousal.

A deeper lesion is in play. Its grim dialectic seeks to redeem itself and the forms generating it, and fails because the meanings lie beneath the surface and bring onto stage deities who no longer dwell  here.²⁰ As my astrologer friend Rob Brezsny sang in his rock-band youth—his groups were Tao Chemical and World Entertainment War—“O God, you pregnant criminal who scorns all my mediocre desires . . . O God, you eater of cruelty, I confess I am not like you, I am you. . . .”²¹  

Endnotes

19. Emily Shurr, email, August 31, 2020.

20. Much of this section is reordered and rewritten from a draft of my unpublished book Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage.

21. Rob Brezsny, “Prayer.”

I wish I remembered the source of the Leary-at-Playboy-Club descriptor; it was from a magazine memoir of someone who partied with him at the time.

4. HOLY GROUND

God’s Heart and Third Eye radiate love, healing, redemption. They fuse science and religion—that is, sacred science: empirical inquiry with sustainable applications (Pelton wheels, windmills, solar cells, floating filters and sensors to siphon plastic out of oceans)—and true religion: rigpa flowing into the human psyche from ground luminosity. The physics practiced by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and the elemental codes deciphered by Charles Darwin and Marie Curie are amenable, in principle, to all subsequent phenomena: “psi” effects as well as gravity, molecules, electromagnetism, particles, and chromosomes. They encompass subatomic superposition, dark matter, quantum entanglement, and the maiden wiggle of an autogene, the first living Gaian.

Modern scientism (of “Science is Real” fame) can’t explain any of that, let alone yeti fur with hominoid DNA, tachyon particles, and debris left by UFOs with new isotope ratios. Scientism won’t acknowledge that some children “remember” the lives of deceased persons while others are born with musical or mathematical talents or speaking languages that they were never taught. Its a priori position is: it couldn’t happen, so it doesn’t.

 One doesn’t have to accept interstellar ships or past lives to recognize that the universe is fundamentally incomprehensible, and far more mysterious than beings on one provincial waterworld or Stephen Hawking or Oliver Sacks can decipher. To admit that there are unexplained objects or to use energy medicines because they somehow “work” is not to reject human-caused climate change or science “as the best method for learning about the natural world.”²² It is to dowse the utter vastness of nature and creation.

Modernity’s shroud over spirit ignores vital forces, reliquaries, rainbow bodies, telekinetic prayer, and resurrections, which are demoted as animist superstitions along with all other indices of active faith. Modernity has no use for shamanic or chaos magic, angels, elementals, the heart chakra, indigo children, third eyes, or blind hope. Its maxim is: “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

This is no incidental side effect or dinky by-product of progressive philosophy; it is a full-service capital empire.

But divine awe is not an opiate; in fact, it is an antidote for opiates. In the words of Cree-Mi’kmaq songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie: “People say Indians aspire to see visions; I say Indians see visions because there are visions to be seen.”²³

 The academic and intellectually smug elite leave ordinary people, Lerner diagnosed, with “a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find a way to connect their lives with a higher meaning and purpose . . . a justification for being on this planet.”²⁴ They crave “the loving, kind, and generous energy of the universe.”²⁵ Socially progressive modernists have lost track of the basic human need to gaze in awe at a majestic, ineffable reality in which souls find themselves. Scientism’s cosmos of extrinsic subatomic dust cyclotronically processed in two trillion galactic spirals is claustrophobic as well as emotionally alienating, psychically disenfranchising, commodity-addicting, nihilistic, psychotic, depressing, and (whew!) unromantic. It is also disingenuous, secretly serving academic and corporate hegemonies while feigning—well-nigh strutting—impartiality.* Charles Eisenstein pulls no punches here:

Nihilism . . . is no mere philosophical position, but the intellectual window-dressing on a psychological state of despair. In fact, this despair is always latent in modern society, because (1) Its reigning reductionism renders the universe into a meaningless scribble of atoms and void; (2) Its reigning theory of life tells us we are here to survive and reproduce; (3) Its reigning economics directs our creative energies toward unfulfilling work and mindless consumption, and (4) Its dominant social patterns cut us off from nature, community, place, and the experience of belonging. For a while, rapid increases in wealth and dazzling technical achievements kept the despair at bay. But it was there all along, a gnawing void at the heart of the ideology of progress. It was there all along, an inner poverty mirroring the destitution progress had wreaked upon other cultures and non-human beings. It was there all along, our own shadow that followed us as we raced toward a Utopia ever just at the horizon. Now as the glamour of progress dissolves, as our exhaustion mounts, and as we face the sobering realization that the horizon grows no closer no matter how fast we run, despair overtakes us at last.²⁶

In the waning months of the Clintonocracy, Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer wrote (and Thomas Franks quoted): “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”²⁷ He doesn’t understand why his inner light—his innate rigpa and sense of celebration—is being replaced by universal secularism. He may be temporal and acquisitive, but he doesn’t just want to be lined up for his (or her) quota of goodies and grab for all the gusto he can get (per a 1970s Schlitz beer commercial); he doesn’t want a diet of sports, steaks, vacations, alcohol, sex, opiates, videogames, and (Lerner) “corporate-dominated media . . . tranquilized by trivia and adrift in drivel. . . .”²⁸ He seeks something vast and profound that he can’t necessarily name, so he blesses and praises the unknowable in ways he can, from Friday night lights and Saturday afternoon moose hunts to politically incorrect banter, profane mantras, Sunday hymns, and Jesus spells.

The Left will never win back Indiana and Ohio, let alone Kansas or Kentucky, “until it is no longer perceived as anti-God and as sneering at the religious and spiritual aspirations of the American people. . . . ²⁹ Spiritual hungers that the Religious Right addresses, perhaps disingenuously, are real needs. Lerner continues, “It’s not at all convincing to tell people that they should keep their spiritual concerns out of the public sphere . . . .”What attracts people to the Republican Party is not “some ethical or psychological malfunction” but a rebuttal to “the despiritualization of daily life.”³⁰

This despiritualization isn’t just a demotion of God or a banning of Christmas displays and mangers from public facilities; it is an underlying dogmatism and scientistically sanctified creed that considers sacredness little more than different ethnicities’ folk cultures of ancestral devotions that they should be permitted as freedom of speech and religion as long as they don’t impose them on others and also as long as they keep them out of places where they might trigger or offend. The superficial consequence is an outlawing of evangelical proselytizing on taxpayer funds or favoring Christianity by New-Testament-infused practices, sigils, schools, and civic institutions. The real consequence is the vitiation of spirit and divinity from public life altogether. That crosses the line from ending religious propaganda and showcased triumphalism to inhibiting all euphoric frolics and raptures that violate separation of church and state and offend secularists. The anti-spirit language police enforce right speech with the zealousness of Taliban or Revolutionary Guards; they can’t imprison, beat up, or murder, but they muzzle and marginalize.        

Working-class Republicans aren’t stupid or incorrigibly amused by Donald Trump’s antics, though they may be unschooled in nuances of social and political manipulation. They are primed for a good show in lieu of empty aphorisms and “angel of the morning” promises. The vast majority are also not racist. They are less racist the Aristos because they mingle. They want nasty, unpolitically-correct, bawdy humor and unfettered social sacrilege—not the snipey dings of late night t.v.

When Sacha Baron Cohen pranked a group of central-casting rednecks in Washington State into singing his chorus about injecting Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Barack Obama, and Anthony Fauci “with the Wuhan flu, / and chopping them up like the Saudis do,”³¹ a reference to the assassination and corpse disposal of Jamal Khashoggi, most liberal viewers probably stuck up their noses and thought, “There go those idiot assholes—racist deplorables all.”

But they were more like irreverent homeboys having fun, briefly blissing out on disobedience, irreverence, and defiance. No one was casting sticks or stones or closing art exhibits or censoring books or telling Keith Richards and the Stones not to sing “Brown Sugar.” It was Coors karaoke, “Let the language police come and arrest us, dudes!” That’s been hooted or honked from time immemorial.

  Political incorrectness lets out a bit of shadow, averting deadlier eruptions. Progressives are just as ugly and incorrect behind closed doors, as they consign the history of violence to the other side and turn their ungenerous feelings and yearnings into cover-up social action. Breaking the glass and pulling an alarm every time someone misspeaks gender pronouns or fails to acknowledge white entitlement doesn’t create a rainbow; it turns busks and elegies into Reichstag curtsying and self-conscious genuflection.

   The Stones were saddened to learn that their so-called “woke” fans no longer grasped that the song’s lyrics were about the horrors of slavery and not celebrating it.

A union shop steward interviewed by Lerner described her life in the accredited Left, “I feel like I’m a zombie surrounded by zombies—everyone doing their assigned role.”³² She discovered a new aspect of herself by attending an Assembly of God service: “I felt the juices flowing there. . . . [People] just seemed more alive. And then I was flooded with memories of how I used to be when I was younger, and I got sad for all that I had given up.”³³

Another interviewee told Lerner, “[W]hen I attended college at UCLA—everyone on the Left made fun of religion and made it seem as though anyone into religion was, I don’t know, I guess it was like they were saying it was like being into a cult. Then I went to do a graduate degree in social work. I can’t tell you how prejudiced people were there against Americans who didn’t vote for liberals. Everyone who cared about things like the Fourth of July or thought America was basically a good place were labeled ‘rednecks.’”³⁴

Yet in 2021, post-hippie San Franciscans fled smoke, woke, and tariffs of high-tech, relocating to Dallas County, Tucson, Boise, Salt Lake, St. George, Truth or Consequences, suburban Chicago, et al. They were teased by friends back home, “Have you joined a militia yet?”

“Maybe if I moved north to Coeur d’Alene or Sand Point,” a Bay-Area Boise migrant told me. “But people here have been downright courteous compared to my former California friends who stopped talking to me or unfriended me on Facebook when I challenged their woke-ism or suggested that something draws people to Trump other than racism and stupidity.”

    True believers also alienate the very working people they are trying to recruit to their cause of social justice. Maine People’s Alliance, canvassing to get white working-class voters to go to the polls for their own self-interests, hired young activists some of whom went into rural regions where they guilt-tripped farmers, machinists, carpenters, fishermen, and boat-builders about their systemic racism. Board this train straight to Paul LePage and Donald J. Trump—bimbos, bombast, and bowdlerization.

    I encountered a Maine MAGA man in the spring of 2021, a retired auto mechanic in a trailer, six grandchildren playing in the yard, a cannabis patch and a red Trump 2020 cap. The guy finds, fixes, and sells old motors: blenders, driers, lawnmowers. He likes engines. They’re his devotion and church. There is no “woke” that isn’t hip to pulleys, gears, rain dances, and séances.

Endnotes

22. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 132.

23. Buffy Sainte-Marie, in a review of a concert in Michigan in 1967. I wrote her website in Paris for confirmation, and she wrote back, “Yeah, I said something like that, probably about the time I wrote ‘Moonshot.’ Quote if u like.”

24. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 3.

25. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 43.

26. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

27. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 124.

28. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, pp. 3, 27.

29. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 125.

30. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 27.

31. Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, 2020.

32. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 49.

33. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 49.

34. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, pp. 118-119.

The title of this section comes from a song by the Klezmatics: “Holy Ground.” It begins: Take off, take off your shoes / This place you’re standing, it’s holy ground.” That theme repeats until the song concludes: “Every spot on earth I trapse around /
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground / Every spot it’s holy ground /Every little inch it’s holy ground / Every grain of earth it’s holy ground / Every spot I walk it’s holy ground.” It’s an unusual song by tone and unvarying scale, more like a prayer or mantra. I think of it as an icaro for Earth. It also brings the Left and Right Hands of God together, for in a Divine and sacred universe, there is no separation between the sacred and the profane; everything is divine and sacred. 

5. HEALTH FREEDOM

The most basic freedom (after speech) is the right to heal and self-heal. Yet health has turned into a battleground, with corporate science and its salespeople and ministries on one flank, and energy modalities on the other.

Mainstream medicine is no longer a “do no harm” proposition—it’s become board rooms, drug tycoons, onco-mice, dividends, shareholders, and vampire squids. Your body is theirs, as commodity and investment. They weigh and measure it and centrifuge its fluids, albeit for sound diagnostic reasons, but they take commoditization itself for granted. The numbers and statistics they generate and conditions they hypostatize enable full capitalization, as health becomes a by-product of medical and biological markets. Sick people get converted into insurance codes, client services, and a slew of blackmails and ransoms. They become defenseless targets of medical merchants and health execs. The impact goes beyond souls, lives, and deaths to the lives and deaths of ecosystems and habitats. To understand how this death spiral works, we have to blend chaos magician Aleister Crowley with psycholinguistic shrink Jacques Lacan. In their combined view, a voodoo master in the form of a physician names a disease to an innocent fool; the person is killed by the name: medical hexing.

From birth and benefits to burial and cremation, there is no escape from this exchange. Every fetus or corpse (and cyborg or homunculus in between) must get registered with the constabulary, which enforces scientism’s sharia-like defense of cellulo-molecular fundamentalism and prophylactic care. The embryogenic field, extracellular matrix, and immune system are viewed as freeloaders, along with the healing modalities that honor them. Procedures, shots, tests, scans, and scopes are cash-register ringers. Everybody is a customer and consumer, sometimes by mandate, sometimes in kinesis to continual broadcasts on the fear channel.

In this war of health freedom against health hegemony, the neo-Liberal Left has allied uncritically with Big Pharma, Big Ag, and their lobbyists and agents in the government. Progressives find themselves on the side of the creators of OxyContin, salmon death-farms, Roundup, Teflon, benzos, and AI—meaning algorithmic as well as artificial intelligence—and mandatory mRNA vaccines.

Health czars and their bureaucracies are less and less neutral public servants and more facilitators or apologists for tech hierarchies, oligarchs, digital gamers, and the belief that transhumanist technologies are our only future.

In a seminal volte-face, the fabled New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Sixty Minutes, and NPR have turned into propagandistic pushers of mechanical medicine, DNA mod, and synthetic biology, joining the enemies and even executioners of energy healers and medical intuitives. A few holistic doctors have been murdered mysteriously and dumped in rivers.  

Increasingly since the New Deal and atomic bomb, science itself has morphed into a trade guild spawning a bureaucracy of accountants, sales reps, lobbyists, and technicians. A century earlier (1847), the American Medical Association (AMA) was founded as an allopathic trade guild. It was incorporated in 1897 and coronated by the Flexner Report on Medical Education in 1910, with a mission to vanquish naturopathic, homeopathic, and osteopathic rivals and limit consumer options to two: drugs or surgery. That’s established medicine now.

Just as debunking climate change is corporate oil’s way of monopolizing the energy market with an unsustainable product, selling palliative drugs while debunking herbs, microdoses, supplements, and manual medicine is corporate pharma’s tactic for clamping a monopoly on their own addictive products while knee-capping their competitors. They have mocked or deprecated vital force, systemic harmony, and sustainable biopoiesis. Spirits and prayer wheels have been demoted along with in-absentia cures, potentized herbs, flower essences, medicine bundles, and magnetic-resonance fields. Holism is forbidden, as either quotient or ethos.

Two items that cannot be allowed in a monetized, objectified reality are subtle bodies and cell talk, for like moon and sun, they are free.

Corporate medicine speaks with a conquistador’s forked tongue, driven by the pseudo-egalitarianism of the state—any state, company, lobby, or consortium, any brand or movement, pharmaceutical or ecclesiastical. Egalitarianism turns “everyone” into “no one,” for everyone receives the same diagnoses, treatments, determinism, and protocols; it’s cheaper and more profitable, down the line.

Yet even as medicine becomes more homogenized and impersonal, its costs skyrocket because, without guiding ethics or a reliable belief system, there is no limit on profit motive or the third AI: artificial immortality. That’s what multibillionaire moguls like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates seek, for they have too much money to spend in a lifetime. The Medical Industrial Complex also operates by Bezos’ mantra for Amazon.com: “Your margin is my opportunity”—166 billion annual units into one portfolio.

Next time you wonder why QAcolytes, trucker convoys, and populisms tramp through the heartland tweeting and honking for health freedom, consider neo-lib obeisance to technocracy and Big Pharma, which has turned once-thriving subcultures into opioid wastelands while making Sacklers and other Aristos billionaires. You can hide just about any con in commodity science these days.

Yet try selling alchemical potions, plant tinctures, and alt-immunity-builders or ecstatic dances and Sun ceremonies to the many of children of the Woodstock mud and the Selma marches who joined the woke Left, and they will accuse you of quackery or murder. In addition, the speech police deem anything derived or developed from non-Western cultures stolen—unjust appropriation, however authentically acquired or bestowed in the global pinball machine. Anyone who engages in indigenous practices without express written consent of tribal bureaucrats is deemed an appropriator.

Meanwhile the libertarian alt-right extends full warrant to pan-cultural healers, herbalists, Sunday shamans, Reiki masters, cannabinoid receptors, and Joseph Mercola. This is no accident; it is how the despiritualization of the political Left has conceded medicine, prayers, and guided visualizations to the political Right, by default.  

It is worth noting too that Buddhism, the nominal religion of many pro-abortion Democrats, is as pro-Life as Catholicism, though it expresses its precepts less stridently. For Buddhists (as well as Hindus and Jains in their native Asia), killing even a mosquito ripens karma. Evangelical Christians are hardly pantheists, but a liquidated human embryo accrues at least as much debt as a crushed fly. A priest friend of mine in Vatican circles covered a number of these bases in responding to an early draft of this book. Remember, he is Catholic, so he sees no path to the bodily autonomy of women without recognizing that the biology of reproduction, derived from both God and Darwin, presents an inextricable double bind:

Trump has been the unworthy banner holder of an important protest movement: ordinary Americans getting tired of being told how to think and how to speak by a fabulously powerful and rich elite that uses non-white (are you white? am I?) people and women as hostages and shields to promote an agenda that half the country finds repugnant. Simple as that. . . . 

I hope people will notice the connection between deep ecology and feminist anti-abortion voices. How can anyone be “pro-choice” and at the same time oppose on grounds of veganism and deep ecology the meat racket, the pesticides and herbicides mafia, the rape of forests and species, the rule of profits, and so forth. . . ?  It is not “allowed” to point out the effects of having an abortion on a woman’s body-mind complex, not to mention on everyone around her. . . .  Also the catalogue of the sale of the body parts. What does doing an abortion do to the mind and hormones of the medical personnel who do it? Once you take away the “unalienable” right to be born, what other rights are on the chopping block? Isn’t this the intuitive reaction to COVID restrictions—that all our rights are gone and all that counts is what Pharma and Medica command? What were these two powerful sisters afraid of (guided perhaps by Teknica and other muse/demons)? That, should the ICUs become overwhelmed, they would be exposed as having feet of clay (thus unworthy to command our every thought, word, and deed)? So do lockdowns and masks, making sure that the message gets out there that this is a viable form of prevention backed by “the science” until the holy sacrament of a vaccine can be distributed to the successive ranks of caste and creed, from the most approved to the least, in tenets resembling Exodus 19-30.

Do I myself support the Right to Life argument or anti-abortion movement? No, I feel that the decisions of souls are made on multiple planes simultaneously, and these things work themselves out over karmic time, much like the kills of hawks and leopards and the unjust deaths of innocents. They get redeemed in some heaven or probable universe. However, the rule of biology by Pharma and Medica and the replacement of an ancient apothecary and tabernacle with idolatry of medical time and machines does have a price and exile.

Among African Americans and First Nations, vaccine denial is blowback for forced medical interventions in communities of color and those underrepresented in the Euro-American power structure. The Tuskegee experiments and HeLa cancer-cell line of Henrietta Lacks are emblematic of a racism that conquistadors and slavers brought to spirit-filled lands along with Christian atheism and anti-shamanic bias. Shakespeare’s Caliban spoke for all indigenous peoples in the diction of the enchanted West: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”³⁵

            It was Elizabethan stagecraft with Miltonic gentrification, but it was also prophetic.

Indigenes also spoke for themselves (as translated from Osage to Anglo): “From amidst the bunches of tall grass / The great snake caused itself to be heard by making a buzzing sound. / That snake also spake, saying, / ‘Even though the little ones pass into the realm of the spirits, / They shall, by clinging to me and using my strength, recover consciousness.’”³⁶ 

There is a reason why traditional First Nations medicine men and women didn’t usually take payment for their services; the power of cure was considered a gift from spirit; so they paid it forward. Otherwise, their healing octave might drop into density and evaporate. The principle remains the same: the more medicine becomes a commodity, the more it loses healing power.

People are not drawn to religion finally by dogmas of fundamentalism or harangues from a bible-thumper; they are called by the holy spirit, the celebration of existence and life; that is, a Christic vibration more than its Jesus personification. Handling rattlers (symbolic as well as reptilian), dancing in aisles, potentizing, actively praying (asking), and speaking in tongues beats showroom Sunday with its stuffed suits and social-justice sermons fifty-three weeks of the year. Hillbilly grace is not far removed from the vital-energy trajectory of Tibetan Buddhist tonglen: With each in-breath, take in the pain and suffering of the universe—draw it into your heart and metabolize it there. With each out-breath, send compassion and hope and healing to all sentient beings, humble though it be in the face of the task.

           Evangelical preachers may lack enough heart opening and focused attention to turn prayers into “pings” or true “asks,” but at least they pray; they intention vibrations.

The spiritual crisis in America can’t be wished away or relegated to delusion. “The human race needs and yearns for the Left Hand of God,” says Rabbi Lerner, “ . . . . [for] the grandeur of creation [to] stand at the center of our political and economic systems and become the major realities of our daily life experience.”³⁷

 And the Left does not automatically get that by goals of world peace, fighting racial discrimination, and carbon trade-offs. The Left Hand of God is a spiritual crucible that has to be forged again and again, hour by hour, spiritually. The dilemma is not limited to Christian unitarianism. The rebellion is against all socially and politically approved deceits. Charles Eisenstein described a dark mirror—a caricature hiding unwelcome truths on both sides:

  As warring parties weaponize facts, we learn to discount all sources of information. We wonder what agenda lies behind a given “fact.” Knowing that narrative warriors select, distort, or invent facts, the canny citizen tends to ask “Who said it?” before asking “What did they say?” and then to disbelieve what they said if it serves a disagreeable party or purpose. . . .

  The rise in conspiracy theories reflects a power establishment shrouded in lies and secrets, which viciously persecutes anyone who, like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, pulls aside the veil.³⁸

   He speaks of a “formative ideal. . . healing rather than victory. . . .” He adds poignantly, “I call it the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”³⁹

   We know, but we have forgotten how to get there.

For a time, the New Left broke from old Lefty tropes. In the spirit of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” activists took conscious breaths. They embraced God’s Left Handedness: the Zen governance of Moonbeam Jerry Brown, the Christ-Buddha teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, the erotic grace of communes, the mystical rites of Hasids, Navajos, and Sufis. They painted in sand to Philip Glass’ elegies, conducted dharmas at Big Sur, performed Dances of Universal Peace, drank and smoked curative entheogens, engaged in psychic exploration and cosmic consciousness, practiced permaculture, herbs, and goats—at least some did.  It was a post-modern “Dreamtime”: “I hope someday you’ll join us / And the world will be as one.”⁴⁰

 Ultimately the “woke” steered them back into the “Symbionese Liberation” imperative, from shootouts to smash-and-grab mobs—whatever was necessary to topple the colonialist pigs. Anything less, Lerner noted, was deemed “naïve and utopian”⁴¹—that is, anything less than ideological purity and collective white responsibility for the deaths of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor was “white privilege.” 

Endnotes

35. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 129-130, 1610-1611.

36. Francis La Flesche, The Osage Tribe, Rites of Chiefs; Sayings of the Ancient Men, BAE 36^th Annual Report to the Smithsonian, 1915, p. 104.

37. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 18.

38. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

39. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

40. John Lennon, “Imagine,” Imagine, Apple, 1971.

41. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 20.

6. UNSAFE OPERATING SPACE

Some two or three million years ago, hominids civilized the three-billion-year-old natural world. With no extant blueprint, the biosphere civilized itself, though it took an Ice Age, glacier-melt, and the emergence of language and stone tools, plus battles eliminating eight or so competing sapient species.

Social behavior was the software, while primate anatomy was the hardware: gene drift under Darwinian selection. Making space for a prefrontal cortex took something like a thousand centuries of allometric redesign among affiliated hominid bands; cranial space for a socializable thought machine was wrested from the simian jaw. Anthropologist Terrence Deacon provided an elegant diptych: “Physically we’re just another ape, mentally we’re a whole new phylum of organisms.”⁴²

Problem was, chordate forces were locked in hominid ganglia. We orient in the way fish and squids do. We are still a hive, a swarm, a hunting pride. We run reptile brains on mammalian hormones, leading to ever more elaborate firesticks and fortresses. Agriculture and technology didn’t annul the hunt or bride capture; they inverted and camouflaged it.

Language originated in call-and-response of hominoids brachiating through 3-D. Song systems of monkeys and apes pulled primal mind through an archenteron—the chordate canal—into throat, larynx, palate, tongue, and lips, the same pathway as mews of lizards, gulls, and cats: ‘I am hungry, I desire, I hurt.’ Human speech retains those mantras—even ordinary conversation does: we plead and rebuff under visceral diction. Even macaw cries and leopard roars are semiotic progressions from tissues and zones that are still pre-semantic, yet tremble with meaning. Chirps, growls, and squeals gradually find onomatopoeia, then phonemics, then deep syntax, then vowel drift.

Clashes of access and power got loaded into neural synapses, as hominid society reassigned and re-ciphered primate rites including hierarchies of rank and call systems among baboons and gorillas. That kept it safe, if barely, from itself. The line between Lockean civilization and Hobbesian chaos fluctuates daily with the world’s markets and spheres of power. Modernity is held together—or not—by supply chains and cryptocurrencies (they’re all crypto, meaning consensual), plus a tacit charter of species protection, victuals, and aid that can be revoked at any time by any government or cabal.

  We are at the end of the 11,000-year-long Holocene summer in which our species evolved and, with symbols and signs, built a technologically and culturally sophisticated civilization. Men and women developed institutions in custody of a relatively friendly planetary environment. During the Holocene, rivers, glaciers, currents, and winds functioned as thermostatic diodes, alternately recalling, storing, and releasing congeries of moderating molecules.

Worlds like ours are hard to achieve—see the rest of Sol’s system for examples. Not a zooid of our biology would work or even arise on airless Mars or on a planet at 99% Earth-orbit, 1% Venus-orbit.

          Who knows how many such Gaias there are in the Milky Way or elsewhere?

Hominids made channels, paddies, moats, thoroughfares, levees, spillways, railways, dams, and factories, molding megapolises, linking them by rail and electrified cords. Labor unions won middle-class lives for their rank-and-file. Prosperity spread, though not everywhere equally. Yet after a second global clusterfuck, a liberalizing elite presuming itself stable, raised us, their sprat, to believe in happy endings, conferring their progressive institutions and ideals on a post-modern arcade. One day, Africa, Asia, and planets throughout the cosmos would presumably join our confederacy. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of history was declared. A tech utopia of cars, jets, telegraphs, toasters, transistors, copiers, serums, software, xenobots, and 5-G arose. Capitalist and socialist nations converged in a chimera of infinite freedom, bubble worlds governed by politicians and marketing groups.

Though Rachel Carson warned us—and we read Silent Spring—we didn’t realize that denouement trumped adolescent horseplay.

We are now engaged in a moleculo-atomic resetting of thermostat and climate. Melting glaciers and superstorms, driven by gravity and greenhouse effects, swirl across continents and stir a new chemistry in the seas. Sewage, industrial waste, and laboratory spill-off drain into oceans. Mass-produced tchotchkes of oil-based plastics, miles of fishing nets, and molds of rubberized petroleums, trihalomethane refrigerants, and PFOAs—forever chemicals—conjugate with bacteria, worms, viruses, suntan lotions, microplastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, raw sewage, and industrial ash. This is worse than a witches’ brew, for it is unlabeled and unclaimed.

  Our Anthropocene back loop—an epoch governed by human systems—is an unsafe operating space of temporary autonomous zones.⁴³ Though Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson rocket through the edge of space, and fancy new diodes, ’bots, and mechanisms are released into the garden daily, technology cannot solve this fiasco.

When Michael Lerner brought up the eco-crisis— that even highly educated primates cannot replenish or recreate a biosphere—in conversation with a funder from the Ford Foundation interested in supporting projects (like Tikkun magazine) that could counter the growth of the political Right, she responded angrily, “Why do you have to bring God into this? Don’t you know all the destructive things done in the name of God?”⁴⁴

One could counter with deeds committed in the name of Marx, by Stalinist gulags, Red Guards in China, and the Kim family in North Korea. “Perhaps,” Lerner mused, “she forgot that I was a rabbi.”⁴⁵

She also forgot that “in the name of God” doesn’t mean God the Guy (or Gal or Trans).

In the 1999 movie Outside Providence, a bushy-headed slacker is looking at a religious poster of mystery footprints with the main character’s younger brother who is confined to a wheelchair. The slacker is a bit high and doesn’t get it—why there is only one set of footprints for a while. The boy explains, “You see, there’s this guy, and he’s looking back on his life, and he sees these two sets of footprints in the sand, like he’s been walkin’ all along with God. But then the guy looks and he notices that during the tough times, there’s only one set of prints, so the guy says to God, ‘Why did you desert me when I needed you the most?’ and God says, ‘No, dumbie, when you saw only one set of prints, that was when I was carryin’ you.’” The slacker looks long and hard, then shakes his head, chuckles, and says, ‘Whooooa. Fuckin’ God, man; he’s all right, ya know!’”⁴⁶

“Fuckin’ God” is all right. S/he is a living flare, a recognition of our own existence in a universe. Devotees of sacred energy ride shotgun for creative blasphemy and chaos magic because they want to feel their innate spirit, they want to feel the wings of archangels levitating them; they want to experience the brush of Jah’s Left Hand, and they don’t want to be belittled, mocked, and demonized for it.

Woke progressives dismiss all that. They dismiss the Tibetan Karmapa bringing vowel shifts and the rain chant to the Hopi Second Mesa, ending a drought with a puja. Language police discount exorcists, Buddhist monks, and Aboriginal elders of high degree except as surviving exemplars of anti-colonialism. They mock healers and medicine women and men as credulous quacks pulling us back to a Dark Ages. They discount the Zulu genesis of family constellations, the origin of the present Dreamtime in an Opossum Dreaming and didgeridoos, and Assyrian and Druid notes in the Christic vibration—all denounced as appropriation as if blankets and beads. 

The sense of isolation and loneliness that develops under a capital-driven, neo-Liberal, social-justice gamelan is deep and diffuse, an enervation that thirsts for any dram of relief or resolution—the sort of practices that First Nations and other indigenous peoples cultivate to lift a siege of drought or an equally arid siege of depression, doom, and dukkha, the innate unsatisfactoriness of existence. But psychic self-sabotage has become our highest art.

Eisenstein, in his own words “in a bit of a tempest right now . . .  as I write more triggering essays,”⁴⁷ curried further blowback by calling out the martyrdom of the woke:

This kind of sanctimonious assessment, which is common in left-leaning social media comment threads, mirrors exactly standard racist canards about lazy, irresponsible black people who blame the system and refuse to take personal responsibility. Both refuse to look at the conditions that generate the choices they condemn.

The relevant question here is not who has suffered more, who is the biggest victim, who is the most oppressed and therefore the most deserving of compassion. The question is rather, What are the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism, and how do we change those? We must ask this question, unless our strategy is to be in endless war against those we deem irremediably evil. . . .

Compassion isn’t the same as giving someone a free pass or allowing them to continue harming others. Compassion is the understanding of another being’s inner and outer condition. With this understanding, one can effectively change the conditions that generate harm. It is precisely the same logic that leftists use when talking about crime. Instead of waging an endless war on criminals, let’s look at the conditions that breed crime. What makes someone a drug dealer, a robber, a gang member? What conditions of trauma and poverty?⁴⁸

He asserts something that magical, healing, and spiritual systems uphold by practice: victimhood is malignant and strangling. The goal is to raise folks up so they can stand on mountains. Eisenstein adds, “It is hypocritical and pointless to call someone to greatness without believing in their greatness.”⁴⁹

Blame and weaponized snits of “you triggered me” are covert forms of agitprop. The founder of the Morehouse commune, Victor Baranco, taught that to indulge in victimhood or wretchedness was to make yourself wretched. Facilitators recited his adage in classes, “When you wake in the morning, ask, ‘What is it which I have to give?’ If it is nothing but grief, then ask, ‘To whom may I make a gift of my grief?’”

Endnotes

42. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species, p. 23.

43. Stephanie Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop.

44. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p 127.

45. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p 127.

46. Michael Corrente (director), Peter Farrelly and Robert Farrelly, script, from a novel by Peter Farrelly), Outside Providence, Miramax Films,1999.

47. Charles Eisenstein, email, December 7, 2020.

48 Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

49. Charles Eisenstein, “From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope,” charleseisenstein.org, December 2020.

7. RACE, GENDER, AND IDENTITY POLITICS

I grew up in the U.S. fifties and sixties, believing in the wisdom of Adlai Stevenson, celebrating the election of John F. Kennedy as the dawn of a new era. I identified with anti-war and Civil Rights movements, Black and Red Power. As a teen, I covered the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City for The Sullivan County (New York) Democrat: “LBJ for the USA.” Five years later, I viewed NASA’s Apollo project and moon landing as opening a hermetic as well as a scientific veil.

I read at the Kent State memorial one year after the shootings of students, sharing a podium with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan. I taught in Goddard College’s social ecology program with Murray Bookchin. I challenged the Cold War canons and consumptionism of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

  In 1973, I watched and cheered, as Bread and Puppet Theater led a humongous Uncle Sam through Plainfield, Vermont, dragging behind him a Third World nation on a chain surrounded by costumed birds, eggs, and a Richard Nixon Death Skull. On the front of his VW bus, my student Sheppard Powell had painted Nixon being hauled off at the nape by a vulture.

 Twenty years later after a long Reagan-Bush winter, I rejoiced in the nativity of the Clintons, the internet, and Free Trade; I reviled W. Bush, Darth Cheney, and the post-9/11 betrayals and deceptions; I was shocked by the ensuing surges and smokescreens. I was elated by “no red state America or blue state America” and hip-hop Michelle and Barack, then horrified by the hatching of Yeats’ rough beast and sliming of America by Mondo Q. Trump.

   Motlier histories were being performed backstage. Kennedy invaded Cuba and Vietnam. He and brother Bobby traded Marilyn Monroe back and forth like a sports car and called in the FBI to re-stage her suicide. LBJ turned out to be more dangerous and destructive than mega-maligned Barry Goldwater. Nixon ended the Vietnam War and opened China to the West. The Clintons sold out working-class America and blew off Rwanda, Somalia, and the opiate crisis. W. turned out to be an overmatched portrait painter who should have been, as Bill Maher said, the beloved bartender at the Nineteenth Hole where his bluster could do no harm. Obama ran a videogame drone force that blew up birthday parties and weddings and turned over Afghanistan to the Taliban. He also broke Libya, deported refugees with stiletto efficiency, and made himself at home on Wall Street. His administration kept Mohamedou Oud Slahi in Guantánamo an additional seven years after he was exonerated, for solely gratuitous political considerations.

Behind détente, Woodstock, glasnost, AMA health plans, social justice, supply-side economics, 401Ks, Trayvon Martin, and Black Lives Matter were Hell’s Angels, Iran-Contra, Columbine, Blackwater, Monsanto, Waco, Oklahoma City, George Zimmerman, Boogaloo Bois, and Oath Keepers. Behind the monstrosities of Trump and the Tea Party were the Freedom Brigades. Behind the hymns, sutras, and amazing grace of Barack Obama was an in absentia drone fleet and backhoes of cancel culture over the Mason-Dixon line. Behind Timothy McVeigh was the Unabomber, but behind the Unabomber was Timothy McVeigh—jail-buddy converts to each other’s heresies despite their ideological polarity. Asperger’s-ridden Kaczynski admired his mate’s macho militarism.

Behind the Central Park Five, InfoWars, Sandy Hook, Breitbart, and the Brothers Tsarnaev were Rumi, René Guénon, Jay Z, geodesic domes, Roswell, Biosphere 2, the beating of Rodney King, and the war on terror.   

  Midland factory workers, fed up with Reaganomics, voted for the Arkansas kid and his two-for-the-price-of-one First Lady. After the smoke cleared, they found themselves disenfranchised by new technologies, global trade zones, and human trafficking. They awoke to the hypocrisy of neo-Liberals pretending to be allies while feathering their own nests and selling out the proletariat, as they championed NAFTA over maquiladoras that let Mexicans find work in their own country. Post-Clinton, the Democratic Party was forever “Build Back Better”: featherbedding, kickbacks, pork, patronage, and no-bid windfalls.

It was just a matter of time before Blue States turned into politburos, while the free press of my youth—seven major dailies in New York City alone—became a multi-tongued Pravda.

 Was the experiment in democracy a blink of the eye into which I was fortuitously born? It seemed so real and abiding at the time.

Champions of identity politics mandate guilt about things over which people have no control because “if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Flagellation supplants faith. The cancel-culture Left with its white-privilege indictments tells proponents of affirmative action and multiculturalism that, as class and race heirs, they are the problem, irremediable, the source of racism as well as of a degraded environment, crony capitalism, colonialism, and planet-wide inequality—no way out, no good-will indulgences either. Lerner remarked that “at left wing gatherings one often hears people being denounced for some aspect of their being that they can’t really do much about; they are citizens of a society that has benefited from genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism, they are white, they are men, they are heterosexual . . . .

“People don’t face this kind of thing in the Right, because the sinfulness that is being denounced there is said to be universal and can be overcome . . . by the powerful act of embracing Jesus . . . . There is a path in these communities for these people to be validated. There is no such path for white heterosexual males in the Left.”⁵⁰ 

Why? Who is served by enforcing critical race theory? Certainly not grade-schoolers. If the “woke” wanted to make them more racist—bring racism back to post-racial playgrounds and school yards—they couldn’t have hatched a better scheme. Kids don’t hear the nuances; they just hear the uglies: censure, obligation, exclusion, difference. This kind of stuff kills spontaneity and good will and leads to both individual and systemic racism. It sabotages a new generation’s chance to make films and music and dances and businesses together, and redesign ecosystems and health plans—it seeds future race wars by sponsoring exclusionism, factionalism, and quotas over camaraderie and corroboree. It elects soul-less ideologues like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, Nikki Haley. 

   Critical race theory, while historically and anthropologically correct, is energetically and emotionally wrong, especially in kindergarten and third grade where it elicits the opposite of its proposed effect. Virtue-signaling is the original false flag.

Atrocities committed by slavers, their allies and enablers were not automatically perpetrated by their descendants or the descendants of later New World immigrants, many of them in flight themselves from servitude or genocide. Murder and dispossession of First Nations were crimes of the Euro-colonial agents of genocide who followed Columbus and appropriated the homelands of Native America.

  These days if you look closely, no one is any longer black or white, red or yellow, or anything. It’s a single intertribal stampede out of Africa, some with more Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. All originate from chattering, squabbling, interbreeding bonobo bands. These days, most “folks of color” are offspring of whites and something else, often multiple something-elses: mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, hexadecaroons.

   All syzygies give rise, if not to children, then ghosts of children. Family constellations form, fuse, and fission, as streams of DNA send souls down wind tunnels. Viking war parties put Scandinavian genes in their Celtic descendants. Scotch-Irish slavers passed their own as well as Yoruba and Ibo blood into rappers, hip-hop moguls, and hoops stars. On the raft of genes and genealogy, you can only have your cake and eat it too: polychrome mestizo frocks and feathers from chordate landfall on. As “linguist of color” John McWhorter pointed out, newly arrived South Korean delivery drivers are as “colored” as second-generation Harvard-educated Bahamian lawyers.⁵¹ Yes, race is a construct.

    Or race is ontological and systemic. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t teach systemic racism and critical race theory Monday and post-racial culture Thursday without many-forked a tongue.            

  Identity enforcement is identity theft. It is intended to sabotage good will within as well as across race—across and within gender and class too. It serves as back-door re-investitures of tribal cults. While pretending to go back to the era of civil-rights marches with their blowback against Jim Crow—fixing what didn’t get fixed—they evince none of that era’s original clarity or awakening.

  Now Trumpism on the Left employs the Right’s identical rhetoric and reprisals. The 2016 election empowered those folks too.  

   I would call “white guilt” and “white fragility” what they are: white power—self-appropriated license by pseudo-Left bullies to seize moral high ground and disguise their own implicit nihilism, gender provinciality, and intellectual privilege.

   Yep, White Power all! It was, initially, an academic game driven by deconstructionist philosophies: elites and educators turning critiques of racism into Teslas and time shares for themselves. Or, more accurately, it was an alliance of convenience between white liberal ideologues and watchdog bureaucrats (their race hardly matters). The ones who are already free don’t want or need liberation. The wannabes mean to stick it to them anyway.

In that regard, the NBA, WNBA, and most pop-music. art, and hip-hop venues are eons beyond Harvard or Princeton.        

With neo-Liberals in charge, no one was supposed to be taking advantage of the working class anyway, but the progressive Left has become as exceptionalist as the Tea Party, having replaced its iconicized Stars-and-Stripes with just as patriotic an anti-patriotism.

When spiritual, health, and food-security activists rallied together in 2021, Left and Right (at the Arise USA! Resurrection Tour in Hill Country north of Austin, Texas, and Belfast, Maine, for health freedom, food security, and defense of the seas and atmosphere), it was patrons of the Left who gathered on the fringe and called for censorship, banging pots and pans to try to drown out speech. A black dude, Kevin Jenkins of Urban Global Health, headlined the event inside with a lively talk on “vaccine racism” leading to audience call and response.

When Jenkins stepped outside to explain his position to the chanting crowd, folks in Black Lives Matter shirts put their hands over their ears as in “Hear No Evil.”

Point made, they removed their dukes but went back to banging pots and pans. The irony of white people in Black Lives Matter gear trying to cancel a black man showcases the burlesque of race as the defining construct. 

The issue is finally not race or even class—though, if we’re talking about systemic and individual inequality, class is way more to the point. The real issue is power, seized power by any hierarchy—white or black, castle or street, intellect or gun. Power, bullying, and ruses of “crimes against the regime” to control landscape and discussion have been wielded asymmetrically since before Genghis Khan or Alexander of Macedonia. The reptile brain is systemically un-good at sharing or redistributing.

       Endnotes

50. Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God, p. 112.

51. John McWhorter in Glenn Loury, “The Unified Field Theory of Non-Whiteness,” glennloury.substack, June 7, 2022.

8. WOKE CAMPUSES, ELITE EDUCATION, AND COLLEGE DEBT

In 2021, my alma mater, Amherst College, announced a neutral admissions policy going forward, meaning no favoritism to children of alumni and no recruiting from elite social classes (unless they are of color).

I buy into that. Legacy admissions was an unearned, unfair advantage. In fact, I have long proposed that the most expeditious route to social justice would be ending inheritance in any form. Let all equities go into a pool at death, presuming that redistribution can be administered without corruption. It can’t—nothing can—but if it could, it would be the shortest path out of the present global caste system.

Already at Amherst a classmate of mine with a prescience for markets and large commodities has established a scholarship program for Third World students. “Arthur Koenig scholars” lent a welcome Whole Earth presence to the volunteers who docented our fiftieth reunion in 2016. It was a refreshing change from the familiar prep-school vibe. Some of us also sponsored a Palestinian student at nearby Hampshire College, making him an honorary member of the class.

 So yes, ending legacy admissions was a positive change, but something more Machiavellian was in play and few were owning it.

Other cancel-culture steps were taken, sort of okay but just sort of. The Lord Jeffs were turned into Mammoths, a mascot and totem upgrade, I appreciate it both for who was cancelled (a colonial indigene-killer) and who replaced him (prehistoric elephants). But, from an opposite view, the school was named not after Lord Jeff but its own Massachusetts town. “Amherst” first appears not in the New World colonies but as a manor in the Anglo-Saxon parish of Pembury in Kent in the 1086 Domesbury Book survey following the Norman conquest of Britain. It’s a decent mix of etymologies and phonemes. Its stirring anthem finally has nothing to do with its apocryphal content (pretty much the reverse of what happened back in the day) and everything to do with a stirring melody and celebration of lost youth—a kind of “little Ivy” up-tempo Whiffenpoof Song or “parting glass.” No reason to cancel the entire traditional mantra and thread (“O, Amherst, brave Amherst”). If we started renaming towns based on strings at three and four degrees of separation, we’d have little heritage or sense of direction, either metaphorical or geographical.

Another member of our class saw a related symptom of the deeper miasm:

All the photos of sports teams thru the years have been removed from the gym. The students have reason to believe that the reason for their removal is that old sports teams do not reflect appropriate diversity. . . . My granddaughter used to enjoy looking at photos of her grandfather (me), father, mother, and uncle on the Amherst sports teams. She is proud of her legacy instead of being embarrassed by it, as [President] Biddy [Martin] suggests [elsewhere] she should be. Whether you have children or grandchildren who attended or are contemplating attending the college is not the point. Like so many changes we have witnessed under Biddy’s term, it is the lack of respect for tradition that is so offensive.

 My hope is that her replacement as president [she resigned after announcing that “acceptance to the college will not be influenced by who your parents are”] will be an Amherst graduate who can restore the school’s culture. . .  and yes, it can be accomplished with a more diverse student body (a worthy thing). But her antagonism is an affront.⁵²

She was replaced by a youngish graduate, yes, but one even more wokeish, one who made his reputation by being woke. Under the new guidelines, that was no surprise.

Yet another classmate added:

This saddens me. Perhaps the legacy provision needed to be removed: a legitimate debate. But the implementation and explanation were clumsy and insulting. As for the photos, I enjoyed them in my time, as my son did in his. Just callous, removing memories because they don’t fit the current narrative or aspiration.⁵³

It is still unclear if this was intentional “cancel culture” or, as the college insisted, routine remodeling—the photos would soon be viewable in a different format.* Probably demotion to a URL. Was that also an attempt by Amherst to minimize alumni fallout from acute wokeness, to keep the donations flowing while decimating the colonial legacy? Subsequent mailings made it clear that wokeness was the driver, transcending all other intellectual, ethical, psychospiritual, and educational auspices.

In increasing numbers for more than a decade, students and faculty at Amherst had been claiming almost daily triggering by stuff that wouldn’t have made a pin drop in the seventies. Not only were faculty being accused of racism by students, but older faculty who had presumed themselves home-free since their days of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were being attacked by new young faculty for recidivism. Everyone was being asked to admit their own systemic racism and correct it, turning recreational dialogues and discussions into war zones. Inspiration (literally breath) was being suffocated by ideologue fidelity.

At the same time, the New York Post decried Amherst’s “insane” COVID-19 rules (see NYU in the next chapter) as “upper-class virtue-signalling. . . . This is sheer lunacy: the lunacy of America’s overeducated upper castes.”⁵⁴

Overeducated and parentally indulged! Did we think of ourselves as that when we were enrolled as freshmen back in the sixties?

A friend who is a faculty member at a similar college told me she had been asked to sign a statement acknowledging herself as a beneficiary of white privilege even though she had grown up chicano and poor. She looked too “white.” A friend at a different elite college said that classrooms and dorms there had flatlined into morgues. After teaching their classes, professors couldn’t wait to hurry home before anything bad could happen. Nobody wanted to hang and schmooze or chill—you might be overheard by language police. You might also get fired for a loose comment followed by wildfire gossip and a student petition for your removal. It happened at Harvard Law, Smith, and Princeton Classics among countless high-education venues. Any old-fashioned defense melted faster than the Republican Party before red-ray Donald Trump. In fact, it was the same vector, instead from the ostensible Left rather than the pious Right.

A college freshman at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, who had worked her butt off in teen years to get into a college, was expelled for a very brief rap she did at age fifteen, a use of the N-word in a non-derogatory, actually reverential K’naan-like context, three seconds of supposed slur recorded, preserved, and transmitted on the internet by a woke stranger, and presented to the community as incriminating evidence and unforgiveable core racism.

My Amherst classmate Sid Schwab posted an online article about language police at Stanford under the heading “Sound Familiar?”

 Stanford University’s independent newspaper, The Stanford Review, reported Monday that the “Orwellian” Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is meant to address “harmful language in IT” at the university by providing alternative terms or phrases.

“Ostensibly, the goal is to make people of color and other perceived victims of historical injustice more comfortable as users of Stanford technology,” according to The Stanford Review, which put newly banned words in bold. “A cursory review of the page, however, should be shocking to any normal person for its sheer insanity.”

The newspaper, which provided a full glossary of words that should disappear within the Stanford universe, also noted that the school locked the list behind a passcode after an initial wave of criticism.

The list is divided into 10 sections: ableist, ageism, colonialism, culturally appropriative, gender-based, imprecise language, institutionalized racism, person-first, violent, and additional considerations.

Internet users, mostly conservatives, were quick to pounce on some of the word choices.

“Stanford University has lost its mind with [an] initiative to eliminate ‘harmful language’ such as ‘brave’ and ‘American,’” tweeted Fox News contributor Sarah Carter.

“Intellectual Morons formulate such crap so they can huff: ‘You just don’t understand!’” actor Adam Baldwin tweeted.⁵⁵

Commenting on Unwanted Advances, a book by feminist cultural historian Laura Kipnis, post-feminist ethnographer Daniel Pinchbeck remarked that “students were being infantilized, becoming dependent on institutional authorities to ‘protect’ them. They had become so afraid of free intellectual discourse that they saw it as something they needed to be defended against . . . .”

  He was talking not about race but sex post-#Me-Too, but intellectual fascism is category-neutral. Pinchbeck wrote:

In her book, Kipnis documents in great detail a number of outrageous Title IX cases that ruined the lives of professors and students, based on flimsy evidence in some cases, and what appear to be outright or intentional lies in others. These days, she believes academics often use Title IX complaints to undermine, smear, or even destroy colleagues and competitors. She has just released a new article on this topic: ‘Why Are Scholars Such Snitches?: The university bureaucracy has been hijacked for political grudge matches and personal vendettas.’

For Kipnis, the growth of the new university departments and federal bureaucracies designed to ferret out sexual misconduct not only negatively impact the lives of both professors and students, they also cause a chilling effect on intellectual discourse:

“The culture of sexual paranoia I’d been writing about isn’t confined to the sexual sphere. It’s fundamentally altering the intellectual climate in higher education as a whole. . . . Sexual paranoia has converted the Title IX bureaucracy into an insatiable behemoth, bloated by its own federal power grab. . . .  Paranoia is a formula for intellectual rigidity, and its inroads in campus are so effectively dumbing down the place that the traditional ideal of the university—as a refuge for complexity, a setting for the free exchange of ideas—is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear.”⁵⁶

That avalanche of platitudes on the Left is what elects Donald Trumps, Rand Pauls, and Ron DeSantises on the Right. Actress Sharon Stone spoke the obvious that most are too shy or intimidated to admit:

I think cancel culture is the stupidest thing I have ever seen happen. I think when people say things that they feel and mean, and it’s offensive to you, it’s a brilliant opportunity for everyone to learn and grow and understand each other. We all come from different ages, different cultures, different backgrounds, different things, and have had different experiences, different traumas, different upbringings, different parents, different religious backgrounds, different everything.⁵⁷

This is almost too obvious, too reassuring, and too subversive (apparently) for most to heed. Even Ms. Stone eventually jumped on the anti-health-freedom “cancel culture” train.

Amherst College of my day (1962 to 1966) was dominated by fraternity culture—there was no other attractive upper-class housing into which women were permitted. Not long after I graduated, faculty and administration broke the generational “Greek” grip and liberated frat mansions for other uses, social and academic. Soon after, women were admitted to a previously all-male student body, and the college’s makeup and curriculum were substantially diversified.

During following decades, I continued to admire, respect, and stand by Amherst, even though I never squared with its scientism, departmental arrogance, and pseudo-avant-garde anti-avant-gardism. I was an outlier alum, a loyal product of a school that represented pretty much everything I stood against. I more closely identified with the homeopathic and hermetic worldview that defined the original Amherst of Emily Dickinson’s day. That aspect of its history had been eliminated from the college website too when I last looked.

Male-bonding hierarchies were endemically tribal—an Amherst fraternity was rumored to have been the model for Animal House. But “woke” imposed a more sterile servitude than even pernicious plebe hazing. My rogue beliefs now transcend my alum admiration. 

What was once a legitimate education throughout academe has become an extravagant simulacrum for knowledge: posh passwords into new technocracy and its digital economy, racially discounted for social justice. Liberal arts—a broad swath of humanities, sciences, social sciences, and classics of literature—is as dead as Marcus Aurelius and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Philosophers, cosmologists, scholars, and artists have been replaced by well-paid popes in academic labyrinths, overseen, in fact featherbedded, by higher paid administrators to operate a sectarian corporate curriculum at tuitions well above the price of an average house in Appalachia, while the system goes on with its righteous fund-raising as if it were selflessly saving our species, and the planet as well. Even James Baldwin has been replaced by quite white Robin DiAngelo. No surprise! White self-flagellation is now tastier than Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” and “Trenchtown Rock” or Stew’s Passing Strange.

I continue to receive urgent money appeals from Amherst College that are so obviously disingenuous and self-serving they would embarrass even the Donald Trump campaign. Hiding behind social justice and higher education, administrator racketeers take their own virtue-signalling to a new level of faux self-sacrifice. What exactly are they sacrificing?

This is White Power with blacks not only welcomed but totemized. What is outlawed by all conspiring parties is spirit, imagination, and “till the sun will climb the heavens no more.” An original North Atlantic Books author of mine, poet Diane di Prima, spoke eloquently to the hidden essence: “The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.”⁵⁸ Because once everything else is up for grabs, adulterated, mandated, monetized, or gated, the imagination is all we will have left.

I am led to re-think, what did I learn back in the heyday of liberal arts? Majoring in English with a bit of classics and anthropology toward the end was not the best litmus test for the system as a whole. In retrospect, my courses were heavily influenced by the parochial opinions of my professors. Some were on my wavelength, generous in their knowledge and view, inspired and imaginative. I learned about Blake, Shelley, Carl Dreyer, Orson Welles, Thomas Hardy, the Maori, Teilhard, Hawthorne. I also got good grades from them. For essentially the same work, I got Ds from a couple of so-called masters for no reason other than that they didn’t agree with my ideas. So, what were either kind teaching and what was the school about as an institute of higher learning?

In coming years, personal quirks of literary interpretation would be replaced by deconstruction, then full wokeism—social-justice re-lensing of every sentence and subliminal intention of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain—negating pretty much the whole curriculum that looked so enticing in the Amherst Course Catalogue when viewed senior year of high school. Not to be petty (but yes!), Benjamin DeMott, the most prominent of the tenured literati there (as well as an author of mainstream fiction about adultery—and my friend Schuyler Pardee’s advisor)— propositioned his new wife senior year.

He was the first of the imperious academics, the so-called “bad guys,” that Schuy trusted.

I never took a course with him or even met him, but eleven years later he was on a humanities grants committee that was about to award me a fellowship. One of the members told me that he argued so strenuously against me, with bizarre fabrications likely from fourth-hand Amherst gossip, that he overrode all the rest with his fervor. My own disenfranchisement aside, what does that say about the authenticity of the program in my era?

If I had majored in one of the sciences instead, I might have gotten more knowledge and a stronger career path, but from a liberal-arts standpoint, the earth and sky were already indentured to the coming technocracy, not every class in every moment but in the overall meaning and purpose of erecting and equipping expensive new buildings and labs.

             Later, in Planet Medicine, I wrote about the capacity of living organisms to transform their identity and meaning—the “self-cure” contained in every healing crisis and medicinal act, the power transferred in every exchange. I analyzed vision quests, faith healing, divination, vitalistic chemistry, and ceremonies like Navaho sand-painting and Australian Aboriginal quartz subincision initiation rites. In Embryogenesis I asked: What made molecules cohere as cells? How did the cells fabricate tissues, tissues organize in layers and mold organs and organisms? Was it, as science ordained, an algorithmic by-product of thermodynamics, heat turning into information—or was there an innate intelligence at the heart of creation? These questions came later; they were nowhere in my courses, even the required science ones. They didn’t even make into later interdisciplinary programs, so how was it different from Rensselaer Polytech or a far cheaper State university?

      To embrace the great-grandchildren of shamans, medicine women, and martyrs while trashing shamanism, spirit transmission, and psi phenomena is intellectually on the level of Government Indian schools, skin-whitener, and haircuts for the descendants of Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull.

Amherst College’s new Anti-Racism Plan includes an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Its “Racial History of Amherst” Steering Committee sponsors student research into the college’s ties to slavery and the erased history of race and racism, but not its equally erased history of theosophy, transcendentalism, and naturopathy, or pretty much anything else of substance back to its founding in 1821. New research assistants and post-doc fellows reviewed early trustees and donors to Amherst’s founding endowment and found three direct ties to slavery, including slave-owning donor Israel Trask. The college is seeking reparation for descendants of his slaves (when they can find them) on the premise that their genes haven’t gotten too adulterated with those of the oppressors that they don’t look or act black enough anymore.

A self-congratulatory letter to alumni exulted about progress, assuming as well as enforcing and trying to shame alumni buy-in:

In 2022, it declared, Amherst offered admission to 1026 of 14,800 applicants, 62% of whom were “domestic students of color.” Of nine newly hired “tenure-line” faculty, seven were “faculty of color.” Two contracts were “out to Latinx faculty.” The Plan includes integrating “anti-racist content and pedagogy into existing or new courses,” re-analysis of existing curricula for racism, and fifteen faculty “offering sophomore seminars broadly focused on issues of race the next academic year.” There are many other aspects—so-called anti-racist initiatives—in the Plan, including overall institutional hiring, workshops and education on inclusion— and “learning opportunities for staff and faculty to grow in their understanding and ability to support a diverse student body.”⁵⁹

Like all roller-coasters in samsara, the plan will have positives and negatives, ups and down, legitimate beneficiaries and opportunistic abusers. Whether it serves and enfranchises more people than it exiles and disenfranchises is the reader’s call not mine. But once you start going back five and six generations, you are talking about one-sixteenth, one thirty-second, and less of DNA and, usually, no vestigial clan property. Meanwhile, the so-called systemic aspect has diffused across the planet such that ghettos, gangs, and classes have traded power, subjugation, and opportunity many times over in a turbulent species-wide tumult.

The Amherst Plan sounds so much like a Right Wing parody of critical race theory that a friend, a George McGovern delegate to the 1972 Democratic Convention, commented, “The modern university is a perfect setting for the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] Cult to take root and thrive, using the economic base provided by tuition, alumni funding, and government grants. If alumni and tuition paying parents start saying no, and state legislatures start looking at what exactly they’re funding, change may come.” 

But only if they really look and start counting. That’s how much the wheel has turned since 1962. Nobody at colleges looks anymore except over their shoulder to make sure no one of higher rank is looking at them.

This sort of dumbed-down faux activism leads to the elevation of imbeciles like Marjorie Tyler Greene and Lauren Boebert to congressional rank. On either side, it is unearned status, like anointing a donkey to be May Queen. Instead of lessening academic and political privilege, schools and political parties have made a parody of it, showing that even Porky Pig can be Dean, Ronald McDonald President.  

Cancelling the totems of “Lord Jeff” culture, yet teaching the ideology of what Biddy Martin deems, by unexamined boast, “a world-class undergraduate education” to merely a different racial mix—while self-vindicating and valorizing its own “academic excellence”—is merely going to hasten the downfall of the empire that brewed this civilizational merde a century or four ago. Then there will be no Henry Steele Commagers, Leo Marxes, Robert Thurmans, or even John McWhorters down the Mass. Pike, just products of academically correct madrasas passing on liturgies of scientistic physicalism and structural nihilism. My friend religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal diagnoses a counterphobia with its own sophistry:

“We [meaning “they”] allergically avoid all … those religious experiences that strongly suggest that quantum effects do scale up into human experience—all that mystical interconnectedness, all those entangled people who somehow instantly know what is happening to a loved one (or a beloved pet) a thousand miles away (nonlocality) or, worse yet, what is about to happen (retrocausation). Instead, we go on and on about how we are all locked into our historical contexts, how religion is only about dubious power, or bad politics, or now cognitive modules and evolutionary adaptations, how these fantastic stories are all just ‘anecdotal’ statistical flukes or perceptual delusions—anything, as long as it is depressing and boring.”⁶⁰

When politics and scientism become the prime or senior liberal arts and the raison d’etre for the rest, then it is no longer liberal arts in the inaugural sense; it is theocratic materialism, fatalist gaslighting, post-modern triumphalism, anti-class classism, decoy conscience, and neo-liberal indoctrination.

 Amherst is also “organizing an amicus brief in support of the holistic consideration of race in admissions. The brief will be filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in challenges against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.”⁶¹ 

John Harvard one-upped the former Lord Jeffs: “Harvard is vowing to spend $100 million to atone for its extensive ties with slavery. . . with plans to identify and support the descendants of enslaved people who labored at the Ivy League campus. . . . Harvard released a new report detailing many ways the college benefited from slavery and perpetuated racial inequality. . . . Harvard’s staff and leaders enslaved more than 70 Black and Native American people from the school’s founding in 1636 to 1783. . . . ‘Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and cared for Harvard students,’ researchers found. . . . [W]ell into the 19^th century, the University and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery. . . . Harvard will attempt to redress its wrongs through ‘teaching, research, and service.’”⁶²

Yes, the world would be better off if the Chinese Communist Party, British House of Lords, and Hindu castes of India, as well as all the other atonement-eligible descendants on the planet, followed suit. The fact is, with this much good will prior to Pureland or a Second Coming, who is bullshitting whom? Most of the collegiate problem lies in the trillion-plus dollars of student debt accumulated in the United States and its de facto equivalents elsewhere. Someone benefited from all that graft, as the cost of teaching biology, history, and Spanish accelerated past everything but health care in the American economy. The Educational Industrial Complex concedes nothing to its Military, Prison, Medical, and Media brethren. Editorialist Christopher Tremolgie summarized:

Politicians have failed the public regarding the student debt crisis. Too few of them have given any attention to what caused skyrocketing tuition prices — prices that still increase annually without justification or, usually, explanation. More of our country’s leaders, from both political parties, need to investigate the causes behind tuition inflation — especially the ballooning in university administrations.

The institutions that once prioritized the pursuit of knowledge and higher learning have transformed into financial racketeers. It is time we start placing the blame where it belongs. Student loan forgiveness is nice, but if nothing is done about college tuition costs, we will be in the same predicament over and over again in the future.⁶³

  Financial racketeers practicing woke White Power are teaching not Milton, Melville, Faulkner, or even Don DeLillo, but their cancel-culture aliases, and that goes for all the rest, from Thomas Aquinas to Michel Foucault. Harvard officials and Gen X to Millennial faculty like those at other institutions are trying to hold on to their salaries and perks by merely tweaking and weaponizing the dialogue and enlisting new vassals, patrons, and poltroons. 

The liberal-arts game is suddenly and stunningly dead, for it has become a neo-liberal debt-generating scene run not by the archons of our society but a top-heavy Department of Stupid. As the nation faces a shortage of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, truck drivers, flight controllers, nurses, farmers, dockers, and auto mechanics, $60,000 a year in tuition (whoever’s hide it comes out of) is an extravagance for debating tenets of race and appropriation while fine-tuning apps and business skills that can be learned with widely available software or on Zoom. If college can’t be interdisciplinary liberal arts, a critique of science, and a moral and aesthetic foundation for life, it might as well be heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.

The disease that turned scientism into a state religion has incrementally replaced Amherst’s courses in empirical inquiry with departmental dogmas. Technology is a powerful driver. Yantras, icaros, and runes that were marginally venerated once, as background culture and symbol, are now either shelved under appropriation or relativized out of existence as relics of the Dark Ages. Woke plus technocracy leaves no one to wake its own bureaucrats.

In the seventies, I taught in the waning years of an experimental residential college. Goddard’s genius wasn’t the classroom; it was the negation of the classroom. Accreditation was a scam, but a scam more radical and prophetic than the academic bureaucracy it deceived. By then, only the thinnest of lines, in fact none at all, separated a college from a parody of college. State Department guests from Somalia and Eretria knew—they studied glass-blowing and left with degrees.

The supposed beneficiaries of Amherst’s moral awakening know too. Mea culpas of “white fragility” don’t enhance post-racial culture or cross-racial friendship; they demean and manner them; they demonize jiving and offhand hijinks until there are only actionable crimes for peeping toms and rats to report and language police to enforce.

The war lies deep in us, and it is not just one war. The faces of God fission as they encounter human psyches. These resonate from feudal baronies to Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms and the tribes that spawned our race-and-gender landscape.

 Babylon is not so easy to overthrow, but I say “Jah” anyway. I say, “Rastafari.” I say Ghost Dance, Zulu magic, Boyds for Praise, Verdell Primeaux, Young Grey Horse, Jaime Torres, People of the St. Croix River, Pangolin Dreaming, Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers.

Endnotes

52. Scott Wilson, Amherst Listserve, October 21, 2021.

53. Malcolm Smith, Amherst Listserve, October 22, 2021.

54. Matthew Walther, “Amherst College’s insane COVID rules are all about upper-class virtue-signaling,” New York Post, September 1, 2021.

55. Brooke Leigh Howard, “Stanford’s ‘Harmful Language’ List Mocked for Sheer Insanity, Daily Beast, December 20, 2022.

56. Daniel Pinchbeck, Facebook post, May 8, 2022. This is a teaser for his Substack essay: “Is Sexual Hysteria the New Communist Threat?” Internal quote from Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus.

57. “Sharon Stone Calls Cancel Culture the ‘Stupidest Thing I Have Ever Seen,’” Yahoo Entertainment/People, March 26, 2021

58. Diane Di Prima, “Rant” in Pieces of a Song, 1990.

59. Biddy Martin, “Anti-Racism Plan Update,” Letter to Amherst College Alumni, April 29, 2022.

60. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion p. 360.

61. Biddy Martin, “Anti-Racism Plan Update,” Letter to Amherst College Alumni, April 29, 2022.

62. Collin Binkley, “Harvard Pledges $100M to Atone for Role in Slavery,” Bangor Daily News, April 30-May 1, 2022, p. D2.

63. Christopher Tremoglie, “Student loan forgiveness is nice — nicer would be holding colleges accountable for the debt crisis,” Washington Examiner online, April 29, 2022.

9. HEGEMONIES

For a long time, I didn’t prioritize race, gender, or ethnicity. I chose a psychospiritual arc over a political one. At Amherst junior year, I veered to a Stan Brakhage film showing rather than a Civil Rights meeting, literally changing course and life agenda on my walk across campus. My childhood friend Phil Wohlstetter turned the opposite way. That’s how he ended up getting arrested in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s coup. On the internet in the late aughts, he confessed his deeper heritage and entitlement, “My father was Jewish. My mother was Catholic, and later Presbyterian. What does that make me? A ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ as right-wing nationalists used to say? In Hitler’s eyes, I’d be a Jew. That is my Platonic ‘essence’; the rest of me is ‘accident. . . .’”

His father was also a Wall Street whiz kid, his mother a Ziegfeld Follies dancer.

“‘A woman once called me a ‘self-hating Jew,’” his post continued. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said.  ‘Only half of me is a self-hating Jew, the other half is an anti-Semite.’”⁶⁴

  A decade later, Phil brought Pakistani American Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, to Seattle’s Red May festival of which he was a co-founder. Contextualizing political theoretician Wendy Brown, Haider pointed out the solecism of identity claims without a grounding in a critique of capitalism, which invariably end up “ascribing a bourgeois, masculinist idea as its measure. . . . The white male identity is enshrined with its status as neutral, general, universal.”⁶⁵ Likewise the progressive liberal who always marched, in spirit if not in deed, for civil rights and social justice. “He” is enshrined by the same shallow acts and entitlement that pretend to dis-enshrine race and gender privilege. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It can turn a black man into an honorary white in a heartbeat—Donald Trump did it to Herschel Walker in Georgia during the 2022 Election cycle, and he ran more white than most whites. It doesn’t work quite reciprocially, as buster Tom MacDonald rapped:

Heard ’em claiming if a white man braids his hair
And likes rap, he’s appropriating culture
But if a white man acts too white he’s white trash
He’s a racist, he’s a bigot, he’s a monster. . . . ⁶⁶

          According to Haider, charges of white entitlement and privilege—whether from whites or blacks—come from the same “false universality of hegemonic identity”⁶⁷ as the “crimes” they purport to indict. The faux-neutral agenda of white moralism decimates its own twentieth-century affinity groups first, then the autonomy of its own political identity and spiritual freedom, e.g., “the right to build and define political theory and practice”⁶⁸ according to who one is rather than who one is told to be or shamed or gaslighted into being. It’s a full-service wrecking ball.

Real “identity politics” is a class-conscious, gender- and sexuality-affirming code like the corroboree proposed by Boston’s Combahee River Collective. It blows up any race or gender orthodoxy.

Race and gender are a rainbow not a binary. I honor “trans” to the skies and am obviously opposed to the patriarchal agendas of pro-family think tanks with their ploys of controlling women for the benefit of males (and the Right Hand of God). Yet, at the same time, I think it is inane to let testosterone-based organisms break athletic records set by estrogen-based organisms. What is the point of gender (or weight) classes in the first place if not to enforce even-handed competition? What about Pleiadeans who arrive with Jovian-gravity skills? Should they wipe out all Homo sapiens track, swimming, and weightlifting records? Of course, I am being facetious, but it doesn’t change the fact that Homo sapiens has few reliable class categories. If we eliminate those, we might as well throw out the clock and rulebook too.

I also agree with fantasy novelist J. K. Rowling that rape by a transgendered MTF (male to female) or transvestite is still rape by penis.⁶⁹ Politics of gender imposes desires that can never be expressed socially or libidinally because they can only be expressed as something else. People’s drives may not even be lifetime-bound; they may pick up their desires and dysphorias psychically, telepathically, and reincarnationally. 

Conducting sexual and chemical surgery on depressed teens under bubble fashions and peer pressure is suicide by mandate. Give boy and girls time to find themselves and get a few hard knocks under their belts, learn how to sort their primal traumas from ambient whiplash. 

Gen X philosopher Maggie Nelson, writing about the work of Spanish gender-and-identity philosopher Paul Preciado, proposed that “we are all wittingly or unwittingly subjects of a new post-Fordist [meaning post-Motown] economic order called ‘pharmacopornism’—a fusion of pharmacy and sexuality encompassing everything from Viagra to synthetic hormones to SSRIs to antipsychotics to IVF to sex work to the Pill to Grindr to mail-order brides to internet porn. . . . [O]ur desires, subjectivities, and bodies feed the pharmacopornagraphic machine, and are in turn fed and shaped by it.”⁷⁰

I would add GMOs, CRSPR, chemtrails, graphene oxide, neuralinks, and gain-of-function spikes—in sum, geoengineered transhumanism and synthetic biology—but I will get to that in the next chapter.

Nelson dubbed this technophiliac farrago “capitalism’s latest iteration,” proposing that “Preciado’s stance is essentially a Foucauldian one: there is no way out of the pharmacopornographic trap—you are in it, by virtue of being a desiring, biopolitical subject”; She cited feminist physicist Karen Barad: “[A]ll matter ‘feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers,’ [so] there may truly be no such thing as ‘an object that has no wish. . . .”⁷¹

Sex will always be sex—a chordate heritage. The desires change with hormone fluctuation and late-onset gene activations, so it’s unclear where or if metamorphosis stops. Better not to splice the butterfly out of the worm before the worm know what it is to fly.

The director of one transgender-questioning think tank was kicked off Twitter for hate speech after he challenged “the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of minors suffering from gender dysphoria.”He wondered what was hateful about his statement. “I was calling for an end to the violence being perpetrated on these children. Another example of the upside-down world of the woke left, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and protecting children from sexual abuse is violence.”⁷²

The problem arises when commodity and ideology take over from the actual biology they purport to liberate. Conflating biogenetically based gender dysphoria with pop transgender fashions plants rabbit holes of irreversible, sometimes fatal decisions for teens who are in swirls of hormone activation when nothing about life is particularly clear. Buck Angel, transsexual pioneer and porn star, pulled no punches. A 59-year-old with gender dysphoria who identified as “a transsexual man,” he told Fox News that when he began transitioning thirty years ago, there was a system and structure that ensured he was certain about his gender identity. He said that that process, to children’s detriment and damage, has since deteriorated.

“Now we have trans with no gender dysphoria, no need for mental health care, self ID, affirmation therapy. . . . That says to me on some level, some form of indoctrination.”

 That is, it is viewed as little different from tattoos and body piercings, as if a more daring, radical, sexy variant.

“Angel, who said he never felt female . . .  was one of the first in Los Angeles to use hormones to transition. He eventually became . . .  an advocate for self-acceptance with a mission to re-define gender. . .

“I’m an elder in a community I helped build,” said Angel, who [has] faced significant blowback. . . . “Now I’m being told that I’m old and antiquated.

“Our community is failing our community,” he added. “We’re not being loving and we’re not being caring. We’re being weird. . . . I see a vast, huge desire to fast track, for lack of a better term, these children into this space of trans kids and put them on puberty blockers. I personally believe blocking puberty could be disastrous. . . .”

The desire to fast track reflects the speed and aesthetics of a TikTok world rather than the slow-moving assimilations and internalizations of biology. No doubt bilateral gender suppresses multi-layered chromosomal and somatoemotional identities. It creates social sexual confusion for young people caught in nondual ideations where desire and peer pressure clash. Yet faddist transgender surgeries are punitive and irrevocable in a a way that breast or penis enhancements, face lifts, and nose jobs aren’t. Gender should be no more recreational than suicide.

 “This isn’t a game, and it’s not something I can pick or choose,” Angel concluded. “Once you choose this life and do this, what I did, there really is no turning back.”⁷³

 Likewise, don’t bury white boys in sand up to their heads in order to get them to renounce white privilege and systemic racism. Yes, this happens in high Hollywood circles. 

Endnotes

64. Philip Wohlstetter, “One State/ Two States/ Democracy/ The American Public Sphere,” Columbia Yahoo Groups, 2009.

65. Asad Haider, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” Red May (Seattle), YouTube, May 27, 2018.

66. Tom MacDonald, “Brainwashed,” YouTube, August 13, 2021.

67. Asad Haider, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” Red May (Seattle), YouTube, May 27, 2018.

68. Asad Haider, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” Red May (Seattle), YouTube, May 27, 2018.

69. Ian Haworth, “‘The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman’: J.K. Rowling Slams Scotland Police for Move to Record Male Rapists as Women Based on Self-Identity,” The Daily Wire, December 13, 2021.

70. Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, pp. 154-55

71. Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, pp. 155 and 163.

72. Jon Brown, “Twitter suspends pro-family think tank director after tweet opposing ‘chemical castration’ of children,” Yahoo News, December 15, 2021.

73. Teny Sahakian, “Transsexual pioneer criticizes modern trans activists, says they’re indoctrinating kids: ‘This isn’t a game’,” Yahoo News, May 23, 2022.

10. PUNISHMENT, ATONEMENT, AND WETIKO

In June 2016, accounts of the so-called Stanford rapist streamed across mainstream media reinforcing chatter on the internet. Brock Allen Turner, a nineteen-year-old freshman on the college swim team, seized a window of opportunity, twenty-two-year-old Chanel Miller lying unconscious behind a dumpster. He didn’t think that she was injured or dying, just drunk and fair game.

He did not foresee an advancing #Me-Too buzzsaw. Miss Miller’s testimony decimated his fabrications, then his facile pretexts of self-forgiveness.

Turner was a coward and a cad, but demonization of him came at the cost of more tangled chains of causation in a culture of online dating, grooming, hazing, gaslighting, and incel blowback. A new lynch mob meant to feed him to the Prison Industrial Complex and impose, if possible, a lifetime sentence on the clueless, zombified lad. Extended blowback included vilification of a liberal judge who went light and a lethal boycott of an all-girl indie band named Good English because one of its members sought clemency for a high-school friend.

On Facebook, I called this behavior Talibanesque, pointing out that “some arguments on the good guys’ side of the equation are skewed: a bloodthirsty preference for punishment over redemption, a wrenching of an event out of any context, and a disregard for the roles played by females in today’s soul-less dating and hooking-up world.”⁷⁴

 A friend (also in real life) disagreed: “No punishment is too harsh. It’s time to say collectively, ‘Enough is enough.’”⁷⁵

 But what does “enough is enough” mean, for our children and their children, for anyone who needs to find love after every crime of the social body has been outed, punished, and seemingly excoriated? Given the pantheon of cads, hunger games, genders, power prerogatives, language cops, and outright sociopaths, how can kids be curious or vulnerable when love is a matter of who has the right and for whom sex is a privilege that cannot be claimed as long as someone else is compromised or denied? Sentences of ostracism without parole place society outside its own vectors of formation. They hide everyone’s secrets. Those who have committed no overt transgressions carry their precursor energies and have committed them: as fantasy and through inattention, unexamined propensities and ideations, and by erotic identification with their own shadow. However moral and ethical they rate themselves, they can’t purge civilization nor can they repeal collective semiosis.

In a poem called “Hegel,” LeRoi Jones, the future Amiri Baraka, spoke prophetically in a more innocent time:

    Pushed to the wall / we fall away from each other / in this heresy. Dispute each other’s / lives, as history. / Or the common speech / of disaster, lacking a face or name, we give it / ours. And are destroyed by the very virtues / of our ignorance. . . . I am not saying, / “Let the state fuck / its faggots,” / only that no fag / go unfucked, for purely impersonal / reasons.⁷⁶

              A more sympathetic Facebook “friend” responded to my post: “There is something just as ‘wrong’ in our collective response to the social process of learning about and discussing events and/or people as there is in the rape itself. You might reasonably ask how could this be, when the initial act was so vile?

“It has to do with its long-term results, and its ethical logic. And also with what one values and hopes for in our lives. By carrying out a collective ritual degradation of a young guy who did a vile thing, do we rise or fall as a society? Have we healed anything? Have we helped other young guys understand and fix the tangled nasty in their heads that makes rape possible?

  “The collective degradation lets us feel virtuous, but are we virtuous? Would wise and healthy people carry out this kind of social process?

   “Or are we just letting our own unresolved inner violence act out in public?”⁷⁷

     A Vermont friend from the early seventies, poet Sharon Doubiago, added: “Thanks, Richard. It took a lot for me to applaud Miller’s narrative, as I did, because I am so opposed to our prison system. There are profound, complex contexts—personal, familial, social, historical—of sexual violations. In my long poem, “The Visit,” I speak of the privacy of the pedophile: ‘we guard as sacred, / his vulnerability, deep fragility / our sons, our brothers, our father, our lovers / and he hates us for this.’”⁷⁸

 Don’t we ever, and doesn’t he too? We see the consequences of denial throughout society and the untoward intimacies it breeds. One-time Clintonista Monica Lewinsky added her own hue to the rainbow of desire, ambiguity, and asymmetric power. The fact that a nation’s obsession with her helped blind it to gathering signs of 9/11’s jihadist attacks shows the degree to which misplaced concreteness conceals both the forest and the trees. Lewinsky’s initial clash was between self-sabotage and personal freedom. She wrote:

I’ve lived for a long time in the House of Gaslight, clinging to my experiences as they unfolded in my 20s and railing against the untruths that painted me as an unstable stalker and Servicer in Chief. An inability to deviate from the internal script of what I actually experienced left little room for re-evaluation. I cleaved to what I “knew.” So often have I struggled with my own sense of agency versus victimhood. In 1998, we were living in times in which women’s sexuality was a marker of their agency—”owning desire.” And yet, I felt that if I saw myself as in any way a victim, it would open the door to choruses of “See, you did merely service him.”⁷⁹

Her right to her own experience is a different freedom: one of agency and desire. She has a right to have been where she was, in her own passion play or, if you prefer, phenomenology, impervious to violation or ritual reductionism and vilification by others, individually and as either the public collective or opposition exploitation. The same would be true of her opportunistic lothario. Each experienced the mystery of erotic play under asymmetric conditions, a form of kink and tantra.

Because Chanel Miller had no such choice or volition, #MeToo became her collective voice, the outcry of women throughout civilization, addressing what Lewinsky calls “the implications of power differentials,” in her case “between a president and a White House intern.”⁸⁰

Both designs, collaborating and taking advantage, run simultaneously on parallel tracks. Maggie Nelson interpreted the complex dialectic behind competing political and personal ambivalences, “I suspect [Lewinsky] is somewhere preserving the part of her experience that refuses to be embalmed or explicated—the part that’s privately held, as so many of our intimate memories are, as an inscrutable engram we retain the right never to fully diagnose, justify, or understand.”⁸¹

That also encompasses health freedom, the right to build and define political theory and practice, and freedom from the language police.

Facile power prerogatives run the gamut. On Sunday August 23^rd, 2020, self-proclaimed “thought-criminal” Richard Spencer, coiner of the term “alt-right,” tweeted, “I plan to vote for Joe Biden and a straight Democratic ticket. . . . The liberals are clearly more competent people. . . .”⁸² He later added, “I’m on Team Joe. The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster, but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end. . . .” He concluded, “To hell with Libertarian ideology. I’m a Libertarian when I want to be.”⁸³ 

       Team Joe and the Bidenistas responded with a dog whistle similar to that of Republican Senators fearing extradition as RINOs: “We disavow your endorsement; you are part of the vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks. What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% unwelcome here.”⁸⁴

           Fatuous DINO blowback with Trumpian hyperbole.

Self-righteous liberals dwell in Stupidville cross-tracks from MAGA-waving cultists. Do they think that they represent anything more than fake racial equality, fake income sharing, fake sustainability, fake prison reform, and bogus justice for all?

By that yardstick, Kamala Harris is the Left Wing’s Sarah Palin. Yes, she is better educated (trained in a District Attorney’s office) and multiracial—a decisive prosecutor in her demesne—but she is also a politically generated cipher from a Bay Area cloud chamber, no match for the Putins and Xis of the world. The Dems will try to keep their identity-politics gesture on “seen not heard” status while they hope Alex Jones’ euphemistic “Presidential corpse” stays reanimated. 

  Even the Green New Deal is corporate smoke and mirrors in collusion with the Chinese coal industry, utility power corridors, transnational carbon arbitragers, frackers, and high-tech sea miners.

  What was overlooked by the Bidenistas was the degree to which the liberally educated Richard Spencer (prep school, Colgate, Universities of Virginia and Chicago) understood the nuances of post-reality deconstructionism. A calculated martyr, he was arrested in Budapest for challenging Hungarian ultraconservative strongman Viktor Orbán while sporting a Hitler haircut and shooting for “the meme to end all memes.”⁸⁵

 I posted the following on Facebook:

 This was a missed opportunity, though par for the fatally polarized climate. Other options would have been: “We’re glad he’s evolving, and we hope he continues to evolve. We are against what he stood for, but we accept that he’s a human being with a possibility of growth and redemption.” Or “As a voter, we welcome him, we welcome all voters. We disavow the movement he represented.” Or “When even one of the founders of the alt-right recognizes the incompetence of Donald Trump and prefers Joe Biden, you know how dangerous to the country a second Trump term would be.”

    Most Americans want to see the rhetoric turned way down and our common humanity recognized and honored. . . . When people are suffering, they use concepts to which they have access to express their sense of exile and pain, Spencer included. Now is the time to extend healing, not indulge further dehumanization. If Biden wins, he will need to calm the inevitable tempest, and he might as well start by peace-making where it’s easy. If Spencer is legitimate, he could be a bridge and an ally. No votes are won by preening for the choir and dueling epithets.”⁸⁶

I got accord but also blowback:

You can’t be serious, dude. Engage a neo-Nazi in political discourse? By the way, Hillary was right, they were deplorable, they ARE deplorable. Their racism has no capital in a democratic society. They don’t matter. The only thing that matters is an acknowledgment that all white people accept responsibility for pulling the trigger that violated the corpus of Jacob Blake, Jr.⁸⁷

Okay. Then what next? 

My author, Penobscot elder and indigenous-rights attorney Sherri Mitchell (Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset), went a few layers deeper:

 We are all carrying grief, a deep unimaginable grief that impacts how we receive and connect with one another. It is a cumulative emotional and spiritual wound that results from the history of violence that we all share. It doesn’t matter if we come from an oppressor population, an oppressed population, or if our ancestors simply witnessed the violence and destruction of oppression: we all carry the imprint of that wound in our souls. This creates a barrier that prevents us from being able to truly see one another, meet one another, and connect with one another. . . .

When our trauma goes unhealed . . . it only allows us to see the obscured vision of our wounds. If we carry the hidden wound of the oppressor, there is often an inherent sense of guilt that exists in the forefront. This guilt also creates an image within our minds of who the other is, and what they need from us. If our image of who they are and what they need doesn’t match their true image, then we become confused and no longer know how to behave. . . .

 It takes incredible courage for us to meet ourselves and one another in truth, with unconditional openness and acceptance. But, if we can find that courage, if we agree to come together and remain conscious of our wounds and triggers, without prodding or poking at them, then we can invite our shadowed aspects into the light. If we can create this safe place for one another, then we can remain together in the presence of our shadows without fear, and allow ourselves to fully emerge. This not only opens each of us to deeper aspects of ourselves and one another, it also creates a space for deeper awareness to emerge.⁸⁸

Indigenous societies require atonement. Thieves and murderers must replace, restore, and sometimes become who and what they have taken. In early bands and tribes, “psychosis” denoted “psychic power” as well as “cognitive and emotional abusiveness.” Clan members could not let its carriers dwell among them, nor could they risk turning them into vengeful spirits. The tribe had to hold the individual, the individual be held by the tribe. For the same reason, tot and teen soldiers, dragooned into genocidal militias, cannot be left ciphers without a tribe—beasts of no nation—or no one is safe.

              Algonquians construed murder, piracy, and rape as states of phobia, hysteria, and possession—our words, not theirs—conditions to be exorcised and healed. They called them wetiko or windigo, Algonquian memes derived from observing cannibalism in harsh winters, then repurposing the word as a descriptor of general sociopathy. Buddhist and Jungian teacher Paul Levy reapplied it to the modern global crisis.

            In this disease state, individuals, societies, institutions, political parties, and nations excuse or even valorize their own cannibalistic and narcissistic tendencies at the cost of the destruction of the planet and the web of life. Blowing up coral reefs to get at fish is about as wetiko as you can get. In Indonesian waters now, colored plastics mimic the creatures they have replaced. Meanwhile, Russian tanks bombard Ukrainian cities. Myriad other examples haunt our wetiko-infested world.

          “Wetiko” morphophonemically drifts into “windigo” in the Ojibwa dialect and into “wintiko” in Eastern Powhatan. Its proto-Algonquian root, “wi-nteko-wa” shares a source with a bird, probably an “owl,” likely for its nightly predation and ghostlike appearance. Wetiko/windigo variations stretched from the pre-Columbian forests of Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes and Wisconsin and, in different forms, the Western ocean. It was widely recognized as windigoo, widjigo, weejigo, wentiko, wintsigo, etc., with a plural of windegoag or windikouk. Windegoag reeked of winter, famine, starvation, and the North Wind.⁸⁹

In all its derivations, wetiko is an insatiable hunger and greed with cannibal and necrophiliac overtones—consumption without boundary or moral compass. An unnamed shaman put it this way: “Anything beyond what we need is poison. It can be power, laziness, food, ego, ambition, vanity, fear, anger or whatever.”

The Western diagnostic manual will not and cannot recognize a condition that pervades and overrides not only its encapsulated disease categories, medically approved complexes, and commoditized illness states, but also its own sanctioned means to treat them. But the emaciated giant honors no boundary, nor do we know how to avoid possession, contamination, and vampiric enlistment by a self-created golem. It emanates throughout Prison Industrial, Military Industrial, Medical Industrial, Surveillance Industrial, and educational and religious complexes. Having taken on the form of civilization at large, it now affects doctors as well as their patients, good guys as well as baddies.

Wetiko has become the ultimate colonialist, conquistador, and hexer, posing wealth and power as the senior goals of existence while leading people into a cannibal state of greed with a concomitant deadening of the heart that brings an incapacity to feel actual love, grief, or empathy. Wetiko psychosis is dangerous to everyone.  

When former Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein was brought before the judiciary in his walker, he had morphed into an archetypal Prometheus chained to a rock, his liver eaten out by a crow, only to regrow and be eaten again the next day by the same or a different bird. His court trial exposed heinous acts—not just rapes but intimidations, decimation of careers, threats to have aspiring actresses murdered if they snitched on him. Weinstein was possessed by wetiko. Yet to try to wring more pain out of his body and mind was just as wetiko.

Watching this on t.v. at ninety-five years, my stepmother Bunny conceded the loss of worlds she had known. “Richard,” she said, “everything we do now is ugly.”

One has to find a way to salvage the individual from his condition as well as his acts. Otherwise, it’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, the Capeman singing “Adios Hermanos,” and the trial of Derek Chauvin.

       Endnotes

74. Richard Grossinger, Facebook, June 11, 2016.

75. Gary Aspenberg, Facebook, June 12, 2016.

76. LeRoi  Jones, “Hegel,” in Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, p. 23.

77. Bill Eichman, Facebook, June 12, 2016

78. Sharon Doubiago. Facebook, June 12, 2016 and The Visit, Wild Ocean Press, 2015.

79. Monica Lewinsky, “Emerging from the ‘House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #Me-Too,” Vanity Fair, March 2018.

80. Monica Lewinsky, “Emerging from the ‘House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #Me-Too,” Vanity Fair, March 2018.

81. Maggie Nelson, On Freedom, p. 121.

82. Sonam Sheth, “‘Absolutely repugnant’: Biden’s campaign forcefully disavows an endorsement from neo-Nazi Richard Spencer,” Business Insider, August 24, 2020.

83. Chris Jewers, “White supremacist Richard Spencer votes for Joe Biden as he tweets, ‘To hell with libertarian ideology,’” Daily Mail, November 4, 2020.

84. Sonam Sheth, “‘Absolutely repugnant’: Biden’s campaign forcefully disavows an endorsement from neo-Nazi Richard Spencer,” Business Insider, August 24, 2020.

85. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 83.

86. Richard Grossinger, Facebook, August 25, 2020.

87. Mark Fisher, Facebook, August 25, 2020.

88. Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions, pp. 55, 64, 70-71

89. Richard Grossinger, “Paul Levy’s Conversion of First Nations Cannibalism to Global Sociopathy,” Afterword to Paul Levy, Undreaming Wetiko: Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus.

         11. THE INCIDENT

I know. I experienced cancel culture directly when Lindy’s and my five-decades-long publishing company was lost.

This is a big story for me. It will always be a big story, lifetimes from now. It would have to be. When you and your partner work for fifty-five years to create an archive and then watch it get dismantled, seemingly without respect and remorse, it is a life-defining lesion.

This is not a simple story either, so I want to confine my telling of it here to its cancel-culture implications and my own depression. To my mind, “social justice” has been widely appropriated as a cover for forms of activity, having little to do with the marginalized people it purports to serve or with reversing systemic racism. It is, however, an effective strategic use.

My “incident” meshes with similar ones involving college professors, publishing executives, journalists, and blue-collar managers. What you will read is my subjective account of a complex event that has many facets. Readers should seek the counter-narrative, draw their own conclusions. In fact, I hope that some folks audit me on this. Everyone is a hero in their own story. What am I missing? Am I an innocent victim or did I commit crimes to which I am not owning up or don’t recognize from entitled myopia. There is always a counternarrative. We are always missing something. That’s how we grow.

Everything I say henceforth is, in the Buddhist sense, “view” or, as playwright Arthur Miller vernacularized, “the view from the bridge.” It is my bridge, my view, and there are as many bridges as there are people and views.

Lindy and I began our publishing modestly and inadvertently as sophomores at Amherst and Smith Colleges in 1964. A detailed account appears in my book New Moon: A Coming of Age Tale.* Initially our journal Io (named after the inner moon of Jupiter) was a medley of literature and the occult. Then in 1967 while we were newly married and living in Ann Arbor, we assembled an alchemy-themed issue based on a work of our mentor at the time, poet Robert Kelly. The Alchemy Issue came out at the start of the first counterculture and took off at once, getting recognition in the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac. That expanded our subscriber and bookstore base and making it possible to keep publishing without the college funds that launched us. Curating issues on diverse topics combining ethnography, myth, and literature, we put out 23 issues in 11 years, turning an annual into an irregular (as libraries re-catalogued us). Themes included Ethnoastronomy, Oecology, Dreams, Baseball, four Earth Geography Booklets, Mind Memory Psyche, Biopoeisis, Vermont, and two Olson-Melville Sourcebooks.

During those ten years, I went to graduate school in Michigan in anthropology, Lindy in English; I did ethnographic fieldwork with fishermen in downeast Maine; and we both taught at the University of Maine in Portland and Goddard College in Vermont.

In 1974, sponsored by the Vermont Arts Council, we applied to a new National Endowment for the Arts program for publishing. We named our press North Atlantic Books, partly for regionality—five straight years then (and counting) in Maine and Vermont—and partly in acknowledgment of Ed Dorn’s epic poem “North Atlantic Turbine”: “. . . the turbine is only movement, / the current of the Atlantic swirl . . . / continents break before it / they pull apart . . . .” That was our intent, a swirl beyond history, a turbine of truth.

For its first few years, the press was purely literary, mostly poetry, and grant-supported. We published books solely on Arts Endowment grants. Authors included Diane di Prima, Bernadette Mayer, Gerrit Lansing, Theodore Enslin, Bobby Byrd, and Robert Kelly. In 1977 Lindy and I left Vermont and teaching careers and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area without jobs and two young kids. Publishing became a luxury as tried to earn a living, although the first Io anthology, Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life,” a literary and cultural collection I co-edited with University of Delaware professor Kevin Kerrane, was such a success in 1978 that we sold it to Doubleday (where it became Baseball Diamonds) and bought six months Bay Area survival after unemployment checks ran out.

For a while, Lindy did arts-management jobs, then worked briefly for Shambhala Publications before putting in over a decade teaching technical writing and ethics in the engineering school at Cal/Berkeley. During that time, I got advances from Doubleday, Sierra Club, Shambhala, and Avon to write books on alternative medicine, astronomy/cosmology, and embryology.

In 1980 we incorporated North Atlantic Books as a nonprofit in order to continue getting Arts Endowment grants without a fiscal agent taking thirty percent. Because of technical requirements too picayune to detail, we created an anthropological society and donated the press to it. Nonprofit status got us a quick three-year grant for multicultural distribution under sponsorship of novelist Ishmael Reed. That included a half-salary for me and bought some more time while I continued to look for an interdisciplinary college teaching job I never found.

Three years after we received nonprofit status, Arts grants dried up, but writing Planet Medicine had put me in the heart of the alternative-medicine world. Holistic health and psychospiritual modalities gradually replaced avant-garde literature. Many of the books came naturally from my taking courses and trainings and recruiting my teachers. With my book advances and being the one who stayed home for the kids’ return from school, I had lots of time. I studied homeopathy, bioenegetics, shiatsu, Lomi, Jungian dream analysis, rebirthing, Breema, craniosacral therapy, polarity, and Feldenkrais. I found authors in all of them. A day-long intensive in Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and three weekend intensives in Continuum micromovements with Emilie Conrad helped me built somatics lists because I not only learned the systems first-hand but met practitioners of various modalities taking master classes.

Our initial books and Planet Medicine itself led to other authors, several of them founders of their own systems. These led to other authors and systems along with their students, colleagues, and friends.

My t’ai chi classes similarly led to practitioners and teachers: Cheng Man-Ch’ing, Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Paul Pitchford, Terry Dobson, Peter Ralston, Wendy Palmer, Richard Strozzi Heckler, Bira Almeida, Nestor Capoeira. Holistic health and martial arts opened our press to a wide range of modalities that synergized energy medicine, shamanism, ethnobotany, and movement and dance.

In a different arc, my writing The Night Sky put me in touch with amateur exobiologist Richard Hoagland. His book, The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, became our first bestseller and extended our spectrum to forbidden archaeology, sacred geometry, critiques of science, and science fiction.

For the next thirteen or so years in Berkeley, Lindy and I built North Atlantic into a trade publishing company, as we became a respected Mind Body Spirit imprint as well as one of the leading publishers in English of books on internal martial arts and somatics. We innovated lists on ayahuasca, food as consciousness, healing trauma, and dozens of other topics ranging from Peruvian whistling jugs to Appalachian dance and Quonset Huts on the River Styx, a compilation of satirical bomb-shelter designs. These arose out of interconnected networks leading back to our original literary world, which itself had a shamanic and mythic component, and my studies. Paul Pitchford, author of Healing with Whole Foods, our second bestseller, was my initial Berkeley t’ai-chi, diet, and meditation teacher.

Amid growing numbers of New Age and Mind Body Spirit presses, none made the particular synthesis we did of martial arts, alternative medicine, the occult, anthropology, and avant-garde literature that we did. It was a rich juncture, and it gave us a high standing in an industry in which we had to compete for authors with well-funded commercial houses.

During those thirteen years of exploration and expansion, Lindy and I ran the entire operation except for book design (our kids even packed books and helped cart them to the post office after school). For production, we paid a freelance designer, Paula Morrison, initially the girlfriend of one of our t’ai-chi authors. Lindy did most of the editing until we added a freelance editor, Kathy Glass.

We mostly didn’t pay ourselves; we donated our time. North Atlantic was more a hobby or art than a business or revenue source. I thought of it as an authors’ collective, an energy field, and a hermetic torch through an epoch of materialism, later a living hermeneutical process. Our IRS mission statement for the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences summarized our founding goals:“to increase awareness of nonmaterialist, noncommercial activities in the areas of gardening, sacred texts, recreation, self-healing, meditation, and experimental art forms so that individuals are oriented toward the depth and richness of their own practices and community; to discover and develop values implicit in technological society for the creation of ecologically cohesive communities with a commitment to the hidden properties of materials and systems; to bring together the ancient lost and the yet unborn, to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.”

It was an attempt to allay IRS concerns about publishing; they didn’t like to grant 501c3 status for commercial products. Dance, theater, and music were okay, but not books.

Nineteen years after storing inventory and shipping from a Vermont barn and various Berkeley garages, basements, and a converted swimming pool, we moved North Atlantic into a downtown office and hired our first staff. Lindy left her job at Cal/Berkeley and joined me on full-time basis. We established a payroll with withholding tax and began a second life as a business. She and I were fifty years old.

During the next seventeen years, we built the company, expanding the list in quantity and range. It took four turns and six years to assemble a staff of fifteen, another six plus three more turns (and three office moves and a switch of distributor from Publishers Group West to Random House) to establish ourselves as a Mind Body Spirit imprint on a par with mainstream competitors. During the transformation we put out sixty, seventy, then eighty new titles a year: graphic novels, esoteric novels, Zen philosophy, translations of the Dalai Lama, high-school football, contrarian AIDS, medicinal herbs, prenatal memories, gay tantra, esoteric anatomy, channeling, healing PTSD, astral travel, and a bestselling children’s book, Walter the Farting Dog, as well as a widening spectrum of alternative medicine, martial arts, bodywork, shamanism, ethnopharmacology, spirit-walking, and New Wave literature.

 Around 2008, we began to increase the staff, surpassing 20 once we moved to Random House in 2007 and raised salaries to industry standards. The majority of our early employees were folks who answered newspaper ads. Few of them knew or cared about our esoteric themes or even publishing as such. We needed literate workers, and they needed a job for which they had skills. North Atlantic was often a second or third choice after digital and video didn’t pan out. During the late nineties and aughts, a few martial artists, Buddhist practitioners, poets, and aspiring magicians showed up for stints. All of them left for the next phase in their careers. I described my unsuccessful attempt to hire my early-nineties martial-arts teacher Ron Sieh in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

An incorrigible trickster, if he sent the wrong books or missed a conference deadline, he said stuff like “Want perfection, hire robots.”

One afternoon, as he was dissing yet another customer on the phone, I headed his way. There was a reason this guy was unemployable.

“You’re not firing me, are you?” he preempted.

“Ron,” I said, reprising a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie we both admired, “I owe you everything, but not a job.”

“Golly gee,” he replied, “it’s a sad day when the burghers take over from the samurai!”

Between 1993 when Lindy joined me and 2010 when she retired, we employed close to 400 people, maxing at 24 at any one time, with a wide range of ages, ethnicities, races, gender orientations, and temperaments, far more women than men. We oversaw romances, feuds, emotional collapses, an arsonist, a kleptomaniac, a Swedish fashion model, two rock musicians, an unemployment scammer, a girlfriend of an Oakland Raiders’ lineman (he sent her flowers at work), a late sleeper who came in pajamas, and a few “sacred office” practitioners. We hired our Czech UPS driver to work in the warehouse where he ended up in a fistfight with another employee, the singer for a local punk-rock band. One woman threw a desk computer over a balcony at her estranged boyfriend waving a gun. Another guy had an affair with his otherwise gay female supervisor and, after she broke up with him, quit. At the door, he turned with a parting call, “This is a coven of witches!”

Another departing male dubbed it a “gynocracy.”

          Antonio Cuevas was a gay chicano artist from LA who went on to write for Variety. Harry Um was a gentle Korean intellectual from New York who moved to academia. Jeremy Bigalke was an introverted computer whiz who left to run his own publishing company. Anastasia McGhee was a Dzogchen devotee who oversaw work-place mindfulness and inspired spiritual activist author Andrew Harvey, a bi guttersnipe who could mime a bitchy British lord, to declare on one occasion, “Don’t cry for me, Anastasia!”; on another, “None of your Buddhist bromides, baby.”

            Yvonne Cardenas was a Cuban cultural historian. Jess O’Brien was a Socratic philosopher and qigong student. Hisae Matsuda was a Japanese translator by way of England, India, and service to Mata Amritanandamay, the hugging saint; she went on to become publisher of Parallax, a Berkeley Buddhist press specializing in the work of Vietnamese teacher Thích Nhát Hanh. Brooke Warner, a changeling from Southern California by way of D.C. politics, left North Atlantic to do feminist publishing at Seal Press, then started her own imprint, She Writes. Nick Sanchez was a gay half-chicano, half-First-Nations media whiz from Colorado who liked to note that his family had been on their land so long that it was the border that moved and made them Americans.

One by one they left, for different lines of work, different lines of books, more money, Silicon Valley, L.A., the East Coast. Jason Kaneko became a union electrician; Zoe Marshall became a docker at the Port of Oakland. Allegra Harris got a marketing job at Proctor & Gamble, Nick got a marketing job at RealClearPolitics.

When Lindy retired in 2010, she stayed on the board, and we began the process of slowly transitioning the press to the staff. It was a nonprofit, so it couldn’t be transferred or sold.

Drop back to 1994, a year after we moved North Atlantic out of the house. We started a second imprint, a for-profit called Frog, Ltd. (honoring an endangered species); we ran it from the same office with the same themes and different book-keeping.

In 2007, after North Atlantic hit a cashflow meltdown during the Publishers Group West bankruptcy—they were our distributor—and our move to Random House, we donated Frog and its $2 million bank account to the nonprofit, an act I found inconceivable fifteen years later—people at our economic level don’t give away two million dollars. But we were younger, the mindset in the country and world was more benign and trusting, and our community of North Atlantic authors was meaningful to us (plus our adult kids by then had independent careers). We thought that donating the money was the best use of it and, if we hadn’t, the press would have folded before getting to Random House.

In 2002, we were warned by a labor attorney that we were an attractive target for theft. His words were something like, “You’re running a multimillion-dollar bullet train like hippies on a Casey Jones track.”

 We had hired him over an employee dispute. A marketing guy had figured out how to corral most of the revenue from Walter the Farting Dog, as it rose to number 1 on the New York Times Children’s Picture-Bookbestseller list. Everything the staffer did was legal, but it didn’t change the fact that he bamboozled us with a commissions scheme such that we were paying him more than the rest of the staff and ourselves combined. That was one reason the lawyer thought we were in over our heads.

His advice and that of others was to convert the whole operation into an S-Corp. The guidance went past us; instead, we gave away the S-corp to the nonprofit. We were still in a fifties and sixties mindset, a midsummer-night’s dream that preceded the election of Donald J. Trump. When the scrim was ripped off an obsolete reality, not only were crimes of all varieties possible but the feared authorities had little power to stop them. We were playing by vanished rules.

Lindy and I began spending more and more time in Maine, finally moving there in 2014. We returned to the Bay for a month or two each winter on home exchanges. Our accountant and attorney, both board members, urged me to appoint someone else publisher.

The young man I chose brought into play a social-justice agenda to which most of Lindy’s and my milieu had pledged fealty since our youth. With our assent, he began to recruit a new more racially and politically diverse board, folks he met in local gardening circles, though who had, at best, peripheral or superficial affinity with our books and understanding of the complexity of the weave. It didn’t seem to matter. Lindy and I had long thought of the board as an artifact rather than what it was, the legal repository of the company. We blended with our protégé’s liberation theology. He didn’t stay around long.

The staff also gravitated toward social justice as a more amenable rubric than Lindy’s and my hard-to-bundle arcana. Identity politics and critiques of white privilege and neo-colonialism trended with the academic and intellectual bias of many of their peers.

About that time, a thirty-year-vested author of alternative-medicine books, a homeopath and acupuncturist, was accused by a patient of inappropriate touching; the guy said he was set up by the pharmaceutical industry. The resulting brouhaha made the local papers. To this day, almost seven years later, so far as I know the case has never gone to court and the author is still practicing. The issues around the event are far more tangled than my description, but given the trajectory of this book, I will leave it here. (Since making this post, I have been told that this author was more recently tried, convicted of improper touching of two patients, and sent to jail. Whether he was set up is an issue more pertinent to the next chapter. His being in jail relates back to my immediately previous wetiko post. It doesn’t affect my argument, just makes me sad for him and our unfinished world.)

Several other of our authors had been accused of sexual misconduct through the years, mostly along the lines of unwanted advances. I never considered it our place to act as their judge and jury. It was a slippery slope. Some of the great works of Western literature were written by people with similar or far worse peccadillos. Carry this yardstick over to the rock and rap worlds and, by citing inappropriate touching and unwanted advances, you can pretty much wipe out the albums and CDs of the last century.

Yet all of the accused’s books were put out of print. The author’s advance for his next book was eaten. The annual cost to the press was in the range of a full annual salary, but that wasn’t the whole price because sexual impropriety wasn’t the lone issue. The victim (or victimizer, depending on your perspective) was a pediatrician as well as a practitioner of alternative medicine. He had written about the relative merits and risks of each common vaccine. His vaxx relativism did not sit well with the staff.

As reconstituted, they didn’t care all that much about energy medicine; it wasn’t part of their daily lives. Plus like months named Thermidor and Fructidor during the French Revolution, words like “alchemical,” “spiritual,” “liminal,” “shamanic,” even “native arts and sciences” could be reinvented and repurposed.

After I was finally removed, North Atlantic cancelled a genre-creating book I acquired on spirit marriage near the end of my tenure, though they kept the author on hold for more than a year. She told me, “I pinged the dude when I didn’t get a contract. He said, ‘Sorry, we changed our mind.’ I asked why. He said, ‘The staff doesn’t believe in spirits and they think polyamory is immoral.’ What the fuck? They said my book was immoral because I was advocating sex with spirits they don’t believe in.’”

There was a bigger issue for me. I had fallen into a clinical depression with insomnia after my sister’s 2016 suicide, which followed the suicides of my mother (1975) and my brother (2005). Her death wasn’t the sole cause, but it was a catalyst.

         My 1960s Amherst friend, Dorey Fliegel, a writer too, described depression well. I have my own accounts in other writing (see Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms) and but I will go with Dorey’s here to universalize the state. It comes uncannily close to my own experience:

Unless you have been there—you cannot know—for what can never be known

is the lived feeling of it. 

            So, too, was it with that loosely-used word, ‘depression,’ about which everyone thinks they know a little something, just as I did, until the real thing showed up at my door and with a sudden, indifferent, rolling pitch, threw me man overboard. . . .

            I had assumed, out of my unknowing, that with time it would gradually slacken—that all I had to do was outlast it. 

            What did I know?  An apple does not slowly fall.  It ripens and it rots.  On any given day it either drops or it does not

            Until you have been there you cannot know the cold that takes control until you succumb to a summons that no sane man or woman can yet imagine, a torment taking you a hundred times a day to the edge of a despair so great the thought of ending it all sneaks over you like a welcome thief, bringing its split-second respite of blessed relief.

            You inhabit a remote, unearthly landscape light-years away, without beginning or end, color or shape, a gray, cold place drained of all living warmth, bound by a gravity that has no name, the only constant a steady, gnawing pain and—in the background—that incessant, hellish refrain—a perpetual reminder of a life gone terribly wrong.

            Impossible to conjure or explain—just as it had been for me when I lived so blithely on the other side, before life served notice and took me for its little detour beyond the reach of time, where one by one you give up on the days and tacitly surrender to the weeks and months, until the years no longer matter.

            Depression gradually removes you from that cruel human illusion of time.⁹⁰

         In James Boswell’s, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he wrote:

My mind is filled with the blackest ideas, and all my power of reason has forsaken me. I run frantic up and down streets, groaning from my innermost heart. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking. O good God! What am I enduring? I have no inclination for anything. All is good for nothing and dreary. I am old, wretched, and forlorn.⁹¹

The election and early Presidency of Donald Trump put my depression on steroids. It wasn’t so much the politics as having the Government in the hands of a mentally disturbed person and mafia don. It was as though one of the Mexican cartels or a Hungarian junta were suddenly running the nation. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, I posted on Facebook: “Note to Republicans: Telling yourself that you can stage-manage four years of a Trump presidency without major catastrophe to the country and the world is like kidding yourself that you can persuade Mohammed Atta to land the plane safely.”

       Yes, I have Trump derangement syndrome. It’s like paranoia. Is it still paranoia if someone is really out to get you? Is it “derangement syndrome” if an actual deranged person is in change?

       Depression, or any so-called mental illness, is a psychospiritual crisis with multiple causes. It is overdetermined, so particular events and co-factors mingle and synergize in unpredictable and undiagnosable ways.

         But, as Dorey’s description so poignantly shows, depression is not extended sadness, as I once imagined; it is the half-life of terror, a total loss of volition and ground.

       The convergence of concerns and crises—plus exigencies of aging—led Lindy and me to try to return to California where our children lived. We spent six weeks in Berkeley in 2017 and again in 2018 while conceiving how to move back for good. Most of 2019 and half of 2020 we rented at $6800 a month, before deciding, given the expense, smoke, power outages, crime, chop shops, pandemic, and situation at North Atlantic Books, that Maine was a safer place after all.

Some say the human-potential movement was a result of geomorphic pressure along the Hayward Fault converted into thoughtforms, continental plates grinding. California forces you to ride theta waves, to find yourself. Everything is available, though nothing is what it seems.

Thirty-six years prior at our Saturn return, we had left the stormish seasons of our Rocky Mountain and Eastern Woodlands upbringings and New England youth to live in those theta waves in winter-less paradise and make a living and home for ourselves and our whelps. It worked until, like all magic, it dissolved into the spell out of which it came. In the backdrop of gardener-tended yards and streets traversed by E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, “irie” reigned, the sense that none of this is really real.

We had lived in a fancy bed-and-breakfast, surrounded by scions of the new economy. Sprawling dot.coms and high-tech planets were re-colonizing the landscape as if computers could compel continental plates forever. It was soporific, yet a jackpot as well as a minor coat of arms for folks like us who arrived with little equity and no jobs.

When police and fire officials held a meeting to tell us that we lived on the most dangerous sector of the Hayward fault and our houses wouldn’t survive a minor temblor, Lindy started a Yale Avenue earthquake-preparedness group to raise money for supplies. She enlisted me to go door-to-door and give some of her failures a second shot. Canned spiels were her skill set not mine; she was a born performer and a riveting, cheery presence. I hated door-to-door even at Halloween; it activated my autism.

I convinced one reluctant woman to sign but quit after a guy with a “Semper Fi” hat in the eastern-most house before Oberlin Street said, “I’ll join if you agree to buy guns and ammunition because that’s what we’ll need when the folks arrive from Richmond and Oakland to kill us or, if we’re lucky, kick us out of our homes.”

California was the ultimate fool’s gold, though it took much of half a lifetime to figure that out. By 2014, gourmet-ghetto appreciation added up to community-less confetti and fill. That’s when we moved to Maine.

We came back to a very different situation in 2019.

Young people—and we ourselves were young for a very long time—think they can pull off anything that their elders can and improve on it, override their endemic blind spots and limitations. I felt as though they were operating on the premise that Lindy’s and my curation hid white theft, privilege, and nepotism and that they could come up with just as good books with racial and sexual diversity mainly by googling.

I was trying to transition the press effectively, and I had a bit of Stockholm syndrome. Throughout my childhood and youth, I found it safer to play wimp and dufus than to let the authorities know the extent of my apostasy. I couldn’t hide from my mother or a pedophile counselor at Camp Swago, but the tendency was as instinctive as a snail carrying a shell. Plus, I did eventually escape both of them, the former by whooping cough, the latter by growing up.

Submission and obeisance were no longer possible, and I was too old to hide who I was.

I was graded poorly—for using the meme “tar baby,” for interrupting a woman while she was talking, for “name dropping” black authors and citing transsexual themes Lindy and I innovated years earlier. All were deemed racism, false entitlement, unearned license. In this new world, the most recent hire on his or her (or their) first day in the building had as much claim to relevance as me. They had it by applying a measure that decreed my career and generation blind to the power structures behind it. It didn’t matter that the tar baby was African-American-generated and was black because it was made out of tar.

I wanted North Atlantic to survive and thrive. Lindy and I had hired enough of the staff to consider them our people. The press was our legacy and the reservoir of five decades of work. I tried to adjust to the change by bringing books from local Filipino, chicano, and black practitioners, shamans of color and trans healers, trying to fulfill the priorities of the new editorial group. I found most of them at a fair at which our office manager played saxophone in a band. These were ignored or turned down, considered an attempt to hold onto power. Plus my depression left me with little spunk and was amped by the situation at the press. It was painful to realize that I was an exile in my own company.  

A world launched in New York City and Colorado prep schools and Ivy League colleges, in a 1960s alchemy salon and through initiations by tarot cards, push-hands, fascial palpation, and aura reading was being rejected by its latter-day stewards. It took Lindy and me most of a lifetime, from our late teen years well into our seventies, to create a living archive of personal transformation, radical healing, and liminal realms, to blend indigenous arts and sciences with futuristic paradigms. But we was old, they was young. As Chip Taylor put it in the London Sessions, 2008, “we was wrong and they was right / and somebody’s gotta pay.”

Somebody had to pay.

I was told I had unfairly received an education that others hadn’t. The word “reparation” was used.

  I hadn’t considered that times would change such that reparation would be required, let alone by a grandchild of Polish and German Jews from whom strangers took possessions, businesses, art, children, dignity, and the right to live a generation or two ago.

My pedigree as a cross-cultural author and publisher from an Ivy League college with a liberal-arts education and an anthropology PhD served me about as well as, sorry, a Jewish musician in 1939 Germany or a professor trying to explain Confucian philosophy and class dialectics to Mao’s Red Guards.

My celebration of African American and First Nations peoples going back to my sixties’ and seventies’ publishing of Hopis, Somalians, and poets sent my way by Amiri Baraka was dismissed as summarily and cruelly if not as fatally as Daniel Pearl when his plaint of empathy for Muslim aspirations was repudiated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s sword.

As an anti-Zionist and supporter and colleague of real-life Palestinians, I never would have thought that a friend and confidante would turn against me like a capo in a death camp to affirm his solidarity with the woke. When I experienced that, I felt like a piece of meat. It wasn’t Kristallnacht, but I had a glimmer of the moment when your equally Jewish neighbor says in front of the Reich, “I love the guy, but—”

You don’t hear it because you don’t believe it’s possible. Try it out. Imagine someone you totally trust turning against you at a critical moment of your life. Sherri Mitchell, my First Nations author, later said, “Now you know what it feels like to have your identity and land stolen.”

Other long-time friends and staff—hip, compassionate people—abandoned me in fear of being dubbed racist or in their wish to prove woke.

My idylls on Hopi mesas, in a Navaho hardball game, and with Cree guides were consigned to name-dropping, self-dealing, and intellectual theft. My support of and by African American and First Nations peoples, from the union rebellion at my father’s hotel (1964) and my dinner that summer during the Democratic Convention with Damita Jo, Bitty Wood, and Dick Gregory at an Atlantic City restaurant, to a perilous road trip through Nebraska with Welton Smith and his white girlfriend (1965), to bearing white witness before a Black Muslim congregation at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York (2010)— from Pine Ridge Oglala Dakota Vine Deloria, Jr.’s blessings at Lindy’s and my wedding (he was a friend of her father), to a ghost dance at Hotevilla (1967), to reading as a white guy at Andy Hope’s Tlingit-Eskimo powwow in Anchorage in 1976, to a prayer at a Penobscot portal—were dismissed as peremptorily and humorlessly as the Khmer-Rouge dismissed their enemies. My self-aggrandized pleas were dismissed as whitesplanation; I was like any white guy saying he had Black or Asian or Native American friends.

They would have sentenced me to the firing squad or gas chamber if they had had the power. That wasn’t an option, but it was the energy I felt and, if you had heard the language used against me in person, which I didn’t in my myopia, you would have been just as stunned and felt just as unreal.

No one is immune to this, however radical and true to the “cause”—no artist, no intellectual, no spiritual seeker, no first responder, no herbalist or healer.

Once again, I remind you, there must be a counter-narrative. There has to be. How else to explain this behavior? Human beings don’t act this way unless they are justified.

My age was cited, but even with my depression, it was irrelevant. I was at the height of my career with a lifelong network of contacts and a steady stream of books. All of that went to Inner Traditions.

If you don’t have to build something from scratch, you don’t realize how difficult it is. A leaked internal memo I saw revealed the self-congratulatory mood, as folks joked about getting rid of authors X, Y, and Z (whom they named) “for basically being douchebags and spreading misinformation.”  

Ehud Sperling, publisher of Inner Traditions, was a fierce competitor of our press going back decades. Yet he said, upon hearing what transpired, “The only reason I can think of for this terrible thing happening to you is that we were meant to work together in our seventies.”

        And so it was.

        When my successors put my books out of print and pulped the inventory I didn’t buy, he said, “Presses need their legacy. Well, they just fucked theirs. They should hang your picture on the wall and thank you every day for providing them with a living.”

They basically discarded a successful working press with the notion that, by ending white privilege, they could make a better, more inclusive organization and gain a new readership. Maybe they can, but it would have been more honorable to start their own company. To me, it is a rudderless vessel driven by stale precepts, manned by pirates, towed like a dead barnacle by Random House.

Inner Traditions helped get me out of my depression by giving me effectively unlimited resources to build a new imprint. I named it Sacred Planet Books. Other changes helped, including relocating most of the time in Bar Harbor back in Mount Desert Island’s synchronicity sinkhole. I am esoterically and psychically oriented by now, but it would be a diversion to try to explain that here. Most of my writing on depression is unpublished, though I have a fairly substantial account of the phenomenology of coming out of an abyss in Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms along with a discussion of the relative roles of healing practices and intention. Honoring the desire to heal, separate of psychospiritual practices, proved more important than all my practices, though I don’t believe I could have done it without them. I wouldn’t have had enough space inside me. My trauma author Peter Levine, who lives in Maine part of the year, was pessimistic after spending time with me in the fall of 2020. After I emerged, he said, “You must have core resilience.” If so, I credit my guides; it’s a karmic and ancestral gift.   

After I joined Inner Traditions, I found new authors at a rate rivaling the early days of North Atlantic Books. I got to represent modern templars, alchemists, and magicians. Multiple authors and locutions appeared—Wiccan, psychic, hermetic, ecofeminist, shape-shifting, Yezidi, Cathar, Magdalene, interdimensional, etheric, dragon. They brought dream palaces, Chaldean oracles, meteoric moldavite, lunar kings, transspecies magicians, time loops, a peacock angel, aetheric alignments, the extracellular matrix, feline keepers of the spiritual world, sacred menstruation, Bon monks, Egyptian astrology, the Universal Christ. I curated projects from London, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Dallas, Omaha, the Carolinas, Italy, South Korea. Book stars Jeff Kripal, Anthony Peake, and Emily Shurr became my scouts. It was as if a dam had broken once I was free.

I acquired over 100 books in two-plus years: Samantha Treasure and her dream cyborg cartoons, Sophie Strand and her Book of Luke as told to Mary Magdalene, Anne-Marie Heckel and her death nesting, Bernie Beitman and cosmic synchronicity, Taylor Keen and an indigenous history of Turtle Island, Keith Thompson and archetypal UFOs, Anu Dudley and Nicolette Miele on Norse runes, Ruslana Remennikova on activating our 12-stranded DNA, Efu Nayaki and Tanzanian-Brazilian family constellations. I curated Elyrria Swann’s How to Become a Mermaid: Embodying the Elemental Energy of Water; David Barreto’s Animal Karma and Reincarnation, Joel and Michelle Levey’s Awakening Warrior: Insights for Living in Turbulent Times from the U.S. Army’s Secret Jedi Warrior Program; Stephanie Mines’ Embodying Resilience: Climate Change, Alchemy, and the Embodied Healer; Matt McKay’s Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife and Love in a Time of Impermanence. Barreto, a Brazilian working as a hotel clerk in London, wrote how when an ant reincarnates as a mineral it is usually rose quartz, as a plant it chooses a lifetime as a rose.

In time, I have come to recognize a tactic to which my progressive roots and habits inured me. It has become widespread in Western culture: elitist white accusers pretending to renounce their racial privileges as a strategy for extending white power.

Removal or marginalization of long-functional members from organizations and universities by social-justice inquisitions has become commonplace. The methods are usually the same: targets are accused of racism, sexual misconduct, or abuse and disrespect. If they haven’t committed anything overtly—no problem, everyone has baggage; just do a deep dive and find it.

  Fools don’t even have to have committed the likeness of a crime or gotten a legal warning. All someone has to do is point a finger and say, “He or she triggered me,” and bang they’re dead! Who needs a gun? But if the woke have access to a gun, usually metaphorical or psychic, they may try to use it. The dead are easier and cheaper to dispose of than the living.

  In Babel, progressive ideologies like feminism, social justice, and critical race theory get turned into instruments of oppression and control. Language police twist any incipient belief or slip of the tongue into accusations of privilege and revanchism. While feigning diversity and multiculturalism, culturally vanilla imposters, consumer politicos, and uninitiated imitators infiltrate formerly edgy organizations. Like a termite infestation, they hollow out the structure while disposing of anyone they deem inconvenient, unworthy, or more informed than they are. Then they pad their nests, virtue-signaling for cover. It’s a racket, from time immemorial.

          My sense is that wokeness armed with cancel culture removes the need for any other ethics, compassion, respect, fairness, virtue, decency, or good will. But I don’t think that it can bring real reparation or understanding.

          Early in my tenancy at Inner Traditions when my depression and insomnia made me dysfunctional, I wrote Ehud apologizing, offering to depart. He sent back a simple text: “I’VE GOT YOUR BACK. CHILL.”

On his show, “Astrology for the Now Age” host Robert Phoenix, declaimed in 2020, “Looking back on the coup staged at North Atlantic, it seems more than just random and the result of some social trend. Grossinger was targeted and marked in true revolutionary fashion, they stole his press for the current siege.

“He was chosen to have his company taken from him as a prize for the cultural revolution and to use NAB to publish Marxist polemics wrapped in racial theory and identity politics. . . .  It’s not about race or being woke. It’s about the wholesale dismantling of the West. ”⁹²

He and I don’t have exactly the same politics or world view, but he touches on the big picture through a glass darkly.

I have no use for football coach Tommy Tuberville, MAGA Senator from Alabama (except to joke about him and Herschel Walker trying to execute the game plan), but when he said, referring to Democrats, “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”⁹³ it resonated with me though I am registered and still vote Democratic. It is why so many from the working class, blacks and Hispanics too, have switched party affiliations.

                  Endnotes

90. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791.

91. Dorian Fliegel, May the Rock Its Silence Break, unpublished.

92. Robert Phoenix, “Astrology for the Now Age,” June 15, 2020.

93. Michael Hiltzik, “Overt racism and antisemitism have become part of our political discourse. How did that happen?” Los Angeles Times, reprinted in Yahoo Finance, October 21, 2022.

12. THE DISMANTLING OF THE WEST

What concerns me now, as it didn’t a few years ago, is that elements of the Left and Right equally want to end civil society, intellectual and empirical discourse, classroom dialogues, art that comes from heart and soul, and the healing and brotherhood of a respectful, communal earth. The woke seek blood as eagerly as Joey Gibson and the Proud Boys; they are ready to have at it: revolutionary war and civilizational collapse—then there will be no more Daniel Pearls, beat poets, Banksy graffito artists, or surrealist playwrights. The woke are bored with climate and sustainability too. 

Before you assume that eco-stewards can turn this planet around sanely—and I do still assume it, we are hope machines—realize that the morally righteous, reinforced by their own self-congratulatory rectitude, will not allow butterflies in Tokyo to begin vibrating their wings or storehouses of indigenous seeds and medicine bundles in St. Paul to go untorched or the innocent young in Yemen, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon to have a life before they are given guns, opiates, and the license to kill. 

  The agrarian, shamanic civilization that was converted by the power of agriculture some four thousand years ago, its chiefdoms and bitcoins, beads and shells, always had pockets of spiritual and aesthetic freedom up to yesterday. Large sectors of Earth were permitted high culture within the State, and not as the State’s enemy. These days, cancel culture is not limited to toppling statues of the Confederacy or erasing names from islands and photos from gym walls. We face a depleted future, not paradise lost but margin and happiness hijacked by warlords, assholes, sociopaths, and Potemkin punks. Under Hobbesian entropy, they run more durable regimes than democracies.

   The 2020 uprisings against property and civil order were camouflaged initially by the revolt against a Trumpian republic of wealth, pomp, and peremptory power. After the death of George Floyd on a Minneapolis sidewalk, Black Lives Matter marches turned into ritual corteges. Folks in good will and solidarity stood in choruses of raised fists, as they chanted off the seconds that Floyd was being choked by Derek Chauvin. That was the alchemical transmutation before carpetbagger militias and demonic superfly magicians took over.  

In New York, St. Paul, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, and elsewhere, marches against police brutality and institutionalized racism flipped from social-justice ceremonies to kites’ tails of gang members looting the malls of the empire. Store windows on New York’s Fifth Avenue and Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive were smashed and their shelves were picked clean: Saks, Tiffany’s, and Louis Vuitton of San Francisco. Gangs chanting “Eat the Rich!” and “Hit a Mothafucka!” burned down Oglala museums and youth centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The fire knew no philosophy at Alexandria; it did not read Parmenides or Plato, only the elemental structure of worlds that had been, worlds that were to come.

       Laptops, backpacks, and purses were snatched on the streets of Oakland and Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Swarms of smash-and-grabbers overwhelmed mall guards and fled with their loot before the constabulary could arrive. Home invasion became as fashionable in Los Angeles, Houston, and Orlando as in Baghdad or Tegucigalpa.

       Hit-and-run ransackings were always possible, but neither cops nor robbers viewed the moral equation as cynically as they do now. The police don’t choose to police the petty shit—nothing to gain and everything to lose. Why risk shooting the wrong dude while breaking up a flash swarm and ending up in a Coen Brothers adaptation of “he’s in the jailhouse now”?  

 On the other side of duplicity, “defund the police” activists and their apologists quickly hired their own private security forces.

Those same mobs—Right or Left hardly matters—will sack Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft before the great fires and floods. Yesterday it was the Islamic State detonating idols, churches, mosques, and neighborhoods of Mosul and Aleppo as well as the last remnants and talismans of Yezidi/Zoroastrian civilization. Tomorrow it will be the French Revolution and Red Guards in Boston and Baton Rouge. Libya is not as far from Miami as it is from Alpha Centauri.

        I want the police unions curtailed too, but government agents and blue coats are the ones who are going to have to escort the next Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office when he locks the door and summons his praetorian Proud Boys to load up and stand by. Those beat cops are whom you are going to have to call when someone shows up at your Echo Park condo or Vermont rutabaga-and-radicchio farm and says, “Reparation time, honky, it’s my house now.” Hit 9-1-1 and hope there’s someone left to answer.

Chapter Four

COVID-19

1. ITS HOUR COME ROUND

COVID-19 marks the end of transhumanism. We are part of the biosphere. We can flee it on screens and devices, but true escape requires a leap beyond technology, plus a shift of core belief.

           It won’t be as robots or chips either. The transhumanists’ agenda of consciousness singularity, nanoteleology, and synthetic biology—AI replacing bodies—is as psychotic and phantasmal as that of colonizing the Milky Way. Even William Shatner realized on his brief trip into outer space: it’s a camouflage cosmos out there; all life is down here, including Star Trek.

           COVID-19 is Cassandra and Paul Revere: “Creatures of water and air! You have another course. And it may not be too late.”

     COVID marks the end of tribal ideology. It tells us to seek common ground because, from its standpoint, we are common ground: animated clay and amino acids, a heap of colloidal crystals and sea water organized by cations and trace elements.

       It tells us we can no longer be ruled by a Babel of disinformation because then we speak neither to it nor to each other.

           COVID marks the end of American exceptionalism. That goes without saying.

           COVID has everything to say about nuclear winter without mentioning it at all.

           In corona time, there are no rules, deadlines, or endgames. We are playing on the virus’ terms but maintaining a panacea-like casuistry, hoping that the previous world and its markets and supply chains were the true reality and this is a limited engagement.

           We have come to an Ides in history, in human life on a spheroid (Gaia) orbiting a sun-star (Sol). Climate will be a more ultimate Ides, but the virus is its envoy. Climate change is COVID on an atmospheric scale. Forget about sheltering at home. Earth is home. Sorry, Bezos, Musk, and pals. There is no second pavilion or backup planet.

           The virus also evinces Earth’s biological resilience, not a resilience we prize but one as microbial and mitochondrial as our origin. Its codex is as current as the Wuhan market and as remote as the images—Chauvet to Utah to Peru—on cave walls. The microbiome precedes us by more than a billion years. Its habitants are tiny, elusive, and savvy in their own pantheon. See my Chapter Two on biomes and microbiomes in Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms. Herbalist Stephen Buhner elucidates:

           Viruses are immeasurably older than we are; they have a great deal of experience altering their genomes to better survive in new ecological niches. It’s become common among researchers to speak of viruses as having trouble reproducing identical copies of themselves. They say the viruses make “typos” or “copy-and-paste” errors or even that they engage in bad “proofreading.” This makes the viruses seem rather stupid: “Oh, the poor things. Can’t even copy themselves correctly.” The truth is very different.

               What is more ecologically accurate is that viruses are a form of swarm intelligence–the individual members are not the entity, the swarm is. One of the primary adaptation patterns it uses is to generate millions of slightly different offspring very quickly in order to produce more highly adaptable forms. The viral swarm also possesses the capacity to create new genomic forms through highly sophisticated examination and analysis of their new hosts’ ecologies. They respond to our responses to them.¹

           Swarms precede other bio-ciphers with their quadrigeminals and stop digits. A swarm reads the collective intelligence of the biosphere and mutates accordingly, pulling the larger critters along with it.

        COVID-19 is World War III in scope but deeper and without ordnance or battle lines. It is like an asteroid hit but one of subtle energy rather than fire and dust. As it deletes strata and melts time like a Salvador Dali clock, days take weeks or even years to pass in a trance that is neither waking nor dreaming. Months also pass in seconds. Each day is different; each day, we are different.         

           In another sense, time seems to be running backwards or in simultaneous tracks. Any song or movie, book or dance from before COVID-19 instantly changed, picking up tinges of surrealism, past-life as well as precognitive. The veil between worlds thinned, strangers becoming more intimate, rainbow bridges more rainbow. In Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms, I chose COVID-19 totem animals: Tardigrade, Coyote, Llama, Crow, Rat, Fly, Elephant, Pigeon, Bees, Octopus, and Turtle, each for its reasons.

           COVID is a gentle virus, a messenger (angel or angelos), albeit with a deadly toll. It could have been more like ebola or nipah; the next one may be. At a Zoom town hall, a First Nations elder warned, “She’s just a baby. If we don’t heed her, you won’t want to see who’s coming next.” Another Native American added, “If she wanted to kill us, she would. She doesn’t. She wants to teach us. We’re not in right relationship, one of reciprocity with the planet and with All of Creation. We just take, take, take. We have forgotten that the Earth is a living being, our bodies are part of her body.”

           We regard other life forms and their niches, as our resources and products. We don’t recognize ourselves—ogres of our own myths and fairy tales. The Earth is not a dumb stone with some water and DNA fuzz. Gaia principle aside (and it isn’t), we inhabit a multidimensional object displaying in three plus one of time. At nano-scale, so is the virus.

           COVID-19 is a teacher, of compassion, healing, meditation, social distancing, and Zoom conferencing, of biological and cultural resilience. A new anarchy of freedom is emerging: cooperation across prior borders, solidarity against the State. Hospitals and grocery stores have become hospices, temples, mercados. Folks create pods, arks, and cuddles to get out of central control—of food, of energy, of currency, of the ownership of labor, of health, of the arbitration of life, death, and the afterlife. It’s a pirate mutiny as well as a street rebellion.

           It is what we dreaded and what we have been wishing for. Don’t say why did it have to be this? we wouldn’t have listened to anything less. We wouldn’t have stopped our tankers, markets, and mishigas without a warning shot that got our attention.

           Dead children washing ashore in Greece and Texas didn’t do it. Hiroshima didn’t do it. The Interahamwe, Islamic State, and Syrian War didn’t do it. The Cuban Crisis and Vietnam and Iraq Wars didn’t do it. 9/11 and Al Qaeda didn’t do it. ISIS in Mosul and Aleppo didn’t do it.

           Now the priest has left the altar, and William Butler Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last,”² has begun to slouch toward Bethlehem, Milan, and Shanghai.

           COVID-19 is a magician (Tarot Trump One) who hasn’t begun to reveal her repertoire, yet future worlds depend on her and her magic. At 9/11 we drew arcanum sixteen: a tower and pentagram struck by lightning, falling figures of a prior cosmology. Card Seventeen is The Star, an androgyne dipping her urns in the waters of unborn worlds and their suns.

           Astrologer Laura Matsue wrote, “2020 is like the world is in an ayahuasca ceremony together—and most people have neither prepared for it nor do they even know they’re in it and there’s no shaman. The shaman is meant to create some containment around the energy of the ceremony, and there’s definitely none of that going on.”³

                       COVID-19 is the shaman of no-shaman.

                     Endnotes

The first three sections and the last section of this chapter were first written during February through May 2020 and reflect their mood. The other sections were written mostly in 2021 through mid-2022. Parts of the chapter are adapted from my closing essay “Moving Forward . . . How Do We Get Out of This One?” in the anthology: Sherri Mitchell, Richard Grossinger, and Kathy Glass (editors), The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical.

1. Stephen Buhner, “Covid chapter updates,” blog.

2. Yeats, “The Second Coming” in William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996)

3. Laura Matsue, Facebook, August 5, 2020.

2. A STATISTIC FOR EVERY BELIEF SYSTEM

Among hundreds of coronaviruses, only seven infect humans. The rest prefer cats, camels, civets, bats, pigs, and other quadrupeds and brachiators. 2019’s so-called “novel coronavirus” may have jumped from another such mammal to a human after a mutation, but its lineage as well as its nature is circumstantial. COVID’s m.o. was muddled from the get-go by conflicting information, contradictory concepts, and clashes of political and social beliefs in the civilization it encountered. Microbiological, epidemiological, demographic, and political factors were quickly conflated with one another as well as with crisscrossing conspiracy theories and strings of mal- and meta-data such that their threads were immediately and inextricably entangled. There is not even a truth du jour or consensus yardstick.

           During COVID-19’s first transformative year, the discrepancy between places that should have been overrun and those that were—between individuals exposed and those who developed serious or fatal symptoms or became asymptomatically infected—left plausible deniability for just about any view while posing riddles regarding spike proteins, antibodies, antidotes, and lifestyles. Despite bulletins from high-level scientists, no experts or baseline veridicalities emerged.

           Even who the first victim was and when and how the disease began became as elusive as placing the origin of Homo sapiens. Who gets sick, how sick, and for how long, and who tests positive (or false-positive) reflect numerous co-factors, including lengths and degrees of exposure, viral load, natural immunity, enzymatic action, diet, body weight, co-morbidities, and other variables, some at a cell and subcell level, others psychic, cultural, and quantum. The relationship of severity of symptoma to blood type, fatty tissue, race, class, age, and diet (starring the commercial food industry with its depleted soils and toxic additives) runs a gauntlet of taboos and statutes against redlining, stigmatizing, shaming, or disrupting corporate commerce. The virus’ truths can’t be spoken openly.

           Whether a given disease is COVID-generated or a co-morbidity with a COVID-positive lab result is still up for grabs. The tests themselves depend on who made the kit and sets the parameters; they each scan different markers and nucleotides. Of course, timing of contact is critical too.

            The anti-COVID response takes place on multiple battlefields. In the first and most urgent, I cast my vote with hospital workers, physicians, nurses, grocery-store workers, bus drivers, teachers, and the vulnerable, poor, and innocent against virus deniers, political bullies, and pandering politicians.

            But I also cast my vote with healers, herbalists, shamans, and old-fashioned family doctors against the Medical Industrial Complex with its lobbyists, propagandists, and bought politicians. There is too much payola in play for something—a Rube Goldberg machine of somethings—not to go wrong. Before COVID’s arrival, we were already well beyond honest casinos. All the key players had extra cards or marked decks.

           Consider the Amazing Anthony Fauci, America’s infectious-disease czar. During his half-century-long tenancy at the helm of a science bureaucracy, he shuffled patents, patronage, and royalties. Transferring biological material from Tennessee or Norway to China would be standard operating procedure for a transnational biocrat in the One World Lab.   

           The neologisms “plandemic” and “scamdemic”—meaning fake pandemic—were adopted by opposing factions: on the Right, by religious fundamentalists and QAnon anarchists; on the Left, by alternative healers and foes of Big Pharma. The claim that Fauci helped concoct COVID-19 by sponsoring gain-of-function research with U.S. funds in a Chinese lab was a conspiracy theory of both factions; the Left for anti-corporate, anti-totalitarian reasons; the Right for anti-Fauci—anti-Aristo, anti-egghead—reasons.

           Neither side had any use for the Chinese Communist Party, but each made its peace with it. Trump turned his love-hate relationship with Chairman Xi into the “China virus” only to score points with xenophobic elements of his base. For the Left and Buddhists, it was an old story going back to Mao and the theft of Tibet. 

            The dilemma transcends a single virus’ nature, origin, back loops, and uncertainty states of particle output, aerosol half-life, and RNA transmission. We are metaphysically trapped, between climate change and capital growth, between mandatory vaccines and mitochondrial depth, between the materiality of UFOs and the speed of light. While markets are up, money buys less, so they keep printing it. Eventually it will turn into something else, or something else will become money.

           As nonfungible tokens and crypto-collectibles convert digital art into equities, the plan is to capture and contain the value of every blip, breeze, tube, and print-screen, to monetize everything, to elude inflation and debt forever by swapping out currencies and futures, tiers of reality and probabilities. Neither the Repubs nor Dems care about national debt any longer (as long as the other doesn’t) because there are endless alternate currencies, including debt itself. Every time LeBron dunks or Yo-Yo Ma bows his cello, coins are being manufactured. Every cartoon strip, Jim Carrey doodle, and Beyonce chord is a bank note and bitcoin as well as a potential Picasso or Da Vinci, cached in a Cloud databank, chemtrailed in metallic dust through the atmosphere.

           COVID-19 minted its own coinage, revalued world currencies, and strafed suburbs with government-issued pentacles, and online shopping carts. It superseded or suspended constabularies, for people had already armed and enslaved themselves, with high-speed internet, with Second Amendment rifles, with infinite delivery services. The prison is the mind, its bars the belief that life and happiness are quantifiable, that freedom, joy, and protection are merchandizable, to be bought and sold, that safety and control come from outside, that a virus can be contained and dispatched, that the supply chain goes on forever.

           George Floyd’s prophetic “I can’t breathe!” spoke for twin pandemics, its irony bearing a brutally un-ironic message. One breath-suffocating agent was external, casual, and personal—three police officers. The other was internal, parasitic, and impersonal. Either way, victims were being choked to death.

            Eventually melting glaciers will choke continents. Toxins from those continents will choke coral reefs and sea life. Nothing will be able to breathe. Rain forests, the lungs of Earth, are being asphyxiated too.

           Between Bob Dylan’s 1962 “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (“Oh, where have you gone, my blue-eyed son) and David Bowie’s 1972 “Cygnet Committee” (“And I want to believe / In the madness that calls ‘Now’”) was once world enough and time.⁴

                     Endnote

The first three sections and the last section of this chapter were first written during February through May 2020 and reflect their mood. The other sections were written mostly in 2021 through mid-2022. Parts of the chapter are adapted from my closing essay “Moving Forward . . . How Do We Get Out of This One?” in the anthology: Sherri Mitchell, Richard Grossinger, and Kathy Glass (editors), The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical.

4. Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia Records, 1963, and David Bowie, “Cygnet Committee,” David Bowie, Phillips (U.K.)/Mercury (U.S.), 1969.

3. BAT-VAMPIRE LOOP

COVID-19 morphed in about four months from a respiratory condition and flu to a blood malignancy, a far scarier proposition given the folklore behind bat-vampire interactions. The undead are sucking not just iron-binding molecules but vital force out of their victims. Their incubi are barely .1 micron long. They may not be sonar-bearing bats, but they come from bats.

           In COVID’s early days of pre-mutated strains, the virus acted like a radiation bomb. Clusters of people fell ill in waves, deteriorated with shocking swiftness, dragged themselves to hospitals from city, suburb, and dale. They looked like victims of voodoo, hair standing up, dazed expressions on their faces. Their trances were accompanied by lucid dreams, spells, out-of-body travel, precognition, time-space anisotropy, sacred comas, and hypnagogia.

           Civilization had dissolved into a monstropedia of roadkill and werewolves, corpses in Black Death parking-lot piles and refrigeration trucks. Some died in their apartments and houses, to be found by landlords and sheriffs in rigor mortis and decay.

           The canary was no longer just in the coal mine.

           The virus was at once as metastasizing and terminal as AIDS or cancer and as glancing as a cold or headache. How did the Three Fates cut their thread so unevenly?

Hematologically, COVID-19 introduced a platelet factor that functioned differently relative to age, sex, race, ethnicity, and blood type. Apparently, its spikes bind angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE2) receptors of endothelial cells, causing inflammation of the walls of blood vessels and capillaries, raising blood pressure, causing clotting and organ failure. The symptoms looked respiratory because of not only precursor flu-like motifs but contagion and entry through nose, mouth, eyes, and throat, binding alveolocytes lining lungs and leading to auto-immune coagulation and a shift in lipid metabolism. Increased fatty-acid accumulation stifled breath. From there, COVID-19 spread to other organs in a grab bag of symptoms. Effects included loss of smell and taste, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and incremental organ failure. Ventilators were a logical but mistaken intervention.

           With 20-20 hindsight in September 2021, a pathophysiologist detailed the course of infection:

           COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia. It is a viral vascular endotheliitis and attacks the lining of blood vessels, particularly the small pulmonary alveolar capillaries, leading to endothelial cell activation and sloughing, coagulopathy, sepsis, pulmonary edema, and ARDS-like symptoms [Acute Respiratory Disease]. This is a disease of the blood and blood vessels. The circulatory system. Any pneumonia that it causes is secondary to that.

               In severe cases, this leads to sepsis, blood clots, and multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines. Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19 are elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time, elevated C-reactive protein, neutrophilia, lymphopenia, hypocalcemia, and hyperferritinemia, essentially matching a profile of coagulopathy and immune system hyperactivation/immune cell exhaustion. . . .  [I]t can present as brain inflammation, gastrointestinal disease, or even heart attack or pulmonary embolism.⁵  

       The medical industry was not prepared for such a resourceful shapeshifter.

Mask-wearing, social distancing, and tracking of those who tested positive were an initial sine qua non to slow the spread. Next came surveillance, crowd control, denial of entry to shops or planes without a mask, then without a vaccine passport. Rumor was that a chip, implant, facial scan, or neuralink was next. In a later phase, the Chinese Communist Party set up street corridors that could not be entered without having a transactional cryptogram: a QR or Aztec barcode at each control station. They created post-modern ghettos.

           The fear from the anarchist left, Libertarian middle way, and alt-Right militias—each in their way—is that we will end up in both 1984 and Brave New World, locked down and sedated. The whole of humanity, including oligarchs (the Trump family too), remaining indigenous tribes and elders, the scientists, middle classes and the poor, even the homeless face a mysterious power so extra-judicial and unassailable that even COVID-19 palls before it.

           Some propose that off-planet forces that didn’t win World War II with their tanks, U-boats, Luftwaffe, and blitzkriegs have returned with a new edition of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Getting out of their trap will require our top shamans and witches as well as our best scientists.

           The problem is, we don’t know and aren’t being allowed to find out. In the meantime, we have been turned against one another while warlords and narco-bosses build climate shelters and dig biospheres thousands of feet deep.

Endnote

The first three sections and the last section of this chapter were first written during February through May 2020 and reflect their mood. The other sections were written mostly in 2021 through mid-2022. Parts of the chapter are adapted from my closing essay “Moving Forward . . . How Do We Get Out of This One?” in the anthology: Sherri Mitchell, Richard Grossinger, and Kathy Glass (editors), The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical.

5. Spartacus: COVID-19: The Spartacus Letter, Sept. 27, 2021.

4. PARADIGMS AND THEIR SHIFTS

COVID-19 arrived in a paradigm that was dissolving anyway. New vaccines opened their own rift. This went well beyond a shouting match between vaccine enthusiasts and an anti-vaxx crowd ranging from those against vaccines per se to those opposed to either just the COVID-19 ones or to the notion that they are even vaccines or only what their advocates and apologists say they are.

           The plurality view was non-negotiable: mass vaccination for plagues. A new vaccine was as presumed as the next day’s sunrise. The reason was a vending-machine technology that has been churning out salvation products for more than five generations. We expect viral prophylaxis from the same assembly lines that gave us personal computers and cell phones, intelligent cars and jets, and take photographs of galaxies millions of light years away.

           Vaccines have been central to the industrial era’s game plan much longer, since the breakthrough experiments of Louis Pasteur and Alexander Fleming a century and a half ago, though humanity’s recognition of isopathy (the use of substances that cause an illness to prevent it by stimulating a pre-infection immune response) likely goes back to the Middle Stone Ages. Despite their potential downsides, vaccines give immune systems a head start on developing antibodies—immunogens—against invaders, especially new ones.

           Practical immunology was first documented around 1000 B.C.E. in China where blow tubes were used to shoot dried-up lightly infected scabs of smallpox up the nostrils of healthy people, conferring immunity to diseases thought more dangerous. The technology travelled via Mongolia to Turkey to central Europe.

           In the late eighteenth-century, “inoculation” reached England. Edward Jenner discovered that people who had been exposed to less virulent cowpox were immune to smallpox. He took an additional step. Two months after inoculating a boy with a cowpox vesicle, he jabbed him (immodestly) with smallpox. The boy stayed healthy, no pox or worrisome symptoms. Point, vaccine.

           Louis Pasteur followed his lead with inoculations for rabies and anthrax; then Alexander Fleming developed penicillin for other small predators. Since then, antibiotics have been society’s default defense against bacteria, and vaccination became its mass-population contingency for viruses. There were downsides, but these rest in Darwin’s code of natural selection and I will get to them later.

           The rationale behind the COVID-19 vaccines may be ad hoc, but it is based on a long-vetted protocol. “Follow the science” means “Follow the inferential data.”

Corona-SARS was an unacceptable peril. Given the eight-billion-and-growing Homo sapiens population on this orbiting orb, the intricacy and interdependence of its markets and supply chains, and our commitment to civilizational coherence and growth, species-wide antigenic inoculation was the closest thing we had to a common medical narrative.  

           The virus had to be eliminated by universal or near-universal vaccination because the fuzzy logic of herd immunity is our sole long-term strategy against the viral kingdom unless we want to rebuild and repopulate our planet following a 99% die-off. Treat the pandemic like warfare! Shut down all counter-information channels, anything that puts this narrative at risk! 2021’s vaccines were meant to confront 2019’s novel virus the moment it entered an individual’s nostrils in a waft of community air. Once a viral load had disseminated into lungs and blood, it was too late to recapture that advantage. Point, virus.  

Initially, as prima facie evidence since the release in the U.S. of three major COVID-19 vaccines (from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson) and others in other countries, infections declined. The vaccinated showed a reduction in severity of symptoms and percentages of deaths. The serums seem to limit the likelihood of contacting severe or long-haul COVID.

           Conversely, in areas without mass vaccination and/or vaccine resistance, the virus continued to spread pandemically, filling hospital beds and killing occupants. Furthermore, this played out against a comforting back story: the demise of polio, smallpox, hepatitis A and B. The COVID-19 vaccines are purported to be no more exotic than other serums by which diseases like tetanus, chickenpox, and diphtheria were also dramatically pared in the human genome.

           The shots are also no big deal. Look at how many people have been inoculated already with minimal consequences. Most vaccinatees have gone about their lives without impact, except they are now able to attend meetings and parties. One would no more hesitate to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2 than against polio or measles.

           This record is widely agreed upon and circumstantially backed by the history of Western medicine and plague control. Note, however, that the statistics have been selectively culled and adjusted for vaccine “sell,” so they camouflage regional, demographic, and epidemiological curves. They also overlook a virus’ natural evolution from pandemic to endemic states. The vaccines can’t affect that either way.

COVID-19 vaccines may represent a continuity of history, but they are also a turn in the road. The reason is CRISPR. During the last big pandemic a hundred years ago, we had nothing like clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic amino-acids repeats—life codes deciphered initially from primitive bog bionts. Through the closing years of the twentieth century into the opening decade of the twenty-first, humanity used them to decipher its own life code, making COVID-19 vaccines ostensibly the best ever, a whole new genre, developed by data sweeps at nano-scale precision with backup software from CRISPR splicing technology. The COVID vaccines are safer than widely challenged MMR (mumps, rubella, measles) ones packaged in aluminum and thimerosal that can cross the blood/brain barrier.

           This is the current anthem of progressive immunology. Those who buy into it notably include scientifically informed people who are otherwise skeptical of governments and corporations and uninclined to jump on bandwagons. Twenty percent of educated liberals usually find a reason to object to anything, let alone a product from a transnational oligarchy, let alone a genetically modified serum from a profit-driven lab. But the usual suspects are on not not on board this time. Pretty much everyone supports universal vaccination.

The vaccine counterargument draws on a potpourri of anti-vaxx drumbeats from a hodgepodge of perspectives and agendas. While many of the critiques are well researched and reasoned, other are shambles of disinformation, political calculation, anti-scientific paranoia, MAGA agitprop, and Right Wing entertainment wars. Start with the fact that most people are scientifically uninformed and politically naïve. In the United States, an education system driven by competing Left- and Right-Wing factions and agendas has made it certain that disinformation is the water most people are swimming in.

           Informed dissents begin with the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines by Fleming and Salk’s standards but a different technology—CRISPR-based gene transfer, which has its own biomolecular source and trajectory. The new vaccines are lookalike shortcuts. Their touted advantage overlooks a disadvantage: they have been rushed to market without adequate testing of their long-term effects or core technology. Their short-term success is also overrated because biologists see only how the game starts, not how it ends. 2022 vaccine optimism reflects the early innings, but nature bats last.

           Despite all the hoopla, the new “vaccines” are leaky; they don’t confer the same degree of immunity that smallpox and polio vaccines do. They also may depress non-COVID-19 immunity while helping spread the virus’ own variants by imposing selective pressure on it without clearing the terrain. (Even as I edit my earlier version of this section), the February 2022 issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology reports that countries with higher percentages of fully vaccinated people also now have more, not fewer, COVID-19 cases.)

           Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca have, in effect, concocted a targeted immunity booster, much like annual flu shots that do not prevent infection but lessen its more severe outcomes. While shots provide only temporary and partial protection, vaccines confer longer-lasting immunity.

           Most significantly, safer and more dependable treatments for prevention and alleviation­ of COVID-19 have been suppressed solely to rid the vaccine of competitors. That’s fucked, and it’s not science.

The gap between those supporting and those opposing vaccines is deep, trenchant, and based on incommensurate belief systems. Each side has its own data sets, health priorities, and epidemiological interpretations. In addition, constructive debate has been discouraged and, in many instances, banned. Most vaccine enthusiasts assume that all rational folks agree that “the shot” is a no-brainer and that the thrust of the resistance, protest, and reluctance comes from idiots, high-school dropouts, conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics, ideologues, acolytes of Donald Trump, guests of Joe Rogan, and opportunistic politicians whose goal is not truth or health but talking points at the expense of lives.

           Yet the premise that anyone with an eighth-grade—or even first-grade—education can see through anti-vaxxers’ arguments overlooks the fact that “seeing through them” would require coursework in post-graduate microbiology and lab training in biotech. What anyone with an eighth-grade education can do is read mass media.

           Taking a step back from the different vaxx positions is difficult, for the long view must reassess the role that science itself plays in certifying its own paradigms—see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for criteria. It must also include a critique of science as the sole and ultimate arbiter of matters in the natural universe. Decade by decade, the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have raised science to a new Olympus with its own Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. In the process, old gods, angels, and healers have been replaced by algorithms—Matthew Arnold’s “drear / And naked shingles of the world.”⁶

Early in pandemic spring (2020) in The Coronavirus Transmissions anthology, I wrote: “Maybe this time will be different, with the whole world watching for corner-cutting and rigged risk/reward assessments. Maybe this time will be different with the best and brightest of a rainbow planet rallying against corporate thugs and bought liars. Maybe this time they will craft a vaccine at the depth and wisdom of our lineage—a Bach and da Vinci, a Coltrane and Baryshnikov of vaccines—and no one will get autism or chronic fatigue or mercury poisoning. By using an array of electron nanoscopes, polymer enhancement, computer modeling, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryoelectron microscopy datasets, they’ll find the SARS-CoV-2 source code; they’ll produce a vaccine of foresight and compassion rather than profit, of communion rather than exile, of love. Maybe.”⁷

           Two years later, these words sound like fuchsia fluff: a prose-poet’s paean to a communal ethic that no longer exists if it ever did.

           On the other hand, maybe “they” did. Maybe they hit the biotech jackpot.

           First, let’s review science’s own rulebook. The isopathic path to personal and herd immunity, based on a legacy of favorable outcomes, is to run trials with other mammal coronaviruses in order to get one of them to copy instructions for COVID-19’s spike and masking enzymes, then to fashion a defanged alias to activate antibody and T-cell responses in humans. The logic is prim and axiomatic: “Vaccines expose us to something and we form immunity to it like a tetanus shot or a tetanus protein.”⁸

          To fulfill this premise, a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine must track the virus across its entire spectrum—how it penetrates, claws its way into and makes itself a mockingbird in cells, how it affects tissues differentially, how it processes, learns, and mutates. Vaxx-activated antibodies have to craft a protein that will continue to be recognized by the immune system and alert the production of antibodies across many mutations and variants. They have to decoy the virus through the labyrinth of nasal passages, lungs, heart, blood, kidneys, neurons, toes, et al. They have to sustain prophylaxis without serious side effects, ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement), or continual boosters and revaccinations.

           There is a reason that it takes at least four years to develop a “safe and effective” vaccine. Computers can speed up cybernetic time, but they cannot speed up cell time. You have to track short-term, mid-term, and long-term genomic outcomes. You have to spot slow-developing data sets. Given that the COVID-19 “vaccines” use a novel form of artificial RNA, some of these effects may take decades or even generations to appear. Scientific and government agencies usually settle for between three and two years of data capture and analysis. With the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, it was closer to three months.

           There is a prior dilemma which scientists often overlook: they cannot explain the origin of life, e.g., how cells assemble holographic semblances with impeccable fidelity from DNA to blastula to cytoskeleton to pupa to full-blown penguin and papoose. What is life? Is it matter or energy, algorithms or cell talk, randy gunk or slumming spirit? Who is the invader, who the autochthon? The origin of life from inanimate molecules lies at the crux of all medical solutions.

           Yet ontological issues don’t concern biologists or most of the populace. They are dismissed as too big, mystical, and spooky. As long as COVID-19 is on the loose, science is looked to instead as the sole bastion, meaning not “science” in an Aristotelian sense but applied tech and, since the threat is a bio-threat, biotech.

The reasons for haste are well-known. With the appearance of a fast-moving new agent, former protocols seemed slow, convoluted. and cumbersome as well as retro for a post-CRISPR world. With the planet’s bio-lab attention and digital capacity attuned to a single virus, conventional modes of development were dismissed; they would take too long. Why try to solve a 2020 problem with a computer built in 1989? Pharma needed to find a miracle serum ASAP if only to absorb all the capital being transferred its way. Success wasn’t optional.

           The corporate choice was not to start at square one. Instead, prior technologies were scanned for alternatives and detours. Biotech folks went to the morgue, looked over dead inventory, pulled down a likely box, gave it a twist that wasn’t available decades earlier, and voila! Repurposed gene transfer was a gamechanger.

           Donald Trump’s “genius” in that regard was, per usual, as Jeopardy host. The boss was in a hurry and wanted results, so he raised the pot. With the virus spreading exponentially and devastating economies, the street was in a hurry too. Warp speed, a Star Trek trope, was legitimized; it gave scientists a reassuring cover for leaps of faith.

           It’s not that POTUS 45 suddenly turned pro-tech, it’s that his faux-reality mind couldn’t distinguish between corporate science and magical thinking. That’s how he came up with drinking industrial bleach to kill a virus. He was looking for a better “bleach.” So, he took out the jockey’s whip, and a whole lot of carrots, and emceed a competition to get your horse first across the finish line. If you can’t make it, fake it. Then make it. Boom, boom!

           Though a majority of Trump’s own followers turned out to be either anti-vaxx or anti-“this vaxx,” Trump was not. He always wanted to own the best and biggest of anything that megalomania and money could buy. He wanted the biggest plane, bustiest bimbo, and meanest casino on the pier, so he threw Uncle Sam’s printing-press money at the roulette wheel. After all, he was El Presidente and the MAGA universe was on his side.

           Scientists jumped on board; they didn’t care where the funds came from. If you need a warp-speed vaccine, you also don’t labor in nature’s forests and swamps. You don’t search for a four-leaf exception when you can clone one in a lab. You don’t slog through twentieth-century test tubes and nineteenth-century wickets when you have twenty-first-century CRISPR, qubits, and gigabyte memory. You don’t need a casting call of aliases from the hood; you copy the virus’ nucleic sequence, biomimic its spike, make a surrogate, and hope it plays true. We got the Trump-brand, warp-speed vaccine. 

          The stuff in those nitrogen-cooled vats was mass-produced from clones and codes; they don’t contain an organism or anything resembling Jonas Salk’s rhesus-monkey kidney-cell serotype and centrifuged organic matter. A COVID vaccine is pure information—like a crime unit’s amplification-fragment-length polymorphism, but reverse-engineered. Tuesday’s sleuth became Sunday’s shaman.

           There was also no human trial. There weren’t even animal follow-ups. The vaccines didn’t pass the mouse test—the mice died; rumor has it, eighty percent in the first twenty-four hours, the rest by the end of the week. Too bad, mice, but warp speed ahead! The infectious-diseases squad under Captain Fauci switched to EUA: Emergency Use Authorization.

           EUA doesn’t mean that the vaccines aren’t safe and effective, just that the parties decided not to wait around to find out. They had a two-birds-with-one stone alternative: hundreds of millions of willing guinea pigs, tens of millions more clamoring to be next. Everyone who received an mRNA or adenoviral inoculation in 2021 and 2022, a gift from Big Pharma and the State, was an unpaid, uninsured volunteer in a clinical trial for the next quadrillion-dollar payoff (that’s the decimal after trillion) in the pharmaceutical industry’s bid to take over tomorrow’s world.

           Without full disclosure of risks—the Miranda card of patient rights—there could be no willing consent. Corporations have abysmal track records for prioritizing health, well-being, and ethics over profits. Overreaches in a haste to get to market ahead of rivals and jump-start shareholder profits means that executives are ethical only by default—that is, when displays of faux conscience make for cheap p.r. while staying ancillary to the bottom line.

           Remember when the Boeing aerospace company was bought by McDonnell Douglas in 1997? It didn’t look suspicious or dangerous for frequent fliers, but the new guys quickly moved the corporate offices from Seattle to Chicago in order to get the engineers out of the craws of executives making real, meaning money, decisions. That was a passenger problem. In 2016, the Chicago dudes decided it was cheaper to hide autopilot alterations in the company’s new 737 Max 8 in digital firewalls and risk a few crashes than to disclose them and face pilot-retraining delays and a loss of sales.

           That’s how corporate America works. McDonnell Douglas execs were “bonused” on stock price, not safety. Then came two nose-down plunges, Indonesia and Ethiopia. Both planes had excellent pilots; both flight crews were blamed by Boeing headquarters.

           There is no shift of corporate priorities from flying machines to vaccines. Civilization was willing to turn over the war on COVID-19 to the same folks who gave us thalidomide, Vioxx, opioids, and the 737 Max 8. The pretext was that the situation was too dire for backroom shenanigans, but those shenanigans were so baked in that they didn’t look like shenanigans anymore.

           There is an additional cautionary tale. Big Pharma was also entrusted with treating advanced COVID-19 in hospitals and clinics. In the early days of the pandemic, the CDC touted Remdesivir, a designer drug that had failed all clinical tests. The recommendation came with the blessing of Anthony Fauci who knew about the trials because he had supervised them. Looking like honest Tony as he stood beside duplicitous Don, he acclaimed Remdesivir as a remarkable achievement. The name itself, a greasy corporate etymology, should have been warning enough.

           So why the unearned green light? Why Fauci’s smiling mug on coffee cups and T-shirts?

           If you go the conspiracy route, Remdesivir’s patent-holder, Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California, was chaired from 1997 to 2001 by neocon Donald Rumsfeld. Bush family stalwart George Schultz was a board member and fellow for a stretch. The firm also sported a host of current politician investors and Congressional overseers to whom it had made max campaign contributions even while some of them were monitoring its products via the NIH and CDC, textbook self-dealing. In any case, the firm had good buzz, and advanced biotech was deemed near infallible. 

           The World Health Organization would eventually conclude that Remdesivir did nothing to reduce mortality or improve any COVID-19 metric. It was not only useless but dangerous; it contributed to the virus’s early high death rate, causing kidney failure while sticking it on COVID’s rap sheet. Remdesivir killed 54% of all recipients within 28 days. Yet to this day (late 2022), it comes up first when hospital doctors punch COVID-19 into their diagnostic apps. It remains a designer drug of choice.

           The presumption that gene-transfer vaccines and Remdesivir were our sole coronavirus options was driven by political opportunism and corporate greed. The street didn’t look at alternatives because the Aristos and bureaucrats didn’t want it to. Yet the NIH and CDC are supposed to be consumer—not pharmaceutical-industry—protection agencies.

Not everyone came to the same conclusions. Peter McCullough, a Texas cardiologist who treated COVID-19 patients from the onset of the pandemic and published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on viral effects, was a vocal critic of the new vaccines from day two. In a mid-2021 interview, he explained why Emergency Use Authorization had to be invoked after the mouse debacle: “The original subjects from clinical trials had the late emergence of side effects nine months later. These individuals ended up with forms of blindness, they couldn’t swallow, there was a little girl on a feeding tube.”⁹

           To those evaluating the data and calling the shots (pun accidental), these “side effects” and injuries were incidental, ambiguous, or not vaxx-related. That wasn’t systematic analysis; it was more like: these things are super-brilliant, high-tech, shiny new, made by our best and brightest; we have nothing else in the hopper, we need them to work, so of course they work—or whatever! Warp speed ahead, Scotty!

           Trump had been telling folks for years that the second-best way to achieve a desired outcome is to pretend you got it, fib about deviations and dismiss counterindications as fake news. I’m not saying that he invented the EUA workaround—he didn’t—but he provided bluster behind a hasty rollout. After all, it was under the Trump brand, and he rated assets by personal gain. The public was told that EUA was a technicality; the vaccines were as good as authorized. This moment was summarized in trauma therapist Heidi Hansen’s Facebook post:

           My understanding is that the FDA has not approved any COVID vaccine. The only way they can be administered is via the current State of Emergency; otherwise it would be illegal to administer them. Since they are not approved by the FDA yet, the companies are, in a sense, testing them on the population. . . . Vaccines should not be de-contextualized— they are a profit-making endeavor and have a massive marketing campaign, regardless of what they end up actually accomplishing.¹⁰

       Right! And Moderna and Pfizer aren’t the Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama of corporations. The vaccines aren’t echinacea jujubes or prayer beads either. They are molecular widgets, assembly-line concoctions, subject to the same stress tests and risk-reward calculus as everything else in the universe from protozoa to Pleistocene hand-axes to Anthropocene iPhones.  

           It is worth repeating here: the serums, while called vaccines by one version of a commonly understood definition, are not made in the same way as traditional vaccines were and do not function in the body like them. Just because something is called a vaccine and based on isopathy doesn’t mean it behaves like smallpox and rabies inoculations, e.g., like an extract from a substrate of a healthy or diseased animal.

           If a vaccine is not deadened llama, mouse, or pangolin DNA, if it’s not a splice from another virus or stem cell from a fly or frog zygote but a codon written by AI-machines in the four-letter alphabet of amino acids, hardened and deep-frozen for longevity—it’s not a vaccine, it’s a gene-transfer cryogenic cyborg, a variation on genetically modified organisms—GMOs. Whenever a news source corrects a politician after he or she remarks that COVID-19 jabs are not vaccines, you are witnessing censorship by semantics and ignorance. 

           The goal shouldn’t be a fake seal of approval or a trick of pop terminology to sway the masses; there should be substantive debate about sources, effects, and consequences of gene-transfer shots. But we have no Marie Curies or Jonas Salks anymore, only dunce heralds and choruses. Between a novel coronavirus and our own biological and epidemiological subplots lie entire Dickensian novels. No one is privy to the full range of back channels of molecular physics—rogue protein activations, nucleations, unstable saturations, uncertain macromolecular thermodynamics, untracked phase shifts. We can’t monitor or track collective interactive protein unfoldings and electro-colloidal transfers except after the fact. Repeated spike cloning could degrade our genome, depress global immunity, trigger new autoimmune diseases, and/or distract the immune system from more deadly viruses on the horizon. We may be trading long-term immunity against a range of infections for short-term immunity against a single variant of coronavirus—and we may be helping it breed its own mutants.

           Or we may be setting the perfect mousetrap.

           McCullough put the downside front and center in a day-three interview:

    The vaccines are genetic vaccines. They are actually classified as gene transfer treatments, so they transfer genetic information into our cells either through messenger RNA or adenoviral DNA. They are failed biotechnology programs. They’ve been around for decades. They haven’t worked out in being able to treat diseases like Fabry’s disease or heart failure or cancer. They were repurposed to be vaccines and trick the body into making the dangerous spike protein, which turns out to be a really bad idea. . . .  None of the [other] vaccines take over our body’s cellular apparatus and cause our bodies to produce a foreign protein. That’s what the vaccines do. We’re producing. . .the original Wuhan spike protein. . . . Inside cells it causes damage. It pokes through the surface of cells and causes our body to attack our own organs. And then the spike protein liberates from cells, and it circulates throughout the body for two weeks, damaging blood vessels, causing blood clots, and damaging key organs like the brain, the heart, the immune system, and the hematologic system.¹¹

That would be a vaccine gamechanger. But is it true? To win out, McCullough must hold his weight against the entire international scientific and medical establishment. No wonder he is an unpopular guy. Any podcaster who interviews him is immediately tainted, badgered, and ostracized. For having him and another scientist, Robert Malone (see later) on his show, podcaster Joe Rogan was shamed by Neil Young and other old zombie musicians.

                        Endnotes

In this and subsequent sections, the anti-vaxx case may seem overstated. Some people (not cited here) suggested, for instance, that everyone receiving the COVID-19 vaccines would be dead within a year. Happily that didn’t happen. I hope that you can listen to the arguments and evaluate them in terms of their individual cogency and logic, toning down the hysteria. The goal is to find a middle way, not to choose either extreme—in other words, to restore rational dialogue to a complex topic. I am pushing an anti-vaxx perspective because it has been denigrated, misconstrued, and ridiculed, but the extreme anti-vaxx position is also a misuse of information. That’s my working stance, and I re-think it regularly. 

6. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” in Dover Beach and Other Poems, pp. 86–87.

7. Richard Grossinger, “Moving Forward . . . How Do We Get Out of This One?” in Mitchell, Grossinger, and Glass, The Corona Transmissions, p. 363 (slightly updated).

8. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com, July 23, 2021.

9. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com, July 23, 2021.

10. Heidi Hansen, Facebook, February 20, 2021.

11. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com, July 23, 2021.

5. SPIKE PROTEINS, GRAPHENE OXIDES, AND ETHICS BY DEFAULT

For McCullough and others with his viewpoint, the downsides of mRNA vaccines center around the perseverance of the artificially made spike protein, the coronavirus’ lance. Artificially activated messenger and transfer strands of code are supposed to dissolve after they deliver a Trojan-horse application to  the ribosomes, which receive it dutifully—they have a billion-year history of robotic efficiency—and use it as a blueprint for making a protein in the course of the day’s work. In this case. a special-order spike triggers COVID-19 antibodies. The strands aren’t supposed to return to the cell nucleus and the ribosome, they are designed to be polarized away for good. In fact, the genetic basis of evolution rests on one-time interactions between DNA files and their messenger and transfer cards.

           In nature, systems work the way they’re designed to, but natural designs are ex post facto. The ones that don’t work are abandoned by default: Darwinian rules of play. When humans intercede, they try to change the rules to their own advantage, which sometimes works, sometimes backfires, and sometimes triggers an unforeseen chain reaction that is irreversible. Algorithmic intelligence may seem nonsensical, but it has depths and resources beyond human ken—witness the living world.

           RNA dissolution shouldn’t be an issue. Left to its own devices, mRNA has a short half-life.  It is degraded by heat, light, saliva, blood—just about anything grazing or breathing on it. The dilemma is getting it not to disintegrate before it has done its job. Biotechnicans solved that problem by attaching its own brief biosphere to the strand. That was the “Warp Speed” factor, where Trump’s funny money got invested and an abandoned technology was reclaimed.

           Pfizer and Moderna messenger RNA clones were wrapped in polyethylene glycol anti-freeze, a cryogenic coat based on the addition of four ostensibly harmless lipids. The Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines used an adenovirus instead of mRNA, meaning that it was expected to interact with DNA in the cell nucleus—a different pathway within the same general model.

           I am not a biologist, so I speak with a layperson’s oversimplified understanding. I am open to correction by people who know more microbiology than me, not less. I have also listened to masters. I sat around a Denver kitchen a bunch of years ago listening to microbiologists Harvey Bialy and Kary Mullis talk bullshit and conspiracy theory, so I know something about how biotech capitalists bury bodies. I also hung out with Peter Duesberg and Richard Strohman—entertaining bio-rebels—in Berkeley during the nineties and followed their arguments well enough to have been invited.

           Deep microbiological reasoning is why many of the folks who later regretted getting vaxxed or did so for practical rather than immunological reasons say, “I only got the J&J. My blood is not contaminated with graphene oxide or the spikes.”

           Though engineered to stay stuck only briefly to the cells transected, the vaccines’ artificial spikes apparently didn’t all dissolve obediently after programming proteins and dispatching antibodies. Some circulated in the bloodstream. This was not good news because the spike itself is cytotoxic—after all, it is the COVID spike. You wouldn’t want artificial COVID weapons loose in your blood.

           Again, is this sophistry and paranoid exaggeration? Or a real red flag?

           According to nuclear cardiologist Richard Fleming and numerous other forensic scientists, within forty-eight hours lipid markers from the main COVID-19 vaccines were peaking in recipients’ ovaries, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. The vacinatees’ blood, Fleming added, looked terrible; it was unnaturally clotting and clumping. Autopsies on people who died soon after vaccination showed killer T-lymphocytes linked to micro-clotting and inflammation. (See a December 28, 2021 substack article entitled “Bhakdi/Burkhardt pathology results show 93% of people who died after being vaccinated were killed by the vaccine.”) Follow-up bloodwork from Japan showed spikes travelling to epithelial heart cells, brain tissues, and reproductive organs.

           COVID-19 data about death rates by age, with or without vaccination, have not been kept and, when kept, not released by either U.S. or European health agencies, making it difficult to get an accurate read on these claims. Yet hearsay evidence should have been alarming because, if confirmed, it presaged long-haul sterility, birth defects, leukemias, and lymphomas—plenty of tsuris down the road without first considering alternate paths to herd immunity. Here is McCullough’s encapsulation:

           Messenger RNA, which is made from human DNA, is typically used one time to produce a protein and then is dissolved. . . . But when we have viral sources of RNA or we make synthetic messenger RNA, which is what Pfizer and Moderna make, they are modified in a way. . . to resist destruction, and we think they are used over and over again, and that’s why they create such high levels of spike protein and antibody response. And we knew from other disease platforms that these messenger RNAs are long-lasting in the body, they are not gone in a couple of days like we originally thought. . . . And these messenger RNAs are incompatible with cellular life. They change the thermodynamics of cells. Cells are not meant to handle yet another piece of messenger RNA over and over again. And if they stay in the cells long enough. . . they can be reverse transcribed. That means that from RNA we can actually have a piece of DNA put in, and that DNA then gets put into our DNA.¹²

           A subsequent scientific article by scholars from multiple labs in different countries, published in Sweden and ignored in the U.S. as though it related only to Swedes, seemed to validate this picture:

            Preclinical studies of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, showed reversible hepatic effects in animals that received the BNT162b2 injection. Furthermore, a recent study showed that SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the genome of human cells. In this study, we investigated the effect of BNT162b2 on the human liver cell line Huh7 in vitro. Huh7 cells were exposed to BNT162b2, and quantitative PCR was performed on RNA extracted from the cells. We detected high levels of BNT162b2 in Huh7 cells and changes in gene expression of long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1), which is an endogenous reverse transcriptase. . . .¹³

          None of this was supposed to happen and, after a while, it wasn’t even supposed to be mentioned.

“Dead wrong,” rejoined CDC scientists. Only they mostly didn’t; they didn’t have to. They relied on trust in the geek squad, shatterproof public faith in vaccines, and the fact that most people’s constitutions would override or at least postpone unhappy side effects. They crossed their fingers proverbially and saw that it was, pretty much, good. 

           The greatest mass vaccination in history took place without any meaningful trial period for the serums, without systemic checks for adverse outcomes—without even customization for age and weight, without routine follow-up medical record-keeping or physician oversight—just a one-size-fits-all jab. There were no CDC or NIH press conferences, no reports of downsides—just line up, folks, at your local shopping centers, stadiums, and Walgreens. Even copacetic press conferences were avoided because they might sow doubts or lead to unwelcome questions. The process was going smoothly, so why risk any cognitive dissonance? Think about it. If you got a jab, did a doctor or agency track you for adverse effects? It was as if you had drunk a gin-and-tonic or taken an aspirin tablet—comme ci, comme ça.  

           The command to jab was so post-hypnotic it could have been issued without a pandemic, as though the goal was not to stop COVID-19 but to vaccinate as many hominids as quickly as possible, to enroll the world in a shot-of-the-month club, especially as more and more boosters were needed to confront variants.

                  The CDC proceeded as if the task were pothole repair rather than blood markers, even while—according to McCullough, Robert Kennedy, Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense (a pre-COVID vaccine inquiry group), and countless other watchdogs—it was certifying in the range of 1,300,000 adverse vaccine effects in seventeen months after rollout, including signs of heart disease, cardiac and thrombotic irregularities with blood clots and myocarditis, menstrual cycle disruptions, Bell’s Palsy, Guillain Barré syndrome, anaphylaxis, strokes, seizures, paralysis, acute fogginess, herpetic keratitis affecting the structure of the cornea, persistent tinnitus, demyelinating diseases, edema, loss or reduction of sight, herpes, vaginal lesions, diabetes, hepatitis, and spontaneous abortions and heart attacks. Even if these side effects were a relatively small percentage of vacinatees, they were flagging something about the nature of the substance causing them: it wasn’t cod-liver oil. Yet vaxxes were being recommended for toddlers, as though any mention of long-term risks to them was paranoid propaganda rather than time-bomb alerts.

           Guitar legend Eric Clapton made an early yelp and was quickly bullied back into silence—a foreshadowing of what was to come. After receiving the first AstraZeneca vaccine, Clapton reported experiencing extremity numbness and an expansion of his peripheral neuropathy. He wrote a vaccine resistance song. Apparently, his symptoms abated because he withdrew his anti-vaxx YouTube video so as not alienate fans.

           More ominously, early adverse effects were harbingers of future autoimmune diseases and cancers, as well as activation of latent viruses and retroviruses like herpes, shingles, and escaped mutants of SARS-CoV-2 itself.

           By late May 2021, around 9,000 U.S. deaths had been posted in VAERS, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System—retired sports stars Henry Aaron and Marvin Hagler among them. About twice that many appeared in the EU’s database. VAERS insiders estimate the real number of unreported U.S. vaccine deaths at closer to 45,000. We don’t know if Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin received a vaccine booster shortly before collapsing on the field from cardiac arrest after relatively minor contact, so it would be specious to add him to the list. I was offended by anti-vaxxers jumping in with their views while his life hung in the balance. However, the fact that it wasn’t part of routine consideration and future prevention was even more disturbing because it was an example of politics overriding medicine and risking other players’ lives to unduly exonerate the vaccine.

           By December, the official VAERS record was up to 946,000 post-vaccination injuries and almost 20,000 deaths in the United States. The United Kingdom’s equivalent Yellow Card system recorded 400,000 adverse effects and 1800 deaths. McCullough summarized (some repetition unavoidable):

           The non-fatal injuries tend to skew towards younger individuals. Remember, younger individuals are people who don’t need the vaccine anyway. . . . As the brain is injured, we end up with forms of paralysis, memory impairment, blindness, ringing in the ears, paralysis on one side of the face, Bell’s Palsy, cervical myelitis or being paralyzed from the waist down. . . . The NIH and CDC have yet to have a single press briefing on this. . . .

               That was just neurologic. Now we are facing the immediate cardiac effects. . . . What happens is, after the second shot within forty-eight hours, the spike protein is produced in heart-muscle cells. It attracts inflammation in the heart, and then it starts actually damaging the heart to the point where there’s chest pain, EKG changes, signs and symptoms of heart failure, marked elevations of cardiac troponin. . . . Not a single one needed the vaccine in the first place.¹⁴

               Who needs the vaccine is its own matter. Suffice it to say that inoculating children, who have little chance of developing serious COVID-19, with stuff that may negatively affect them for the rest of their lives is like countering a .0001% risk factor with a .1% risk.

           A nurse who works in Belfast, Maine, speaking informally at a backyard gathering, described a middle-aged man who, earlier that day at her workplace, went blind and was partially paralyzed after receiving his first Pfizer jab. A doctor at the facility agreed that the vaccine was the cause but said that the guy had unusual genetic factors; he was an anomaly. The implication was that everyone accepts vaccine risks for the common good. The nurse said that the man cried, “I’m still blind for life.”

           That is random gossip from someone who could even have been a conspiracy theorist or a plant. In similar hearsay, a friend in Connecticut told me about the deaths of ten out of twenty residents of an elder-care facility in the days after a vaccine-truck visit (he knew a doctor who worked there), but this is also third-hand chatter. Still, it doesn’t take much scuttlebutt to make getting “the jab” somewhat more existential than flying in a jumbo jet within the same technocracy.

           J. Bart Classen noted the additional risk of antibody-dependent prion effects in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, a journal that (it has been widely pointed out) is not peer-reviewed.

               RNA based vaccines offers special risks of inducing specific adverse events. One such potential adverse event is prion-based diseases caused by activation of intrinsic proteins to form prions. A wealth of knowledge has been published on a class of RNA binding proteins shown to participating in causing a number of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and ALS [Lou Gehrig’s disease]. . . .

              Autoimmunity and the opposing condition, metabolic syndrome, are well-known adverse events caused by vaccines. COVID-19 infections are associated with the induction of autoantibodies and autoimmune disease making it more than plausible a vaccine could do the same. One author has found amino acid sequences coded by the spike protein to be identical to sequences in human proteins including proteins found in the CNS [central nervous system]. Autoimmunity can also be induced by epitope* spreading when a foreign antigen, like the spike protein, is presented by an antigen presenting cell that also has self molecules attached to its MHC molecules.¹⁵ [Footnote: *An epitope is the part of an antigen that is recognized by the immune system and to which an antibody attaches itself.]

           The CDC’s blanket response has continued to be that none of these outcomes were from vaccines or solely from vaccines, and they were what was to be expected statistically from widespread distribution of any drug—a baseline pathology/necrology index for a population. A few confirmed adverse events were considered unfortunate but the sort of collateral damage that will come from intervention itself—you can’t run a limousine service or taco stand without occasional casualties. They also blamed the high VAERS numbers on sampling errors and gamed interpretations, continuing to assert, “It’s just like every other vaccine.”

           But the VAERS curve wasn’t like those of any other vaccine. The death rate on the general vaccine graph after COVID vaccines’ inclusion jumped from a range of around 200 per year to 4500 in 2021 just through May 28. The comparison baseline number represented seventy or so different vaccines going back thirty years. This disparity overrode any sampling or other errors.¹⁶

           Yet anti-vaxx claims have uniformly been rejected as hysteria, hyperbole, fake science, anti-scientific propaganda (even if from scientists), circumstantial induction, and speculation based on minims of data. The public was given only continuous rosy, dumbed-down prognoses.

           Furthermore, says the fallback raison d’être, while mass vaccination may be a species-wide gamble, so were internal combustion engines, plastics, and antibiotics, and though there have been adverse side effects, the sky isn’t falling. Civilization has advanced immeasurably, and humanity is still reproducing.

           But we have lost track of collective low- and mixed-toxicity build-up as well as microplastic and other nano-swarming because none of the wee intruders individually behave or look like their swarms. They’re amassing below the radar.

        The vaccines instead became the new 8.5 carat diamond or blowfish sushi. The rich wanted it because it was initially scarce and hard to get, making it a trophy drug worth a private jet to Florida or the Northwest Territories. The poor and uneducated were wary because they had been baited-and-switched too many times. The result was the disenfranchised rejecting a giveaway they didn’t trust, and the enfranchised trying to buy their way ahead of them. Two years later, these free vaccines still have 90% buy-in from the wealthy and educated but a mixed response from the rural poor and street.

Karen Kingston, a former Pfizer executive with a skillset encompassing chemical, biological, ethical, and legal aspects of medicine, tried to expose a skeleton in the pharma closet: the graphene lipid nanotechnology of mRNA vaccines is poisonous to most life forms. That’s how labs made a biosphere for their RNA messengers: graphene oxide is 4000 times stronger than titanium and can withstand 1700-degree Fahrenheit temperatures. It renders unstable nucleic-acid strands near indestructible.

           The ingredients and their unique formulation, Kingston pointed out, are a “trade secret” not required to be listed on global patent forms or in filings with the CDC. Their decisive component is not just proprietary knowledge but the djinn in Elon Musk and Bill Gates’ cherished technology for creating neuralinks (human-AI interfaces): imbedding machines or mind-control devicesin humans. This news has prompted the QAnon claim that the COVID vaccines are meant to implant connectivity between recipients and 5G, leading to thought control, memory replacement, and Big Brother tracking and takeover—an exaggeration of current capacity but not an exaggeration of the transhumanist game plan. In an interview with podcaster Stew Peters, Kingston remarked drolly, “I think they’re just trying to see how much they can put into people before they die, honestly.”¹⁷ She meant boosters on top of original shots.

           When Kingston took her detective work further by tracking industry-coded data—MSDS numbers (Material Safety Data Sheets) in Pfizer’s EUA filing—she found that the graphene oxide was made by a Chinese company, Sinopeg, whose website identifies one of its vaccine ingredients as “core-shell structured polyethylene glycol functionalized graphene for energy-storage polymer dielectrics,” boasting that “graphene, as the strongest and stiffest material and arranged in a honeycomb structure with hybridized carbon, finds more applications in modern industry than other carbonaceous allotropes; in pristine form, it is also an excellent heat and electric conductor.”¹⁸ Does that sound like a food-grade ingredient?

           Graphene can host an electromagnetic field, which is how it connects devices to the internet. Positively charged nanoparticles can be activated by external electromagnetic fields. They’re also a bioweapon and purported ingredient in chemtrails.

           A few people with discriminating nervous systems experienced the vaccine as metallic and innately dehumanizing, apart from any neuralink. “It doesn’t protect against COVID-19,” a friend told me, “because it is just as alien and metallic, and they vibrate together. It’s not a surprise that the vaccinated are getting the virus; the vaccines don’t immunize against it; they draw it. The metal in the vaccine draws the metal in the virus.” This is an esoteric intuition of the anthroposophical variety. I provide it for what interest it may have and also because I take up Rudolf Steiner’s thoughts on vaccination later in this chapter.

           Kingston bring her own evidence to a logical, outraged conclusion:

           Anyone who came out and said, ‘Hey, this virus isn’t that bad,’ they were mocked, they were ridiculed, they were ostracized. Doctors were threatened with having their licenses taken away. . . . Even the FDA’s documents, they talk about, ‘We don’t think anyone under the age of eighteen should get these things. We’re worried about viral shedding. . . .’  No one in good conscience should have approved this, but this is such brainwashing going on, such control of what basically the big techs wanted you to know as ‘the truth’. . . . All your trusted advisors say this stuff is safe, everyone in the media says it’s safe. And if someone says, ‘No, it’s actually lethal, planned genocide,’ it’s impossible to believe.¹⁹

           To join Kingston in elevating this mash of complex chemistry to medical genocide or an intentional depopulation tactic may be paranoia plus agitprop, but we have no language for the political misuse of science, so hyperbole reigns. The fact is, we don’t know, and “they” don’t know. What we do know is that if they did know and the answer was bad, they wouldn’t tell.

                        Endnotes

In this and subsequent sections, the anti-vaxx case may seem overstated. Some people (not cited here) suggested, for instance, that everyone receiving the COVID-19 vaccines would be dead within a year. I hope that you can listen to the arguments and evaluate them in terms of their individual cogency and logic, toning down the hysteria. The goal is to find a middle way, not to choose either extreme—in other words, to restore rational dialogue on a complex topic. I am pushing an anti-vaxx perspective because it has been denigrated, misconstrued, and ridiculed, but the extreme anti-vaxx position is also a misuse of information. That’s my working position, and I re-think it regularly. 

12. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com,  July 23, 2021.

13. Marcus Aldén, Francisko Falla, Daewei Yang, Mohammed Barghouth, Cheng Luan, Magnus Rasmussen, Yang De Marinis, “Intracellular Reverse Transcription of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 In Vitro in Human Liver Cell Line,” Current Issues in Molecular Biology, Volume 44, Issue 3, February 25, 2022

14. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com, July 23, 2021.

15. J. Bart Classen, “COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease,” Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 2021.

16. Bret Weinstein, Robert Malone, and Steve Kirsch, DarkHorsePodcast, Plandemicseries, July 8, 2021

17. Karen Kingston, “Former Pfizer Employee exposes deadly Graphene Oxide in the Covid Vaccine,” Stew Peters Show, Vaccine Liberation Army, July 29, 2021.

18. Karen Kingston, “Former Pfizer Employee exposes deadly Graphene Oxide in the Covid Vaccine,” Stew Peters Show, Vaccine Liberation Army, July 29, 2021.

19. Karen Kingston, “Former Pfizer Employee exposes deadly Graphene Oxide in the Covid Vaccine,” Stew Peters Show, Vaccine Liberation Army, July 29, 2021.

6. THE VACCINE MEME

In this section, I want to distinguish between the COVID-19 vaccines and the COVID-19-vaccine meme. The former is made of molecules; the latter is made of letters, concepts, beliefs, and marketing. The former gets injected into people’s blood; the latter doesn’t. 

           When you hear folks canonizing and recruiting for the “V” word, take a step back and remember messengers like Jacques’s Lacan and Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss. You are in a church needing deconstruction. The vaccine is the virus whisperer. Parishioners invoke it devoutly in order to resume their mixers and mingles. The “V” word is holy water for maskless dining, sporting events, theaters, gyms, parties, cruises—the safe, shared air they once took for granted. Everyone wants it back, or a half-decent simulation. Vaxxing soothes the fear that the old normal is gone for good, that sustainability under capitalism is doomed.

      Citizens are less willing to look at the shadow side, what global supply chains and artificialized desires have done to themselves and the planet—container ships with tchotchkes backed up out of Long Beach and Oakland well into the Pacific.

       The word “vaccine” is a derivative of Latin vaccinia, from vacca, “cow,” reprising etymologically cowpox particles to immunize against smallpox. MRNA vaccines are, in effect, an artificial herd. Perhaps if people were told, “This is a Monsanto Jones calling your latest polka with a warp-speed gene-transfer fiddle,” they might think twice about allowing his tunes into their cell-nucleic engines. Yet the V-word is so anointed that it is essentially against the law to note that the SARS-CoV-2 vaxxes do not comply with their own branding.

        The “V” meme is running so far ahead of the vaccines that it alone is what the he vast majority of vaxx enthusiasts are touting and responding to. They have no idea what the serum is or contains, the implications of receiving it, or what the alternatives are, but they honor the meme with patriotic loyalty. The “V” is impenetrable, its cabin sealed for flight, its transponder as immaculate and generic as shampoo, fish ’n’ chips, and wine.

        Or the “V” meme is an agent of the enemy, a construct as covertly politicized as guns, abortion, and gay marriage (on the other political side) with the difference that those remain concepts within the social body, not obligatory blood fluids. Vaccines are memes at the level of fluoride in the water, water-boarding, circumcisions, subincisions, and GMOs—they are GMOs—so they stick at a visceral level, meaning that they are visceral for those who hate them while those who accept them ignore their visceral effects or treat them as ancillary, like ingredients on a ketchup bottle.  

        People don’t realize, or have forgotten, that all vaccines have risk-reward ratios, meaning risk as well as reward, all of them. Some provide more reward than risk, though none fulfill V-word magic. As it stands, COVID-19 vaxxes, not their meme, are higher on the risk and lower on the reward scale, especially when injected into children. They are not reward-less, but they have poor walks-and-hits-per-inning ratios.

Most lab blokes are honest brokers. They sift, sort, sew, copy, clone, and track within the world of the cell nucleus and DNA’s twin-coded helical strands; they are alchemists, cryptographers, micro-astronomers, seamstresses, nano-zookeepers. Within their paradigm of cell biophysics, they are “good guys,” working 24/7 at a miracle to end a plague across a lockdown-weary world. Some may be tainted by a “God complex” as well scientific fundamentalism and, in a few cases, avarice and ambition, but they are not conducting fake experiments, making perilous potions on purpose, or putting out intentionally bad information.

           Yet there is a disconnect between meticulous, straight-shooting microbiologists and their media paracletes. Both are honest brokers at their respective trades, but no thread connects them—they are whistling Dixie in different keys, using the same words to describe very different realities.

           The vaccine assurances that are flying fast and furious in the early 2020s are not from scientists in labs who grok the paradoxes and risk-reward equations under which they are operating, but folks who know nada about cells or genes and are in no position to guarantee anything, let alone vaccine safety and effectiveness. Yet newscasters, community activists, and educators, few of whom have even high-school biochem basics, try, with artless sincerity, to convince the masses that the COVID vaccines are not only harmless but a civic duty.

           Even most doctors lack understanding of viral epitopes and mRNA transfers and how they affect cells and tissues. They didn’t study this stuff. Civilians who assume that they prescribe their pills out of deep wisdom are kidding themselves about not just vaccines but medical wisdom, which palls before the advanced sales tactics of the Medical Industrial Complex with its pharma, hospitala, and insurance branches. Most doctors are highly educated rubes in matters of healing, so they are at the mercy of companies selling cash-and-carry cures based on linear interpretations of nonlinear systems. That goes for vaccines, benzos, opiates, statins, and the rest of the modern medicine bundle.

           Docs who cite their own M.D.s with snobbish superiority—“I guess I could have saved the money for medical school if [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis knows more about vaccines than I do”—are not disclosing that (1) they learned relatively little in medical school at a subcellular level (that’s in a different building), and (2) their entire education took place within a rigorously allopathic model of cure under a sworn pledge to the allopathic AMA guild.

           DeSantis may not be all that far behind. Even though he is spouting a second-hand, politically driven platform, his M.D. advisors aren’t marooned in the allopathic model. They attended medical school too and came to different conclusions. For instance, most old-fashioned osteopaths have a broader notion of health and disease from working hands-on with tissues and organs than the average M.D., but therapeutic touch was declared “outmoded.” Years ago, I wrote:

           We are spectators to Brother Love’s Gala Reality Show/Pentecostal Synod, underwritten by the mercenaries of Big Pharma and the health-insurance empire, Vegas-like syndicates who pay their own executives tens of millions of dollars skimmed out of working-class premiums to diagnosticate how to charge more service fees and deny coverage to as many suffering humans as possible and then how to beat more surcharges and service fees out of the same sea of misery.²⁰

           Gods of commerce have replaced gods of healing, while politicians play politics with scientistic cover stories, painting over a Jackson Pollock splatter with Rockwell Kent landscapes. A chaos field of dynamic disequilibrium is portrayed as if it were a pinball of cause and effect. The media rewrite nature as if none of this mattered—it’s all good!—as if what happens in real cells and bloodstreams is negotiable. The thing being put in your body is considered secondary to the word.

        But the creature body can’t be gamed; it is a living field made up of thirty trillion organisms, each with its own factory and metabolism. When chemical brews are jabbed into the factories’ feeder lines, they encounter a juncture of nucleic-acid streams, not Meme Limited. That’s where rubber meets road. Adverse events are not just a statistical anomaly, they are something in the vaccine that creates issues. It is biochemical, not political, information.

           Yet Anthony Fauci had to gall to declare before a Congressional committee, “When they aim their bullets at Tony Fauci . . . they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.”²¹

           I think he believes that. His arrogance and condescension go back to junior-high biology where eggheads were baptized in a new religion. By pretending that science can be reduced to pre-packaged homilies under jurisdiction of a government agency, Fauci is showing off his five-star badge while faking West Point logic, but he is taking authority for health decisions affecting millions and squelching all substantive debate.

           “Follow the science” is issued a free pass—“Go right on through, sir!”—but it is a fake visa based on a meme-ridden illusion. At least Jonas Salk respected nature and put in his honest time. The new V-word is a forged construct as well as a tautology: vaccines can’t validate or vindicate themselves. When only a circular firing squad of linked meanings legitimize each other, science is being sacrificed on the altar of scientism.

If most doctors and virologists don’t know the genomic, microbiomic, immunogenic, and epidemiological consequences of gene-transfer treatments, certainly lay microbiologists Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Andrew Cuomo, Neil Young, Daniel Lippman, Jennifer Aniston, Wolf Blitzer, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Olivia Rodrigo don’t. I have the utmost respect for most of these folks, fondly Kareem, who participated in an art project with my daughter not knowing (of course) that he and I rode the same NYC subway cars en route to our respective high-schools in the 1950s, he then a tall lad in a Power Academy athletic jacket; but when he says that Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers doesn’t understand immunology, unless the former Buck and Laker Hall of Fame center is versed in systemic switchbacks within cell biology, he is mistaking a cartoon-like interpretation of isopathy for multivariate distribution of vaccines in organisms, genomes, and biospheres. Rodgers may not grok as much immunology as Kareem, but he at least knows that there are such things as homeopathic and herb-based immunity and colloidal distributions of trace effects, which (ironically) are closer to skyhooks and jazz than Pfizer antitoxins.   

           “Safe and effective” is a corollary phonemic clump formed almost like “saefan’d-fective” or any mindless buzz that skips over a meaning. It was subliminally skimmed from a fifties’ aspirin ad. Of course, no one knows if the COVID-19 vaccines earned their “safe and effective” seal. They had no test drives before being declared kings of the road. Count them now: the new hand axes, iPhones, and Teslas! They dash about the marketplace like indiscriminate suitors. How did so many appear so quickly? The Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Astra-Zaneca, Janssen, the Russian one, the Chinese one, the Cuban one? By February 2021, there were 240 COVID-19 vaccines, 52 in clinical trials. That wasn’t just Warp Speed, it was white on rice!

           Again, it was because they weren’t vaccines, they were software. Every lab developed its own platform: complementary instructions and recombinant sets for writing the spike protein in messenger RNA or adenoviral acids. Most of these folks grew up playing computer games, so why not? It was like cloning pigs and rabbits in test tubes, then giving them cute names.

                  Vaccine fervor remains unhedged and unexamined, visceral and subliminal, even (as noted) among usually skeptical folks and traditionally suspicious liberals. Things have gone truly haywire when the ACLU, the main protector of free speech, calls for expanded censorship to silence critics of vaccines and when Left Wing guru Noam Chomsky recommends total exclusion of the unvaccinated from society. Asked how they were to be fed, he purportedly replied, “Well, that’s actually their problem.”

           Why is everyone so dead sure of the fidelity of their beliefs (or superstitions) and so intolerant of rebuttals? How can they spout off so casually? Capitalist marionettes act as though they know everything about stuff about which they actually know next to nothing, bowing at the shrine of fundamentalist scientism as they yak about jabs and shots in arms as if people were slot machines, data terminals, or heroin addicts. Calling mRNA shots “routine medical treatments,” they defend them fervently, trusting the imprimaturs of self-interested entities that made and funded them. Meme supporters and cheerleaders have come to believe that anyone who questions COVID-19 vaccines is a vandal or a fool.

           Remember, Pfizer and Moderna are not NGOs; they are companies founded to make products and generate dividends. The stuff in their cryonic cylinders and vials aren’t memes but liqueurs with attributes, bunches of molecules that got together with the help of advanced hominids. They will go the way of all molecules in ecospheres and biomes, but they can’t be dj-ed away by a technocratically driven mindset or replace life with a game called life.

            Yet the “V” meme is so strong that it convinces former Green stewards and folks who studiously read fine print in order to avoid GMOs and Frankenfoods—like songwriter Neil Young just a few years ago—to put Frankenvaxxes in their bloodstreams without a second thought and tell themselves that it’s somehow different or safer than other potions of Monsanto Jones.

           In 2015, Young renounced genetically modified corn with a clever anti-biotech playlist dubbed The Monsanto Years. In a promotional appearance on “The Late Show with Steven Colbert” (according to an account calling it “cringey”), “Colbert asked Young about scientific evidence showing GMOs were safe. Young dismissed it out of hand, retorting, ‘That must be a Monsanto study that didn’t notice the terrible diseases and all of the things that are happening.’” He went on to cite zealous anti-GMO regulations in the EU as scientific proof. “The cringey bit concluded when a man dressed as a GMO corn cob appeared, asking Young, “I was born this way, why do you have to label me?”

           Young replied, “I don’t normally like to label things but you’re so dangerous, and you’re dangerous to me personally and my family, and the rest of the planet.” Eventually the corn got angry and exploded in a shower of popcorn, which Young implored Colbert not to touch.²²

           Cringey enough! But in 2022, the same songster valorized genetically modified gene transfers, amping them during his Joe Rogan kerfuffle when he removed his playlist from Spotify to protest their sponsorship of Rogan’s podcasts interviewing Malone, McCullough, and other vaxx skeptics. Rogen, a Young fan, tried unsuccessfully to make peace. 

           How does a songwriter convince himself that he knows the difference between two gene-transfer sciences and how one is dangerous while the other isn’t?

           It’s because vaxxes are not what he thinks he knows or is touting. He’s flying his tribal team colors, declaring himself anti-QAnon, anti-Trump, anti-Tea-Party, anti-hillbilly-elegy, but he also declaring himself pro-Pfizer, pro-Moderna, pro-technocracy, pro-biomod, pro-censorship, pro-lockdown. And, on top of that, the vaccine is a Trump vaccine, so he is valorizing Trump’s warp-speed bluster. 

Tellingly, some other of the vaccines’ biggest enthusiasts were initially its most vocal critics. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and pretty much the entire Democratic Party asked rhetorically during the 2020 campaign, “Would you put a Trump-warp-speed serum in yourself?” Right up to the election, Biden challenged the integrity of the vaccines, implying that POTUS 45 had encouraged shortcuts in research, testing, and approval. Jamal Simmons, soon to become Kamala Harris’ communications director, accused Trump of “pushing a janky science vaccine into the public for political purposes.”²³

           As soon as the Presidency changed hands, Joe and crew turned on a dime and made mass vaccination their sole COVID policy. The janky Trump vaccine morphed into the safe and effective Biden one. A World Rasslin’ Frankenvax became a patriotic Mighty Mouse. “Warp Speed” became the Democratic slogan, revived during the 2022 mid-terms.

         The default policy became vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, which is not a policy but an attempt to make the absence of a policy look like one while turning health freedom into a political whipping boy. The Biden administration could shift blame and act smart while, behind the scenes, run around like headless turkeys.

           The subsequent language around the COVID vaccines has come to resemble Trump’s “perfect phone calls.” What made them perfect was that they had to be perfect to fend off their imperfections and widespread suspicions about what was being hidden. If health czars had wanted to encourage a vaccine rebellion and trucker freedom convoys, they couldn’t have chosen a more effective course. They compelled journalists writing about the new vaccines to genuflect with honorifics, disclaimers, and Allah-be-praised strophes when reporting with any smidgen of candor on opposing vaccine views. How is that not suspicious to anyone with a second-grade education? When was anything so good that it couldn’t sustain the gaze of a free press? When has widespread censorship in the name of the public good ever been for the public good? When has it not been claimed as the reason?

           Stew Peters expressed his own honest bewilderment as he responded to Karen Kingston’s graphene-oxide spiel on his podcast:

            I’m a human, you know. And so just knowing people who have subjected themselves to this inoculation, knowing how difficult it is to have a conversation . . . doing what I do, loading down to my brain terrabytes of information every single day, trying to determine what’s real, what’s not, what’s missing, what’s disinformation, who’s deep state, who’s trying to throw me off, who’s controlled opposition. . . . It sounds like some kind of sci-fi movie. . . . There is no threshold here. It doesn’t matter how many people die, they will continue this incessant push.²⁴

           Everyone is struggling with those same terrabytes, admit it or not.

The COVID-19 vaccines may yet prove as beneficial as both Biden and Trump have claimed on their respective watches, but a “pandemic” of pile-on deception has oversimplified a complex landscape. Rhetoric about “rolling up sleeves” has made vaxxing sound as ho-hum and workaday as donating blood or playing paintball. Jargony jingles and lottery-like contests with chintzy rewards make light of something more like radiation exposure. “Jab” and “poke” are one-syllable stops that infantilize the process, encouraging buy-in before their premises can be examined. In the UK, folks refer to the vaxxes as “pokes” like train-tube bumps. But they are more like spider bites.  

           The sell is, who would be against a little jab or poke? Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Who’s spooked by Porky Pig? Intelligent New Yorker commentator Amy Davidson Sorkin revealed the degree to which an abstraction had come to pass as a real thing when she characterized what Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill told the Supreme Court was “an invasive, irrevocable, forced medical procedure” (closer to the truth) as—in Sorkin’s dumbed-down version—“a simple shot that protects against a disease that has taken more than eight hundred thousand American lives.”²⁵ A simple shot! She knows that? How does her mind skip over all the Lacanian subtexts and roll across the finish line with antiseptic triumphalism? You can’t get any deeper Tower of Babel than that.

           Nowhere in the press discussion of vaccine hesitancy is the slightest notion that these vaccines might be oversold or that graphene oxide is a wild card. The coverage continues to be about a meme without an underlying biochemistry. Vaxxing is made no more substantial than vaping. Vaping may not benign, but it softens and recreationalizes its fellow gerund.

           “Booster” or “boost” is a follow-up meme. No attention is given to what is being boosted or how or even if. Just be boosted, bro! It’s a Popeye-like validation. Open a can of spinach, pour it down the gullet. Boost! Send in the A-team. Get those restaurants and supply chains operating again. That is what “boost,” translated from Orwellian into Anglo, means

           “Shooting up” is a more accurate term, as in speed, crack, steroids, pentobarbital. Vaccines are not intentionally psychogenic, but “shooting up” is more informative than “jab.”

           Yet the boosters go on as if they were multi-vitamin transfusions, leading to wake-up spoofs like the Green Family’s “Hotel Vaxifornia” on Rumble: “nanobots in my brains /Got modified mRNA, graphene oxide in my brain.”

         The following satire circulated online in 2022 recalls routines of double-talk comedians of the fifties like Abbott and Costello and Professor Irwin Corey:

           The third dose boosts the immune system, so after the fourth dose you are already protected. When 80% of residents receive the fifth dose, the restrictions will be eased because the sixth dose stops the spread of the virus and prevents it from spreading. We are calm and believe that the seventh dose will solve our problems, and we have no reason to be afraid of the eighth dose. Clinical studies of the ninth dose have shown that antibodies remain more stable after the tenth dose. The eleventh dose guarantees that there will be no new mutations, so there is no reason to criticize the idea of the twelfth dose.

           Trouble is, neo-Libs and progressives have lost their sense of humor and, with it, their suspicion of utopian technocracy.

         Endnotes

20. Richard Grossinger, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, p. 405.

21. Tiffany Lane, “Fauci Raises Eyebrows—I REPRESENT SCIENCE,” Kevin Jackson Network, November 28, 2021.

22. Louis Anslow, “Neil Young’s Long Record of Spreading Scientific Misinformation,” Yahoo News, January 25, 2022.

23. Jessica Chasmar, “VP Harris’ new comms director suggested Biden ‘Dazed and confused,’ slammed Trump for ‘janky science vaccine’,” Fox News, January 7, 2022.

24. Stew Peters, “Former Pfizer Employee exposes deadly Graphene Oxide in the Covid Vaccine,” Stew Peters Show, Vaccine Liberation Army, July 29, 2021.

25. Amy Davidson Sorkin, “Vaccine Mandates Have a Bad Day at the Supreme Court,” The New Yorker, January 8, 2022.

7. HEALTH FREEDOM

Health Freedom is not just a matter of freedom from government control over health and medical decisions; it also means freedom to maintain one’s own homeostasis, microbiome and, to the degree that people believe in them, their astral, etheric, and other energy and subtle bodies. Health Freedom doesn’t rid one from social responsibility to prevent spreading infectious diseases, but it also shouldn’t impose blind allegiance to a technocratically anointed hierarchy. It encompasses freedom of religion too. I hope that my perspective on this tricky matter will be clearer by the end of this chapter and put in an even broader context by the end of the next. 

           Some sort of collective trance—what I describe as an “egregore” (also in next chapter), a bit like what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject” and Jung a “collective archetype”—has taken over public perception of COVID-19 and its vaccines. “Large-scale mass formation” is Dutch psychologist Matthias Desmet’s term for this post-hypnotic-like state. In his words, a Stockholm-Syndrome-like “Covidian Cult” has caused “mass conformity to an official psychotic narrative . . . based on paranoia and not bound by logic or reason . . . and [un]shaken by facts.”²⁶ He says, and I paraphrase:

           Mass formation emerges in a society in circumstances of a lack of social connectedness and a lack of meaning. These two are connected because humans are social beings and, when there is a lack of social bonding, there is a lack of sense-making too. In addition, there must be a lot of free-floating anxiety—anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation. You don’t know what you’re afraid of, so you can’t control the fear or how it generates social discontent. Put these together with a build-up of free-floating aggression and frustration that can’t be directed at an object, and you have a perfect storm.

               Then a narrative is distributed through the mass media indicating an object of the anxiety and providing a strategy to deal with it. There is a huge willingness in the population to go along with the narrative and participate in the strategy. The free-floating anxiety and lack of meaning have a place to go, something to connect to, and a plan for resolving it.²⁷

           To my view, Desmet is creating semi-academic jargon without adding much new value to Freud’s concept of reaction formation, but I agree with him that a lack of meaning and free-floating anxiety have caused a societal madness or delusion.

           After 9/11, hysteria about terrorists stampeded usually leery people into relinquishing cherished constitutional rights. Delirium about a plague is even more personal than a one-up set of suicide attacks. It turns usually savvy folks into pawns of health officials, corporate bullies, medical lobbies, and media hysteria. COVID-19 freedom-of-speech rules have come to make post-9/11 censorship look almost reasonable. Spinning the vaccines’ verities while concealing their market-driven basis has produced a shadow drama worthy of Homer or Euripides. In the current Götterdämmerung, COVID-19 is an enemy like the 1950s Reds or H.G. Wells’ Martians, threatening planet-wide annihilation. The vaccine is our ally, a Star-Wars-like shield for restoring our safety bubbles. This is either mass or reaction formation.

           Neither the virus nor the vaccines are as critical a long-term crisis as the shutting down of debate about them. Lack of open vaccine discussion has become a First Amendment disaster.

           I have no problem with moderate in loco parentis oversight. When spokespersons for State agencies tell people not to drive under the influence of alcohol, use fentanyl as a pain-killer, give away their Social Security numbers to spamming strangers, or have unsafe sex, these may be encroachments on absolute freedom, but they are not irrational. No one censors debate on even volatile and contentious issues like abortion, cannabis, and guns. Yet when Jen Psaki, Joe Biden’s well-informed first press secretary, told the media (and Spotify) that they should eradicate “COVID-19 misinformation,” she was using the bully pulpit to censor responsible doctors who had narratives countering Dr. Fauci’s.

         Someone should tell well-meaning progressives that the syllogistic reasoning behind banning false cries of fire in a crowded theater doesn’t apply to politicization of facts where there is no potential mob or stampede. Instead, they should promote fixing the underlying causes of gullibility and mass formation: a broken education system, abuses of corporate and political power, and class disparity of access to goods and freedom. You don’t make people smarter and more discerning by sheltering them from so-called propaganda. Plus, censorship of contrarian arguments about vaccines is not protective of society; it is protective of the Medical Industrial Complex and its agendas. It has nothing to do with incendiary speech or unsafe driving, despite the attempts to conflate them. Responsible doctors and scientists with differing views are not mischief-makers or demolition-derby drivers. Journalist Rebekah Koffler, an émigré from old Russia, speaks to a scenario she saw unfold in her homeland not long ago:

           [The Soviets had] terms for opinions that are ‘correct’ (korrektnoye) and ‘incorrect’ (nekorrektnoye). . . . [I]ndividuals who dared to express “nekorrectnoye” opinions, challenging the party line were blacklisted, fired from their jobs, thrown into mental hospitals, imprisoned, and even expelled from the country. Books by authors who prompted people to think for themselves, such as George Orwell, were banned. The Soviets framed these drastic measures as being good for the people, protecting them from the pernicious influence of those disgruntled alternative thinkers, the ‘enemies of the people.²⁸   

           In the West, we have entered a somewhat similar era of authoritarian control of the news formerly associated with dictators and the sort of mythodramas characterized by Pravda behind the Iron Curtain. Anyone against the regime became a mole, wanker, backslider, jerk, or criminal, and a few were made examples of, sentenced to Siberia in Stalin’s Russia or Pyongchang-ri in Kim’s North Korea. In the ostensible Free World, journalist Matt Taibbi points out the implications:

           The latest . . . ham-fisted campaigns demanding [that websites] discipline writers . . . presents Substack as a place where, as Mashable put it, “COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish.”The objections mainly center around Joseph Mercola, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone. There are issues with the specific critiques of each, but those aren’t the point. Every one of these campaigns revolves around the same larger problem: would-be censors misunderstanding the basic calculus of the freedom of speech.

               Note the nuancing suggested by the word “calculus.”

               Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official.

               Whether it’s WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] or the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco or the missile gap or the red scare or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, the worst real-world disasters always turn out to be driven or enabled by official falsehoods. In the case of Afghanistan (and Iraq, and Vietnam before both), the cycle of war disaster was perpetuated by a sweeping, organized, and intricate system of official lying about everything from the success of missions to the efficacy of weaponry to the political devotion of supposed allies. The only defense against these most dangerous types of deceptions is an absolutely free press. . . .

               To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of COVID misinformation.²⁹

           In addition, Biden’s calling COVID-19 “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” was a divisive lie, intentionally ignoring the limitations of the vaccines while disdaining benefits of natural immunity and alternative medicines. Members of the Democratic establishment, emboldened by years of cheerleading for democracy, were blind and deaf to totalitarianism’s stealth approach. Every muzzle on so-called disinformation greased a slippery slope. When enforced chastities replace  pen discourse, the spaciousness that makes democracies possible evaporates. Authoritarianism steps in, as it has for the last 4,000 years.

           Plus, vaxx oversell that leads regular folks to mistrust even life-saving vaccines makes rote rejection of the anti-vaxx position even more anti-vaxx.

Yet the touting of a COVID-19 “vaccine”—a squadron of interchangeable vaccines—has continued to shoot off the charts. The mix of self-righteous backlash, public and private bullying, and exiling of folks who express doubts or initiate dialogue has simultaneously escalated. The government’s campaign includes YouTube erasures and videos interrupted by crawlers with links to vaccine liturgy. Facebook accounts of folks who died after receiving a COVID vaccine have been deleted.

           This drama is so all-consuming and its ideological momentum so sweeping that adverse-effect signals cannot be detected, but then that’s the goal. The bell doesn’t ring because a counter-crescendo is at full din. Well-informed people say to fellow well-informed people: “Have you lost it or something?” “You believe in QAnon conspiracy theories?” “Why would you take quack medicines?” “An insult to the memory of my friends who died!”

           Where were the voices of the McCulloughs and Kingstons? You found them on Right Wing and Christian podcasts and websites, in The New York Post, The Federalist, and The Washington Times. There was no major pushback, no op-ed or alternate views, no investigative journalism, no “Sixty Minutes” segment.

Discussions of adverse vaccine effects were taboo in mainstream newspapers and scourged from apps likeTwitter. They got no serious coverage on network t.v. beyond Fox’s faux journalism. Qualified physicians and scientists were barred from platforms and caricatured and ridiculed by the neo-Liberal press, with zero consideration that the conversation might have value or be necessary to make informed health decisions. Charles Eisenstein elucidates:

           [M]uch of the dissent migrates to dodgy right-wing websites without the resources to check facts and scrutinize sources. One would think, for example, that a highly credentialed scientist like Dr. Peter McCullough, a professor of medicine, author of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, and president of the Cardio-Renal Society of America, would be able to find a hearing outside the right-wing media ecosystem. But no. He’s been sidelined to places like the right-wing Catholic John-Henry Westen show. I wish I could find a link to this persuasive interview somewhere else, especially because there is actually nothing right-wing about McCullough’s views.

               Tragically, the sites that host people like McCullough are quite often home to anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ articles that use the same tactics leveled at anti-vaxxers, tap into the same template of dehumanization and scapegoating, and lend themselves to the same fascistic ends.³⁰

           The widespread assumption is that society is dealing with malcontents or criminals instead of doctors and scientists. The circumstantial alliance of vaccine doubters with anti-LGBTers, white supremacists, and climate deniers is an entente that should be not only avoidable but an absolute priority. Donald J. Trump should be nowhere near a roster of free media because he is a professed admirer of the Third Reich and a hypocrite, prone to flip in a blink.

The 2020 Trusted News Initiative, meant to counter false news and misleading conspiracy theories, has cast a top-down shroud over the internet, imposing a censorship project with the goal of suppressing information about natural prevention treatments of not just COVID-19 but any disease, while aggressively promoting mass vaccination; it’s universal Gates Foundation propaganda. Readers are bombarded with “vaccine regret” and anti-vaxxer downfall tales, which are as scary as they are meant to be:

           “Conservative radio host who regretted vaccine skepticism dead after COVID,” “Unvaccinated hospitalized patients say they regret not getting the shot,” Day after day, these sound an apocalyptic chorus: “Unvaccinated husband dies of COVID after infecting vaccinated wife,” “Unvaccinated TikToker’s emotional plea before death,” “State senator who opposed vaccine dead after contracting COVID.”

           These are not impartial news accounts but fear prompts meant to spook and activate: “QAnon influencer who spread conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19 dies after contracting the virus,” “Washington state trooper who told off governor over vaccine mandate dies from COVID,” “QAnon Star Who Said Only ‘Idiots’ Get Vax Dies of COVID,” “An Alabama couple who trashed vaccines on their YouTube channel died from COVID-19 within 3 weeks of each other,” “Veronica Wolski, QAnon supporter at center of ivermectin firestorm, dies of COVID-related pneumonia at Chicago hospital.”

           Favored outlets for these squibs include Yahoo Entertainment and Business Insider. As Matt Taibbi noted: “News writing has become a pre-fab profession, like assembling IKEA furniture. All you need is an Allen wrench and a list of the latest clichés.”³¹ Do these even sound like real news as opposed to cookie-cutter plot summaries written by interns?

           True, Ms. Wolski was refused ivermectin before she died. Lawyers suing for the right of near-death patients to receive alternatives to Remdesivir have been regularly losing. “The way medicine works,” groused Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, “is, they are the experts, the doctors and . . . the hospitals. When you go there, you’re not going to a restaurant. You don’t order your own treatments. You can’t have a medical field that’s subjected to having to practice according to patient demand backed up by court orders. That is positively horrible medicine.”³²

           It is also  the epitome of health non-freedom when the so-called “experts” are political appointees rather than healers. What Caplan, the media and pols are supporting is not good molecular biochemistry (about which their knowledge, again, is nil) but a gridlock of memes against natural and rogue healers. Civilians are terrified of jungles and favelas—ask those who put Jair Bolsonaro in charge of Brazil.

       The modern CDC provides vintage instances of p.r. and meme magic over actual science and test results. Even Pfizer, no model of caution, wasn’t as heedlessly boosterish of their own product as the CDC was when it came to recommending semi-annual shots for children, even though the CDC’s own study indicated that age groups of young, strong immune systems did not gain more than they risked from vaxxing. Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine reported:

         When [their] study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn’t matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

          I listened to the meeting and couldn’t believe what I heard. At times, the committee members sounded like a group of marketing executives. . . . The committee also debated how hard to push the booster recommendation, discussing whether the CDC should say that 5-to-11-year-olds “may” get a booster versus “should” get it. Exhibiting classic medical paternalism, committee member Dr. Oliver Brooks of the Watts Healthcare Corporation said, “I think may is confusing and may sow doubt,” adding “if we say should more people will get boosted versus may, then we may have more data that helps us really define where we’re going.”³³

           In other words, guinea pigs not patients. It sounds like a meeting for religious proselytization rather than a discussion of rational science.

           Not all doctors, paramedics, nurses, ex- and present pharma scientists, and executives are rolling up their sleeves. A shop clerk in Trenton, Maine, told me that his mother works in a medical facility in Bangor and that few of the doctors there were getting the vaccine though most were conspiring how to fake it. 

Healthworker union officials and AMA spokeswomen have tried to hide the fact that those closest to vaccine technology are among the least willing to be jabbed; it isn’t just lower-level, untrained assistants—janitors and electricians—who reject the vaccines. Abstaining physicians are careful not to broadcast their counternarrative. The consequences are too dangerous: stigmatization, intimidation, loss of license and jobs, charges of moral impropriety, even criminality.

           Professors, police, clerks, and technicians as well as health workers are being fired from long-term positions because their sole identity in the eyes of the bureaucracy, state, peers, and colleagues—regardless of their training or experience—is “unvaccinated batshit bat-virus-carrying asshole.” They are ostracized because they won’t be inoculated with an experimental vaccine or submit to a medical procedure as a condition of their employment.

           It is not certain even what any given doctor believes as opposed to what he or she has to say to keep their place in their profession and society. Defending their own cognitive dissonance may make them more vocal in vaccine defense than they actually are. Ambivalence plus guilt is a powerful driver.

With uninformed hyperbole, the Hawaii Medical Board filed a complaint against one of its own members, Lorrin Pang, despite two decades as a respected medical adviser for Maui County, after he recommended ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2. State lawmakers called for Pang to be fired:

              Ahlani Quiogue, executive officer of the Hawaii Medical Board, also filed a complaint against another Maui doctor, Kirk Milhoan. Pang and Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and pastor at Calvary Chapel, are co-founders of The Pono Coalition for Informed Consent, a website that calls the Covid vaccines “experimental” and advocates instead for the use of discredited drugs (sic) to prevent and treat the respiratory disease.   

               Quiogue said the pair would be investigated by the Regulated Industries Complaints Office. If the complaints are substantiated, RICO can then pursue a settlement or a contested-case hearing. The Hawaii Medical Board could then discipline the doctors by suspending or revoking their medical licenses. . . .

               Also Thursday, state Sen. Rosalyn Baker joined a group of legislative leaders to urge Quiogue and the Health Department to immediately fire Pang for his “alarming and outrageous” endorsement of unapproved and discredited drugs to prevent and treat Covid, saying, “We don’t need to be treated by quacks.”        

               She also called the Hawaii Medical Board on Wednesday and requested that it revoke his medical license.

               “He has violated the very oath that he should have taken when he got his degree,” Baker said on the Senate floor. “He definitely is violating the trust of everyone who might think, because he is the district health officer of Maui, that he knows what he’s talking about.”³⁴

           And she has any idea what she is talking about?

           So powerful is the meme of mass vaccination that folks without medical training consider it more patriotic and ethical to let patients die than to cure them by illicit means—see George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma. Doctors who don’t follow the party line and instead practice according to knowledge, experience, and their oath to treat the sick risk losing hard-won medical licenses from the whims of bureaucrats like Quiogue. Pang’s job was saved by public support.

           In early 2022, my own doctor Meryl Nass was not so fortunate. She had her license suspended by the Maine Medical Association (whose members included a real-estate agent, two young doctors, and two pharmacists) for prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine off-label for COVID-19. Though off-label prescribing is entirely legal, she was accused of spreading COVID misinformation.

           Punitive suspension of a medical license has become weirdly normal, but it is still a shocking sea change. Nass is not just a successful life-long family and hospital physician with countless satisfied patients and no black marks but also an expert on anthrax, lyme, ebola, and vaccines in general and has been employed by the government to resolve bioterrorism issues. She should not be subject to exile by middling doctors directed by state bureaucracies.

                  More than half a year after suspension, her hearing with six state assistant districts attorney was live-streamed by 172,000 viewers internationally. The liberal establishment in Maine had no idea what they were getting into; they had thought to make an example, a scarecrow, out of an elderly doctor past their concept of retirement age and instead ended up with major health-freedom blowback. When the first district attorney said that she had broken the law, her own attorney responded, “What law?” The representatives of the State were unprepared and didn’t know—the media flak had been so fast and furious that they assumed that she must have broken many laws. They are still trying to find one.

                  She is seeking full vindication and legal reimbursement.    

          My guess is that most of the docs conducting these supposed peer purges are less interested in treating sick people than in scoring brownie points and maintaining guild orthodoxy. A medical license a sacred thing, difficult to earn and maintain. To have it taken away facilely as a political gesture in the constitutional United States is chilling and portentous.

Vaccine valorization has become more like a cargo cult of academics, progressive thinkers, and hip comedians—high knowledge lorded over rubes. But dunce cap and dummy pulpit have switched parties; Democrats and progressives now run the Department of Stupid. A comic asks unvaccinated members of his audience for a show of hands, then tells them to slap themselves in the face because they are idiots. Aziz Ansari blames Aaron Rodger’s anti-vaxx stance on his being hit on the head during quarterback sacks. With hip brilliant-wise humor, “Crossing the Event Horizon” oracle Jonathan Zap makes himself his own anti-QAnon joke, but he is too clever by half:

           Just got Pfizered on the one-year anniversary of Covid being declared a global pandemic by the WHO! I was skeptical that they could put a computer chip in it that could make it through the needle, but seconds after the injection I got this cool augmented reality holographic vision of Bill Gates with high muscle definition. He was drinking a 16 oz can of Adrenachrome and he had a cool 5G aura scintillating around him. Apparently, once I get the second dose, I’ll be able to speak and understand Mandarin and will become a 5G-controlled soldier in a giant libtard army fighting the war against Christmas. I’m excited! No symptoms so far except for total 5G mind control!³⁵

                  It’s legitimately funny, but the joke is also on him. The Allen’s wrench of great punchlines misses the forest for the trees, kind of like joking about Alzheimer’s or Chernobyl. Can’t be done.

           Facebook is filled with similar japes about the stupidity of not getting vaccinated, comparing it to sticking a fork in an electric socket, skydiving without a parachute, ending up on a ventilator wearing an anti-vax T-shirt, seeking scientific proof before heart surgery, eating McDonald’s mystery meat but interrogating vaccine ingredients.

           To the journalist who declared triumphantly that we don’t what’s in statins or sleeping pills but take them anyway “based on our doctors’ expertise, why draw a line at vaccines?” I say—let’s draw that line, everywhere. Not knowing what you’re putting in your cells is a cautionary tale. Statins contain chemicals with side-effects, and not everyone should or needs to be wolfing them down. Sleeping pills are addictive and don’t produce REM sleep. While hot dogs and McChickens stay in the digestive track and psychotropics cross the blood-brain barrier, neither go into the cell nucleus to get replicated.

           For educated people and progressive thinkers like Zap, vaccine doubt is equated with Right Wing propaganda and conspiracy theories and assumed to be ridiculous. That’s why they regard Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci as the new Mein Kampf. But hipdom stumbles on the snare of its own tropes. The comic strip is now in charge, and it isn’t just Trump’s Bluto versus Fauci and a Beagle Boys wrecking crew. Behind the façade of QAnon’s reptile body-snatchers are actual body-snatchers and trashmen.

African American pro basketball players addressed the vaccine subtext as direct legatees of eighteenth-century tropes of personal sovereignty, descendants of those who, just a few generations back, were told that their bodies weren’t their own. At the start of the 2021 NBA season, vaccine passports were required to play in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Native American philosophy informed the response of Brooklyn Nets homeboy Kyrie Irving, who is half Sioux as well as black and lights sage and conducts “ceremony” before games for clarity:

              This is my life. I get to do whatever I want with this, this is one body that I get here. One God body that I get here. And you telling me what to do with my body? It has nothing to do with the organization, I’m going to put that out there. It has nothing to do with the Nets, it has nothing to do with my teammates. This has everything to do with what’s going on in our world. I’m being grouped into something that’s bigger than the game of basketball.”³⁶

           After relenting to the vaccine to be able to play, Golden State Warriors star Andrew Wiggins sat at a news podium, head bowed in frustration. He said that he was now the only vaccinated member of his family:
              I guess you don’t own your body. That’s what it comes down to. If you want to work in society today, then I guess they made the rules of what goes in your body and what you do. Hopefully, there’s a lot of people out there that are stronger than me and keep fighting, stand for what they believe, and hopefully, it works out for them.

               I feel like I could go on for days about why I didn’t want to get it. Most importantly, I don’t know what’s going to happen or what it’s going to do to my body in 10, 20 years. . . . But I guess it’s something that had to get done. . . .

               It’s not really something we believe in as a family. They know that I had to. It came down to get the vaccination or don’t play basketball. I’m 26. I have two kids. I want more kids. I’m trying to do something that will generate as much money as I can for my kids and my future kids, [create] generational wealth. So, I took the gamble, took the risk, and hopefully, I’m good. . . .

               It feels good to play, but getting vaccinated, that’s going to be something that stays in my mind for a long time. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I was forced to.³⁷     

           Orlando Magic player Jonathan Isaac put the matter succinctly:

               I’m not anti-vaxx. I’m not anti-medicine. I’m not anti-science. I didn’t come to my current vaccination status by studying black history or watching Donald Trump press conferences. . . . Natural immunity is not being spoken about or discussed in this country.³⁸

               In 2022, Philadelphia 76er Matisse Thybulle addressed the evolving scenario:

               I’m not fully vaccinated. Yeah, this is a decision I made a long time ago. I thought a lot about what I’m going to say here, essentially, I made this choice and I thought if I keep it to myself, I can keep it private, but people are always gonna wonder why. I was raised in a holistic household where anti-vaxx was not a term that was used. It’s a weird term that’s been thrown around to just label people, but we grew up with Chinese medicine and naturopathic doctors and with that upbringing, coming into this situation, I felt like I had a solid foundation of medical resources that could serve me beyond what this vaccine could do for me.³⁹

           Did anyone pay the slightest attention to his mention of Chinese Traditional Medicine and naturopathic background? Racist vaxx bias was implicit even in the very folks who virtue-signal anti-racism. These statements are startlingly lucid, current, and astute, and they come from basketball players with very little knowledge of microbiology, not doctors, not health czars. Something is wrong when those who don’t know know more than those who do.

The disingenuity of the situation was demonstrated by the evolution of Irving’s situation. Newly elected New York mayor Eric Adams inherited predecessor Bill de Blasio’s mandates which, in their tangled logic, allowed unvaccinated visiting players to play in New York City but not local players. When aspects of the mandate were lifted for indoor venues, Irving was allowed to attend games but not play in them. A private-sector employee mandate still applied. On national t.v., people saw the optics of Irving, walking the stands, greeting fans in his ghost-dance robe and hugging teammates, but not permitted to participate in the game. The agitprop transcended any health issues, overriding the more relevant detail that he was unvaccinated and healthy.

        When asked at a news conference about freeing Kyrie, Adams replied that Irving could play tomorrow; just get vaccinated. He changed his mind when he realized that baseball players, Yankees and Mets, also fell under the mandate—outdoors didn’t matter. Less educated and more Latin than basketball players, Major Leaguers were less vaxxed and less willing to get Yanqui vaccines. With a growing fandom of voters, Adams relented on the mandate for “performers” only, but he didn’t solve the moral equation for firemen and police officers who had lost their jobs under the same belief system. It had become a battle of memes: Kyrie, buffalo soldiers, and cleansing sage versus graphene oxide, health un-freedom, and the “V” word.

            Irving later noted the “holistic background of my upbringing and just the way I view medicine in general.” He realized that being vaccinated, he could still get and spread the disease. “I felt like I was secure in going to the doctors that I have to treat COVID if I did get it and in the case that I did, I was able to go about it in my holistic way and I’m able to sit here today healthy and be OK because of it.”

From the opposite ideological side, fire captain Christian Granucci took a related stance regarding Los Angeles County mandates: “This is not about politics. This is not about left or right. This is not about red versus blue. This is not about Republican versus Democrat. This isn’t even about vaccinated versus unvaccinated. This is tyranny. This is about freedom of choice.”⁴⁰

Tom MacDonald rapped:

Don’t speak, we don’t need to defund police
Need to defund the media who lies through they teeth, like
Big pharma doesn’t cure you, dog
‘Cause every patient that gets cured is a customer lost.⁴¹

         Natural immunity is still the elephant in the room.

Despite protests across race and class, mass vaccination proceeds as if governments were building air-raid shelters. Tucker Carlson is a rabblerousing chicken hawk jazzed by big-man totalitarianism—and he has no real-life experience of the Vietnam War, let alone what Hitler did to captives during the German Third Reich—but when he draws “a connection between COVID-19 vaccine mandates and Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps,” he is being taken out of context solely for the purpose of delegitimization.

           He may be making a dumbass moral equivalence between dismemberment and vaccines that are intended to be beneficial, but the imposition of obligatory experimental medication on populations does efface people’s rights to their own bodies. His actual words: “After watching what the imperial Japanese army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments, I thought that American physicians agreed that compulsory medical care was unethical, it was immoral, and it could never be imposed on anyone. When did we forget that?”⁴²

           In an article referenced also in the previous chapter, Robert Malone, whom Carlson was interviewing when he made his comment, joins two other authors in calling out a litany of crimes, counterproductive measures, and stubborn refusal to acknowledge errors of analysis and judgment:

              Academic publisher Elsevier’s suppression of an article documenting the myocarditis risk of the COVID-19 vaccines, with no excuse or pretext offered, is incredible enough. Viewed alongside Twitter’s censorship of the American Heart Association, YouTube’s suppression of a panel discussion of vaccine mandates on Capitol Hill, and the Orwellian call by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins for critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies to be “brought to justice,” the trend is positively chilling.

               Now more than ever, we need substantive debate about decisions that affect the health of hundreds of millions of people, including views counter to official positions. . . .

These are just a few examples of the wave of censorship that has accompanied COVID-19, uniting government bureaucracies with obedient news media, academia, scientific publishing, and powerful Big Tech companies. Above all, this concerted campaign suppresses all disagreement about topics including potential early treatments, the natural immunity of recovered individuals, and the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. . . .

               In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, the censorship aims to stamp out any questions about a universal vaccination program that, it is now clear, was based on the false premise that low-risk individuals must get vaccinated to halt the spread of COVID-19 and end the pandemic. . . .

               Rapidly waning vaccine efficacy, COVID-19 surges in countries and regions with high vaccination rates—including Israel, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and now Europe, as well as high-vaccination U.S. states like Vermont—are evidence that vaccinated individuals can spread COVID-19 at rates comparable to the unvaccinated. Multiple studies have shown that viral load in vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 is the same as in the unvaccinated.⁴³

           If this is true, the rush to vaccine judgment defies ACLU precedent and the purviews of a free press.

           A prior instance of censorship was the swift “cancel” of the Great Barrington declaration, which advocated natural herd immunity over mass vaccination:

           The declaration was written by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, and, according to its website, more than 15,000 medical & public health scientists and over 45,000 medical practitioners have signed onto it. . . .

               In an email to Fauci dated Oct. 8, 2020, Collins vilified the Great Barrington Declaration as the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” that “seems to be getting a lot of attention. . . . There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” Collins told Fauci. “I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?”⁴⁴

           This is how politburos talk. In myopia and smugness, democracies drift into it. It’s what thousands of anti-vaxx truckers were answering, as they took their “Freedom Convoy with Airhorns” across Canada and around Ottawa’s streets, blaring at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Nothing scares a liberal politician more than working-class blowback.

           In American renditions of those horns, I didn’t hear “Go Trump” or “We Love QAnon and Marjorie Tyler Greene.” I hear, “You don’t know (or care) what the fuck you’re doing! You are subjecting us and our children to governmental chemical control!”

           They were honking against tying life, death, and happiness to medical and technocratic absolutism. They were honking at elitists, Aristos, and politicians because those folks kept telling them that they don’t know shit from shinola or anything beyond GPS, engines, and bills of lading. But they did know how human beings live, eat, learn, play, fuck, gather, and die.

A potential collapse of medical infrastructures, a far more likely outcome than unvaccinated healthworkers infecting healthy people, was dismissed as incidental. An article in the Bangor Daily News noted the staffing implications of Governor Janet Mills’ October 2021 deadline for mandatory vaccination of people in Maine’s medical system:

              Paramedic Corey Booneview must get the coronavirus vaccine or quit. He is considering the latter after 20 years in a job he said he got to help people. . . . Bonneview said he is not against vaccines, but he feels the COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, pointing to a friend who developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, after getting one. . . . “Why are we, all of a sudden, being forced out! It is the most illogical thing that we could be doing in the midst of a health crisis, and it is going to make it worse.”⁴⁵

           Mills subsequently deemed criticism of her mandate morally repugnant.⁴⁶ Though she is a politician delivering “politicianspeech,” I take her at her word. She doesn’t recognize the gap between a vaccine meme and the actual nature, ingredients, uses, and outcomes of substances concocted in corporate laboratories. She is assigning probity to agents of technology, charging moral repugnance not for immoral acts but objections to hyped products. When asked about this during her 2022 reelection campaign, she cast a baffled and somewhat hurt look, saying that she was just following the advice of experts. But that’s the problem: who gets to coronate expertise.

           Politicianspeak may entail uncritical reversals of one’s own prior positions, which legitimately expresses the paradoxical nature of reality. But politicianspeak is also the refusal to admit that.

                        Endnotes

26. NurseNet, “Are You Aware?” August 28, 2021.

27. Matthias Desmet, Interview, “Why Do So Many Still Buy into the Narrative?” YouTube, September 21, 2021.

28. Rebekah Koffler, “The censoring of Joe Rogan is a tactic right out of old Soviet Union,” New York Post, February 5, 2022.

29. Matt Taibbi, “The Folly of Pandemic Censorship,” TK News,  substack. Com, January 27, 2022.

30. Charles Eisenstein, “Mob Morality and the Unvaxed,” substack.com, August 1, 2021.

31. Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians,” TK News, substack.com, January 7, 2122.

32. Deepti Hajela, “Lawsuits demand unproven ivermectin for COVID patients,” Yahoo News, October 16, 2021.

33. Marty Makary, “Why America Doesn’t Trust the CDC,” Newsweek.com. June 11, 2022.

34. Britanny Lyte, “Maui State Health Director Faces Mounting Pressure Over Disputed Covid Treatments,” Honolulu Civil Beat, August 26, 2021.

35. Jonathan Zap, Facebook post, March 11, 2021.

36. Nick Schwartz, “Kyrie Irving speaks out, suggests he was promised vaccine exemption,” Nets Wire, October 14, 2021.

37. Wayne Sterling and Ben Morse, “Basketball star Andrew Wiggins on getting vaccinated: ‘Not something I wanted to do, but kind of forced to’,” CNN.com, October 6, 2021.

38. Don Feldman, “Magic forward Jonathan Isaac: ‘I am not anti-vax. I’m not anti-medicine. I’m not anti-science’,” MSN.com, September 29, 2021.

39. Ky Carlin, “Sixers guard Matisse Thybulle opens up on why he isn’t fully vaccinated,” Sixer’s Wire, April 10, 2022.

40. Kellen McBreen, “Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Under Investigation For Video Slamming Covid Vaccine Tyranny,” COVID-1984EVER, August 24, 2021

41. Tom MacDonald, “Brainwashed,” YouTube, August 13, 2021.

42. Yelena Dzhanova, “Tucker Carlson relates COVID-19 vaccine mandates to Nazi experiments on human subjects in concentration camps,” Yahoo News, January 28, 2022.

43. Harvey Risch, Robert W. Malone, and Byram Bridle, “Forcing People into COVID Vaccines Ignores Important Scientific Information,” December 14, 2021.

44. Matt Margolis, “Fauci Orchestrated ‘Quick and Devastating’ Takedown of Anti-Lockdown Experts,” PJ Media, December 19, 2021.

45. Caitlin Andrews, “Hospitals brace for some workers to quit over vaccine mandate,” Bangor Daily News, August 16, 2021, p. 1.

46. Caitlin Andrews, “Janet Mills rejects GOP call to ease vaccine mandate after Lewiston hospital reduces admissions,” Bangor Daily News, October 12, 2021,” p. 1.

8. THE FUTURE OF THE GENOME

Despite the noisy bandwagon, it is unresolved whether the vaccines are beneficial or detrimental overall, not only to individuals but to our herd and genome. As a global vaccination rollout was ramping up in March 2021, Belgian virologist Geert Vanden-Bossche declared that putting these new vaccines in populations was creating more infectious strains of COVID-19 in the same way that antibiotics breed super-germs, by putting selective pressure on an invasive organism while allowing it to escape herd immunity. He was not only pro-vaxx but a vaccine developer who had worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he considered mRNA vaccines good science.

           He proposed that civilization was sacrificing long-term broad-spectrum immunity and coronavirus-variant immunity in favor of an overspecialized, temporary immunity to just one strain of the virus. This would lead inevitably, he predicted, to asymptomatic viral shedders, weakened species immunity, and enhanced susceptibility to future coronaviruses. Daniel Pinchbeck characterized Vanden Bosch’s message as warning the politico-scientific establishment against “a catastrophic error leading, eventually, to massive loss of life due to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). . . .  The immune system gets boosted initially, but [is] eventually negatively impacted by the mRNA vaccine [including] more severe symptoms as well as a much higher fatality rate.”⁴⁷ In ADE, when a widely scanning immunity network becomes a specific adaptive immunity function in response to a pathogen, antibodies binding to the pathogen become a “Trojan horse,” allowing the pathogen into the cells and causing a virus to spread more widely.

           Vanden-Bossche’s rejoinder, when he was asked if he risked giving comfort and “fuel to the fire” of anti-vaxxers, went beyond mere medical denial:

           No, no, no . . . . At this point, it’s so irrelevant whether you’re a pro-vaxxer or an anti-vaxxer. It’s about the science; it’s about humanity, right? I mean, let’s not lose our time now with criticizing people. Anti-vaxxer? Well, okay. You could be an anti-vaxxer, you could be a stalker. We like to stigmatize because if you stigmatize people, you don’t need to bother about them anymore. Oh, this guy’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s out of the scope. He’s a stalker, he’s out of the scope.⁴⁸

           Vanden-Bossche was widely rebutted, including by a supposed online expert, Zdoggmd, who charged that the virologist was veterinary-trained (presuming that to be a decisive handicap), also one voice against hundreds of thousands of equally or more qualified scientists, and had his own axe to grind: a “killer T-cell” product in development to compete with Pfizer et al. in the vaccine market. Furthermore, ZDogg added, unitarian conspiracy theories—”me against the world”—are rarely correct. 

           ZDogg was slick and facile, the perfect foil out of central casting: the jiving dude who groks all and refs fairly while confiding the truth, boys and girls. His mock “Strangelove”-accented putdown of Vanden-Bossche was so fascistically anti-fascist that it was hard to believe that he thought he could get away with it, but it showed how torqued the media landscape has become.⁴⁹ Between politically correct, too-cool-for-school enforcers and amok rebels, you can get away with pretty much anything.

        Without dignifying ZDogg’s standup routine, I would distinguish two opposing Darwinian forensics: The conventional line of argument is that vaccines don’t breed variants—Vanden-Bossche is committing an error of logic—vaccines increase herd immunity by removing the virus’ loci. Mass vaccinations have been taking place for generations without waves of antibody-dependent illnesses and, in the novel-corona pandemic, with a significant reduction of SARS-CoV-2 infections and hospitalizations. It is the unvaccinated who are the variants’ main fuel. For public safety, everyone should be vaccinated, by mandate if necessary. (If this is true, by the way, Bill Gates’ privatization of markets—patent protection and monopoly medicine denying the subcontinent of India and poorer African nations access to generic forms of the vaccines—helped hatch Delta and Omicron variants. His priorities suggest, if not a goal of depopulation, at least passive Third World eugenics).

               Charles Eisenstein states Darwin’s other side succinctly:

        Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.⁵⁰

           If variants are latent in the genome, then vaccines are driving Delta, Epsilon, Lambda, Omicron, and possible Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Psi, and Omega strains down the road, while mutating in overpopulated viral cookers in South Africa, England, Brazil, Peru, California, and Colombia because “vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.”⁵¹ By making T-cells hyper-vigilant toward an early—now pretty much extinct—Wuhan rendition of COVID-19, original vaccines would reduce organisms’ capacity to combat later variants like Delta and Omicron. Viral swarms function, in effect, like lions and hyenas culling our herd much as herbalist Stephen Buhner predicted:

           Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 has found that it took up residence in a number of immuno-compromised people around the world, learning a great deal from them in the process. The virus then recombined its genome, creating more adaptable forms that are better able to live within us. In one Boston hospital a 45-year-old severely immuno-compromised man remained ill with the infection for five months. Doctors sequenced the virus from the beginning and found that more and more mutations occurred, twenty-one by the end. The virus was experimenting with alterations in the spike protein to find the ones best suited to evade immune responses. After the man was given a new antibody drug, the virus immediately developed alterations to evade it. This exact same process occurred nearly simultaneously in countries throughout the world.⁵²

           Point virus.

           By an add-on argument, as the virus mutates, it weakens—Delta, Lambda, and Omicron variants have smaller spikes with more folds. The virus, though spreading more rapidly and evading vaccines, is gradually becoming endemic, less serious and more diffusely distributed. A Wall Street Journal touched on this aspect New Years’ Day 2023 when discussing a new Omicron variant: “It isn’t clear that XBB is any more lethal than other variants, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccines as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments. Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution.”⁵³

           Chris Martenson, a neuro-toxicologist as well as an economic futurist, proposes that each variant will be less deadly than its forerunners as COVID-19 goes through a natural evolutionary life cycle, becoming more widespread and less symptomatic.⁵⁴ Omicron may turn out to be a better “vaccine” than anything on the market. Two microbiological pathologists at the University of South Carolina agreed, with a throwback nod to the Salk era:

               Some vaccines expose the host only to select portions of the virus. For example, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use . . . mRNA, to encode and produce a fragment of the “spike protein”—the knobby protrusion that is expressed on the outside of SARS-CoV-2 viruses—inside a person’s body. [They] are designed to mimic that protein and trigger an immune response against it.

               In contrast, some vaccines against other infections, such as chickenpox, and measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), expose the host to a “live attenuated” form of the virus. These vaccines use small amounts of a weakened form of the live virus. They mimic a natural infection, trigger a strong immune response and afford lasting resistance to infection.

               In some respects, omicron mimics these live attenuated vaccines because it causes milder infection and trains the body to trigger a strong immune response against the delta variant. . . .”⁵⁵

           When immunity is stretched across simultaneous natural and biotech landscapes, the outcomes of both in both Darwinian and vitalistic models converge as they did in the origin of life, even if Darwinians and vitalists have renegotiated the matter on different terms each generation. It is possible that opposing theories of natural selection are equally valid and work in interlocking cause and effect such that vaccines cook variants that then spread across unvaccinated populations. Darwinian evolution—natural selection—operates nonlinearly not only on populations and biomes at large but subcellularly and mitochondrially through both expression and constraint of data, so the same processes could simultaneously enhance and hinder herd immunity. No surprise—evolutionary biology is a chaos system. Classes of asymptomatic carriers who initially spread the pandemic by delivering the virus across the globe undetected might then held build natural immunity by spreading less symptomatic variants.

           Among nonlinear decks, who knows when to hold’em or when to fold’em, to honor Kenny Rogers’ “Gambler”—when to walk away and when to run? There is no immaculate answer because, even within microbiology communities, the riddle lies deeper than the debate. As Eisenstein cautions, “The science on the issue is so clouded by financial incentives and systemic bias that it is impossible to rely on it to light a way through the murk.”⁵⁶

The social impact of not only the pandemic but contradictory and draconian measures used to contain it has come to rival the virus in impact and overall social disruption. A college classmate of mine, a professor of politics and public policy, responded to a memo from the physician who supervises his school’s own COVID policy by writing:

        NYU . . . has been spooked by the coronavirus’s extreme contagiousness. Its raging spread across the country has been trumpeted by the media, producing panic. The New York Times has featured blood-red maps on its front page. That is why the national response has concentrated on preventing infection for everyone. . . .

               Even a single infection is treated as threatening a “super-spreader” event where the whole institution becomes infected, the hospitals are overwhelmed, and multitudes die. That fear has actually intensified even as the actual infection rate in New York has plummeted. About a third of my entire time on the job is consumed just in being tested for covid, getting the results (always negative), and constantly reserving for further tests. Students face the same demands. But even at its worst, the pandemic never overwhelmed NYU. From the alarmist tone of your memo, one would never know this. . . .

               Like other institutions I belong to, NYU has declared war on the virus, sacrificing all other values to that end. Supposedly, in doing this, it is following “science.” But the public health establishment seeks only to minimize deaths that occur in the health system. With few exceptions, these experts totally ignore the huge costs this has imposed on the rest of society. . . . The damage is not only to the economy but to private organizations of all kinds and to public health and morale.⁵⁷

         Pan is a faun of not only pandemics but panics and pandemonium.

Modernity is ultimately no match for a pre-Cambrian brigade. In the long haul, chasing corona spikes with software puts not only the social order but the biosphere at risk along with the microbiome that underwrites our lease. Nucleic proteins launched our templates. Their nonstop replication—triplet fidelity—keeps us alive. Their homunculus is a ball of coding yarns and junk (noncoding) strands that goes back to pre-Cambrian hot springs in its stringing, stranding, and erasure of threads. By epigenesis, it underwrote evolution from cilia-driven aquatic worms to bipedal taekwondo and ballet. I track a lot of this evolutionary history in my books Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity; Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life; and Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.

           Biotechnicians may be CRISPR stars, but they can’t rival a magician more than a billion years old. It is one thing to have Gaia transferring wild snips across species, orders, even phyla and kingdoms nonlinearly; it’s another to patch a “concept,” in this case a Pfizer or Moderna polyester, into a genome. Bodyworker and martial artist Annie Gottlieb put the matter bluntly:

           Of course, our genome is full of incorporated viral DNA, some of which gave us vital gifts, like the placenta. The difference is . . . WE didn’t put it there. The difference is, WE fat-fingered blunderers don’t know WTF we’re doing.⁵⁸

           Into the cell nucleus go genetically modified instructions for a spike protein; out come organelles who will do what they have always done: freelance in their medium, nucleic acids. They will make whatever they want to or have to make, as they have since their self-fabrication—we were never closed biomolecular systems. Once synthetic strands are in an organism, they will continue to invent and incubate proteins. Pfizer even wants to do what they call “directed evolution” by modifying some monkey RNA. Future generations will be cyborged on our linear terms not nature’s, presuming the life code continues to scan.

           RNA may be the medicine of the future, a breakthrough at the scope of artificial intelligence, but that hasn’t yet been ratified by the biosphere. There is no way to foresee how the current sets will choreograph over time, let alone what their presence will do to more complex life forms and ecosystems. Plus, as Pinchbeck noted: “One of my main areas of concern over the mass vaccination program is that it reinforces the tendency of Capitalist, post-industrial civilization to contort knowledge into an instrument supporting a particular model of reality or worldview.”⁵⁹

           It’s the same mistake as trying to halt nonlinear climate change by geo-engineering the atmosphere rather than changing diet and lifestyles or cutting back on carbon emissions. The planet’s tuning fork has been jangled with chemtrails, WiFi towers, computer generated clouds, ionization, polymers, biofilms, exotic fibers, plasma beams, light-emitting diodes, Lilly waves, and HAARP (high-frequency active auroral research) waves. Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket punched a 560-mile-hole in the ionosphere. Yeah, it supposedly healed. But when gigantic Jupiter (1,321.3 times the volume of Earth) swallowed a black nuclear cloud as NASA detonated the Galileo spacecraft in its atmosphere, the explosion changed Jovian physics and astrology forever. 

           What could possibly go wrong with Sirs Musk and Gates in charge?

           This isn’t a game against a hypothetical foe. When the asteroid comes for real or another three degrees Fahrenheit singe the pot, it’s going to raze everything, wipe the slate clean, of dinosaurs too. Any deterrent better be real.

                        Endnotes

47. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination.”

48. Geert Vanden Bossche, “Mass Vaccination in a Pandemic—Benefits versus Risks: Interview with Geert Vanden Bossche,” Vejon Interviews with Dr. Philip MacMillan, MacMillan Research, March 6, 2021.

49. ZDoggemd, “Why Vanden Bossche Is Wrong About Vaccines,” The ZDoggemd Show, March 16, 2021.

50. Charles Eisenstein, “Mob Morality and the Unvaxed,” substack.com, August 1, 2021.

51. Spartacus: COVID-19: The Spartacus Letter, September 27, 2021.

52. Stephen Buhner, “Covid chapter updates” blog.

53. Alyssia Finley, “Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?” Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2023.

54. Prakash Nagarkatti and Nitsi Nagarkatti, “Is the omicron variant Mother Nature’s way of vaccinating the masses and curbing the pandemic?” Yahoo News, January 27, 2022.

55. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination.”

56. Charles Eisenstein, “Mob Morality and the Unvaxed,” substack.com, August 1, 2021.

57. Lawrence W. Mead, “Taking Stock of the Coronavirus,” letter, February 27, 2021.

58. Annie Gottlieb, Facebook response, February 20, 2021.

59. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination.”

9. CORONAVIRUS TREATMENTS

Earth has developed many successful medicines, most of them human, a few taught by other life forms as well as by spirits and plants in shamanic interchanges. Some creatures—insects, reptiles, vines, cactuses, and mammals—have inborn medical talents, whether from DNA, hundredth monkeys, or morphic resonance. Our repertoire includes herbs and tinctures, manual medicines, sensual medicines (colors, scents, sounds, touch, tastes, etc.), immunogens, microdoses, subtleenergies (prana, chi, Reiki runes, et al.) and, of course, pharmaceuticals and knives. Modalities of healing employ palpation, suppression, excision (surgery), transference, transduction, transmutation, and resonance. All of these work via the embryogenic field. This is a condensed precis of territory I covered in Planet Medicine: Volume One, Origins and Volume Two: Modalities.

                  Since Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) and Aurus Cornelius Celsus (25 BCE – 50 CE), we have built prophylaxes against a predator that is viral (nucleic), bacterial (protist), and parasitological (insect and wyrm), and would otherwise have consumed our tribe long ago beyond the direst imaginings of Stephen King and Ridley Scott. Microbes are ubiquitous and travel with tourists, cargo, and conquistadors, driving history—ask the First Nations of the Americas and Australia.

        Antibodies have played an irreplaceable role in the evolution of Earth’s species. No protoplasm-based biont could have survived its incubation, given viral, bacterial, and other opportunistic infections, without coevolution of its own immunogenic system. Isopathy replicates the serological origin of life in high-microbe environments. It is an artificial, speeded-up serology to fend off invaders more dangerous than wolves and tigers or Viking and Mongol hordes.

At present, vaccines are the medical system’s main response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet shots and boosters seem to weaken at around six to nine months, and more boosters are necessary on a near continual basis.

       The harms of vaccination may outweigh the benefits in the context of (1) an ongoing reevaluation of the avant-garde coronavirus with its mutations and makeovers, (2) overall social, economic, and psycho-traumatic effects of masks, mandates, and isolation, (3) implications of mass inoculations for our species’ ecology, broad immunity spectrum, and protection against future zoonotic agents, and (4) therapeutic alternatives.

                  Plus, even if we set severe risks (to heart, eyes, genitals, etc.) of COVID-19 vaccines at under .1%, if you happen to fall under the lip of that curve, it’s like a comet hitting your planet.

COVID-19 appears containable and treatable in its early stages. Most infectees fight it off at the level of a bad cold or flu. It becomes acute or fatal only when it gets into the bloodstream and start perforating cells and replicating at large. Yet astonishingly little attention has been put on self-care or early treatment. The media likewise have next to nothing to say about modalities or the period between infection and when SARS-CoV-2 causes blood clots and invades organs, leading to hospitalization.

                  Remember too, it’s not the vaccine that prevents COVID, it’s the cells’ immune response to the presence of a vaccine. Vaccines are not surrogate immune systems; they enhance invader-specific immunities and can’t act without an underlying broad-spectrum T-cell immune system continuing to do what it is doing. And it is not a pile-on, more-the-merrier situation, either. Too many shots will eventually augment—short—and undermine their own effects.

                  If, however, you can “trick” the immune system into responding as comprehensively, or even more comprehensively, from introduction of a vital agent—an herb, supplement, microdose, or food—vaccines become unnecessary and superfluous. McCullough proposed that “natural immunity is robust, durable, and complete.”⁶⁰ It is also free, self-generating, and local. Those who end up on ventilators are primarily people with co-morbidities and complications or who get no treatments—herbal or pharmaceutical.

                  Natural immunity should at least have a seat at the table, but hospitals respond to COVID-19 as if it were an alien invader requiring hand grenades and surface-to-air missiles. Co-morbidities are discounted or ignored in treatments—it’s, again, “one size fits all.” Any other knowledge about health, nutrition, exercise, and hydration instantly goes out the window. The menu consists of antiviral drugs like Remdesivir and Paxlovid and ventilators, modalities that often abet or hasten the patient’s demise.

                  If someone gets stuck hospitalized with COVID-19, meaning in an exclusively pharmaceutical regime, McCullough recommends monoclonal antibodies rather than antivirals. That was the treatment given to Donald Trump when he contracted the virus late in his term. According to McCullough, the U.S. Government purchased 500 million doses of these antibodies from Regeneron in 2020, more than enough to treat every American, then stowed them once mass vaccination began. Vaccines were seemingly a cheaper, more efficient way to halt the pandemic, rendering even already-paid-for alternatives luxurious and redundant. Plus, making alternate treatments less accessible increased the incentive to vaccinate while punishing the unvaccinated. 

                  Monoclinal antibodies are expensive: $30,000 per treatment (if the government requires folks to pay their way) as opposed to $50 for off-label pharmaceuticals. It makes economic as well as holistic sense to try another route.

Emphasizing that he is not anti-vaxx, just against these particular vaccines, McCullough also recommends waiting for old-fashioned antigen-based technologies without no gene transfers.

Alternative preventatives and cures for SARS-CoV-2 are diverse and heterogenous: herbs, medicinal mushrooms, cultured vegetables, nattokinase, spirulina, black cumin and honey, licorice, kimchi, homeopathic microdoses of COVID and T-cells, repertorized flower essences, chokeberry and hawthorn tinctures, vitamins, red algae, seaweed extract, horseshoe-crab blue blood extract, colloidal silver, zinc (with quercetin complex for absorption), melatonin, magnesium, and likely many other substances and potions. One doesn’t have to take all of these—repertorizing for individual use is a medicinal art even in an infectious environment.

                  Among allopathic alternatives are hyperbaric oxygen and quirky off-label uses of hydroxychloroquine (a malaria, arthritis, and lupus drug), fluvoxamine (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that is used primarily for the treatment of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder), and ivermectin (an anti-parasite pharmaceutical).

                        With this many inexpensive and relatively benign deterrents, antidotes, and treatments, mass vaccination becomes a political and ideological decision rather than a medical one. Commoditized cures are a priority of an alliance of corporate technocracy with academic scientism, which eschews natural immunity and homeostasis of the biosphere—stuff that doesn’t make enough use of their commodities and commoditized knowledge. They are following the tech, not the science. In addition, most people can’t afford herbal alternatives or don’t have the patience keep up daily regimes. As with diet and exercise, there’s no one-and-done solution or shortcut stroke comparable to vaccines, which match the rest of modernity’s convenience shopping.

                  Perhaps if an equivalent investment were made in natural COVID treatments, the world would look different today, for the same rationale applies to economies based on solar, wind, and tidal energy instead of straight fossil fuels.

The gold standard of any treatment’s effectiveness is—or should be—its performance under game conditions—inexplicable intercessions allowed, even encouraged. It is not performance against a so-called placebo in an experimental simulation in which factors of transference, projection, and empathic participation, let alone unmeasured molecular and atomic quanta, have been ignored, cancelled, or manipulated to get a desired result and sound bite or inadvertently purged. Living systems are alchemically, shamanically, homeopathically, and psychically entangled. In some cases, the active component is too complex and multivariate to pin down. Creative chaos and colloidal disequilibrium can’t be replicated in a sterilized trial, so the actual catalyst may be inadvertently excluded.

                  Natural healing, etheric fields, and the like are based on the view that life itself is a miracle, and health is a stasis of the imponderable “vital force” and its embryogenic field. Nonpharmaceutical solutions have the additional benefit of enhancing these as well as comprehensive immunity.

                  Trouble is, most scientists don’t recognize the vital force, the memory of water, telekinesis, potentization, synchronicity, vibration, prayer, thoughtforms, holism, the power of similars, nonlinear effects, the nano underground, or off-label serendipities and the thin line between medical healing and medical hexing. They assume that a product developed in modernity by Team Moderna (itself!), AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer—will automatically be more effective against COVID-19 than a nineteenth-century nosode potentized homeopathically from a microdose of viral sputum, though they can’t say why.

                  A vaccine has to whack every mole and cover every gap and spike like Aesop’s wind trying to blow a man’s coat off. A nosode only has to smile like the sun: its radiance goes everywhere. I’m not saying that there is proof of homeopathic effectiveness or natural pathways sufficient to prevent or cure COVID-19; I’m just “saying” because, otherwise, where’s the discussion, including the mystery of how life got here, in the middle of nowhere, and what it and consciousness even are? Are we robots or earth angels?

                  And placebo doesn’t mean “the joke’s on you”; it’s the most powerful force in the universe, showing the intrinsic power of mind and its thoughtforms.

Despite Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro’s bent for subversive make-believe and political circus, hosts of reputable doctors have used hydroxychloroquine with success in both prevention and treatment of COVID-19. One interpretation is that its lysosome-penetrating activity slows antigen production and enhances autophagy: cellular cleansing of cytoplasm.

                  Yet most physicians regard hydroxychloroquine as quackery, protesting that it is useless and/or harmful. This is Neil Young brand rather than Marie Curie brand science. A generic, inexpensive drug, prescribed safely for sixty-five years to millions of patients, was abruptly declared dangerous for COVID-19 alone, even as people were ostensibly being cured of COVID by hydroxychloroquine at NYU and Henry Ford hospitals (New York City and Detroit, respectively). A fifty percent reduction in deaths should lead to an obvious conclusion, but it didn’t.

                  Once a bluebird whispered “hydroxychloroquine” in Donald Trump’s ear, the properties of the drug became synonymous with magical thinking. Hydroxychloroquine joined other Trumpian tropes and travesties and lost its status as a real medicine. As Meryl Nass put it, “‘Never Trump’ turned into ‘Never Hydroxychloroquine,’ and the consequence was ‘Never Over’ for the pandemic.”⁶¹

                  In response to an earlier draft of this book, health educator Dana Ullman added his own considerations:

                        You may or may not know that the two largest and most promoted studies that “disproved” HCQ were published in the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, though both of these journals retracted (!) these studies because they found that the data was fraudulent.  The media hardly reported on these retractions—and their retractions did not stop the WHO from issuing a strong statement against its usage.

                        However, the biggest problem with the studies that “disproved” its efficacy is that none of them tested HCQ with zinc supplementation. . . and the primary reason that doctors who use it say that it works is that it enables the body to more effectively absorb zinc.  Zinc is helpful for fighting viruses because it activates thymulin, a hormone from the thymus gland that is responsible for creating T-cells (the body’s most important tool to fight viral infection).

                        One reason that Anthony Fauci was so antagonistic to this drug is that he and Big Pharma needed there to be no known treatment useful in the prevention or mitigation of Covid-19 in order to get the “Emergency Authorization Exemption” from the FDA that would enable Big Pharma to speed-up the approval process by needing less safety studies (and all animal trials).

                        The bottom line is that Big Pharma needs there to be nothing that provides benefits to people in terms of prevention or the mitigation of Covid symptoms. That is also why Fauci never mentions the body of evidence for Vitamin D, even though Fauci once acknowledged that he takes Vitamin D and C . . . .

                        The fact that Fauci and the media totally ignore the second half of the infectious disease equation (the immune system!) is a part of the allopathic paradigm. . . .

                        China so quickly stopped the complication rate and death rate because the country’s regular usage of herbal remedies provided an important alternative to the various fever-suppressing drugs that are so liberally doled out to people with even milder fevers, even though basic physiology and pathology teach us that fevers are vital defenses against viral infection.⁶²

                  Hydroxychloroquine raises issues of ethics, conspiracy, and false flag so complicated that it is impossible to tell who the stakes players are among medical institutions, pharmaceutical conglomerates, and oligarchs. It is hard even to know if they can tell because the ones pulling the strings are not always the profiteering beneficiaries.

Hydroxychloroquine is only one wild card. After psychiatric fluvoxamine’s off-label potential was discovered by accident, it was repurposed for treatment of COVID-19 and met the bar of a phase-3 trial. At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a “collaboration between the university’s Department of Psychiatry and Division of Infectious Diseases involved 152 patients infected with SARS-167CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Researchers compared the outcomes of those treated with fluvoxamine to the fates of those given an inactive placebo. After 15 days, none of the 80 patients who had received the drug experienced serious clinical deterioration. Meanwhile, six of the 72 patients given placebo (8.3%) became seriously ill, with four requiring hospitalization. . . . [F]luvoxamine seems to prevent some of the most serious complications of the illness and make hospitalization and the need for supplemental oxygen less likely.”⁶³

                  It wasn’t considered for widespread testing because it got in the path of the narrative.

The poster boy for COVID-time contravention, calumny, and sabotage is ivermectin. More than four billion doses have been prescribed over forty years, and it was never flagged for harmful effects until it was repurposed for COVID-19. That provoked the establishment. In 2021 it was removed from drugstore shelves, maligned even by Merck, its original manufacturer. Doctors in the U.S. and Canada (which is even more restrictive) have been ostracized and fired for even mentioning ivermectin. Pharmacies have been required to report prescriptions to law-enforcement agencies. Compounding pharmacies filled the gap until they were threatened with a cut-off of raw materials. Even now, suspicion is that the raw ingredients for ivermectin have been diluted or adulterated in order to sabotage the drug. Readily available for decades, ivermectin is now black-marketed at sapphire value.

                  A pharmaceutical martyr was born in 1970 when a Japanese biochemist, Satoshi Omura, discovered a bacterium in nature effective against roundworm. He passed the information to a colleague, William Campbell, a scientist at Merck Pharmaceuticals, who experimentally developed a medicine on the structure of the bacterium. It was released by Merck in 1980 and proved effective against the parasitic worm that causes River Blindness in Central and South America and much of Africa. In fact, the WHO put it in a kit of the world’s “essential medicines.”

                  Merck’s patent expired in 1996. Because ivermectin is cheap to produce, it has been manufactured since throughout the world in a variety of formulations and with a diverse range of uses. When scientists were searching for off-label drugs that might be effective against a novel coronavirus in 2020, they prioritized formulas that had already demonstrated antiviral properties. Ivermectin had documented effectiveness against Zika, West Nile virus, and influenza. Scientists at Australia’s Monash University noted the wide range of applications in the medical literature and tested it against SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. They found that a single treatment caused a 5000-fold reduction in viral activity with no evident cytotoxicity. They put their information in a scientific paper in April 2020: “The FDA-approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro,” Antiviral Research, Elsevier Publishing, Volume 178, June 2020: 104787.

      Parallel studies in the United States showed that countries where ivermectin was used for a variety of ailments including scabies and river blindness had drastically lower rates of COVID-19.

                  On the front lines of ICUs, embattled physicians began using ivermectin as a “hail mary” for dying patients. After people with advanced COVID miraculously improved and could be discharged from hospitals, it became a key drug for the FLCCC (Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance). Follow-up studies were conducted in countries without taboos on the I-word: Peru, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Patients in hospitals and control groups showed twice as much improvement after receiving it.⁶⁴

                  On December 8, 2020, members of the FLCCC appeared before a Senate subcommittee investigating early treatment of COVID-19. Speaking to the Senators, Dr. Pierre Kory pleaded:

                  Mountains of data have emerged from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin. It basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick. I cannot keep caring for patients when I know they could have been saved with earlier treatment. And that drug that will treat them and prevent hospitalization is ivermectin. All I ask is for the NIH to review all the emerging data that we’ve compiled. We have almost thirty studies. Every one is reliably and reproducibly positive, showing the dramatic impacts of ivermectin.⁶⁵

         That was reasonable as presented and should have been taken at face value with at least hedged optimism. Trouble was, the subcommittee was chaired by Ron Johnson, a notorious Republican ideologue not taken seriously by scientistic progressives or given any rope by Democrats. What followed the presentation, either spontaneously or by coordination, was a political, pharmaceutical, medical, and mainstream-media blackout of ivermectin led by The New York Times and Associated Press with a goal to remove or distort all positive reports. Google-owned YouTube followed suit. Twitter even blacklisted an entire European medical journal that discussed treating COVID-19 with ivermectin in one issue; that is, they blacklisted everything from that journal, including other health topics. Facebook removed all posts by the FLCCC. This is a complete flip of not only health freedom but a free press and open debate in a free society.

                  The treatment guidelines panel of NIH also jumped in, refusing to list ivermectin as a remedy for COVID-19. When asked why, a doctor on the panel called the drug “medical psychosis.” It was as if his mindset was to push patients to the point of intubation when hospitals could use Remdesivir. The fact that members of the panel were financially supported by Gilead, Remdesivir’s patent holder and manufacturer, made their failure to report successes of ivermectin or approve further studies look like true medical psychosis as well as financial self-dealing. It is too scandalous for anyone to have thought of, let alone carried out; yet it reflects the sort of mass reaction formation that binds people to false narratives.

         The populace is frightened and alienated by a machinery that dwarfs and trivializes their humanity and takes the power of their own health and well-being out of their hands.

My Amherst College class, full of doctors and medical researchers, has been debating this matter in a 2022-2023 class forum. Ophthalmologist Richard Klein, an informed advocate of allopathy, nonetheless gave this explanation of the new medical megastructure to a classmate:

It’s getting more complex than your description of providers vs. patients vs. employees. First, ‘providers’ (in terms of who’s in charge) are no longer the traditional providers of our youth: physicians and nurses and PTs, etc. but rather Hospital Conglomerates, Private Equity firms, and Insurance Companies that own most of what used to be traditional providers’ business. The traditional providers are now replaceable widgets in a huge system. The entire health care system has devolved into one whose sole purpose according to the owner/providers is market share and profit. Patients are the pawns in the system, and traditional providers are rapidly becoming the same.  Here’s one sad example of how patient welfare took a back seat to profit/marketability in a large hospital system I know well: The hospital’s bioethics committee spent hundreds of hours developing a bioethics manual which set standards for the hospital system.  Before publication, the bioethics manual had to be approved by the hospital system’s marketing department (!). They blocked its publication, and instead published a slick manual about how the hospital was a “center of excellence.” So, physicians and bioethicists were trumped by a gung-ho MBA.

When we lived in California, my wife and I had bank accounts for twenty-three years at a local Citibank branch. During the last year that we used it before relocating to Maine permanently, the bank made an accounting error of nearly $1000. It was obviously their mistake, and they admitted it and planned to rectify it. At the level of organization above the local branch, they were not permitted to fix it, nor were we able or even allowed to speak to anyone about it. Whereas once there would have been if not a moral obligation, a public-relations attempt to satisfy a customer and do the right thing, that no longer exists, in part because no one has any incentive to disrupt the chain of command or expose themselves to shame. They will not even talk to you; they figure they are invulnerable and eventually you will give up and go away. Once we closed the account, that became an additional excuse; we were no longer a customer. They could punish us for that. In the three years in which I phoned the office, the manager of the branch changed multiple times until the last one I dealt with in 2022 and 2023 who always called me “Mr. Richard” agreed that he would be angry too but that his hands were tied if he wanted his job.

Although I would advise never putting money in a bank as hierarchicalized and impersonal as Citibank. In the new normal, if you can’t get a mistake reversed or even an app to work, you escape a spinning death ball or cycles of dead-end loops only by discussing the matter with AI or waiting on Muzak hold for a helper in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, or Macedonia. Once you begin sliding down neo-capitalism’s ramp of discarded consumers, you are tended by a robot democracy, for you exist solely to be monetized and only as long as you have arithmetic to clear. From there, the sooner you are disposed of, the better.   

Sid Schwab, a successful career surgeon voiced his own dismay over the decline of the medical profession since his graduation:

When I first went into practice, my future partner asked me how many operations I’d want to do per week to feel fulfilled. Having just been Chief Resident on the trauma service of one of the US’s premier trauma centers where I’d done at least 15 per week, I said, I don’t know. Ten? You’ll kill yourself doing that many, he replied. Six a week is perfect: decent income, enough time to enjoy life. 

That was when docs could bill whatever they wanted, payers paid, say, 80%, and docs could “balance bill” patients for the difference. I won’t argue fees were reasonable back then, but it wasn’t long before one could bill whatever they wanted but payers paid what they wanted and you couldn’t bill for the difference. And “what they wanted” was around ⅓ of the so-called fees.

By the end of my career, before I burned out, I was doing 15-20 operations per week and barely maintaining income in the face of nearly yearly cuts. For the most part, the same applies to hospital bills, which is why so many have folded. 

I don’t know how much a surgeon ought to make compared, say, to a baseball player or, for that matter, an internist or an NYU professor. But I do know that for decades the only attempts at cost control have been to cut reimbursement to ‘providers’ (love that term, just as I love ‘clients’ replacing ‘patients’) and there’s only so much blood in that turnip. I burned out from a combination of overwork and what was probably an overly-acute sense of commitment to my patients and to keep providing the kind of high-quality, cost-sensitive care I always did, despite it being entirely unrecognized and unappreciated by payers, whose criteria for having docs on their ‘panel of providers’ was accepting their latest cut to reimbursement. 

Rewarding quality care is an ideal which is, I think, too complicated to be meaningful. So it amounts to selecting certain ‘indicators’ such as giving pre-op antibiotics within an hour of ‘cut time.’ Which happens to be the exact opposite of the rule when I was in training, so they’d have time to develop effective tissue levels. Make of it what you will.⁶⁷

This is a complete breakdown of ethics and priorities and portends the vaccine debacle, though I know that Sid, despite no love for medical conglomerates, doesn’t share my suspicion about the ingredients, ethics, or care in the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines. From my standpoint, the marketing people and money men, not honest doctors like Sid or perspicacious scientists like Richard Feynman, are running the show.

                  But tell that to Rachel Maddow, a respected news journalist in progressive circles, who characterized ivermectin as a “horse dewormer,” as if she were reporting a widely accepted verdict. In the process, this self-appointed docent of truth maliciously conflated equine and bovine doses of ivermectin paste with the human pill. This is not journalism but Political Entertainment Wars.

                  CDC made a related joke out of ivermectin on Twitter, posting photographs with the caption, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”⁶⁸

                  What smug young wiseass wrote that? Did he or she intend “y’all” as a dog whistle to blue states or a taunt to red ones, Mississippi hillbillies, and Fox Republicans? Is this corporate, bureaucratic, technocratic, and scientistic fundamentalism, or something more insidious?

                  The CDC followed up by planting false reports about hospitals being overwhelmed with ivermectin-poisoning episodes. A fact-checker found that one of the emergency rooms (with supposedly no space for patients because of self-medicators) refuted the report on its own website, encouraging patients in need to come—no waiting. Mississippi poison control numbers were tweaked from two to seventy percent in concert with methodically removing ivermectin from drugstores and chains.

                  Diane Perlman, a political psychologist and one-time psychoneuroimmunologist and a self-proclaimed Rachel Maddow fan, in an open letter on Substack challenged her performance as “beyond shocking”:

                        I experience you as a decent, ethical person with integrity, but am troubled by some reporting that succumbs to corporate influenced groupthink. We need smart analysts like you to challenge and demystify seductive, inflammatory, harmful, mindsets. . . .

                        As opposed to, for instance, throw more fuel on the fire.

                  Ivermectin is on the WHO’s list of essential medicines. It is sold over-the-counter in many countries. Merck’s patent on IVM expired in 1996, so it can’t make billions for Big Pharma. Originally approved to treat parasites, IVM was discovered to be a “multifaceted medication” with antiviral, antimicrobial, anticancer, and immune-modulating mechanisms beneficial for many conditions. Doctors repurposed IVM for “off label” uses, a common practice. It has been considered a “miracle drug” by those who study it. . . . Early treatment prevented cytokine storms, hospitalizations, the use of ventilators, and deaths. . . .

                        Different forms of evidence from a variety of sources combine to create a coherent, robust picture of the effectiveness of Ivermectin. . . .

                        IVM is one ingredient in animal parasite medications. IVM for humans is safely sold over-the-counter in many countries. Many people procure IVM to prevent Covid or to have handy in their “Just in case Covid kit” of remedies if needed, including IVM, Vitamin D3, Vitamin C, Quercetin, Zinc, Melatonin, Gargle/mouthwash.⁶⁹

     As if Rachel cares behind the show-biz woke smile.

We should regard the attack on ivermectin as what it is: a proxy attack on the entire alternative-health system and modernity’s reassertion of absolute seniority. Ivermectin was singled out because it circumvented the prime political agenda by both having a legitimate pharmaceutical lineage and being inconveniently effective. In a sense, old-fashioned early Pharma with its generic model was being attacked by new, bigger-money Pharma, seeking much greater profits and drug monopolies rather than actual healthcare.

                  Merck’s new “morning after” COVID pill, Molnupiravir, is an experimental synthetic nucleoside derivative of N4-hydroxycyttidine that was developed in a bioweapons context for targeting equine encephalitis. Using a different set of pathways, it proposes achieving the same result as ivermectin, which, having gone generic and cheap, was available at a pittance from compounding pharmacies. Yet it was no longer of use to its parent corporation, and it presented a political problem for government agencies pushing EUA vaccination. 

                  Steve Kirsch, a tech entrepreneur whose expertise includes early treatment of COVID-19 and out-patient use of repurposed drugs, insists that many in the CDC and WHO knew about the effectiveness of fluvoxamine and ivermectin and intentionally withheld the data while encouraging disinformation and enforcing removal. At first naïvely presuming that this was a mistake or oversight, he reached out to a close associate who ran NIH treatment guidelines for COVID-19. He reported the outcome in a discussion with Drs. Brett Weinstein and Robert Malone (who participated in the development of mRNA technology):

                        Malone:

                        No change. Doesn’t even respond. In the case of ivermectin—there was a report by Tess Lawrie, an excellent report; it was done three months ago, widely distributed to the WHO—by the way, the WHO knows fluvoxamine works too, and so does the Gates Foundation, but they’re saying nothing to people. And if anyone wants to challenge me on this, if Gates Foundation wants to debate me on this, bring it on. If the WHO wants to debate me on this, bring it on, and I will show that they knew and they’re not telling people. You know, this information is being suppressed. Tess Lawrie created this report on ivermectin, and these guys did nothing. They sat back and said, “Well, Tess, it’s not peer-reviewed, nobody’s going to peer-review it, so we don’t have to do anything.” So Tess said, “You know, these guys aren’t doing anything with it, so I’m going to submit it to a journal, and she got it peer-reviewed and it’s going to be published. . . .  In which case [to] all these people who said, “ivermectin doesn’t work, and I believe in evidence-based medicine,” I said, “Here’s all the evidence, here’s the systematic review and meta-analysis that you need. That’s the highest level of evidence. Look at the evidence.” And the response is, “Well, the WHO and NIH doesn’t say, so sorry, I’m not interested.”

                        Weinstein:

                        The evidence is overwhelming, and there’s no question, and this is one of the safest drugs we have.

                        Malone:

                        . . . And so you have a drug which is available in the pharmacopoeia, it’s licensed; physicians in the United States at least, in most countries, have the right to prescribe from the existing pharmacopoeia even off-label for other purposes, okay, at safe levels. And there are active consequences for physicians prescribing this drug.

                        Kirsch:

                        And pharmacies won’t even fill the prescriptions. . . .

                        Weinstein:

                        When we are trying to grapple with what it is that’s doing this, it’s very tempting to imagine that there must have been a meeting in which people decided that it was okay for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people to die needlessly, given a pandemic we might be able to end if we simply decided to do it.

                        Malone:

                        But it doesn’t have to be a meeting, it can be a function of the underlying drivers.

                        Weinstein:

                        What we do know now—and people have been on this apparently for months, I became aware of this yesterday—is that Merck, very conspicuously (another anomaly on the list), attacked the safety of its own drug ivermectin, even though they knew from four decades of work—

                        Kirsch:

                        Safest drug on the planet.

                        Weinstein:

                        So why would Merck say that its own drug was unsafe? No evidence to it. Why? Well, it turns out they have another drug headed rapidly for what? For an EUA. What does an EUA require? It requires that there is no safe and effective therapy existing because, if there was, you wouldn’t take the risk of fast-forwarding this process. And not only that, but they’re also involved with Johnson & Johnson; they are partners with Johnson & Johnson in producing their vaccine. Okay, we’ve got an anomaly. Why would Merck say things about its own drug that aren’t true and indicate that people should be afraid to apply it when the precautionary principle would suggest that they have to apply it . . . ? [I]t might have to do with the fact that their business, their portfolio of COVID therapies, involves an EUA.⁷⁰

                  As late as September 2021, NIH’s own website ingenuously described the possible off-label interaction of ivermectin with COVID-19:

                    Reports from in vitro studies suggest that ivermectin acts by inhibiting the host importin alpha/beta-1 nuclear transport proteins, which are part of a key intracellular transport process that viruses hijack to enhance infection by suppressing the host’s antiviral response. In addition, ivermectin docking may interfere with the attachment of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein to the human cell membrane.⁷¹

                  These imbroglios show how powerful a hypothetical conspiracy might be—a control so Sauron-like it pulls the strings of the CDC, WHO, Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the Saudis and Chinese too, whether it is of common Earth or not. Mr. Trump served its agenda with an almost impossible trifecta of (1) extending the pandemic, (2) superfunding the technocracy, and (3) consolidating the Deep State and oligarchy above and beyond his own brand.

When occasionally asked for a short answer as to why I have not gotten the vaccine, depending on who’s asking I say some combination of: “Not fully tested, Trump-derangement warp speed, zero liability, potential adverse side effects, toxic spike, antibody-triggering augmentation, antibody-dependent enhancement, reduction in overall immunity, a distaste for government propaganda and bullying. They didn’t take the time to develop a real vaccine; instead, they developed an alias. It didn’t work nearly as well as a real vaccine, so they sold the meme instead of the serum.”

                  When a store clerk belligerently inquired, “Are you a doctor,” I said, “No,” but I should have added, “Are you?”

                  An osteopath I trust told me that the COVID vaccine has the effect of weakening what is already most vulnerable in a body, hence the broad range of adverse effects, from heart to joints to lungs to eyes to genitals—and he got vaccinated in order to practice and travel.

                  Fauci is also the collective proxy adult I found unworthy in my childhood. I am wary of anything those officious uncles over-promote and that can’t be undone.

                  I assume that natural immunity is a better long-term strategy against all viruses and diseases, plus I am guessing that the COVID-19 “vaccines” are not upgrades to overall health or immunity. Graphene oxide is not something that anyone who knows what it is wants in his or her arteries even if it isn’t a tool of mind control. It’s an unassimilable metal with a sharp molecular razor.

The subtitle of Pinchbeck’s essay is “Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson & Johnson shot.” He opens his discussion with an elegant presentation of the dilemma:

                  Among my more alternative friends (shamans, holistic health mentors, hypnotherapists, particularly ones living in alternative sanctuaries like Ibiza, Bali, and Tulum), getting vaccinated equals capitulation to the New World Order mind-control system. I admit that I sympathize with this view. Other friends—those who tend to be more attuned to mainstream media—thought I was risking my life at my age, crazy not to get it. I sympathize with this view as well. Above all, I started to find the never-ending discussions around the subject—on social media, IRL, and inside my own skull—close to unbearable. . . .⁷²

                   Later in his jeremiad, Daniel notes a tendency in himself “and in many alternative-culture friends as well as the global Neo-shamanist healer community—SPD . . . Schizotypal Personal Disorder [covering] a wide spectrum of character traits including: ‘Peculiar, eccentric or unusual thinking, beliefs or mannerisms’; ‘Belief in special powers, such as mental telepathy or superstitions’; ‘Suspicious or paranoid thoughts’; “Unusual perceptions, such as sensing an absent person’s presence or having illusions’; and ‘Dressing in peculiar ways, such as appearing unkempt or wearing oddly matched clothes.’ According to the Mayo Clinic, I am somewhere on the Schizotypal spectrum, as are many of the people I know and love.” He adds that SPD leads to “self-dramatization, histrionic paranoia, hyper-individualism, and knee-jerk rebellion in our resistance to the Covid vaccines.”⁷³

                  I never heard of this spectrum and consider it political pathologizing with shaming. No matter, count me in. My one-time therapist called it omnipotent grandiosity. That’s the dark side; the illuminated side is visionary acuity and a sense of the big picture.

                  Daniel next engages in self-reflection:

                  Returning to New York City after more than a year, I noted, generally, in the streets, a new spirit of collectivism, sense of civic duty and responsibility for others that mandated receiving the vaccine. The feeling on the ground has become vaguely communist — a sense we are all in this together—in a way I find admirable. Not getting vaccinated began to feel a bit stingy, stodgy, and narcissistic. . . .

                  I was no longer convinced that my anti-vaccination stance was correct. Perhaps this was a caving into the social norms in New York City, where vaccination had become a kind of moral imperative as well as being supported by strict mandates.⁷⁴

In more rural Downeast with friends in “Maine Stands Up”—a political group supporting vaccine freedom and regularly re-calculating COVID risk-reward ratios—I don’t confront moral imperatives. But I am just as afraid of catching COVID-19 as you. I’m not anti-vaxx or anti-technology, just anti-czar, anti-propaganda, anti-authority, anti-zombie, anti-technocracy.

                  I drive a car and write on a computer; I consume stuff from jars, cans, bottles, cellophane wraps, and waxed cardboard, mostly not reading the labels, which are just words anyway. I use a cell phone and currency chip. I enjoy and am addicted to the current civilizational set-up. I couldn’t be a Luddite if I tried.

                  Every day along with my fellow creatures, I roll the dice on mortality. Every act and choice of mine shifts the odds, mostly imperceptibly.

                  I am not saying nay. But I am also not saying yea, to any of it.

                  For now, I am relying on the innate immunity I need anyway to survive in a random crowd or air-sharing dyad, plus tinctures and supplements in lieu of the vaccine. That doesn’t mean I’m confident of my choice. There have been months during which I have reconsidered daily. I may have to get a vaccine eventually if only to participate in my human “gather” grid and its transportation hubs. I don’t want to be an outlier and recreant forever. It is uncomfortable setting myself outside of most of my base, folks I have identified with and trusted since grade school. Anti-vaxx is cutting me off from not only doctors and hospitals but many acupuncturists, osteopaths, herbalists, Ayurvedic practitioners, psychics, Zen teachers, poets, painters, dancers, ecologists, and general sages, people with whom I am bonded on most matters of aesthetics, health, sacredness, and faith. 

                  If I get a vaccine, I will meditate on homeopath Vatsala Sperling’s affirmation emailed to me on March 11, 2021: “If you must have the vaccine, have it with an open, optimistic, and happy heart, fully trusting that it will not harm you. Make friends with the virus and the injection—both will be kind to you.” Her words were a homeopathic microdose. 

                  For now, I put five pellets of a homeopathic COVID nosode under my tongue monthly. That’s my isopath: a potentized microdose. I wash down the following supplements, some daily, some irregularly: zinc, quercetin for zinc absorption, nattokinase, red algae, fucoidan (iodine), spirulina, reishi mushroom tincture, vitamins C, D, and K, and a black chokeberry tincture for which I hiked five hours up three small mountains with friends to collect as rare berries. They alchemized a tincture, using how-to lessons from Sage Moon (AKA Jennifer May), who teaches under the banner “2 Uncommon Witches.” I plunk it onto my tongue and, separately, three drops of a flower-essence blend developed for prevention of COVID-19 by May’s mentor, Dave Dalton of Delta Gardens in Massachusetts; it contains Black Pansy, Chestnut, Botswana Agate, Lungwort, Tobacco. I also take a homeopathic T-cell microdose weekly. Whether this is pissing in the ocean, I’ll leave for others to decide.

                  The one time I experienced virus-like symptoms (in mid-August 2021 waking to a fever, cough, headache, and fear), I also drank iodine in an “alchemical blue” Illumodine form in orange juice where it looked like a Picasso palette. I mixed a dilution of a traditional Chinese flu prevention formula in water, added olive leaf and oregano pills to my daily supplement, and slurped four packets of rotten-lemony-tasting liposomal (phospholipid) “nano-spheres” of vitamin C. I tore off the tops and squeezed out the contents by pulling the mustard-like packets through my teeth and swallowing the goo with a gulp of mango or grape juice.

                  Then, as prescribed by Meryl Nass, I took four ivermectin tablets. By the afternoon, the symptoms were gone. I don’t assume that I had COVID-19, was COVID-positive, or that the remedies worked. I am guessing that belief, placebo power, and synergistic and systemic effects play roles in drugs like ivermectin and other immune-based therapies. Ivermectin may be irrelevant in some cases, game-changing in others.

                  I wear a N95 mask in stores, and I regularly shoot an anti-COVID saline antiseptic up my nostrils after indoor crowd contact. On some high-contact days, I mix grapefruit-seed extract and Celtic sea salt in warm water in a neti pot and then tilt and lean back, using gravity to get it deeper into cranial passages.  As we move into the omicron world, I have had incrementally more exposure, hoping for equally incremental immunity, and I have cut back on or eliminated most of these more extreme processes. Such is life in a time of pandemic—no way around it, just through it, meaning a redefinition of practice and prayer.

                        Endnotes

60. Peter McCullough, “Top American doctor: COVID shots are ‘obsolete,’ dangerous, must be shut down,” John-Henry Westen Show, rumble.com, July 23, 2021.

61. Dr. Meryl Nass has provided information for this paragraph by email and phone.

62. Dana Ullman, email, January 2, 2021.

63. Jim Dryden, “Fluvoxamine may prevent serious illness in COVID-19 patients,” Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis edu site, November 12, 2020.

64. The history of Ivermectin is from KanekoaTheGreat, “The Story Of Ivermectin and COVID-19,” Rumble, September 2, 2021.

65. Dr. Pierre Kory, quoted in KanekoaTheGreat, “The Story Of Ivermectin And COVID-19,” Rumble, September 2, 2021.

66. Richard Klein, Amherst Listserv, January 2, 2023.

67. Sid Schwab, Amherst Listserv, January 3, 2023.

68. “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Prevent or Treat COVID-19,” CDC Twitter feed, August 21, 2021.

69. Diane Perlman, “IVERMECTIN, Truth or Consequences: Open Letter and Challenge for Rachel Maddow.” substack.com, September 23, 2021.

70. Brett Weinstein, Robert Malone, and Steve Kirsch, DarkHorsePodcast, Plandemicseries, July 8, 2021. I have rearranged for readability.

71. Covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov.

72. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination: Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson shot.” Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter, substack.com, August 21, 2021.

73. Pinchbeck, Daniel. “From Vacillation to Vaccination: Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson shot.” Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter, substack.com, August 21, 2021.

74. Pinchbeck, Daniel. “From Vacillation to Vaccination: Why, despite uncertainty, I got the Johnson shot.” Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter, substack.com, August 21, 2021.

10. THE VACCINE IS NOT THE PROBLEM WITH THE VACCINE

Of course, the vaccine is the problem with the vaccine. But if oversell and side effects were its only downsides, it would be another speed bump through planet-wide crises. The problem with the vaccine is the notion that the human technosphere can or should surpass nature. This deep-seated myth and bliss realm of modernity encourages a technophiliac mindset, as an endless menu of industrial panaceas keeps returning us to our bubble with its games of skill and chance. The present political and ecological gridlock is an opportunity at Ice Age scale; yet we seek patches and quick fixes.

     Most citizens these days have a scientist-as-magician view of daily survival, a technocratic belief system that perforates even the most anti-technocratic sectors. People want to feed and be fed by the beast because they want the beast to be real.

                  Addiction to a vending-machine satori with its depleted phenomenology and spiritual vacuity is, to my mind, the greater dilemma of which new COVID vaccines are a mere symptom. The technosphere is humanity’s firewall against nature: a pandemic, a super-germ, a global drought, or a superstorm leading to a post-modern collapse and dark ages. We hand each new mess, as it emerges, to technocrats and ask them make it right. We cede our individuality, inspiration, and power to a quotidian industrial-age easement: see the problem, whack the problem. There’s a machine to manufacture, software to write, or a molecule to move to repair or reverse just about anything. It leads to unsustainable drilling, mining, microwaving, and dump-siting of a thus-far resilient planet.

       Technocracy is modernity’s de facto first cause, god, and fallback posture. Even conservation-minded Liberals have conceded, without much inquiry, that the only way to achieve their competing agendas—social justice and sustainability—is to throw in with machine-age magic: geoengineering and synthetic biology. It all over the liberal media starting with the New Yorker and New York Times. Solving atmospheric, carbon, health, and equity crises simultaneously is presumed to be a matter of software and production—there are no other options. The Green New Deal, which once had elements of sacred geometry and new alchemy, is driven solely by technocratic presumptions. This is a Faustian bargain, given who we are cutting a deal with and the price, environmental and spiritual.  

                  Plus, putting tech band-aids on the environmental crisis is like trying to reverse Mercury retrograde or repair a hole in the sun. It’s farther beyond our pay grade than the Taj Mahal is beyond field mice.

                  Yet the unexamined presumption is that, without higher and higher tech, we can’t recover our already humongous down-payment in hardware, infrastructure, supply chains, and belief systems. Beyond a few remaining Amazon tribes, neo-survivalists, and sasquatches, this paradigm is as hegemonic as it is apocalyptic. Gene mod isn’t limited to soybeans, corn, and vaccines; it is a universal strategy that includes, at its most nitwit and demonic extreme, eugenics by gene drives to exterminate “pests” of no value to our species.

                  A survey team to Earth from another solar system would report a world on the wane: crew-cut forests, sewers disgorging into seas, miles-long agri-beds of GMOs in bulldozed synthetic soils, industrial pig, chicken, cow, and fish farms with their suffering captive cornucopias. This isn’t terra-forming, which would be making Mars, Luna, or a Jovian moon more Earthlike. It is its diametric opposite: techno-forming, making Earth itself less biological, more suitable for robotic rule. Hominids themselves have become modified, pollution-cocktail cyborgs, each with traces of Bikini, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima, microplastics, and DuPont’s “forever chemicals.” Eco-journalists Zahra Moloo and Jim Thomas put the fallacy of eco-reductionism into cybertopian context:

                        BMGF [The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. military organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) whose exact level of investment is disputed). BMGF have also funded and influenced lobbyists, regulators, and public narratives around gene drives, in an attempt to push this dangerous sci-fi sounding technology into real world use, shifting research priorities on industrial agriculture, conservation and health strategies along the way, and attracting the interest of the military and agribusiness sectors alike. . . .

                        By deliberately harnessing the spread of engineered genes to alter entire populations, gene drives turn on its head the usual imperative to try to contain and prevent engineered genes from contaminating and disrupting ecosystems. The underlying genetic engineering technology is unpredictable and may provoke spread of unintended traits. The notion that a species can be removed from an ecosystem without provoking a set of negative impacts on food webs and ecosystem functions is wishful thinking and even taking out a carrier of an unpleasant parasite does not mean the parasite won’t just jump to a different host. Moreover, the implicit power in being able to re-model or delete entire species and ecosystems from the genetic level up is attracting the interest of militaries and agribusiness alike and runs counter to the idea of working with nature to manage conservation and agriculture.⁷⁵

          The presumption that humans not nature should direct evolution is the definition of technocracy and the generic opening boast of most biotech companies’ portfolio. The use of born-again gene drives as opposed to billion-year-old microbiomes, viruses, and fungi to regulate ecosystems is biblical-scale hubris. Its omen won’t be realized—we lack the resources, gumption, and know-how—but if we stay its course, the future is bleak: total control or total collapse. There is a reason that car windshields once had to be cleaned of bugs at gas stations. Do you see much bug-splattered auto glass anymore? To continually vaccinate and boost is the epidemiological equivalent of depleted, contaminated ecosystems.  

Machine intelligence has come to resemble the alien agenda that QAnon conspiracists assign to lizard ETs. Transhumanists presume to take over Sol 3 as their birthright and prerogative. In Technoville, things are supposed to work, its biggest selling point even to Luddites. Turn on the faucet, water comes. Flip a switch, space is lit. Click on Zoom, a person across the planet appears. This is both compelling and peerless. If the price of gas get too high, drill or turn plants or shale into fuel. Energy is bottomless because scientists can always conceive new ways to dredge it up or turn something new like hydrogen into it. Everyone has either seen too many sci-fi movies, played too many videogames, or been suffused in their metastasizing tropes.

                  Futurism’s agenda is axiomatically immortal: dump light-reflecting metals in the atmosphere; paint buildings white; sterilize invasive species; create new isotopes, chemicals, and drugs; implant cameras and computers everywhere.

                  In an idealized future, a string of CRISPR-based mRNA cocktails will match the genomes of all intruding germs, eliminating unfriendly microorganisms and bacilli, all coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, and superbugs (antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi) through genome imaging and software that matches their molecular structures. A dose of computer code, comprising medusoids, xenobots, and yet-to-be-invented artificial animals, will eliminate pathogens from the local biosphere and even from comets and interstellar spores. Inject in the bloodstream. Return to business. Consume, prosper, repeat as necessary.

                  In atopian Vaxifornia, visits with actual doctors, already curtailed by HMO profiteering, will be phased out. At the end of hours-long waits in emergency rooms sit mere overworked, underpaid figures, formulaic forerunners of their own AI and robot replacements. Medicine will move to upgrades of Zoom with drug delivery by suborbital Amazon Prime.

                  After that, the next goal will be to reprogram genes carrying birth defects and unwanted ancestral traits and to fill needs and desires (or their surrogates) by enzymes and hormones of origin. People, if they so desire, can get re-gendered by medical tattoo. Mankind and its planet can be transformed simultaneously.

                  COVID-19 vaccines portend not only the medicines but the laptops and Smart Phones of the future. They will run on circuits of entangled tardigrade qubits and stem cells. Their microtubules, amino acids, proteins, and carbon chains will provide zeta- and yotta-bite memory, storing data on singularity clouds in nucleic frog strands exponentially beyond the capacity of inanimate silicon. The entire database of the planet could be stored on the holographic hard drive of one DNA crystal from a tadpole embryo or even an activated proton.

                  We are living in a mirage of the magical cities envisioned by Marcilio Ficino and his fellow Renaissance hermeticists, but with hard wires and WiFi instead of sigils and radionics. Too bad.

It has become near impossible, in fact, to conceive of a future earth, short of a “Waterworld” or “Mad Max” hunger games that is not ruled by a global elite of technocrats. That’s how deeply imbedded we are in endgame futurisms, as civilization tries to outrun its own biosphere, back-engineering life while keeping itself as pristine as possible. French philosopher Paul Virilio captured the moment: “Interactivity keeps the world in a kind of tetanic trance, at once inert and overexcited, sleepwalking on a planetary scale.”⁷⁶

                  Sleepwalkers all! Apocalypse has become more comforting than waking up

                  At this point, technocracy becomes theocracy, a Godworld with biotechnicians the archangels. Tech wizards compete in squid games to write the ultimate salvation software. If obsolete deities can’t be overthrown, they can be turned into super-programmers in a digital Valhalla. After all, Yahweh long ago created the Machine in His Image by projecting it through billions of years of algorithms. Space rockets of the father, son, and holy ghost, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, are now the vanguard. A blogger named Storm Wolf offered a truer reflection:

        Looking at [Bezos] in his astronaut costume, and his cowboy hat, and his omega speedmaster moon watch, coming out of his penis craft, being greeted by his ling cod lipped girlfriend, dripping in oversized diamonds, I saw a man completely without a sense of irony. Not a man aware that he had been entrusted with the greatest fortune in human history to benefit all of humanity, but a small narcissistic buffoon, unaware that the universe is 10,000,000,000 light years wide and he had just spent $5,000,000,000 to fly sixty miles through it, so the whole world could look at him at once and see what a truly small man he is, and hear his Kermit the Frog voice declare that his big plan is to pollute space.⁷⁷

                  Right, one charmed quark and boson at a time.

People no longer want to be human, they want to be more (or better) than human—to be saved, serviced, fed, wired, hooked up, bathed, and bred by transhuman networks. When their body succumbs, they can be downloaded with their memories into a cloud—a consciousness singularity—stored on a hard drive till a technology for reconstituting them in bodies is available, or they can live in a hologram with holograms of their pets and crawlers of their memorial tweets and posts, as long as their bank account can fund an artificial-reality probability wave based on their life.

       Sorry, but that’s Satanism. Blogger Darin De Stefano proposed that the force tempting us to become superhuman is subverting our actual humanity:

                    Transhumanism is nothing but subhumanism on advertising steroids. And what it is selling is a kind of omnicidal dehumanization that is explicitly anti-biological. One cannot exceed a humanity which has been boldly counterfeited into nonexistence. We would have to have become human first, a task at which we’ve staggeringly failed. . . . . Adding dead things to yourself or yourself to dead things doesn’t ‘exceed your humanity.’ It renders it ironic. The result isn’t a ‘superman.’ It’s a living being so confused that it replaced parts of itself with doll-parts and machines and shit.⁷⁸

                  Thomas Frick, former head of the publications department at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of the Arts) and editor of Sacred Theory of the Earth, an anthology I published back in 1986, likened the current crisis to a Zoroastrian morality play: Luciferian and Ahrimanic forces are leading the evolution of worlds away from Buddha and Christ consciousness toward a Mephistophelian Eighth Sphere or Great Reset in the name of Christ.:

                  The very impulse toward technological “solutions” is tying the knot tighter. Laurie Anderson said: “If you think technology (pause) is the solution to your problem (pause) then you don’t understand technology (pause) and you don’t understand your problem.”* (Heidegger couldn’t have said it better. The disgusting smugness of Al Gore and Bill McKibben in Planet of the Humans was a lesson to me about the masks of the enemy, as was the glimpse into their investment portfolios, which of course are inescapably interwoven with the whole range of toxic banks and corporations their public green efforts elide.⁷⁹

Many technologies work quite well and with some sustainability: electric lines, internal combustion, bent glass portiéres, light metal wings, software, arthroscopic surgery, batteries. It is technocracy that doesn’t work: continuous mobilization against an insoluble paradox or fungible enemy. World Wars I and II morphed into the Cold War, then into the War on Terror, then into the War on COVID-19. This “war” is so tacit, insensate, and self-regulating that we take it for granted—still reptile and monkey minds in baboon bands with reptile brains.

                  But passports to Pleasantville are as smart as their own algorithms—that is, very and not very. The highs and lows speak for themselves: the high arts of healing and compassion, the low arts of conscription and blackmail. All-points gadfly Daniel Pinchbeck diagnosed the blind side of this drear-mare Gatesian hell-realm:

                    [W]e are trapped in a technological “enframing” of the world, which conceives of all forms of nature—including human nature—as a “standing reserve” to be exploited for technological ends. With mRNA technology, we are now treating the innermost aspects of human biology as a “plug and play” operating system upon which engineers can experiment. One conspiratorial view on the vaccine campaign is that it conveniently advances the transhumanist agenda, based on biotechnology and genetic engineering. The multitude felt deeply suspicious of this agenda and resisted genetic modification. Now, due to a life-threatening emergency, they welcome it.⁸⁰

                  While Daniel’s Marx-to-ayahuasca path creates bends for its swift ascent from New York’s existential depths, I have always found him uniquely brilliant, never flagging on the one or two or three extra nuances necessary to get a full 3-D or 4-D scan. “Plug and play” is the problem with the vaccines. The masses feel and broadcast back on the fear channel. As the virus super-pumps up its vibration, the technocracy pumps palliatives into the same mindstreams. Journalist Geoff Shullenberger described how fear provides incontestable content:

                  White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients issued a remarkable statement. He began by reassuring “the vaccinated” that “you’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this,” but followed this optimistic bromide with a dose of fire and brimstone: “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.⁸¹

                  That’s a tactic worthy of a second-rate Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. What’s most alarming is that there’s no alarm, only groupthink, not to become the fly in the ointment.

       Democracies and oligarchies alike have grown bored with life, impatient with nature; they are looking for a new moral identity. Dystopian futurism has become the lone alternative to tedium and depression. In Junky, author William Burroughs admitted that he didn’t get addicted to heroin because he liked it; he couldn’t think of anything better to do. “You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked.”⁸²

                  Likewise, humanity. For “junk,” substitute any commodity, lifestyle, addiction, pharmaceutical or tech. There is no competing compass, moral or otherwise. We can’t imagine anything else to do. Pinchbeck laid it out succinctly:

                    It does seem that our society is in the process of reorganizing around the unprecedented surveillance power of the tech companies, meshed with the government and the financial elite, and lastly, the encroaching field of bio-informatics as a means of overarching tracking and control. It is unclear if this is an intentionally orchestrated process (with a cabal of evil geniuses working it all out from some hidden bunker or secret society, in league, perhaps, with nefarious extraterrestrials), or if it is happening outside of any group’s conscious will or volition, as an inherent tendency of the technologies upon which we have become increasingly dependent and seem to be controlling us more than the other way around. Right now, I am tending toward the latter—that it is basically, in other words, a clusterfuck. People still seek to profit and to advance their particular agendas, even within a relatively chaotic meltdown.⁸⁴

                        QAnon is not an outlier; it is the tip of a cognitive-dissonance iceberg.

Even the relative success of isopathy in curtailing pandemics—measles, smallpox, polio, and malaria among its credits—is a matter of debate vis à vis environmental, epidemiological (natural immune), and vaccine (induced immune) functions. Though Donald Trump spoke from self-entitled ignorance when he said that the pandemic would just end one day, in fact it will just end (or not), and we won’t know for certain why (either way). All plagues did, even the blackest and most vampiric. Gaia’s biosphere has natural resilience and immunogenic learning capacity. Human thoughtforms are not even its biggest component. That’s what Mssrs. Fauci, Bezos, and Musk don’t get. They are midgets in the maw of a whipping star. Strange attractors, micro-immunity networks, mitochondria, Golgi bodies, telekinetic and chaos fields balance disease and health in feedback loops far more intricate than scientism’s lockdown forensics.  

                  Purposefulness as a single-variable strategy doesn’t work—humans are not wiser than the biosphere that gave rise to them.⁸⁴ Asking technocrats to fix ecosystems bypasses homeostatic triggers and tipping points that were put in place during thousands of years of hominid ceremonies. Tribes knew this intuitively until internal combustion engines, plastics, pharmacies, and fiber-optics won their hearts and minds. Trouble is, the technology and governances that created the current knot of crises can’t untie it. As journalist Sarah Hinckley wrote:

                    The virus is here for a reason and the shift that is happening is essential for our survival. I’m not sure the answer is in a needle and I believe the wake-up will only get louder if we continue to address the problem with the same school of thought that created it.⁸⁵

                  Messenger RNA vaccines and gene drives may yet turn out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread—or since the Neolithic cultivation of rice and barley—but they are messing with source codes that will have more to say about reality than we do. Vaccines may not implant people with 5G interfaces, but they take leeway out of natural resilience and systemic homeostasis. They weaken the body’s natural immunity, wrongfooting T-cells to high vigilance toward COVID variants that have already been supplanted by viral mutants.

                  The belief that technology is the only way and, if not perfect, as perfect as it will ever get, is necropolitics as well as the ultimate rabbit hole because it doesn’t look like a rabbit hole.

                        Endnotes

75. Zahra Moloo and Jim Thomas, “Driven to Exterminate: How Bill Gates brought gene drive extinction technology into the world,” ETC Group, October 14, 2020.

76. Stephen Craig Hickman, “Paul Virilio: The Anti-City,” onscenes.weebly.com, September 15, 2017.

77. “Storm Wolf” may be a Native American blogger and influencer widely re-quoted on Facebook, September 2021.

78. Darin De Stefano, Facebook post, June 3, 2021.

79. Thomas Frick, email, December 12, 2020.

80. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination.”

81. Geoff Shullenberger, “How vaccine mandates became a political weapon:

Biden is using them to punish his enemies,” UnHerd.com. January 7, 2022.

82. William S. Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, New York: Ace Books, 1953.

83. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination,” August 21, 2021.

84. Roy A. Rappaport, “Sanctity and Adaptation” in Richard Grossinger (editor), Ecology and Consciousness: Traditional Wisdom on the Environment, p. 105.

85. Sarah Hinckley, Facebook response, February 20, 2021.

11. TECHNOCRACY: I OWE MY SOUL TO THE COMPANY STORE

Since I began writing this book, the Pfizer vaccine was formally “approved” by the FDA. The official announcement reads like a Borgesian short story, legalistic doubletalk in an attempt to keep Pfizer liability-free while making its product mandatable. That combination shouldn’t be possible and isn’t. The vaccine that was approved apparently doesn’t exist or can’t be obtained, but it is said to be “identical” to another Pfizer vaccine that received only EUA. You can’t get the approved vaccine, but you don’t need to because you can get its EUA clone.

         This is approval from Tlön Uqbar.

         In an online talk, Swedish M.D, Astrid Stückelberger, a researcher and evaluator of research for twenty-five years for the WHO and EU and a European Union representative to the World Health Association, spoke with unusual candor as a whistleblower on hegemonic technocracy. She accused Big Pharma of manipulating healthcare with the long-term goal of imposing a technocratic dictatorship with the collaboration of neo-liberal governments. She said—and I paraphrase from her ESL—“They take away your belief system, your spirituality, your humanity, and your health. They eliminate natural healers and control everybody with technology. All diagnosis is with machines. The outcome is always pharmaceutical medication. Even hospitals are bribed.” She called medical experimentation on human beings “a violation of the Nuremburg code.”⁸⁰

         She surmised that WHO scientists were intentionally withholding data because they were serving corporations and governments, while the media were being paid off.

         State censorship equals State science—politically repackaged science. Neutral data collection becomes invalid, subversive, or reactionary. “They have the whole system in their hands,” Stückelberger claimed, “and total immunity. Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and affiliated multinational organizations have control over governments and the World Bank. They control money and agenda.”

         She cited as their main goal one of QAnon’s central conspiracy theories— “depopulation”—and claimed that Gates had unwittingly confessed as much in a 2015 TED talk.

         “Eugenics,” she went on. “Too many people in the world. How do you deal with this? You lock down liberties, annihilate thinking, emotion, cognition, and impose protocols. Technology grows exponentially while people track it linearly.”⁸¹

         She added that while Gates is an expert on technology, he knows little about health, yet he’s exactly what the global health system has become, not medicine but a delivery system for tech commodities:

         “Biotech with nanotechnology creates little transhumanoids with vaccine passports. DNA is sent through WiFi.  You have chips, electronic tattoos. You monitor, implant, direct into the brain through nose swabs. Vaccinate regularly. Every flu is possible death, make people afraid they’re going to die. You use fear—perpetual fear your whole life. Perpetual pandemic, eternal pandemic, perpetual vaccination. In front of everybody’s nose. Crazy.”⁸²

         It gets crazier. In late 2019, an Uber driver at SFO told Lindy and me that we were picked up by him on instruction so that he could entrust the following tale (he gave me his email, so I had him clean up my rendition of his story):

         I signed a contract with ROTC in high school allowing the U.S. Military to use any technology on my person including futuristic technology not yet developed. They found out that I already had an implant. It’s because I was raised in a neighborhood where a secret society was using the technology on themselves and their children. I have an incision on my skull to prove it.

            The existing neural network was something similar to RCT, the Randomized Controlled Trial developed by RAND Corporation, and runs on nano-molecular bio-chips. The technology films through your eyes. It feels like there like there is a space helmet on your head, only the speakers are embedded. It sounds like two transistor radios embedded on each ear screaming commands and belittling you all day 24/7. Regular human 60k thoughts are digitally enhanced with this nano implant to the tune of 180k thoughts per day. Not only does that require a lot of bandwidth, it requires nutrition, rest, and exercise.

            While at Neuralink when I was hooked up with diodes to the Neuralink BMI (Brain-Machine Interface). I could see, hear and communicate with Neuralink team members in my mind like a digitally implanted dream.  In this dream Neuralink team members asked me permission to access my memories via FFT. Fast Fourier Transform is an algorithm that converts a signal from its original domain to a representation domain, so it can extract thoughts and memories in full color digital video. The team said because they could see, hear and send thoughts and memories both to and from my brain, they could see my emotions, events, wants, needs, and desires. 

            The team informed me that after this FFT that Neuralink was going to prepare a meal that I ordered via FFT. In my brain I could see a menu and I ordered off that menu. I thought, ‘This is what I want for lunch,’ and that exact meal was prepared for me in the Neuralink cafeteria.

         It’s no longer a matter of whether you believe this stuff; the question isn’t viruses and vaccines either or our own small lives; it is who controls the planet, biosphere, and future. Pinchbeck laid our predicament on the line:

         A good deal of my resistance to mass vaccination—in particular, with the mRNA vaccines—was based on a vague, ominous sense that we are being pulled into a technocratic, transhumanist control system . . . from which we can never escape. . . .

            [W]hen I imagine an endless series of variants accompanied by an endless series of boosters, I toggle back to the conspiratorial view. I find it infuriating that this meshes ideally with the profit model of the pharmaceutical companies. It would reward the bizarre, inappropriate smugness that Bill Gates expresses in interviews. I feel deeply suspicious of Moderna, for instance.

            Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, has a reputation for cut-throat corporate practices. . . . On Clubhouse, I heard Bancel speak arrogantly about how they consider mRNA to be the “software of life” and see the vaccines as “platforms” for future drug developments. Moderna’s website states that they “set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer.” The boosters, then, will be like system upgrades.

            If these vaccines turn out to compromise our natural immunity, people may feel forced to get these new shots every three to six months in order to remain healthy or even just survive. I find this horrific. It seems the height of hubris to treat our intricate biology as an input/output machine, like a computer. I suspect this will backfire on us eventually, as so many of our other technologies have, from plastics to GMOs to fossil fuels. . . .

            One difficulty in reaching clarity is the disturbing fact that the pharmaceutical companies are major sponsors of the mainstream media. Also, if the vaccines turn out to cause complex health issues down the line, these same companies will make the new drugs to treat them—a “win win” for them. A physically weakened, drug dependent population is also a more compliant population. Once again, a development in this direction doesn’t necessarily require conscious conspiracy, rather systemic complicity.

            Capitalism/post-industrial society tends to take everything that was once intrinsic to our free existence as human beings, exploit and outsource it, then sell it back to us for profit.

            How can it be farfetched to propose that the pharmaceutical/biotech industry intends to do the same thing with our immune systems? As Covid splinters into an endless series of variants, will we be forced to outsource our immune systems to companies like Moderna and Pfizer, and then pay for the latest upgrades? If this becomes like a Netflix subscription service for our biological hardware, it is a wet dream for these private, profit-driven companies.

            Is this all engineered or intentional? Is it a tendency built into the systemic logic of extractive Capitalism? Is it both-and? It hardly matters. I don’t see any way to interrupt this systemic logic, at this point, barring a popular uprising. At the very least, let’s try to understand this process in which we are enmeshed.⁸³

So what is its driver? Vaccines are both a conscious and unconscious control mechanism on multiple levels: sociopolitical, economic, psychospiritual, medical, even ontological. Their metanarrative is controlled by six or so separate groups with internal cohesion but minimal coordination: (1) Big Pharma, which represents more than ten percent of the world’s gross national production, second only to energy and food, but with comparatively minimal cost of goods sold; (2) Wall Street and the commodity markets; (3) the Western World Deep State, specifically national State Departments, CIAs, NSAs, KGBs, Mossads, and FBIs; (4) the Chinese Communist Party, the deepest demographic gravity well and most entangled spider web on the planet; (5) the EU, NATO, and Russia in a rivalry of eternal return; (6) technocrats, globalists, and plutocrats. Operating without citizen input, these cabals generate their own constructive and destructive wave patterns. Where they meet, a wake is created. If the pattern is constructive, its backwash outstrips all six combined.

         The so-called vaxx conspiracy may not be eugenics or markets but the combined wake of six supertankers.

Homo sapiens now faces alternate futures: one robotic, authoritarian, and technocratic; the other a wild-west creative-chaos zone. The clearest goal of the vaccine imperative is to get buy-in for a bioengineered future because no other future is allowed to be imagined. Even as variants of COVID-19 were becoming less deadly in late 2022, the fear channel amped up in full broadcast mode, browbeating sinners.

         A quote about the subtle body from early-twentieth century philosopher Rudolf Steiner much bandied online these days captures the big picture that gets lost in the scrim:

         In the future, we will eliminate the soul with medicine, Under the pretext of a ‘healthy point of view,’ there will be a vaccine by which the human body will be treated as soon as possible directly at birth, so that the human being cannot develop the thought of the existence of soul and Spirit.

            To materialistic doctors will be entrusted the task of removing the soul of humanity. As today, people are vaccinated against this disease or that disease, so in the future, children will be vaccinated with a substance that can be produced precisely in such a way that people, thanks to this vaccination, will be immune to being subjected to the “madness” of spiritual life. He would be extremely smart, but he would not develop a conscience, and that is the true goal of some materialistic circles. With such a vaccine, you can easily make the etheric body loose in the physical body. Once the etheric body is detached, the relationship between the universe and the etheric body would become extremely unstable, and man would become an automaton, for the physical body of man must be polished on this Earth by spiritual will.

            So, the vaccine becomes a kind of arymanique force; man can no longer get rid of a given materialistic feeling. He becomes materialistic of constitution and can no longer rise to the spiritual.⁸⁴

         He was writing in the 1920s. so for “vaccine,” substitute CRISPR and global geoengineered transhumanism and synthetic biology per ethnographic journalist Elana Freeland.

         In fact, as the virus mutated through its varied omicron phases, some people described a sense of an alien presence. “It wasn’t like a flu or any disease I remember,” a friend told me. “It didn’t feel animate or organic; it felt mineral, very dense and deep. It weakened every part of me and dragged me into my body and the earth in a way I never felt before. It was the most soul-less entity I have ever encountered, almost satanic. I think it has to be manufactured in a lab. It’s the epitome of synthetic biology and demonic possession.”

         I don’t see any indication of “soul loss” in my vaccinated wife, adult children, and friends, but Steiner is talking about something vaster and subtler, not a specific vaccine but an overall molting of the etheric body, the transformation of a universal physical-etheric being into a cyborg.

         None of the eight billion humans or trillions of animals on Earth have “bodies” in the way that cars, houses, and bridges do; they have codes that continue replacing transient compilations of cells. Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and James Watson may have scried a double helix, and subsequent microbiologists deciphered its clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, which allowed them to alter the helix’s assembly lines, but they have not deciphered or hacked the God code, which connects us to the hidden universe of Genesis and the Etheric source of our physical bodies.

         A screed from Lauren Witzke, the losing 2020 GOP candidate for Delaware Senator Chris Coons’ seat and a woman on the “Taylor-Greene/Boebert” fringe, nonetheless tells you all you need to know about why QAnon is a God-code ghost dance and cargo cult:

         In a post on Gab, a social network popular with right-wing extremists, Witzke claimed she was “recovering from this insane bio-weapon called Covid.” The 33-year-old, who has worked as a political commentator for the right-wing Christian conspiracy site TruNews, said she had decided not to tell anyone earlier so as not to alert “the shitlibs in the media.”

            “This bio-weapon is demonic,” she wrote. “I’ve lost all of my senses and struggle with constant indifference, brain fog, and I’ve lost my joy.”⁸⁵

         She is talking about Etheric separation and DNA interference waves, though she doesn’t know it.

The fear channel picked The Daily Beast (reprinted in Yahoo News):

         A highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 [from Hong Kong] . . .  is more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.

            “It is likely the most immune-evasive and poses problems for current monoclonal antibody-based treatments and prevention strategy,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.

            Even if you accept Adalja’s sincerity and an element of truth, the warning is prefabricated and its tone stale, the “boy who cried wolf” genre. What follows seems vaccinology’s classic carrot after stick:    

            That’s the bad news. The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB. They won’t prevent all infections and reinfections, but they should significantly reduce the chance of severe infection potentially leading to hospitalization or death. “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most—severe disease—remains intact,” Adalja said.

            As the novel-coronavirus evolves to become more contagious and more resistant to certain types of drugs, keeping current on your boosters is “the most impactful thing you can do in preparation for what might come,” Peter Hotez, an expert in vaccine development at Baylor College, told The Daily Beast.⁸⁶

         In the package of keeping current with your boosters is the agenda of SSI (Synthetic Sex Identities), a well-funded political, academic, and medical movement; it is not helping gender-dysphoric people find their anatomical identities and emotional comfort zones (as claimed); it is replacing biological gender with technologically delivered substitutes. Journalist Jennifer Bilek exposes a faux transgender philanthropy that is attempting to remake human biology as a series of commodities with elective organs:

            [SSI] has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists. [Jennifer] Pritzker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH [World Professional Association of Transgender Health] to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.)⁸⁷

         You have to take a step back to grasp the chutzpah of academically sanctioned body-snatching porn. It allows professors, doctors, and even high-school principals to play with gender while seeming medical rather than lascivious. It is saying, forget both Darwin and God; we can do a better job than nature, a better job than the Ethers. Not only that, but you have been chained by sexual gender. Now you can pick or change. You are free. This false conclusion is as old as Aquinas but with a new tech roulette; it is mistaking his first freedom for what counts in life or the universeL his second freedom, the chance to do something meaningful and divine. Furthermore, fighting an exquisitely designed reality is as perverse and self-destructive as it is presumptuous. And it hands the Republicans a gratis weapon in the culture wars.

         Commoditized biology has become the only game in town, whether by direct deposit, monthly tithe, or mandate: pay as you go. Fascists and anti-fascists concur on this one. Both adore a technology-dependent surveillance state because it tracks customers by simple algorithms and keeps them relentlessly loyal. They can even be monitored by high-altitude balloons. The jabbed are being enrolled in a life-long subscription plan, replacing the chalice of biopoiesis with Animal Farm vials of graphene serums. Tennessee Ernie Ford was singing about sixteen tons of number-nine coal, but it could have been any commodity, drug, or data chip: “I owe my soul to the company store.”⁸⁸

         To enlist in a process that needs constant boosters from the Mob means that your freedom has been bundled and sold. You become like Hondurans and El Salvadorans fleeing their homes from narco-syndicates; only you don’t go north, you get locked down in place.

         Against a historic archaeozoic commons of biomes and species stands a Blackwater-like alliance among Military-Industrial, Prison-Industrial, and Medical-Industrial Complexes that resembles the actual alliance between Monsanto and Blackwater, which was repackaged into German transnational Nestlé, a vampire squid sucking up the world’s potable water to sell back to its species. Ask any Chickasaw or Cherokee if streams and their spirits can be bought and sold.

         The rule here is, don’t start a war, special operation, or police action for which you don’t have an endgame. The nondiscursive logic of systems is going to say what it has always said: everything; that is, everything else—all the unknown unknowns. There is a reason we reel from zombie apocalypse to carmageddon to snowcalypse to rudeboy shufflin’ and ocean-current wobbling.    

         When my most long-trusted guides and esteemed mentors—sacred activists, eco-futurists, cranial osteopaths, organic arborists, transcendent musicians, morphic resonators, anarchist astrologers, and selfless it-takes-a-village and welcome-the-stranger colleagues in food banks, homeless shelters, and enfranchising the poor and powerless—support GMO vaccines as the sole responsible and effective response to a mutating coronavirus, citing high-level, socially conscious technocrats and biotechnicians as their witnesses and corroborators, while militia members and QAnon enthusiasts set up biodynamic and herbal clinics and schools of crystal healing in the hinterland in the name of  health freedom, then we are truly in a Tower of Babel. When anthroposophists, noni-fruit vintners, and energy healers flee Zombierkeley, Vaxifornia, once ground zero for the free-speech movement, and head for Sandpoint, Tulsa, Houston, and San Miguel de Allende, the Etheric pod has burst and the great Aquarian seeding has begun.,      

         If mRNA vaccines are the medicine of the future—and I hope they at least buy our grandchildren a decade or two—let’s calm down and stop proselytizing. Let the hierophant speak in her time.

Endnotes

86. Astrid Stückelberger, “Planet Lockdown,” The Worldwide Truth Channel, YouTube, June 5, 2021.

87. Astrid Stückelberger, “Planet Lockdown,” The Worldwide Truth Channel, YouTube, June 5, 2021.

88. Astrid Stückelberger, “Planet Lockdown,” The Worldwide Truth Channel, YouTube, June 5, 2021.

89. Daniel Pinchbeck, “From Vacillation to Vaccination.”

90. Rudolf Steiner, Physiology and Healing, pp. 237-238.

91. Charles Davis, “’I’ve lost my joy’: Anti-vax Republican, who worked for the Trump campaign and embraced QAnon, says she has COVID-19,” Business Insider, October 21, 2021.

92. David Axe, The Nightmare COVID Variant That Beats Our Immunity Is Finally Here,” Daily Beast, reprinted in Yahoo News, October 15, 2022.

93. Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI),” tabletmag.com, June 14, 2022.

94. Merle Travis, “Sixteen Tons,” Gillette, 1946.

12. THE SOURCE AND DESTINY OF COVID-19

Mainstream microbiologists and virologists have “proven” both that COVID-19 had to have been bioengineered (there is no other viable explanation for its chimerical spikes, furin cleaves, and Fibonacci sequences) and that it could not have been bioengineered (96.2 percent similarity to a SARS-like virus in bat feces from Yunnan’s Shitou Cave and no known closer lab correlates). Those who believe that it was bioengineered (as a gain-of-function coronavirus) twain between deep cynics and conspiracy theorists who argue that it was released as a bioweapon, the first salvo in a Great Chinese Takeover or Deep State Reset, and mere paranoids who favor Fauci-style overreach and accident.

         On the side of gain of function, COVID-19’s RNA, even if bat-based, has sequences resembling HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) that would indicate nano-grafts, either intentional weaponization or the search for an AIDS or SARS vaccine gone south. “A manipulation is done around this virus . . .  the bat coronavirus. Someone added sequences,” Nobel French virologist Luc Montagnier insisted. “It’s the work of professionals, of molecular biologists…a very meticulous work.”⁹⁵

         If meticulous, is it military or medical? Classen pointed out that, in a biowar scenario, the virus could function as a Trojan horse for an already weaponized vaccine, which could then be targeted in a second-wave attack:

            There are many other potential adverse events that can be induced by the novel RNA based vaccines against COVID-19. The vaccine places a novel molecule, spike protein, in/on the surface of host cells. This spike protein is a potential receptor for another possibly novel infectious agent. If those who argue that COVID-19 is actually a bioweapon are correct, then a second potentially more dangerous virus may be released that binds spike proteins found on the host cells of vaccine recipients.⁹⁶ (italics mine).

         This speaks to those metallic intuitions about this virus and its mimic vaccines.

         Journalist Carolyn Kormann recounted the initial gain-of-function reasoning of infectious-disease expert Kristian Andersen:

         It shared eighty per cent of its genome with the first SARS, and was more distantly related to MERS, another bat coronavirus. This new virus, however, was spreading far more quickly, reaching at least twenty-six countries by the end of the month. “It seemed to be locked and loaded for causing the pandemic,” Andersen told me. Most viruses circulating in the wild, though some can be deadly, are not very good at transmission. They are still animal viruses. “This, almost from Day One,” Andersen said, “appeared like a human virus. . . .”

Andersen noted that “a really small part” of SARS-CoV-2’s genome had “unusual features.” Its spike—the crucial bit of surface protein that a coronavirus uses to invade a cell—appeared able to bind tightly to a human-cell receptor known as ACE2. This, Andersen told me, “means that it’s more effective at infecting human cells.” The other significant trait, a rare insertion in the genome of twelve nucleotides called a furin cleavage site, might also increase the virus’s transmissibility and lower the species barrier, allowing the virus to jump more easily to humans. “One has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he wrote.⁹⁷

         After conferring with shapeshifting Fauci and other prominent scientists on a dozen-person February 2020 Zoom link, Andersen changed his view completely. The power call included pharmaceutical based Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar and NIH head Francis Collins. It led to a collaborative March 2020 Nature Medicine article that delegitimized gain-of-function explanations as unjustified and conspiratorial.⁹⁸

         Did Andersen flip from conviction or for career preservation?

The virus’ source may lie in a maze of mishaps: one researcher brings back the COVID mother and another leaves the lab with her cubs hitching a ride under his fingernails or clinging to a crease in his pants—a consequence of Darwin’s and Murphy’s laws meeting in a most unwelcome collaboration.

         By 2023, the clouds were clearing enough that journalist Alina Chan was able to speak the unspeakable while sounding measured and reasonable:

      The idea that the pandemic virus might have accidentally leaked from a lab was never implausible. We now know through FOIA’ed [Freedom of Information Act} emails that numerous virologists and infectious diseases experts worried in private that the virus had come from a lab in Wuhan. One Major General and former president of American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene who had bought the market story wrote in April 2020: “The flimsiness of the epidemiology pointing to the wet market, the absence of bats in the market, the failure to identify an intermediate animal host, the extraordinary measures taken by the Chinese government… to cover up the outbreak, the steps taken to silence the laboratory personnel, the change in leadership of the lab, all point to the lab as the source of the outbreak.”

Later, as more information came to light that risky experiments involving SARS-like viruses had been performed at low biosafety levels, more virologists expressed concern publicly. One virologist who had initially condemned conspiracy theorists suggesting an unnatural origin of the virus told the Wall Street Journal: “I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it…and some sloppy individual brought it out… They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”

. . . One bombshell revelation came in the fall of 2021, when it emerged that Wuhan and US scientists had proposed a unique experiment that could have plausibly led to the creation of the pandemic virus. A document sent to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in March 2018 stated that the scientists would introduce a special feature called furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and assess how these viruses could grow in human cells in the lab. Live SARS-like viruses would be generated using established techniques based on what they found in nature. Less than two years after Wuhan and US scientists had pitched this experiment, a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site was causing an outbreak in Wuhan.

One virologist who had worked with the original 2003 SARS virus said of the proposal, “Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have… You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”

The rarity of such a pathogen cannot be overstated. Close to two decades of searching for novel SARS-like viruses has not unveiled any of their kind with a furin cleavage site. Every close relative reported so far is missing this unique feature which confers the virus with pandemic powers. An analogy is that scientists had proposed putting horns on horses, and scarcely two years later a unicorn appears in their very city. It is sighted at the local wildlife market, but this is only one of hundreds of thousands of wildlife markets in China or Southeast Asia. Why the market in the city of the one lab in the world that has been sampling novel SARS-like viruses across eight countries, and synthesizing and modifying these in the lab at low biosafety levels? And why only now — shortly after these scientists proposed putting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses?⁹⁹

         The issue is not even whether this one came out of the Wuhan lab; it is that, with such labs in play and multiplying (as they justify their existences by one another), the next one, or the one after it, will.

         In any case, it is weaponized now and, whether China created the virus, accidentally or strategically, it worked. In the long view, the transnational technocracy concocted a bioweapon; then transnational technocrats bioengineered an antidote—a variation on mutually assured destruction or like in a prison where the guards and prisoners come from the same neigborhoods. Either way, it’s their world forward. The COVID-spike and the vaccine spikes are twins, and the effects of either mimic lyme, which itself might encode gain-of-function splices from a GMO. In that regard, a widespread “urban legend” is that biotech gamers injected lyme in ticks, then released them to see how far they could get from their Lyme, Connecticut lab. Quite far, it turned out.

         To even worry about whether COVID-19 escaped (or was set loose) from the Wuhan coronavirus lab, as opposed to arising naturally, is to assume that a verdict of origin means anything more than a single raindrop this way or that. It’s a jungle regardless, whether it’s a rainforest, ocean, river in the sky, single strand of algae or seaweed, water droplet full of rotifers, or a cell. Once nature and culture are entangled, it’s all nature (algorithm) and all culture (symbol, sign). The rusting machine (or cyber-hardware) in the garden is the dandelion or virus growing out of terra-formed trash. Against a Milky Way backdrop, a scientist in a lab is a hominid in a cave with sophisticated hand axes and cleavers. Mud dwellers are going to get muddy, by primal rain or engineered splice.

         COVID-19 may not even have originated in Wuhan. Analyses of sewage from Europe and South America dating well before it showed up in Asia indicate that its agents may have been present throughout the biosphere before being ignited by some environmental factor or population tipping point and/or a heightened electromagnetic field (Wuhan’s 5G is often implicated). It may not be Trump’s “China virus” but a Swedish or Faroe Island stowaway, arriving in a cargo of frozen fish.

         Once again, natural immunity, habitation clusters, and the bioelectric body play unknown roles in maintaining homeostasis, until they don’t. Then a slipped allele becomes a pandemic.

In my condensation of outlier physician Zack Bush’s scenario, viruses and retroviruses, from the beginning of life on Earth, transport new RNA within microbiomes. They are natural genetic updating machines. Without these messenger and transfer services, our cells could not have developed stem pluripotency or multicellular bundles gotten recapitulated in myriad diverse taxonomies.

         We house bacteria, viruses, viromes, fungi, algae, trichocysts, vestigial protists, archaea, lysosomes, mitochondria, Golgi bodies, prions—rogue proteins that were once independent creatures—as well microbes and microbiota that are still independent (though captured and colonized), and all these critters’ genes. They participate with each other in micro-ecologies while exchanging DNA indiscriminately. We also have a HERV (Human Endogenous Retrovirus) library of nonhuman DNA, much of it made of antique diseases passed down through thousands of generations. This is how we might reverse-transcribe vaccinated mRNA.

         In a book on the microbiome, gastroenterologist Alessio Fasano and his co-author Susie Flaherty explained, “Our human genome has coevolved with trillions of constantly changing microorganisms found in and on the human body. . . . [W]e are the product of coevolution . . .  with the metagenome (the gene array from our microbiome), which contains from 100 to 150 times more genes than we do.”¹⁰⁰ (italics mine).

         A hundred to a hundred-fifty times is quite a backup archive.

Vertebrates have borrowed from other chordates, jellyfish, fungi, oaks, and the like in evolving into mammals and primates. Before that, alleles jumping species and phyla led to the differentiation of the original global blastula, as RNA from insects, spiders, algae, club mosses, and snails infiltrated our lineal forebears. We are viral and pandemic in database, architecture, and molecular journey through the Gaian field.

         The modern world has triggered new differentiations in our microbiome. According to Bush, COVID-19’s RNA spike is a viral reading of pesticides from the agricultural industry (notably Monsanto’s Roundup with its soil-killing glyphosate) as well as antibiotics pumped into captives of factory farms (particularly our biological cousins, pigs, with their lake-size cesspools), air pollution (disgorges of methane, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter), and a generally pharmaceuticalized habitat. The novel coronavirus didn’t just come from bats. Bats were its vector, but it represents a holistic response of the biosphere.

         Clumping with various toxins, COVID-19 runs too much exogenous data through our microbiome. This overload, not the virus, says Bush, is what is making people sick and killing them. The hypoxia of COVID is not an initial respiratory symptom but cyanide poisoning in response to climate, pollution, forest fires, and choking of planetary oxygen—a hyperinflammatory immune blowback or cytokine storm from neurotransmission overload.

         Yet, Bush reassures, most of those infected have their RNA updated without serious harm. They receive regular small COVID-19 variant loads and develop immunity as well as rudiments of new enzymes and organs. From his view, our species is responding to its altered planet by refreshing its microbiome, so the pandemic is a biological awakening, a transspecies metamorphosis, at worst a healing crisis. Over time, it will result in a new hominid. We are adapting to the planet and, in a sense, healing our own miasm. 

         Remember, to the microbiome, a virus is pure information, and the microbiome is an information glutton. Yet to add an mRNA/nanoparticle cocktail won’t alleviate the pandemic, and it may increase toxic overload.¹⁰¹ Continuum bodywork therapist Barbara Karlsen, once the Newfoundland-based steward of The Polar Star which travelled to Antarctica, Greenland, and Svalbard to track first-hand the effects of climate change, re-stated COVID-microbiome interaction in terms of eco-feedback:

         COVID 19 is a messenger from Gaia and what do we want to do? Kill the messenger (I mean it literally is a messenger RNA virus). We are too quick to react, causing more imbalance and sterilization of an already overly sanitized field. The vaccine does not address tomorrow’s or next year’s variants. We need to turn and face what is pressing up on us instead of fleeing from it! The bottom line is, we are fleeing from ourselves. We need to complexify our biology. We are flat overly sanitized representations of ourselves.¹⁰²

         The vaccine also doesn’t address the extracellular matrix, biospheric membrane, and atmospheric bubble around the Earth. Long-term information is epizootic and endemic, and we are merely one vector.

         Sherri Mitchell arrived at a similar insight from a First Nations view of the reciprocity of society and nature:

         We are connected to the web of life. . . . [W]e are the web of life, one living being having simultaneous experiences of our self in multiple forms. We recognize that we are born from one body of matter. Therefore, we can never be separated. This understanding is best described in modern scientific terms as quantum entanglement. What quantum entanglement tells us is that any matter that was once connected physically can never be disconnected energetically. In our teachings, we recognize that we can never be disconnected energetically or spiritually. . . .

            [The virus] is telling us that we have to let go of the toxic breath that we’ve been forcing into the body of Mother Earth. It’s telling us that we cannot go back to the way we were living before quarantine. It’s forcing us into a position of letting go and showing us the collective power that we possess to alleviate the stress we are placing on our vital systems.¹⁰³

         Aikido black belt and multimedia artist Kathy Park, while deciding to regard her glioblastoma, a life-threatening brain tumor, as her sensei rather than her foe, met COVID-19 similarly:

           Now we come to the second sensei. Earlier this spring when the pandemic came trundling along, it was natural for me to wrap a black belt around coronavirus as well. Sensei coronavirus is a sensei of epic proportions. Unlike sensei glioblastoma, who takes on one student at a time, sensei coronavirus is taking on whole countries. Hell, it is taking on all humanity. . . .

            [It] is giving us a gigantic opportunity to change course, evidenced by the huge reduction in pollution and noise this spring, the dolphins swimming in Venice canals, the selfless efforts of many to save lives even at risk to their own, the inventive entrepreneurs who let go of rigidity and adapted to new conditions and parameters. Look at how many people are planting a garden.¹⁰⁴

         The technocrats didn’t solve shit. Under an imprimatur of warp speed, they created a pandemic PlayStation to chase viral variants in a global matrix. With so many keyholes to work with, they fashioned just as many keys.

         Ultimately, we are going to have to live with our guest, invited or not, guest or golem. We are going to have to accept her gifts, gifts or not, and their price, incremental or absolute. We are loose in the same biosphere, share a biome and microbiome, and there is no net vast enough or fine enough to get each of us out of the other’s snare.

Endnotes

95. Desk Blitz, “What Nobel Prize laureate Luc Montagnier says about experimental vaccines,” Weekly Blitz.net, July 3, 2021.

96. J. Bart Classen, “COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease,” Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

97. Carolyn Kormann, The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory,” The New Yorker online, October 12, 2021.

98. Carolyn Kormann, The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory,” The New Yorker online, October 12, 2021.

99. Alina Chan, “Will 2023 be the year we discover the truth about Covid’s origins?” Spectator.com, December 4, 2023.

100. Alessio Fasano and Susan Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health.

101. Zack Bush, “Bush on COVID-19, glyphosate, and the nature of viruses,” LiveHealthyBeWell, Stitcher.com, June 23, 2020.

102. Barbara Karlsen, Facebook response, February 20, 2021.

103. Sherri Mitchell, “Exposed,” in The Corona Transmissions, pp. 93-94.

104. Kathy Park, Bowing Into Sensei Glioblastoma, Dreampower Artworks, p. 50.

Chapter Five

Chaos Magic

“When the hurlyburly’s done,
 When the battle’s lost and won.” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1

1. THE ORIGIN OF MAGIC

As human society emerged during the Ice Age, tribal elders apparently comprised two lineages: scientist and shaman or tool-maker and conjurer. These professions had their own skillsets, worldviews, and clienteles, but many figures undoubtedly bridged them. The ultimate fusion of magic and science into scientia,knowledge, before their split in the Renaissance into different views of how the universe works, is sometimes called “traditionary science,” implying an emphasis on a species spectrum of open-ended vision and empirical analysis, leading to both hand-axes and spirit contacts.

         More“traditional”—conventionally modern— science dates formally to the writings of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and the subsequent principles of Aristotle and Plato. The sophistication of Parmenides’, Thales’, and Heraclitus’ speculations indicates that they were rooted millennia earlier, before writing.

Science turned “traditionary” during Europe’s Middle Ages before reviving and flourishing, leading to the industrial revolution and our current relationship to nature and cosmos. The Greek and Roman nonlinear field had to go through the cauldron of the Middle Ages to achieve an actionable scientific revolution. Greek and Roman medicine and science may have sparkled with experimental and analytic clarity, but they lacked a deep shadow of creative tumult representing the actual catacombs of Nature. The Dark Ages with its symbols and signifiers added something that Greek and Roman doctors and scientists missed: the implicate depth of the world’s evasive complexity. Heraclitus needed Augustine to incubate Whitehead. Democritus’s atom could only get to Rutherford’s atom by way of the gargoyle and castle. It took tens of thousands of masses, murals, prayers, and icons to cross a bridge the Greeks built but never saw, leading to chaos, complexity, and nonequilibrium.

Corresponding sciences in Asia developed in more traditionary forms such that Vedic, Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and Bön cultures reached levels of philosophical sophistication beyond their Western correlates, for instance in medicine, agriculture, and architecture but without materialistic industrialization. 

         Alchemy, astrology, shamanism, divination, and numerology are bellwether traditionary sciences. In prehistoric times, their precursors were the true sciences. Each now represents an archetypal organizing principle that pervades Creation at large: universes, multiverses, and laws of nature. We cannot derive any one traditionary science’s absolute axioms, for we know them only by phenomena exhibited in any observable universe on any temporal planet in any one of its epochs. Sages have built an occult knowledge base and hermetic cosmos by going deeper, dowsing, meditating, and petitioning disembodied spirits and other guides.

On Earth, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and thermodynamics are empirical sciences, but they still remain subsets of traditionary sciences. Alchemy as a traditionary science and the forerunner of physics and chemistry explores transitions between phases of manifestation. Operating on a borderline of phenomena and phenomenology from the late Stone Ages, alchemists attempted to bring about primal transmutations, initially using forges and vessels as crucibles, though alchemists in Eurasia were purely herbal, entheogenic, and yogic.

         During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, forges and vessels became athanors and alembics en route to test tubes and cyclotrons.

         Modern atomic and subatomic alchemy addresses tiers of causal energy that give rise to elements, periodicities, and isotopes, in principle anywhere throughout All That Is. It encompasses homeopathy, biological transmutation, and anthroposophy. Chemistry, by comparison, restricts its palette to elemental and biochemical properties exhibited on Earth and, from satellite and spectrographic analysis, on extraterrestrial planets and stars. It only attempts transmutations chemically and atomically and is scrupulous not to mix psyche and substance.

         Astrology as a precursor to astronomy explores the astrophysical intersection of space-time with its cyclical and psychic aspects. In an individual’s birth chart, his or her evolutionary potential is individualized against all probabilities and singularities. Using an Earth-based starry field and historic zodiac, the astrologer indexes an Upper Heavens of numinous suns, which itself indexes an even higher or subtler heavens of trans-ethereal stars, e.g. focal fields. An astrological chart fuses all these cosmoses, anchoring them in relation to one another and their celestial map.

         Each multiverse (or universe) forms against the backdrop of all universes, its meanings bound by archetypal laws that underlie gravity, mass, motion, and their equivalents elsewhere in creation. They are what psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli were trying to derive in their joint study of physics, psychology, and astrology; see Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Letters, 1932-1958.

         If astrologers dowse the hyperspatial whirlpool, astronomy assays its concrete, proximal levers, gears, and screens—the Big Bang is an astronomical interpretation of an astrological implosion.

        Magic, thus far unmentioned, is the king and queen of traditionary sciences, setting the telekinetic rules of engagement in the cosmos. On Earth, magic is the trans-physical study and practice of thoughtforms—how to convert intentions and thoughts into matter, consciously and subconsciously. Physics, magic’s material subset, restricts its kinetic explorations to moleculo-atomic and gravitational ones—purely physical causes and effects. Mind is not in the equation. In my introduction to Bottoming Out the Universe, I wrote:

I am challenging modernity’s paradigm—that the material world is the single pavilion and protocol for reality.

Some of you may believe that matteris the only real thing, but do you even know what matter is—or what a unified field would look like if consciousness were given its place proportionate to mass, gravity, and heat?

Two things stand against reductionist materialism:

           First, the universe doesn’t bottom out as matter but turns into something else. Electron microscopes and cyclotrons discover no statutory source. Instead of bottoming out, quarks and preons dissipate into energy, curvature, strings, quantum fields, whatever scientists choose to call it.

            Guess what? Post-Newtonian physics with its self-immolating quarks is the physics of a mirage. Materialists know this, but they don’t believe it.

             Second, consciousness that witnesses itself as consciousness does not fit any unified field theory of physics. I’m not saying that physicists don’t get out the shoehorn and make it fit. I am saying they do.¹

Our ancestors were innate magicians. They attempted to change situations in ways that their own ancestral mammals and primates couldn’t consider. With evolving prefrontal cortices that filled with new thoughts, awarenesses, symbols, and possibilities, they sought control over objects and events in a potential-rich, perilous environment. Their initial attempts—brain to eye, mind to metacarpi—chip and cut rocks, wood, shells, and bones, and turned them into hammers, scrapers, and spears: extrabodily organs. Over millennia, this practice led to building forges, purifying metals, alloying bronze, making spears and swords, designing factories and, eventually, launching industrial civilization. In Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life, I provide a quick ride through the incremental transitions from cells to extracellular matrices to stone tools to clothing to computers.²

         Elephants, octopuses, beavers, and spiders fabricate tools from their anatomiesl; they interface with objects. Crows count and deduce by beaks rather than phalanges and opposable fingers. Migratory birds locate by clairsentience, including sensitivity to magnetic fields. Canines and felines map by smell. Octopuses have eight-fold (octacameral) brains as well as tissues that shape- and color-shift in mimicry of landscapes. But none have symbols.

         Even as the hominid mind crafted our current technology and epistemology, its “third eye” continued to explore a waking dream onto which it projected its greater needs and desires: its “asks.” The practice of magic was, on the one hand, a lazy offshoot of “creatures from the id” wish fulfillment and, on the other, the anything-but-lazy art of aligning one’s volition with the cosmos.

Paintings discovered tens of thousands of years later in caves at Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux, now in Spain and France, were blueprints for psychic interactions more rather museums of Palaeolithic art. They reveal that hominid bands stalked by semblances—thoughtforms, doppelgängers—as well as by tools and tactics. Cave rituals were also precociously cinematic—the combination of rough stone surfaces and flickering firelight set figures of prehistoric bison, rhinos, wooly mammoths, and horses galloping across space-time. That was “magic,” and still is, in movie theaters and on Netflix and YouTube screens, which are our current grottos.

         By depicting life forms in dyes tinctured from plants, stones, insects, blood, and the like, early hunters summoned prey from the landscape for food. Palaeolithic shamans called out to beasts to be stalked, asking them to permit themselves to be consumed—a primordial participation with nature as well as sympathetic magic. When their telepathy was successful, they thanked their prey—sister and brother mammoths, kangaroos, impalas, coelacanths—for the use of their bodies. They inducted them into their clans. They honored gods and spirits of the hunt, forerunners of Artemis, Arawn, Nyyrikki, Diana. These guides taught voodoo and inaugurated ceremonial cycles.  The goofy ape became the weird magician. 

         According to scholar of magic Ioan P. Couliano, “Hunt medicine” was the source of all scientia (magic and science); it used “magic sounds . . . prognostications, telekinesis, [and] psychosomatic effects on animals . . . .”³ By elucidating symbols, the descendants of tree shrews and monkeys became far more dangerous, to themselves as well, than descendants of their own predators: ospreys, jackals, lions, and the like.

         Through Stone epochs that were many times longer than written history, hominids refined their magic in vision quests, astral journeys, and lucid dreams ,and passed that knowledge down through clans and hunting societies. A hunt shaman learned to telecommunicate his or her intentions through spirit helpers, including the band’s ancestors and plant, animal, crystal, and celestial totems. These surrogates helped summon game on their predators’ behalf.

         Lions, hawks, and sharks communicate with prey by mantras and songlines too, but they favor physical-etheric lassos: beak, tooth, claw, and psi waves. For an in-depth discussion of uses of divination and quantum entanglement in caribou scapulimancy and hunting among the First Nations Cree, see my chapter “Converting Thoughtforms and Riding Synchronicity” in Dark Pool of Light, Volume 3.⁴ In it, I concluded, “[T]he caribou are pretty psychic too if they can read unconsciously the hunters’ unconscious projections. . . .”⁵

During Mesolithic and Neolithic kalpas, humans developed sympathetic magic in concert with state-of-the art stone tools. They extended their power over space, time, and matter, and established social and domestic rubrics. For tens of thousands of years, melds of magic and proto-physics dominated empirical activity. Stone Age pieties and prayers led to Holocene sodalities, lodges, shops, and academies, then to our current universities and guilds.

         At the deepest level where mind and matter converge as the same protean expression, science and magic can’t be unjoined, for science is magic, a projection of thoughtforms through time using stone craft and telekinesis. Addis Ababa, Beijing, and New York were derived out of ceremonies of the Stone Age, though it took many tribes and empires for original intentions—e.g. “give me food, shelter, power, and mobility”—to herd enough molecules into mindstreams and mold them at a grand scale. Daily intention continues to herd molecules subliminally, through gas-propelled engines, nuclear turbines, and fiber-optic grids even as creative visualizations establish unknowable long-term goals. Science and magic each dispatch effects nonlinearly through space-time. Physics, biology, and medicine are not departures from magic but telekinesis in denser phases. Couliano elucidated:

         Historians are wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of ‘quantitative sciences.’ The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural powers of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast.⁶

         In order to understand why technology is magic, you have to understand how thoughtforms shape matter not only materially but psychically and not only in cultures but in star systems at large.

The scientist evolved as an arbiter of matter: mason, herbalist, farmer, smith, carpenter, animal whisperer, mechanic, electrical engineer. All of modernity’s core sciences, featuring physics, chemistry, and biology, were derived from thoughtform-based manipulation of stone, steel, and then polymerase chain reactions, which comprise tinier, softer crystals or “stones.” While magic remains gnomic and inductive, science turned deductive and didactic. Yet magical and scientific systems continue to share symbols, formulae, charms, seals, numbers, mascots, signatures, and sigils, achieving hybrid results within different applications of the same hominid skill sets.

         The epistemology of Thomas Aquinas gave way to the logic of Francis Bacon which yielded the a priori knowledge sets of Immanuel Kant. The Hegelian dialectic limned the Planckian constant and psychic playing cards of Charles Richet as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s universe of representations. Scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton troweled gravity, mass, and light out of prior astrological and alchemical contexts; then quantum physics and parapsychology restored them to sigils and totems in an eternal return.  

         Endnotes

1. Richard Grossinger, Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, p. 2.

2. Richard Grossinger, Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life, pp. 308-313,

3. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 122.

4. Richard Grossinger, Dark Pool of Light, Volume 3, pp. 232- 236.

5. Richard Grossinger, Dark Pool of Light, Volume 3, p. 235.

6. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 104

2. RENAISSANCE MAGIC

Magic was formally codified during the Eurasian Renaissance by a hermetic guild that included Marsilio Ficino, John Dee, Elias Ashmole, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, et al. Its sphere of inquiry stretched from the Azores to Croatia and however farther east and west trade winds took individual texts, travelers, and teachings. Magic helped hatch mathematics, poetry, mythology, numerology, talismanology, mnemonics, and stagecraft, which lingers in modernity’s “make-believe magic,” practiced mainly by skeptics who think that all “magic” is the hocus-pocus of hands that are quicker than eyes.

           Revisiting the Elizabethan world, Couliano proposed that magicians believed that since “everything is manipulable, there is absolutely no one who can escape intersubjective relationships, whether these involve a manipulator, a manipulated person, or a tool.Theology itself, the Christian faith and all other faiths, are only beliefs of the masses set up by magic processes.”⁷

           Religion is magic lite.

           In Picatrix, a hermetico-astrological codex written in Arabic during the tenth or eleventh centuries and consulted by later Europeans, magical goals included “arousing (lasting) love or union between two people, obtaining the protection of the great or the protection of servants, increasing wealth and commerce, bringing good luck to a city, destroying an enemy or a city, preventing construction of a building, releasing a prisoner from his prison, evicting a man from his home, separating friends, causing someone to incur the king’s wrath, assuring a fisherman a good catch, putting scorpions to flight, healing wounds, ensuring the (financial) success of a doctor, increasing harvests and plants, curing many diseases, etc.”⁸

           To a degree it worked—in rain dances, love spells, and voodoo—not reliably but more so than without magic, and some success is better than none. With a bit of imagination, you can translate these into present-day counterparts: pest control, sabotage, blackmail, Valentine Day cards, day-trading. . . .  People still try to apply telekinesis to bowling balls, pool balls, and long fly balls and place kicks headed toward poles. It’s not just body English; it’s vestigial voodoo in an era when methods of actual voodoo have been lost.  

Historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal, Couliano’s colleague at the University of Chicago, proposed that a distinction between sham and real magic is immaterial insofar as the unconscious mind does not make such assessments. It uses its own modes of representation, sublimation, projection, and conversion for when to play—magic or science—for real.⁹ Countless shamans and magicians—wizards capable of miracle healing, precognition, remote viewing, telepathy. and other “superpowers”— developed out of pretend ones. For the psychological-to-psychic spectrum, see Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Sorcerer and His Magic” in Structural Anthropology and Kripal’s account of remote viewer Russell Targ in Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. I discussed these cases at greater length in Planet Medicine: Origins and Bottoming Out the Universe.     

           In another text, Kripal identified a hermeneutical process that transcends while incorporating phenomenology, theophany, and synchronicity. He recalled a night of revelatory events and insights as constituting “an honest and accurate description of my own creative processes and their constantly morphing phenomenology.” He added:

           And the accent falls on morphing. Over the last three decades I have come to see that the entire hermeneutical experience of that Night, from its first orgasmic eruption in Calcutta in November of 1989 to the writing of this text here and now, is alive. There is no stable meaning of that Night, not at least one that can be languaged or reasoned. Its meanings and energies change or mutate as I engage them in intuitive, rational, and literary acts. It is a living hermeneutical process, not a dead historical fact that can be pinned down as ‘this is what happened.’ It is much more a matter of ‘this is what is still happening’ or ‘this is what wants to happen now.’¹⁰

            Likewise, there is no fixed or stable meaning for any historic event, as either magic or science, only a living hermeneutical process, from a Pleistocene moose hunt to Mediaeval crossbows to an industrial-era steam engine to a twenty-first-century cyclotron. We are always juggling agency against an unknown universe. Even in the crowds of civilization, we are singly hermeneutical fools.

Early physical science divorced itself from magic’s “wireless” divinations, replacing dodecahedrons and zodiacs with apples and orbits. Accomplishing a cleanse in installments, it developed its own instrumentality. Kepler and Newton were fence-sitters who didn’t know that there was a fence. Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Edward Kelley, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Michael Maier, Thomas Digges, and Galileo Galilei fell on either side on of the invisible picket.

           Nowadays historians assign Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, and Bacon to the scientific half but, in their time, they were members of a sorcerers’ lodge too. Crossover hermeticism was practiced by Plato, Ptolemy, Paracelsus, Fludd, Dee, and Agrippa. They were receptive to both magikos (enchantment, sorcery) and experior (experience, experiment), rendering respectively unto God and Caesar.

           British historian Frances Yates documents a Rosicrucian movement that stretched from Graeco-Roman, Egyptian, and pseudo-Egyptian sources through Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In benchmark texts—Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Theatre of the World, and The Art of Memory—she depicted “the roots of the change that came over man when his life was no longer integrated into the divine life of the universe,” adding, “In the company of ‘Hermes Trismegistus,” one treads the borderlands between magic and science, magic and art or poetry and music. It was in these elusive realms that the man of the Renaissance dwelt. . . .”¹¹     

           It may have been a midsummer night’s dream, but it wasn’t a fallow slumber. Technology, with its unintended side-effects of climate change, pollution, and species extinctions, marks the dream’s shift into nightmare. It may take century or two to resolve it definitively.

           After scientists succeeded in separating crafts and objective experiments from charms of magicians, they valorized the empirically oriented works of Newton, Darwin, James Maxwell, and crew, while discounting and excluding their concomitant alchemy, astrology, and magic as defects of clouded intellects. Newton the alchemist and Darwin the theologian were dismissed.

           But science ended up, two centuries later, back in the “hermetic” lodge, confronting the Sphinx and Oracle in new guises: light waves, relativity, and quantum entanglement. Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein had no choice but to become magic moles. The subatomic universe was, if not telekinetic, consciousness-infested.

           Concluding her discussion of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, Yates described a current in which scientist-magicians swam: “a reservoir of spiritual and intellectual power, of moral and reforming vision”:

              The great mathematical and scientific thinkers of the seventeenth century have at the back of their minds Renaissance traditions of esoteric thinking, of mystical continuity from Hebraic or ‘Egyptian’ wisdom, of that conflation of Moses with ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ that fascinated the Renaissance. . . . Below, or beyond, their normal religious affiliation they would see the Great Architect of the Universe as an all-embracing religious conception which included, and encouraged, the scientific urge to explore the Architect’s work.¹²

                       And finally, to decode, deconstruct, and replicate. That is where we are today, a magic driven by science’s stake in matter and its struggle to hold off its own shadow and blowback.

                        Endnotes

7. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 93.

8. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 118.

9. Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, pp. 52 and 76.

10. Jeffrey Kripal, Secret Body, p. 52.

11. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 455.

12. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 219.

3. THE ASCENT OF CHAOS MAGIC

Chaos magic was magic’s own magic, or magic lost and found. Long after the hermetic cauldron had been drained and sterilized by microscopes and spectroscopes, sorcerers and witches reclaimed it, bypassing progressive physics, telekinetically pilfering its own particles and psi waves, and reintegrating traditionary sciences with post-modern philosophy, parapsychology, and synchromysticism.

The new system debuted modestly within a neo-occult mid-to-late-twentieth-century counterculture that brought avant-garde artists together with assorted taggers and other dissidents. It installed rogue interpretations of superposition, probability, synchronicity, and space-time relativism—a “fuck that!” and “I don’t give a shit!” backlash against enforced causalities of power structures, elitist laws of logic, and colonialist domain accession. QAnon was a lazy, late vandalistic variant of chaos-based agitprop.

“Punk” magic was also an offshoot of “punk music” with roots in South London. The Rolling Stones, who named a 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, borrowed the trope. Soon after its release, band leader Mick Jagger played Moog synthesizer and performed as “Himself” beside Lucifer, Satan, and Sister and Brother of the Rainbow in Kenneth Anger’s 1969 Thelemite film Invocation of My Demon Brother, aforerunner of rock videos and DIY ceremonies.

In loosely linked overlapping orbits, folks recovered modes of divination and rituals from Rosicrucian, Enochian, and Thelemite traditions, mixing in shamanic, Druid, Gnostic, Bön, Kahuna, Wiccan, and other endorsed techniques when available.* While some chaotes acknowledged their debts to Dee, Crowley, Franz Bardon, and later English artist Austin Osman Spare, most borrowed liberally and blindly.

With pop culture and revived witchcraft in their sails, they blew past the warnings of material modernists like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, that we would return to a “demon-infested world,” because they didn’t think that demons, spirits, and allies were bad or could be driven from the world if they were. They reinvented formulas, symbols, and procedures in post-modern contexts that included time loops, entheogens, crazy wisdom, Reiki, pop art, abstract expressionism, hip-hop, superhero comix, and anime, making up new rules for activating language, images, cartoons, and coincidences, and using them for influence at a distance.

         The New Magic had many unintended sponsors too: the Freudian unconscious, string theory, deconstruction, black holes, strange attractors, uncertainty principle, existentialism, Dada, gestalt psychology, biofeedback, contact improvisation, the Yaqui nagual, and Vulcan mind meld. Avant-garde dancers, abstract expressionists, and rappers contributed to the mashup.

The word “chaos” was apparently first applied to traditionary magic by British magician Peter Carroll in his Liber Null & Psychonaut (1978). “Null” means “zero” as in both “zero sum” and “degree zero.” “Chaote” means practitioner of chaos (“kaos”), the mysterious organizing energy of the cosmos. “Chaos,” Carroll proposed, is “the ‘thing’ responsible for the origin and continued action of events. . . .  It could as well be called ‘God’ or ‘Tao’, but the name ‘Chaos’ is . . . free from the anthropomorphic ideas of religion.”¹³ So much for accusations of Satanism, though Charles Manson and other sociopaths exploited chaos and bound others by black-magic spells. Carroll meant “ chaos magic” in a creative, imaginal sense:

         Chaos . . . is the force which has caused life to evolve itself out of dust, and is currently most concentratedly manifest in the human life force, or Kia, where it is the source of consciousness. . . . To the extent that the Kia can become one with Chaos it can extend its will and perception into the universe. . . .¹⁴

         That is the apothegm and activatable sword of chaos magic, in both theory and practice. The butterfly that, with a flutter of its wings in Tokyo, causes a thunderstorm in New York, has nonequilibrium dynamics and thought-activated runes working on its behalf. For the chaote, that means projections of individualized life energies and their symbols into generalized fields that transmit effects. The operator sends specified information into a chaos of charmed pinballs, algorithms, and Boolean operators to generate desired results.

Magical tool kits drew inherently on the reprogramming techniques of EST, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and Silva Mind Control. These and other random symbol generators, notably, Madison Avenue’s subliminal advertising, reinforced Thelemite cryptography.¹⁵  

WADL (Witches’ Anti-Discrimination League) elder and publisher of Wiccan Rede magazine, Christopher Blackwell, proffered that “for an advocate of chaos magic, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.”¹⁶ Musicians Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Donovan Leitch and, later, Spider from Mars chaote David Bowie agreed.

Twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley established the “meta-belief” that “belief is a tool for achieving effects”:¹⁷ chaos magic’s raison d’etre. Crowley handed down a first law of magickal physics, “Every intentional act is a magical act.”¹⁸ That statement summarizing a lifetime’s investigations put a positive-thinking spin on magic.

While modern science is still trying to resolve a Big Bang of two trillion galaxies and deeps strings inside particles inside atoms, all from an implosion tinier than a seed of rye, chaotes bask in an intimate universe with its own lion’s roar. Infinity and vastness do not bother them; the cosmos can no more be contained by Stephen Hawking’s topologies or Oliver Sacks’ neurons and ganglia than it can by John Dee’s sigils or Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s charms. Hermeneutics allows infinity itself to be put at the service of individual will.

         Chaote Peter Clarke, writing in the Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements, noted that modern magicians eschewed traditional rituals, rules, and correspondences, even as they borrowed “from other magical traditions, religious movements, popular culture and strands of philosophy.”¹⁹ Chaos philosophy purged extraneous elements and actions— “the symbolic, ritualistic, theological or otherwise ornamental aspects of . . . occult traditions.”²⁰

         A younger Wiccan crowd made this coup axiomatic. “My sisters and I,” said Blackfoot-Druid practitioner of witchcraft and necromancy Salicrow, “use science fiction as well as Wiccan to project magic. We don’t want to be bound by a dead rigid system.”²¹ Carroll and Equinox editor Ray Sherwin were similarly bored by “Golden Dawn” and “Holy Guardian Angel” scripts. They “wanted stronger stuff. They weren’t concerned with getting their pentacles correct or being at one with nature but with ‘making something happen,’ that is with magick as real power.”²²

         The Sephirot and other tulpas, deities, and gateways may or may not exist outside the mind. To a magician, the issue is immaterial. By conducting magical operations, he or she instigates certain results—”symbolic and linguistic constructs” manipulated to achieve certain ends.²³ They blow off veridicality and proof and trust chaos under intention to deliver—and it does, whether it does or doesn’t. That’s the beauty of the system; it’s independent of thought or jurisdiction. It is ruled by synchromysticism. Boundaries and rules are as tedious as they are superfluous. If you don’t get the right result, repeat. It may not even happen in this lifetime, but you are setting your ducks in a row. Or you may have set them in a row in a previous lifetime and now is your shot.

         Citing historian of magic Dave Evans, Gary Lachman added: “[T]he idea of a history of chaos magic is, aptly enough, oxymoronic, given that, like postmodernism, chaos magick affects an atemporal, ahistorical character, picking from the past, present, and, often enough, the future. And as with postmodernism, for chaos magick the idea of “truth” or “facts” is anathema . . . .”²⁴

         That is what Steve Bannon taught Donald Trump: Why worry about facts; create whatever you need.

In an overdetermined universe, all events converge around power points. What a magician does is send out his own chaos waves—matching pictures and and basins of attraction. These materialize with their own optimizations. Psychic teacher John Friedlander explained the “paraphysics” in one of his workshops:

         There are always an infinite number of “causes” each of which is . . . responsible. . . . [I]f you somehow wiped out everything else, you . . . could still develop a causal explanation, “This is what caused that.” But [conversely] if you assimilate or clear any one of those infinite causes from neutrality, all the other causes will also be assimilated.

            So matching pictures always generates an expression of whatever is your next step. Whatever you meet in the world, wherever you have a matching picture light up, that’s your next step in clearing your matching picture. Remember, “what’s in the way is the way.”

            The reason that ‘what’s in the way is the way’ works is that everything is overdetermined. You can say, “This is caused one hundred percent by this, one hundred percent by that,” because consciousness is multidirectional. Every dissatisfaction, every weakness is overdetermined. Every weakness you have can be the result of some past life, of something your parents did, of something society did to you, of something you did to yourself, of something that that jerk in front of you is doing at this moment. There are an infinite number of causes, each sufficient to generate your dissatisfaction. If you think there is only one answer that’s the real cause, you’re likely to get enmeshed and caught up in that and really be deeply stuck.²⁵     

         Welcome modern physicists, biologists, and allopathic diagnosticians!

Once chaotes recognized overdetermination, they were able to reap the richness and capaciousness of reality. Everything was grist for the telekinetic mill—“the rationale being,” according to Scottish chaote Grant Morrison, “that all symbol systems are equally arbitrary, and thus equally valid—the belief invested in them being the thing that matters.”²⁶ New Orleans Mardi Gras, Berlin Tanztheater, and MAGA rallies were temporary autonomous spell-casting zones.

         Aleister Crowley used to tell his assembled students that they were going to pretend to raise Saturn (or some other deity) as practice for the real thing. They proceeded with a simulated ceremony. When a rowdy figure in robes and a crown burst into the room and began kicking over hammocks and knocking ornaments off tables, novitiates applauded their teacher’s playfulness as well as his largesse in hiring an actor; only he hadn’t. He feigned theater so that they wouldn’t censor their own power or be frightened by its implications.²⁷

Chaos magic fed Donald Trump’s revanchist politics even as it had Jimi Hendrix’s Aquarian voodoo and Bowie’s gender-fluid Martian spiders. Trump was an eighties dabbler in twenty-first-century chaos fields. As he shifted facts in his Rubik’s cube, he turned MAGA into meme magic and helped launch QAnon. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing it; he didn’t have to; he was a natural spell-binder and narcissist, and he had Steve Bannon to guide and validate his egotism. It led straight to the Presidency, so don’t say that chaos magic doesn’t work.

         Crowley’s motto “nothing is true, but everything is permitted”²⁸ became the Trumpian game plan, though Donald probably thought that it came from Norman Vincent Peale or Roy Cohn. As his malignant narcissism came under Bannon’s direction, it generated an alt-right chaos brand, partly scripted by Bannon’a use of the cultural nostalgia of Italian conspiracist Julius Evola and French metaphysical philosopher René Guénon. The former naval officer cleverly fed Trump’s fuhrer fantasies. His boy may not have been Hitlerian in capacity, but he identified with the Third Reich’s Realpolitik, Aryan eugenics, warrior loyalty, blood lust, and reality theater. That brought the golem to life.

         Transposed through the religious Right’s neo-Conservatism, Evola and Guénon’s yearning for a lost golden age became MAGA. Per Lachman, “magick works by inducing synchronicities, by somehow purposely creating meaningful chance events . . . any structured series of events designed to bring about a specific end. The paraphernalia are up for grabs. So there are instructions on how to make a talisman, an energized ritual object, out of a fridge magnet. . . . There is even a ritual in which the part of Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence, is played by Harpo Marx, the mute Marx brother. . . .”²⁹

         Puns count as more than puns; they are implicit meme magic. If fridge magnets and Harpo Marx work, why not babes on bikes, Proud Boys, and faux red-white-and-blue icons? Or body-snatching lizards, Rothschild cannibals, and a tot-devouring Satanic cabal? Once the barn door is opened, screech owls and mothmen fly out.

         As posited in Walter Cannon’s 1942 essay “Voodoo Death,” a successful act of magic transmits a wave of psychogenic synesthesia and emotional shock, whether delivered telepathically, by body language, by voice and tone, by power relations, or by all of the above. Claude Lévi-Strauss came to a similar conclusion in “The Sorcerer and His Magic.”* Couliano wrote:

         [T]he magician must be convinced of his capacity to transmit his own emotions to another subject or to perform other transitive actions of that kind, but he never ceases to be aware that the phantasmagoria he has produced function exclusively on the terrain belonging to phantasms, namely the human imagination.³⁰

         I would change that to “but he must never cease to be aware” because he must never let his own misplaced concreteness or aspirations rig a result or get in the way of his pure imaginal power. He or she is using symbols to prepare his or her unconscious mind and the activated unconsciousnesses of others as well as the cosmic field, to steer the universe towards his or her ultimate goals. He shouldn’t want to know what those goals are and rarely gets to.

         This is where Magus Trump went astray; he tried to order around angels, totems, spirits, and Saturn the way he did civilian lackeys and stooges, so they turned his magic back on him in the homotopy of infinitely interlocking systems. As Bardonian magician William Mistele noted after the January 6^th debacle at the Capitol, low-grade manipulation that seeks to control others only mimics magic while remaining impure and inferior (See Chapter Two, Part 8, “Trump’s 5-D Chessboard”). Too eager for results, it reverses its own energy field. John Friedlander came close to describing the cosmic machinery during his explanation of a psychic technique to a class:

         Our lives are nested in things that are unimaginably big. No matter who you are or when you are, the whole universe wraps itself around you and re-wraps itself around you each moment. The whole universe changes its address to you each moment. No matter how small a change you make, the whole universe—and all universes—instantly change in a way that it wraps around you. Not just you of course; you as part of the whole universe change and wrap yourself around every other subjectivity in the universe. 

            How in the world does this miracle work where you’re creating your reality according to your conscious beliefs and I’m creating my reality according to my conscious beliefs and yet it’s so flexible that moment to moment it all coheres?  The universe is so creative that when you change, everything immediately adjusts.

            Everything that happens to you at any given moment—it’s a little more complicated than this but for starters—every single thing that happens to you is the optimal possibility given your beliefs at that moment. . . .³¹

         That’s a magic game plan all right. But those beliefs must operate subconsciously, superconsciously, and collectively. They are not control mechanisms or lassos. Creation is the medium in which and scale at which the chaos magician works. Lachman elucidates (with the help of assorted chaotes):

            The “art of making coincidence happen begins with “changing our state of mind.” Through this we can “change the patterns of events in our lives and so control our destinies.” If we think differently we will act differently and so will those around us. What is necessary is to break out of our “existing cognitive habits” and make the “creative leap beyond what is already known.” If we can free ourselves of the “tyranny of Consensus Reality” by creating an inner Temporary Autonomous Zone,” we can achieve the “deep certainty that one’s sorcery will yield the desired result.”³²

             That was Trump’s genius, but “temporary autonomous zones” were not only a tactic of MAGA rallies but Kurdish armies, Occupiers of Wall Street, and anarchists in Portland (Oregon) and Seattle. Their goal was to change not just the present and future but the past. Cancel culture is merely a profane time traveller’s copout; Friedlander proposed a more direct mode:

Probabilities are not just hypothetical or unconscious or available in the dream state. Any time you have an encounter in which you’re not happy with the resourcefulness you brought to it, you can actually go back and re-do that encounter and improvise until you’re happy with your behavior. When you are finally pleased, the other person can, at an unconscious level, choose, “Oh, I kinda like that one better than the one we did originally.” They can hook the circuit board up so that you were behaving resourcefully and it replaces the one where you were behaving unresourcefully. I find time after time after time when I go back and change history, the next time I see that person they respond to me more as if I had been resourceful in the initial instance. It is not because I’m forcing the other person to change but because they prefer the replacement option.³³

         By changing yourself, you change the universe. It isn’t always happy, but it is spiritual freedom. Cancel culture is spiritual incarceration and bondage.

Proposing that magical results are “a series of events going somewhat improbably in the desired direction,”³⁴ Carroll assigned their outcomes to an interdimensional field in which entities—transpersonal intelligences—specify and transmit energies. As archived in Hinduism and catalogued modern theosophy, Google Reality encompasses Etheric, Astral, Causal, Buddhic, Atmic, Monadic, and other planes where nature as we know it is created. Carroll draws on this interdimensional setup: “All magical paradigms partake of some form of action at a distance, be it distance in space or time or both. . . . A mental event, perception, or an act of will occurs at the same time (synchronously) as an event in the material world. . . .” ³⁵

Carroll’s sort of action at a distance almost always requires projections between planes of consciousness. Physical systems are overridden or supercharged by their Astral complements and by other higher dimensional “aggregates, whose radiations develop new properties.”³⁶ They plant Etheric seeds in the Physical realm where they manifest according to hermetic principle. Even DNA is an Etheric idea transposed helically to a Physical plane. Rune Soup occultist Gordon White advised students in accord:

         [It] works best when you grant agency to objects or entities beyond human consciousness, and particularly so with living systems . . . . It is more useful for the magician to consider living systems not as some unaware little eddies in a universal consciousness field, but as ‘outposts’ of the spirit world.³⁷

         When a First Nations shaman enters the body of an eagle or bear, he or she is shapeshifting in a universal consciousness field. When an Australian Aborigine vibrates at the Dreamtime’s frequency and receives information from hundreds of miles away, he is reordering space-time while co-creating with the near landscape in songlines. Crowley provided an invocatory shortcut: “Every Man and Every Woman is a Star,” meaning “intrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and proper motion.”³⁸ In magical systems, distinctions between stars and persons that valorize either evanesce, likewise distinctions between acts and thoughtforms. Friedlander proposed terms that madden materialists, skeptics, and nihilists alike: “We work with energy. Energy transcends identification or designation. If something works for you, it’s real. . . .”³⁹ 

Endnotes

13. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.

14. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.

15. See Chaos Magic, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by avowed skeptics who don’t respect the paranormal so, despite the fact that “Chaos Magic” is a very astute article, the author is accused by Wiki’a overseers of relying on “fringe theories without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view.” Ha! This is precisely the sort of self-anointing authority that chaos magic and, to a degree QAnon, seeks to override or smash.

         I have listed the Wikipedia article’s sources where given, but it doesn’t supply page numbers for so-called “self-published” sources. In a different context, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote: “It’s not hard to see this becoming a trend, where history itself is deemed to violate common decency.” (“Meet the Censored Hitler. Can history itself violate community standards?” TK News, July 30, 2021.) 

16. Christopher Blackwell, “Before, Chaos, and After,” Wiccan Rede.

17. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 45.

18. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XIII.

19. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.

20. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.

21. Salicrow, personal communication, March 28, 2021

22. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.

23. Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos.

24. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 44.

25. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 75.

26. Grant Morrison, Pop Magic!

27. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (editors), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

28. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice,

29. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 48.

30. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 124.

31. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 65

32. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 49. Internal quotes from Jaq D. Hawkins, Understanding Chaos Magic, p. 63; Gary Humphries and Julian Vayne, Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick, p. 123; and Phil Hine, Prime Chaos, pp. 15 NS 23.

33. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 107.

34. Peter Carroll, Octavo.

35. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.

36. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 123.

37. Gordon White, Pieces of Eight.

38. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XIV.

39. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 9.

4. SIGILS

Sigils are symbols in that they stand for more or other than themselves, but they don’t remain static like literary or artistic symbols; they are also chaos drivers. They are signs too, in a phenomenological—per Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—sense: they create meaning out of an undivided whole. They are not only symbols and signs; they are tulpas, visualizations for accessing deities and linking bardos. In Paracelsus’ hermetic science, they are signatures, links between the microcosm and macrocosm based on the shapes and characteristics of plants, stones, animals, and other found items in nature. In chaos magic, sigils are activators, runes, or radionic-like grids to set a particular magical intention or operation in motion. Sixteenth-century occultists Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Oswald Croll made lists of sigils and their uses resembling those that, a century later, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton made of arcs, orbits, and gravitational algebras.

Radionic devices use sigil-like grids for transmission, replacing metals and transistors with runes. These send and receive other-dimensional energy rather than electrons. Instead of being run like phone lines, printed circuits, and motherboards, radionic networks are drawn like sacred geometries in two dimensions and then hieroglyphically potentized. Radionic bracelets, rings, coins, and medallions look like the guts of an old portable radio, but the stations they purport to receive are clairaudient.

         If we were to imagine the signatures or crystalline transmissions of homeopathic medicine’s microdoses enlarged to visibility, they might look like snowflakes, radionic circuits, and molecular hydroglyphs.

The Renaissance sigil was a magical tool repurposed by modern-day chaotes. It includes glyphs, emblems, mascots, even asymmetrical squiggles and psychic pictures that encapsulate a particular intention. As with Paracelsus and Agrippa, they function as microcosm-to-macrocosm signals for opening magical negotiations with the universe.

        Signifiers to transduce and transmit nonlocal realities hearken back to the Stone Ages. It is one thing for a hominid to jiggle a stick into an anthill to draw out a tasty meal or to hurl a rounded stone at a large lagomorph; it is another to exchange mutually understood codes about matters not at hand. That requires synesthesia: the shift of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body to another sensation or organ, from sight or smell to thought and sound. In this case, stimulation goes from sight and feeling to imagination, mantra, and psycholinguistic chirp.

         Eight million years ago, hominoids that were still biologically apes but mentally proto-human migrated through forests and across the plains of South Africa. Humanoid bones from Olduvai Gorge (initially dubbed Australopithecus)have been recovered from 1.8-to-2 million-year-old soils. We don’t know if Africanus, archaeologically renamed Homo transvaalensis, used symbols, but he, she (and “they”) made pebble tools: 3-D symbols by hand. Spreading across Eurasia, Africanus mutated into Pithecanthropus: Homo erectus. A shell from Java, inscribed 500,000 years ago, bears the sort of abstract zigzags that came to signify linguistic rows—petroglyphs prefiguring runes, alphabets, and gematria.⁴⁰

         The earliest known scripts appeared on cave walls alongside as well as in painted herds of animals. Letter-like marks from 40,000 years ago suggest a sophisticated abstract sign system of 20,000+ prior years depth. According to palaeoanthropologist Genevieve Von Petzinger, this code included “dots, triangles, lines, squares and zigzags [as well as] more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms. . . .” She adds, “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention.”⁴¹

         Forty thousand years is fifteen times the length of recorded history. Though time was experienced differently in the Stone Age, the development of alphabets, symbols, and signs must have included a deep meditation on the symbol before it burst into lances, telescopes, and cyclotrons, perhaps enhanced early on by entheogens, a theory of ethnobotanical brothers Terence and Dennis McKenna. During that epochal span, many different hominid species became “sapient,” most of them contributing strands to our genome before becoming extinct. “Adam” alone survived his genus’ territorial imperative. 

         The earliest known writing system is the cuneiform script found in excavations of the Iraqi city of Uruk from around 5,000 years ago. Its letters represented constellations, heavenly bodies, trees, flowers, tools, and counting devices as well as reifications of life, death, birth, and self in spirts, deities, and passages. Other alphabets used “stars, crosses (Phoenician taw), segments of a circle (Greek omicron), triangles (Greek delta), forks (Arabic waw), and houses (Hebrew beth).⁴² 

         The first sigils likely arose with alphabets, even as hunt magic arose with cave paintings of the animals hunted. A sigil like a stone tool was meant to help accomplish a goal but, like later radionics, it was imprinted on a two-dimensional representation of undivided spaciousness. European Rosicrucian versions encompassed their own Egyptian, Celtic, Germanic, and Cro Magnon precursors while gathering affines from totems and thoughtforms throughout Eurasia and then Native America, Aboriginal Australia, Polynesia, and Africa, as England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands expanded from their coastlines colonially.

A popular form of sigil is devised by writing down a desire, then condensing its letters into a monogram, anagram, or composite signet or emblem. All subsequent operations using the sigil are visualized, projected, or received imaginally through the glyph. Synchromystic adept David Lee proffered similar sigils in keeping with sympathetic witchcraft: e.g., cutting together images of two people to form a love spell.⁴³ His modus operandi is as old as Sappho’s poems and a lover’s jealousy.

         More bioenergetic sigils are fashioned by sluicing visualizations into composite images. Such talismans can also be made by superimposing feeling states, memories, and constructs into mental-emotional bubbles (like tulpas on a Buddhist altars, which empower lotus flowers and theriomorphs). Some practitioners set these on or in placeholder Rosicrucian roses or lotuses—visualized florescences—to contain as well as charge an operating tulpa.

         A magician then projects the energy of his or her desire and its residue of symbols into the visualization. From there, she uses intention to activate its artifacts, weaving them into a form of cipher or spell while plunging it into her subconscious where it can begin to work on reality.

         After activating the sigil, she also commits to “a deliberate striving to forget it.” The thoughtform’s field has been subliminally launched toward its target or goal.⁴⁴ As noted earlier, it bypasses the conscious mind while clearing the static of its own greedy “want” energy. Results that follow such an operation may startle even their operator. Magic that tries to override its unconscious loops almost always flips or washes out.

         Tibetan Buddhist tulpas can be utilized, if they live up to their operating manuals, for travel into bodies and spirits of animals, trips in astral bodies between astral continents or world tiers, and future incarnations. That echelon of magic indicates that the symbolic nature of the universe may be more real than its so-called real aspect, and that reality is a collective projection of thoughtforms, a presumption that binds all magical and shamanic systems. Changing oneself does change the universe, though (again) not always in the manner presumed. Magic is creation, not control, as it might be in a simpler hypothetical universe.

         A primitive grade of sigil magic is practiced subconsciously and unconsciously everyday by people in routine social interactions. It is how charisma, personal influence, and power function in a social and political world.

Avant-garde writers Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs pioneered a literary method of sigilization.⁴⁵ A book or page was cut up and rearranged, usually at random, to create a new “nonsense” text with evocatory or divinatory power. This aleatory technique was later adapted for other media: film, photography, audio, choreography, even websites. A diligent magician—Burroughs was inducted into The Illuminates of Thanateros in the early 1990s⁴⁶—he insisted that his technique had a solely magical function: “the cut ups are not for artistic purposes . . . [they are for] political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration.” Contending that they themselves “break down the barriers that surround consciousness,”⁴⁷ he added:

         I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I’ve made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened. . . . Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.⁴⁸

         If sigils override the flow of time, then they are precognitive as well as telekinetic. They mean something because meaning is deeply imbedded in ongoing actions in the broadest sense, stuff that can’t be interrogated extrinsically or deposed. It combines Merleau-Pontry’s signs with Heinrich Agrippa’s signatures and planetary sublunations.

Nowadays angels and spirit guides address mortals through billboards, marketing jingles, iPod shuffles, t.v. shows, synchronicities, and overheard conversations; anything can be a hot link. Spirits adore technology, for they are already a projection of human intentions into electromagnetic and higher fields.

         There were 22 John Prine bands out of 4858 on my iPod in 2019, meaning that one should come up every 221 plays. After Prine’s premature death from COVID-19 on April 7, he made 6 appearances in the next 58 plays. That could have been coincidence, a shift in algorithms, or diffuse poltergeist activity. Numbers, names, and words are willy-nilly, all-over-the-place and random, but the ones you notice are the ones that contain messages for you.

         David Bowie used cut-ups to enhance his own divinations from the I Ching and tarot.⁴⁹ Genesis P-Orridge, a nearer disciple of Burroughs, described the aleatory technique as a way to “identify and short circuit control, life being a stream of cut-ups on every level. They are a means to describe and reveal reality and the multi-faceted individual in which/from which reality is generated.”⁵⁰ It is a cosmic shuffle. Here chaos magic also expresses its nihilistic—Satanic, punk-tantric, transgressive—side. Lachman elucidates:

         Perhaps the most famous chaos organization was Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY), formed by the performance artist Genesis P-Orridge. P-Orridge was part of the “industrial” music group Throbbing Gristle, which spiced their performances with hard pornography and Nazi imagery. TOPY was a kind of cult-cum-fan club and magical organization, geared toward exploring the “transgressive” side of magic. Among its antimonian influences were the Process Church of the Final Judgment—big in the 1960s—Burroughs, Gysin, Crowley, Anton LaVey of Church of Satan fame, the “love and death” guru Charles Manson, and chaos magick. P-Orridge is a proponent of “occulture,” a portmanteau expressing the blend of occultism and popular culture that has come to characterize chaos magick. The meme magick that helped put Trump—himself a popular culture icon—in the White House was, we can say, a work of occulture.⁵¹   

         Note how renaming and altering spelling is a form of sigilization.

Remember, your subtle body is much larger and more dimensionally complex than your physical one. Consider the solar cloud out of which planets, moons, comets, and meteors formed as a gigantic sigil or aura. Friedlander noted that the aggregate transpersonal entity that manifested to medium Jane Roberts as Seth casually confided, “’I was part of a group to put your Earth together.’”⁵²

         John extolled what a remarkable universe we must live in— “something that helped create the Earth itself could later sail one of its seas and smoke oregano without diminishment.”⁵³

         This also shows how thoughtforms can take on any size and scale, operate in any medium, and instantly change mediums and manifestations—one day the whole Earth, the next day a man in a boat.

         Consider too the possibility that this whole universe—stars, galaxies, planets, seas, winds, nations, interstellar and intergalactic space—can be summarized in a single globule the size of a droplet as it is passed into the Etheric and then the Astral plane. By the same measure, a droplet in the Astral can explode into the hologram in which we emerge: the so-called Big Bang. Likewise, all the beings on Planet Earth, that are now or ever were or to be, can be synopsized in a single gall on a leaf such that each discrete meaning transforms the whole like a shape-shifting ruby fording space-time.

        That’s its own deep breath!

In the Middle Ages, individual sigils became associated with particular angels or demons. Byzantine Platonist Michael Pselius, one of the first scholars to transmit the pre-Christian Greek Hermetic Corpus to the West, advised readers that demons “are surprisingly numerous: ‘all the air above and around us, the whole earth, the sea and the bowels of the earth are full of demons.’ There are six categories: those who live in the fire that borders upon the higher zone of air . . . (‘igneous [or] sublunary demons’), demons that are aerial, terrestrial, aquatic, subterranean, and finally demons of a kind ‘who flee the light, who are invisible, wholly dark, causing destruction by cold passions.’”⁵⁴

         The demons or daemons of neo-Platonism return as the hidden persuaders and subliminal kelpies of modern advertising. Grant Morrison cites corporate logos like “the McDonald’s Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph” as a viral form of sigil he calls “super-breeders,” adding that corporate sigils “attack unbranded imaginative space.”

         By translating subliminal marketing pitches into magical agents—in effect, making the public realm psychic—corporate sigils instigate mass behavioral shifts. That’s the purpose of sigilization and why so much money is invested in branding, marketing, and propaganda; sigils are cheaper and more efficient than airtime. In fact, they are free as well as subliminal and stealth. Morrison expounds: 

         They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. . . . The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. . . .  Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.⁵⁵

         Because sigilization is not named in our culture, most people regard its effects as mere brands that they are free to take or leave. Not so. Sigilization activates brands and styles to take over minds and wills. You don’t have to know what meme magic is to enact it.

Our world is overwhelmed with not only Disney characters but intruders from precincts of Madison Avenue, comix, television, sports, politics. Original icons as well as their sigilized progeny infest our inner life and thoughtforms. In dreams and fantasies, people interact lucidly with Little Lulu, Donald Trump, John Wayne, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Meryl Streep, Blutto, or a leprechaun, sylph, or chupacabra.

         Kathleen Roberts, a British woman who professes to be the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, claims that she and Michael Jackson’s ghost were married by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He seized the moment one evening as she was stepping out of the bathtub. She also confided that “the late music icon . . . likes to eat in with me. He loves cookies. He cusses a lot more than I’d expect him to as a former fan.” She added that he “‘doesn’t like being touched back. . . . He scares me with spider visions and dead corpse visions if I kiss him or try to initiate romance physically.’”⁵⁶

         I believe that she is talking about sigils and thoughtforms, not egoic spirits or souls.

         Icelandic pop artist and surrealist Erró, British assemblage sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, Brooklyn-American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Bristol-based street artist Banksy are among sigilists who fashioned curative counter-sigils and graffiti against kitsch system controls.

The advertising Weltanschauung, epitomized by the Don Draper character in the series Madmen, provided a robust premise that has been adopted by narco gangs and Jihadist groups alike. You don’t just sell statins and SUVs with sigils; you create cults and religions. Daesh didn’t invent weaponized scripture, a theology of rape,or necrophiliac street art; it appropriated them, producing hip-hop-like videos of ecstatically apocalyptic beheadings and live incinerations by applying the techniques of George Lucas and Notorious B.I.G. to a death cult. It knew how to game the Internet and dominate Instagram and YouTube, blasting its sigils into the young Islamic world as “advanced terrorism” brands and a global recruiting tool.

         The Islamic State used a “sigil barrage” similar to a “shoaling” technique perfected by chaote Gordon White. For psychically “promoting” related goals, instead of sigilizing individually for each—finding a new house, developing a customer base, and investing successfully—you sigilize them collectively to send an overall probability wave toward your goal: for instance, a modern caliphate.⁵⁷ By that definition, Daesh shoaled itself into dominion over chunks of Iraq and Syria. Amateur chaos magician Steve Bannon shoaled his client, Mr. Trump, into high office.

         As a corollary, White developed the “robofish”: a sigil for something that a magician thinks is sure to happen. By inserting an event that doesn’t require telekinesis for its execution, the chaote tries to positively pendulate the rest of the wished-for school: so-called “follow the leader.”^58. In Synchromysticism as Kabbalah, White attributes this sort of chaos magic to David Bohm’s implicate order and the “strange attractors” of bifurcating systems:

         How does the Technical Hermetica ‘work’? How did Ficino’s system of planetary ritual magic “work”? Simply put, both work because some things are associated with other things. Symbols recur, patterns repeat, sounds heard on a radio associate with similar outcomes in your life. An Animist universe speaks a language of symbol and synchronicity. To you, to itself, to the birds. This awareness underpins systems of magical correspondence the world over—such as practical Kabbalah or Technical Hermetica . . . . These systems are indications that the universe speaks in a symbolic language . . . in a wider synchromystic context.⁵⁹

         A total rearrangement of reality according to synchromysticism is necessary to understand events in modernity, especially post-Trump. Whereas POTUS 45 was only interested in his own personal gains and elevation from chaos magic practiced on his behalf, he opened the floodgates, and other politicians realized that sigils and shoaling were far more effective than old-fashioned campaigns. But that’s just the banal application of chaos; those background sounds from radios like Bon Iver bands or birds listening to and sigilizing human and industrial background noise, not crows or parrots or other talking birds, but common flocks of pigeons and jays, begins to show the complexity of the universe and it myriad interdependent thoughtforms, however sourced and conducted—not only human but animal, and not only animate but machine-made.

Fellow chaote Morrison used the term “hypersigil” to refer to an extended sigilization that is charged with magical meaning. Politicians, movie stars, cartoon characters all contribute to hypersigilization and egregores (collective sigils—see Part 5). Morrison personified his hypersigils in a postmodern comix series The Invisibles. A transgender Brazilian shaman, a refugee Boy, a telepath named Ragged Robin, and Liverpool hooligan Jack Frost comprise an undermanned team of Invisibles defending Earth against Archons of the Outer Church, interdimensional agents who have enslaved most of the human race without their knowing it—shades of David Icke’s Robots’ Rebellion. In one Invisibles dialogue, “boy” asks, “Do I really turn into a pigeon? I mean how does it happen? Was it real? It was more like a dream?”

         Old Street Buddha answers, “When you dream, what makes you think it’s not real?”

         “It’s a fucking dream. You can’t touch it, can you?”

         After Street Buddha puts “boy” through a demonstration, boy says, “It’s like . . . real or something. I feel fucking amazing, man.”⁶⁰

         These days, psychics routinely project into owls, wolves, butterflies, and other creatures.

The same concepts were employed by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman in 1989 and the early 1990s, as he created Sandman or Dream of the Endless. Drawing from his small pouch of self-replacing sand, the Sandman opens portals between dreams and waking-world realities such that they get turned into each other. Scale disappears. A single dream can become a universe or distort, disrupt, or destroy a universe.

         In the serial Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, when Dream of the Endless engages in a battle with Lucifer Morningstar in Hell in order to regain his clairvoyant helmet from the demon who has come to possess it, he and she (Gaiman’s Lucifer is a woman) engage in a battle of creative visualizations—sigils—that start out as small as a wolf and snake, then switch scale down to a bacterium before becoming planets, stars, supernovas, galaxies, and an entire universe. But the psychic energy driving this series of transformation is greater than even the universe, so when Lucifer destroys everything with anti-life, Dream of the Endless restores it with hope. This is chaos magic supreme!

         The hypersigil performed by Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers ruptured history and set a clock ticking as surely as the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Its vibration penetrated history far deeper than airliners and toxic fires.

         According to modern chaote David “Avocado” Wolfe, owner and overseer of a diverse superfood plantation on the north Hawaiian island of Kauai, magic is the mangosteen of traditionary sciences.

When a sigil begins to operate autonomously, it is sometimes referred to as a servitor, literally a “servant.” A servitor is a psychological (psychic) construct created for a specific magical goal that takes on life and volition beyond the agency tagged by its maker.⁶¹ The monster set loose by Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein as well as the golem of Hebrew folklore that was animated by letters of the Hebrew alphabet were servitors. When AI—artificial intelligence—assumes volition like Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot,” the computer HAL in Arthur Clarke’s Space Odyssey, or current programs and deep fakes that are powerful enough to fool or take over populations and countries, the servitor has replaced the magician. Additionally, “when such a being becomes large enough that it exists independently of any one individual, as a form of group mind, then it is referred to as an egregore.⁶²

         Terminology fissions here as it navigates the unseen universe. Totems, tulpas, sigils, hypersigils, shoals, servitors, and psychoids are all, according to Steampunk goblin-creatress Jaq D Hawkins, “animated thoughtforms that take on autonomous existence . . . [and] can gain a certain amount of functional vitality and longevity for a specific purpose.”⁶³ They encompass hallucinations, ectoplasmic projections, and holograms, each providing its own agency of mobility. Whether secularand existential or esoteric and etiological, they open channels—psychic lei lines—through which specified energies and destinies transmute. That becomes clear when they get loose as giant balloons, hyperobjects, or metaverses: MAGA, Stop the Steal, the Red Army, vaccines, cryptocurrencies, a Taliban caliphate.

Endnotes

40. Helen Thompson, “Zigzags on a Shell from Java Are the Oldest Human Engravings,” Smithsonianmag.com, December 3, 2014.

41. Alison George, “Codes Hidden in Stone Age Art may be the root of human writing,” New Scientist, November 9, 2016; internal quote from Von Petzinger, The First Signs.

42. Hugh A. Moran and David H. Kelley, The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs, pp. 9 and 11 (adapted by me).

43. Dave Lee, “Cut Up and Collage in Magic.”

44. Ray Sherwin, The Book of Results.

45. Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture.

46. Matthew Levi Stevens, “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” Reality Sandwich, June 8, 2018.

47. William Burroughs, The Job.

48. William Burroughs, The Job.

49. Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold the World.

50. P-Orridge, THEE PSYCHIC BIBLE: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

51. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 46-47.

52. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 135.

53. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 153.

54. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 148.

55. Grant Morrison, Pop Magic!

56. Samantha Ibrahim, “Woman Claims She’s Married to Michael Jackson’s Ghost: ‘He Stays Possessed in Me,” New York Post, August 17, 2021.

57. Gordon White, “Sigils Reboot: How to get Big Magic from Little Squiggles.”

58. Gordon White, “Magic Secrets as Taught by Robot Fish.”

59. Gordon White, Pieces of Eight.

60. Grant Morrison, Invisibles, Book One, no page numbers.

61. Marik, “Servitors” in Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms, http://thespiraloakgrove.weebly.com.

62. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.

63. Jaq D.Hawkins, Understanding Chaos Magic.

See also my forthcoming book Homeopathy: Nanoscience, Energy Medicine, and Life Code (Inner Traditions, 2024) for a discussion of signatures, Similars, and medicinally potentized thoughtforms. This is a revision of my 1990s book Homeopathy: The Great Riddle.

5. EGREGORES

Egregores (from the Greek root for “wakeful”) are sigils that turn into collective thoughtforms. As superorganic entities, they function like mind viruses launching pandemics, only unconsciously so that those infected don’t know that a virus even exists.

Groups, whether at a lodge séance, at a sporting event, an academic conference, during guillotine amercements of the French Revolution, or enforcing rules of other authoritarian governments, create egregores that dominate societies or nations for stretches of time, sometimes centuries; see feudalism and the Middle Ages. Egregores can hold together religious cults like Ruland and Warren Jeff’s FLDS (fundamentalist Mormon) sect in which women as young as eleven and twelve married men in their seventies and eighties to join eternal polygamous families. An egregore promising an eternal afterlife in Zion was broadcast into their and their parents’ thoughtforms from early childhood. Whether or not the egregore is real—I won’t address that here—once in force it is all but inescapable. It takes intervention or a radical awakening from the spell.

         Egregores are everywhere. They represent consciousness’ innate interdependence and unity and its ability to create transpersonal mindstreams. You could call them indoctrinations or phases of emergent culture and knowledge, but that misses the role of conducted magic and reduces life to chance algorithms. Egregores can be as supernal and longstanding as alchemists’ gold or as evasively concrete as a molecule or cell, as volatile as the fever of a mob, as quotidian as Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” which ignored the Third Reich’s gas chambers, or as crazed as the axe-wielding servitors of the Rwandan interawahme.Remember, in a sacred universe—and this one is—all forms are sacred, for they originate at subtler planes and frequencies. Egregores are self-sustaining blocks of meaning, indications that meaning itself is sacred, contagious, and reinforcing.

         Aetheric magician Robert Podgurski refers to egregores as “watchers that preside over earthly affairs or activities” or a “specific spirit or energy [that] could be said to be under the aegis of a specific aspect of the world-will.”⁶⁴ “World will” is a useful phrase that removes egregores from disenchanting reductionisms. That is, they cannot be generated or manipulated separate of the larger cosmic flow. In The Sacred Alignments and Sigils, Podgurski puts the matter overtly: “To know what your body’s skin cells want is to know the intent of the universe. Herein lies the root force of desire enabling sigils and egregores.”⁶⁵ They cannot be easily dismissed or dislodged because they align with creation itself. That doesn’t mean they always work or are for good; they operate as sub rosa codes like DNA strands and mitochondria.

Journalist and technocracy whistleblower Elana Freeland captures the esoteric nature and power of egregores in a conversation with a former Vatican official. He acknowledged not only the concept but that the word itself is used in inner circles:

While living in London, I encountered an Italian who had worked at the Vatican in a high secular position during the reign of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005). He shared with me a term used broadly in esoteric circles: egregore.

Her source defined it this way:

An egregore is a kind of group mind which is created when people consciously come together for a common purpose. Whenever people gather together to do something an egregore is formed, but unless an attempt is made to maintain it deliberately it will dissipate rather quickly. However, if the people wish to maintain it and know the techniques of how to do so, the egregore will continue to grow in strength and can last for centuries.

An egregore has the characteristic of having an effectiveness greater than the mere sum of its individual members. It continuously interacts with its members, influencing them and being influenced by them. The interaction works positively by stimulating and assisting its members but only as long as they behave and act in line with its original aim. It will stimulate both individually and collectively all those faculties in the group which will permit the realization of the objectives of its original program. If this process is continued a long time the egregore will take on a kind of life of its own, and can become so strong that even if all its members should die, it would continue to exist on the inner dimensions and can be contacted even centuries later by a group of people prepared to live the lives of the original founders, particularly if they are willing to provide the initial input of energy to get it going again.

If the egregore is concerned with spiritual or esoteric activities its influence will be even greater. People who discover the keys can tap in on a powerful egregore representing, for example, a spiritual or esoteric tradition, will, if they follow the line described above by activating and maintaining such an egregore, obtain access to the abilities, knowledge, and drive of all that has been accumulated in that egregore since its beginnings. A group or order which manages to do this can, with a clear conscience, claim to be an authentic order of the tradition represented by that egregore. . . .”66

         The Vatican certainly falls into that definition, under not just one but multiple aggregating egregores, from the living Christ, to Inquisitions and Crusades, to the current Pope.

Egregores share territory with Émile Durkheim’s totems and Carl Jung’s psychoids. Totems, remember, are symbols and beliefs holding together tribes, religions, political parties, nations, religions, and clubs—from Aboriginal sodalities to Masonic lodges to Manchester United football. In Durkheim’s usage, an emotional group energy flows among adherents, raising them to collective action. This is attached to human existence and flows from cave paintings and the dreamtime to conceptual art, graffiti, and cryptocurrencies. The sociologist’s totem is the shaman’s egregore, grounding energy, according to historian of magic Mark Stavish, from “the astral counterpart of the group . . . in [each individual] psyche.”⁶⁷

         Psychoids are borderline entities: poltergeists, UFOs, Loch Ness monsters, sasquatches, leprechauns, fairies, and mermaids, all of which require our psychic collaboration to enter this dimension. That ritual is even conducted by police and village councils in Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands and by clan chiefs and powwows throughout the indigenous world.⁶⁸ They engage with and protect Astral thoughtforms.

         Real or imaginal; the raison of egregores is that they combine actual and fictive powers in operational figures like the king and bridegroom of alchemy, America the Beautiful, Batman, the sandworms of Frank Herbert’s Planet Dune, and the elements of the Periodic Chart. The Trinity (father, son, and holy ghost) is an egregore of especially far-reaching scope and duration, drawing on a Christic vibration in the universe at large, as well as reliquaries like the Communion, the blood of martyrs, and the Shroud of Turin. Buddhism has similar egregores: lotuses, stupas (sacred mounds), celestial emanations, and rainbow bodies.

         Egregores are eclectic enough to generate mass movements, in one instance alien abductions; in another Occupy Wall Street or Stop the Steal. Assorted cartoons, theriomorphs, and spirit animals transcend their origins and stations to take on collectivized power.

         John Lennon fashioned such an attractively provocative egregore that a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, shot and killed him. Charles Manson, drawing on Crowley and the Beatles, used “Helter Skelter” to reprogram cheerleaders and cowgirls into assassins. Tejano singer and songwriter Selena Quintanilla-Perez was murdered by Yolanda Saldívar, the first president of her own fan club, ostensibly over a dispute regarding Saldívar’s embezzlements from the club, but more under the influence of its egregore. My point is that egregores are not only voracious but unpredictable—and deadly.

         From here, I will use sigils and egregores as different frequencies of the same energy.

Endnotes

64. Robert Podgurski, “Thoughts on Egregores,” Concatentations, robertpodgurski.com, November 13, 2020

65. Robert Podgurski, The Sacred Alignments and Sigils, p. 69 (plus an emailed addition).

66. Elana Freeland, Atmospheric Nanoscience Biowarfare: The Geoengineered Transhuman Assault, tentatively Inner Traditions, 2024. This is an expanded and updated version of the first half of her book Geoengineered Transhumanism: How the Environment Has Been Weaponized by Chemicals, Electromagnetism, & Nanotechnology for Synthetic Biology, no imprint (self-published), 2021.

67. Mark Stavish, Egregores, p. 8.

68. See my discussion of psychoids in Richard Grossinger, Dark Pool of Light, Volume 2, pp. 160-161.

6. PEPE THE FROG

Gary Lachman identifies Pepe as an evolving egregore. The humanoid cartoon was initially adopted by the alt-right and white supremacists as an emoji and password. What may have contributed to the choice was Pepe’s entrée “as a kind of millennial slacker . . . in his first appearance, urinating in public. When asked why he was acting so deplorably, Pepe answered, ‘Feels good man.’”⁶⁸

That same energy typified much of MAGA’s appeal up through the January 2021 march on the Capitol.

         Embraced by pop singers Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, Pepe migrated through the internet, becoming a 4chan frog. As creator Matt Furie had lost control of his amphibian. Pepe was seen looking over the U.S.-Mexican border—the “ultimate internet troll, the personification of the cynicism [4chaners] felt toward everything.”⁶⁹ He partnered with Donald Trump as underdog pals during the 2016 Presidential campaign, gaining alt-right mascot status to the horror of Furie.

         Rival Hilary Clinton, not an aficionado of imaginal realms, declared Pepe “a symbol of hate” or, as Lachman spoofed, “an amphibious postmodern swastika.”⁷⁰

         From a conflation of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Nile frog deities, Pepe rose to “the modern-day avatar of an ancient Egyptian god [Kek] accidentally resurrected by online imageboard culture.”⁷¹ Through a further conflation of Korean and English graphemes with the mistranslation of an acronym—coronation by aleatory cut-up and synchromysticism—Pepe settled into a frog-headed god of primordial darkness.⁷² Alt-right founder Richard Spencer was wearing a Pepe badge when he was attacked by Antifa members.

         In a 2017 discussion with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, symbolist Jonathan Pageau expounded on Pepe’s range:

         The frog is a perfect liminal character because it lives both on water and on land. It has a monstrous characteristic that it can cross over between worlds. You see that in stories. The story of “The Frog and the Princess” is a perfect example, and it relates to the Pinocchio story.⁷³

         Peterson then showed his own rendition of the frog as a psychopomp, mediating between not only water and land but the known and unknown. Pageau added:

         We’re in a situation where things have been inverted, and the people who create the norm are being marginalized—they’re being pushed into the margins. . . . That’s why they’ve identified with the frog. A strange inversion happens. The power of inversion and the power of mocking and the power of humor is usually on the side of chaos, the power of the margins. . . . Pepe is like an inversion machine. The people who use Pepe take something like an insult that is being thrown at them, and they flip it around on those who insulted them.⁷⁴

         Trumpism 101.

         As a demonstration of his shapeshifting ability, Pepe was espoused by 2019 Hong-Kong protestors against Chinese takeover of their city-state.

Endnotes  

69. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 85.

70. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.

71. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.

72. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.

73. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 93-95.

74. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, “The Metaphysics of Pepe,” YouTube, January 3, 2017.

74. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, “The Metaphysics of Pepe,” YouTube, January 3, 2017.

7. DONALD TRUMP AS CHAOS MAGICIAN

A swarm of sigils and egregores were put in play under Trump—a blend of eighties Warholism and cyborg phantoms like Gorilla Monsoon and Junkyard Dog. MAGA extended aughts Reality starz into twenty-teens techno-magicians, political rallies into temporary autonomous zones.

         Trump became Pepe, or Pepe became Trump. Either way, he never had to distinguish between entertainment and agenda, strategic fuckery and diabolic lies.

         Lachman cites a similar egregore in post-Soviet Russia, replete with “Satanism, séances, Ouija boards, occultism, drugs, sex, alcohol, role-playing, and fascism. [These] came together in a heady brew.”⁷⁵ In Absurdistan, a thin line separates “bohemian occult-science fiction” from poisoning political opponents with nerve agents. You end up with “Guénonism plus tanks.”⁷⁶

         Vladislav Surtov, deputy prime minister of Russia (1999-2013), a devoted Putinist, was the Russian “Steve Bannon,” as he “combined his political technology with a love of gangsta rap, Beat Poetry, and writing postmodern fiction.” He was the likely author, under a pseudonym, of a 2009 political satire about New Russia, Almost Zero. Lachman concludes,“He is a real twenty-first-century hipster, with posters of Che Guevara and John Lennon on his walls and a photo of Tupac Shakur topping his desk, next to one of Putin. He writes essays on modern art and the occasional rock lyric. . . .”⁷⁷

         At the same time, he is an authoritarian Putinist: Tupac plus Putin equals Kremlin synchromysticism. Next thing you know, missiles are being fired at apartment buildings in Ukraine.

MAGA started as a trademark and sigil, then became an egregore, launched by rallies, bling, and crowdmind. The 2016 Presidential campaign was a masterpiece of chaos magic. One persona of Trump may have blithered like an idiot, unable to complete grammatical strings or thread together three logical sentences, a limited vocabulary, and almost no attention span. The other was Pepe in a suit, an Elvis-like Reality star. “Donald” was “trumped,” possessed by “The Trump,” even as Bobby Zimmerman was—by his own confession—taken over by a “Bob Dylan” egregore that was blowing in the wind and was sure to attach to some dude toting a guitar. That the egregore is larger than its creator is incidental until it isn’t.

Personal flaws and deficits are boons for a magician who knows how to use sound and mudras. Trump fed off the psychic energy of his fans as he ignited egregores. That virtually nothing he said was true was of no import to him or them. A fan of his own speech rhythms, mesmerized and seduced by the mantra of mindless chanting, he raised his words to the adulation and response of loyalists. Egregores flew like crows, turning him into Orange Jesus.

         After POTUS 45 woke from his month-long post-Election snit, he appeared at a December 2020 rally for the two Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senatorial runoff. From the pulpit, he claimed accomplishments he either never accomplished or did pasquinades of, such as “building the wall and securing the border like nobody’s business.” There were nonexistent factories saved, phantom jobs created, Mara Salvatrucha-13 gangs dispatched (“bad guys—guys who will cut you with a knife ’cause knives cause more pain than guns—we’ve taken care of them [cheers], in prison or deported. America’s never been safe like this”).

         It was free association in blank verse. It was an admission that all politics is nonsense. A birther egregore was incubating a Stop the Steal egregore.

         As Trump’s speechifying crescendoed, suburban moms were rescued from unsavory neighbors, Georgia’s arborists reimbursed after a hurricane: “the one that came from Florida—great state, great people—it ruined the best peaches ever, destroyed them, a crop they had waited for their whole lives. Those farmers were real patriots, they didn’t want the government’s money, just a level playing field; we took care of them anyway.”

         None of this was true. He was blowing soap bubbles. He knew what he was doing; he had always known. He may have conducted fuckery in prior lifetimes. No rival politician could come close.

         During the waning days of his Presidency when MAGA crowds shouted, “Stop the steal,” it could have been “Hold that line” or “Pass the biscuits.” It was call and response.

         Behind a playboy who tired of pornographic confections was a recreational assassin, so his slogans and sigils instinctually turned lethal: “Lock her up.,” “Build the wall” or his Proud Boys’ pleaser, “Stand back and stand by.” To outsiders, they may have sounded either idiotic or like agitprop, but they were black magic.

         If it had been a different crowd or agenda, his oversoul would have been just as pumped: a Miss World pageant, a WWF bout, or an AFL-CIO rally if fate had made him a union demagogue. He was the Little Drummer Boy (or Girl) who went on drumming like the pied piper, “so follow me, and I’ll show you where it’s at.”⁷⁸

         He went from groping or fucking unwilling women and paid sluts to fucking an entire nation and holding the party of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan in politico-erotic bondage, blurring, then eliding the toggle between “willing” and “unwilling.”

         You might say that these are opposite meanings of the word “fuck”; I say they are the same for a chaos-magic sociopath on the Asperger’s spectrum for whom sexual kink and dominatrix tantra morph into power opiates and spanking monkeys because erotic capacity eventually runs through its consummation in strumpets and golden showers. Without a Presidency to extend sadism and necrophilia to a global scale, Trump faced only “Jeffrey Epstein” cul de sacs on Little Jeff Islands.

           Not enough attention is paid to how Trump’s whole deal was evasion of his own tedium, terror, and loneliness. He had to keep the band playing and the props coming because, otherwise, he would fall into the black hole of his own nihilism, a hollowness of empty wealth, facile power, and stale charisma. These are whiplash energies for any practitioner, and the Donald may not even have been at the service of his own will.

         Instead, he put his badonkadonk on the world, Melania as his Ghislaine. In place of underage girls, he seduced ambitious politicians, turning their horny zealotry against them with a more royal randiness. How else to describe what he did to Marco Rubio, Kevin McCarthy, and Ted Cruz? He fucked them, and they came willingly, power and sex fused in chaos magic.

         Mini-Trump Matt Gaetz should have been warned: Trumpism has no friends, no true disciples, no scruples, no endgame.   

         Trump fucked a planet, enemies and devotees alike. The Republican Party folded. His staunchest foes—Lindsay Graham and Rand Paul among them—were smitten in both senses. Hulk Hogan and André the Giant couldn’t have played it better.

         Rubio, Cruz, Mike Pence, J. D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, and the rest behaved as if they had seen a ghost. This was no longer Trump the knucklehead and golfer. Satanic energies were working through him, seeking their new Reich.

         You can regard the Republican Party as a personality cult, a bunch of wimps and pansies, even a nascent, neo-Fascist coup, but I see a bunch of people who looked at Mephistopheles and flinched. They wanted his patronage and now are in his service like other aspirants who sold their souls for a taste of power and mafia protection.

         While I was driving from Portland to Somesville, Maine, in September 2020, candidate Trump was in the hospital with COVID-19. The bridge over the Sheepscott River at Wiscasset was on Mona Lisa Overdrive, young people on the west end running back and forth with giant American flags, then on the bridge itself mostly women marching with equally huge flags costumed in Trump-Pence red, white, and blue, waving and smiling at cars with the-rapture-is-underway stares.

         It didn’t look political. It looked millenarian, zombie, orgiastic. It suggested, in its energy and ceremony (not its content), Hare Krishna dancers or, in its Endtime surety, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or in apotheosis, Jim Jones and a Kool-Aid bacchanal.

         Before driving through this cabaret, I thought of “Donald Trump” as a cult more than a political platform. By the time, I reached the other side of that bridge, I was aware that states of possession that depraved turn into interahamwes before they get cooled.

Endnotes

75. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 151.

76. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, p. 180.

77. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 138.

78. Steve Duboff and Artie Kornfeld, “The Pied Piper,” Decca, 1966

Chapter Six

Saturnalia

1. ROGUE SOFTWARE

Trying to get a bead on Donald Trump’s behavior requires multiple levels of interpretation. Anyone’s behavior does, but here we are dealing with a highly functional multiple personality and its expression, performance, and self-parody through not only its own intentional and unconscious psychodynamics but the disguises and masks by which it imposes its needs and desires. On top of that is his ability to create egregores and then continually shift his relationship to them.

         I won’t try to sort all that out, though psychologists, sociologists, and homeopaths have made a cottage industry of diagnosing at a distance: acute narcissism, borderline personality, sociopathology, germophobia, syphilitic miasm, Fluoric Acid, wounded child—an individual so highly traumatized that he cannot distinguish between pain and pleasure in himself, so he has zero capacity to feel empathy for others. In addition, his lying is so instinctive and endemic that journalists counted over 30,000 of them during his time in office, meaning multiple untruths per day. The deeply symptomatic nature of this trait means that he periodically loses the ability to tell the difference between a lie and reality, again Fluoric Acid.

         New York Times journalist Carlos Lozada describes fellow Times journalist Maggie Haberman, a rare Trump whisperer among non-MAGA writers, putting him on her “couch”:

         [She] recalls an interview with Trump in which he muses that talking to her is like talking to his psychiatrist. Haberman, a New York Times reporter, dismisses the line as a “meaningless” attempt at flattery. “He treats everyone like they are his psychiatrist,” she writes. Even so, “Confidence Man” constitutes a study of Trump’s “personality and character traits,” as Haberman affirms. She writes of his stunted emotional development, of the loneliness “that always seemed to be stalking him,” of the “emotional balm” that campaign rallies provide for him, of how he displays “both the thickest and thinnest skin” of any public figure she has covered, of his tendency to live in the moment yet inhabit an “eternal past” full of unquenchable grievance and of his “irrepressible self-destructive streak.” Haberman concludes that her subject is “a narcissistic drama seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse.”¹

But nearly half the population of the United States and a fair portion of the rest of the world didn’t just fall for a miasmatic madman and mental patient. He was an effective businessman (or marketer and promoter, depending on your definition), an extraordinary politician, instinctive authoritarian, and, despite a lack of nuanced knowledge, intellectual depth, or belief in anything other than his own accomplishments, executed much of the agenda of the evangelical Right, conservative Wall Street, and disenfranchised mid-America such that they saw not a sociopath or borderline personality but a warrior able to overcome his own flaws and defects to deliver the sorts of results that none of his more sophisticated Republican colleagues could come close to. Anyone is lovable to those who love him and, to his admirers and supporters, Trump was a lovable magician. You can diagnose him till those proverbial cows come home, but you will end up with the flatland version, lacking dimensionality. Add his own sense of irony and strategic self-satire, and you have a black swan. All this needs to be taken into account, as well as my own lampoon in Chapter One. The trouble with caricatures is that they only get smaller and smaller, while their target expands and dimensonalizes.    

Despite polling to the contrary, POTUS 45 was confident of a second Electoral College victory and term. The polls tended to be light on his loyal base, for he was an occult, neo-Rosicrucian presence. Much as he didn’t plan to win in 2016 and made none of the usual preparations for moving into the White House and carrying out campaign promises on Day One, he didn’t have a backup plan for losing and departing in 2020, certainly not with an opponent like Sleepy Joe. In the closing days of the campaign, he could feel the energy building again on his behalf, particularly in swing states like Ohio and Florida. Inwardly he was gloating, preparing a new clip of jibes for the pollsters, liberals, and Never Trumpers who had underestimated him again. He was probably plotting exquisite Machiavellian and Sadian vengeance on his enemies. All election night he led. His base was partying like it was 2016, or 1984. He was ascending in his glory, an incarnate Washington, a modern Alexander the Great.

         Then came “The Steal”: “hacked” voting machines, zombie ballots, rogue software, stealth crews, purloined cartons, bamboo fibers, Biden bundles, Smartmatic swarms, Dominion dumps, Chinese hacks, grabby Nest thermostats, Italian and Deep State space satellites, malware bankrolled by a late Venezuelan dictator, an Olympian supercloud dubbed “The Hammer,” and Scorecard software that switched “Trump” electrons into “Biden” positrons and then triple-punched them.

         It was an immaculate deception—systemic fraud at unprecedented scale.

         It was more truly a response to Trump himself as well as a quirk of pandemic voting habits. Republicans, especially his MAGA branch, preferred to vote in person on Election Day like attending church. Democrats favored absentee ballots: separation of church and state. Trump was warned by advisors not to declare victory under a Red Mirage, but he was hellbent, and not just on November 3rd. He had planned months earlier to declare victory on election night regardless of the count, possession being nine-tenths of the law or of something. Mere ballots didn’t faze him; they were the sideshow. It was always political theater more than politics. In fact, he didn’t understand politics as opposed to performance and personality, internationally either. That’s why he was convinced later that he could get Putin to stop his war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He could stop the performance and personality, do a theatrical conciliation and handover (as with the Taliban) and then fake the tanks and missiles.

So, control over announced results were the whole game. It didn’t matter how many clicks were made on whoever’s behalf; a single click was all that counted—the last. You could declare whatever number you wanted and challenge anyone else’s. The arena was egregores, not votes.

         “What people need to understand,” said his niece Mary Trump in an MSNBC interview, “is that Donald doesn’t believe he should be denied anything he wants.”²     

         That was a mistake on his part. Declaring a strategy ahead of time makes it harder to use effectively afterward. Of course, the Election was “fixed”; either Trump won legitimately, or he would call it on his own behalf.

         In the wards of Trump City, nuances were overlooked. The election was rigged on Joe Biden’s behalf—no doubt, no dispute. “There are more ballots that are bogus ballots out there than you can shake a stick at,” declared a Maine Republican state senator.³

“Those machines are like Swiss cheese,” added ubiquitoid Rudy Giuliani. “You can invade them. You can get in them. You can change the vote.”

         True in principle perhaps. But it was just as true in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. Everyone knew the hackability of motherboards. Palware downloads were suspected by both parties. Some Republicans still believe that Barack Obama prevailed in 2012 only because his geek squad defeated a rival one of Mitt Romney. They hacked last.

         In 2004, Anonymous, a group previously claiming hacks of the Justice Department, Motion Picture Association of America, and Church of Scientology announced that they had reversed hacks by Karl Rove’s team in Butler, Claremont, and Warren Counties and suburban Cincinnati in swing-state Ohio as well as overrides from a Republican failsafe SMARTech link in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which had vaulted George W. Bush into the lead over John Kerry. The counter-hack was presented in manifesto-like decrees. Few noticed, and it didn’t finally succeed. Yet the notion that election software can be overridden by tech nerds cancelling tens of thousands of votes with a computer key was put in play.

         Then before the 2008 election, a black-robed figure in a Guy Fawkes mask released a suicide-bomber-style video:
         We know that you will attempt to attempt to rig the election of Mitt Romney to your favor. We will watch as your merry band of conspirators try to achieve this overthrow of the United States government. . . . We are watching and monitoring all your servers. . . . We want you to know that we are waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor. . . . If we catch you we will turn over all of this data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.⁴

            Overthrow of democracy by computer and confusion had been in the air since Bush-Gore 2000: hanging chits and butterfly ballots.

After Obama’s historic victory, Anonymous posted a triumphant yawp:

         We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove. . . . After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.⁵

         Fabulist mythology or true detective back story?

The shoe may have been on the other foot then, and an Obama egregore overshadowed software but, to switch metaphors again, the flower was ripe for plucking. It remained unplucked for a while, unspoken except for whispers. Till Trump, no one dared. The Donald only dared; it was his m.o. He had been watching the flower bloom for at least five years. He plucked it and opened the floodgates: a stolen, hacked election! Why accept a life-altering verdict when it could be reversed with a gimme putt? 

         From POTUS’s parochial view, while he was busy MAGA-ing, making great things even greater (or whatever), some very bad people stole his Presidency and were poised to undo his crowning achievement. There had to be epidemic fraud; how could Hulk Hogan lose to Listless Joe? It was irony, fabrication, tactic, and also, paradoxically, conviction. The myth outweighed the game on the field. Performance over politics.

         The Divine Right of Kings was so deep in Trump’s aura and nervous system that he drifted into assuming that he had been enthroned rather than elected. Authoritarianism came so naturally to him that he also took for granted that everyone else accepted it too, that they not only tacitly shared his realpolitik but secretly idolized dictators as much as he did. He forgot because he never understood what the original Tea Party was about, and he either didn’t watch Hamilton or power-dreamed through it.

His oversoul had never lived in a constitutional democracy before, so it was hard for his ego to fake. Creatively misinterpreting the Constitution, he expected to be made Emperor for Life like his buddies Putin and Xi. He figured that he had earned it as much as they had and, like them, he wanted permanent control over land and populations. He was resentful he had to hide his mojo under legal challenges and threats—a royal bore.

Trump’s escalating tantrum proved contagious. It stirred marches, demonstrations, lawsuits, a “truthing” sect, and a cast of millions, including conspiracist attorneys, loyal or scared pols, and zealot broadcasters. For more than half the Republican electorate and eighty percent of Trump voters, the “steal” was obvious, incontrovertible. The only question was whether outing it would wake the populace, remove pretender Biden, and restore Donald’s monarchy.

         Coached by a team of obedient, flaky attorneys, Trump presumed that a few key states could invalidate their authorized elector slates and send in replacements ex post facto. That’s authoritarianism—when you believe you can be reinstalled in the People’s House like a zipless fuck.

         It was the way that Trump had conducted business his whole life, by trickery, stalling, and bullying while pretending to charm. In a New York Times article,Haberman quoted Alan Marcus, a consultant who worked for the Trump Organization in the 1990s.

:        “Trump views the judicial system as he sees everything else: corrupt, ‘fixable’ and usable as a bullying tactic. . . .  Mr. Marcus recalled Mr. Trump calling lawyers who had filed suit against him to try to convince them that “it was a waste of time and money,” then ultimately trying to get the case in front of a judge he perceived to be friendly.⁶

          Autocrats Putin, Orbán, and Xi changed their constitutions to extend their presidencies. Orbán was democratically elected the first time, just like POTUS 45. Then from the powers of office, he proceeded to rig the electoral machinery and strip the media so effectively that the playing field tilted his way. No other candidate could roll a ball sufficiently uphill to dislodge him; it would take a landslide to blast him out of office. The next step in Budapest will be Soviet-style dictatorship, electoral setups that guarantee that he can’t lose because, if he does, the results will be “corrected” before they are announced.

       That’s what Trump tried to accomplish in a single sweep. It proved a bridge too far. Using the pretext of a stolen election, he and his Republican enablers put in place initial steps to end democracy in the future and institute pseudo-Christian authoritarianism: redrawn districts, electoral monitors, and mechanisms for endless recounts until the counters get it right.

         The U.S. Constitution, though regarded on in evangelical circles as a commandment of God, is surprisingly malleable. It is only as strong as the belief systems and egregores sustaining it; for instance, it can be rewritten by pastors and Supreme Court justices to serve Christian law. That’s where un-separation of church and state inevitably leads, legacy aside. Those who didn’t understand why the founders separated Congresspeople from preachers revert unwittingly to the same theocratic impulse that drove their ancestors out of Eyre, Scotland, and England.

         Democracies don’t necessarily die under gendarmes and tanks. They fade away under chicanery and gerrymander.

It didn’t matter to Trump whether he actually won; it was more important to ride the appearance of victory and, if necessary, find alternate quasi-Constitutional paths to certification. He didn’t respect plebiscites anyway; they were, to his mind, weak as well as janky, unworthy of a strongman. He wanted to dominate the landscape by force of personality and brand, the way he had done his whole life.

         The effect of Donald Trump on America and the planet exceeded the capacity of one man. He reminds me of the 2009 US Airways flight from New York to Charlotte that encountered a flock of Canadian geese that got sucked into its engines reducing them to broken rotors, scrap metal, and spare parts. If democracy was the plane, Trump was the Canadian geese. His impact was existential and exponential. Yet I think that democracy was more like free-flying, unaware geese, and Trump was the plane suddenly rising into their midst.      

         The Stop-the-Steal egregore grew so powerful that it made off-the-wall measures appear self-evident. FBI-certified Russian mole Michael Flynn wanted the President to declare martial law, temporarily suspend the Constitution, seize some Swing State voting machines, and have the military supervise a do-over. That would have been a heyoka dance for the ages!

         Donald was corrupt and brain-fogged enough to imagine that this sort of stuff could slide by, either by popular acclimation or intimidation. He thought that if the Republicans won Congress in 2022, they could even decertify the 2020 results, remove Biden, and restore him to his rightful office. He would demand, he griped, six full years as payback, enough time to prepare Donnie, Jr. for succession. That cult then took over much of the Republican Party.

         As Trump lost clearance between the Reality show and reality, Mark Miley and the Joint Chiefs worried that the guy might go full banana-republic. Those closest to 45 recalled that he detonated in a blind fury whenever anyone doubted the Steal or tried to reason with him. By then, either he was under the influence of his own egregore or he was trying to flood the field with fuckery. Attorney General Bill Barr noted that when he talked to Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. . . . He’s become detached from reality.”⁷

         Did Barr just notice it then? What he is calling “reality” never interested Trump as much as intrigue. Arrested development and a rage or terror of not being able to impose his will wherever he wanted was the wound either of a poor little rich boy or a past-life trauma.

In bipolar-like swings of near-psychotic anxiety and omnipotent grandiosity, he reeled from one conspiracy theory to another—suitcases, thermostats, voting machines, Venezuelans, British, Chinese. As each conspiracy was refuted by one of his advisors, he acknowledged their verdict and moved to the next, ultimately settling on conservative philosopher Dinesh D’Souza’s manipulated mathematical charade in his 2022 film called 2000 Mules because it had a GED-match-like patina of satellite surveillance and digital footprints “proving” mass ballot-harvesting. 

         He was also under the daze of his inebriated (or over-pepsied) attorney Rudy Giuliani whose fifteen minutes of fame were more than two decades ago. Rudy reminded Trump what the Donald had taught him in their halcyon days: claim victory and then shove it down everyone’s throat.

         Back in the spring when Trump mentioned 1960s race riots to justify the possible use of troops to restore order, Milley set him straight, throwing cold water on the idea, part of a larger discussion that resulted in the President cursing out his top military advisors. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker detailed the dialogue in I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year:

         “Mr. President, it doesn’t compare anywhere to the summer of sixty-eight,” Milley said, according to the book. “It’s not even close.”

            After senior advisor Stephen Miller chimed in to declare the protests as “an insurrection,” Milley pointed to a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through the American Civil War.

            “Mr. President, that guy had an insurrection,” Milley said. . . . “You don’t have an insurrection. When guys show up in gray and start bombing Fort Sumter, you’ll have an insurrection.”⁸

            Note the irony of “Mr. President”—like Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” onstage to John F. Kennedy without acknowledging their love nest. With every tongue-in-cheek use, the honorific becomes more of a self-parody.

Endnotes

1. Carlos Lozada, “How the House of Trump Was Built,” The New York Times Opinion section, January 1, 2023, p. 10.

2. Mary Papenfuss, “Trump ‘Handed Down Death Sentence To Mike Pence’ To Stay In Power: Mary Trump,” Huffington Post, June 19, 2022.

3. Peter LaVerdiere of Oxford, Maine quoted in “Maine presidential electors cast votes in divided outcome,” Associated Press, December 14, 2020.

4. Sam Sacks and Thomas Hartmann, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” The Daily Take, November 19, 2012.

5. Sam Sacks and Thom Hartmann, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” The Daily Take, November 19, 2012.

6. Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Well-Worn Legal Playbook Starts to Look Frayed,” The New York Times, January 31, 2023.

7. David Klepper, “Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole,” Yahoo/Associated Press, June 18, 2022.

8. John L. Dorman, “’You’re all f—ed up’: Trump exploded after his officials warned against using military troops to end George Floyd protests, book says,” Yahoo Business Insider, July 31, 2021.

2. STOP THE STEAL

A lack of forensic backup continued to outrage Trump and his Election truthers. To believers, it was obvious what had happened. Even the Democrats, they proclaimed, were of aware their unconscionable crime. Trump-fanatic broadcaster Lou Dobbs puzzled his way through the “paradox” on his Fox News show, “We’re eight weeks from the election, and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed—that is, defrauding other citizens who voted with fraudulent votes (sic). We know that’s the case in Nevada, we know it’s the case in Pennsylvania and a number of other states, but we have had a devil of a time finding actual proof. Why?”⁹

         How did he “know”? He didn’t; a robofished egregore did, eventually becoming a GOP passport for legitimacy, lack of which condemned one to a RINO. Followers believed so strongly in Trump’s 5-D invincibility that a stolen victory was a certainty, a 99% likelihood.

The master crook had conducted his meme magic again. What had begun as a blend of performance art and tactic turned into a way to invent new electoral rules. What also began years earlier as Trump’s “joke” that Barack Obama must have been born a Muslim in Kenya had turned into a string of punchlines. “How many Poles (or Mexicans” jokes became “how many Democrats does it take to screw in a light bulb (or screw up an Election?” and “How could I lose to a dementia-ridden coward hiding in his basement” became “I didn’t lose to Joe Biden. Watch 2000 Mules.”

         Humoring Trump while compartmentalizing elephants worth of discrepancies became the new version of Ronald Reagan’s Southern Strategy. To stay relevant, Republican politicians had to embrace the Steal.

         But it was more than that. It was internet relativism: old rules and verities didn’t count; a mere retro election was lame beside TikTok and Instagram “likes.” In the Opinion pages of the Sunday New York Times, Carlos Lozada wrote:

         “[T]he lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequences. The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it. When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. . . . When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke.”¹⁰

         The joke precedes Trump’s “politics as performance art,” but the last scintillas of seriousness and consequences were subsumed in their confluence. Now there are only costumes, props, and scripts.

The Big Lie was not just based on the Big Joke, there also seemed to be circumstantial evidence. If the Deep State, or a Democrat-led collusion aided by RINOs and Never Trumpers, or a corporate cabal, or the Illuminati themselves, wanted to rig an election and turn a Trump landslide into a Biden steal, they would have used the same game plan and left the same fingerprints: a whopping Trump improvement from 2016 among African Americans, Hispanics, and women; a surge of 40 to 50% in midland regions; a 4.4% gain in his native New York despite his abandonment of the City for Florida; significant hikes over his 2016 numbers in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, a Republican down-ballot near-sweep in Congressional and state legislatures; nine million more votes than his own pollsters’ 63-million victory threshold—in other words, a combination grand slam and royal flush.

         But where’s Donald? It took a deluge of late Biden mail-in ballots to pitch four key swing states plus Arizona and Georgia. Where did those cartons of cards come from? How did the royal carriage turn into a pumpkin at midnight?

I see three separate steals: one bogus, one legitimate, one metaphysical.  First the bogus.

I accept that Trump thought, or convinced himself, that the 2020 election outcome was rigged and that he had won in a landslide. There was, in fact,a landslide, but only in MAGA counties—a Red Mirage enhanced by the fact that it encompassed more than eighty percent of the total counties in the U.S. He was blind to anti-Trump blowback in denser blue population centers where the majority saw him as, to varying degrees, a buffoon, an emotional three-year-old, a repurposed crime boss, a con artist, a lazy imbecile, an unqualified lunatic flying in Air Force One, or a maniac holding nuclear launch codes. There was only one candidate, Trump; his opponent could have been Sylvester Cat and he would have lost. As long as it wasn’t someone too “Bernie” or “AOC.”

Trump not only didn’t win the actual Election, he lost in a relative rout given a pretty much evenly divided electorate. Outside of Trump City, 81 million people voted, if not for Joe Biden, then to end a national nightmare. Folks absentee-voted in unprecedented numbers to get Trump’s tweets, idiocies, grift, emoluments, and “so sad” cadences out of their lives. It might not have been “more bogus votes than you can shake a stick at” but more new voters—did you see them lined up in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, overriding the Red Wave? And that’s not even counting the pandemic-amped mail-in, harvested, and drive-by ballots—the ones Trumpists deemed invalid.

         Trump got 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but Biden got 15 million more votes than Clinton and 18 million more than Trump the first time. The critical mass was that 66.9% of the electorate voted in 2020, compared to 55.7% in 2016. That made the difference. The so-called Steal, a turnabout that Sean Hannity claimed was mathematically impossible, was conducted by 11.2% new voters, enough to make it quite possible.

         Even assuming fraudulent votes peppered among them, bootleg ballots alone would not have been anywhere near enough to override other checks and balances and overturn the results. In fact in the 2020 election, far more Republicans than Democrats were outed as double-voting or voting for dead people.

         Trump was wrong too that more than half the people who voted put their mark by his name—“your favorite President,” as he was wont to say when assuming that his self-love was requited even by folks who despised him, a narcissist’s endemic delusion. He came closer to the truth unintentionally when he said, in effect, “81 million people didn’t vote for Sleepy Joe, he couldn’t fill an outhouse. Those were fake ballots and dead people.” Yeah, Donald, the election was about you, and you drew 150 million votes to Biden’s paltry 2 or 3 mill. But those weren’t fake ballots or dead people voting: 79 million voted nay.

         The majority of Joe Biden’s votes were legit—every recount in every county or state confirmed that, even the one that Republican shill Cyber Ninjas meant to “trump up” in Arizona. Ballots may have been cast under pandemic rules with unprecedented eligibility and leeway, but that didn’t mean that fake or dead people voted, just that the majority of newbies voted against Trump, which was crime enough for believers and the fanatic MAGA base. It also wasn’t more votes than voters either; a third of the country still didn’t cast a ballot.

         The measure that most favors Republicans, in fact, every first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is the huge numbers of nonvoting cynics, slackers, and snobs, a majority of whom are left of center. They put Repubs in office, cycle after cycle, all the way back to Richard Nixon. But it was never the case that more Americans wanted a second term for Trump and that their collective will was thwarted. Even if there were major irregularities—and there weren’t beyond looser eligibility rules—the majority still voted “Trump, vamoose.”

         No MAGA Republican could win a referendum of all eligible voters; that’s why, afterwards, y’all wanted to change the laws and trim the bandwidth. 69% was way too many voters. 55% had proven just right.

        This fuss was always about “who votes”—the unruly masses, descendants of slaves and mulattos, immigrants, nationless Gaians, First Nations, West and East Indians, Eurasians, Asians, Aborigines, and everyone else—or just everyone else.

         What the Stop the Steal crowd wanted—and still wants—is a poll tax under plausible deniability of racism.

         The notion of a stolen election was a maturation of a global revanchist delegitimization of opposition parties. Because the opposition is considered automatically unpatriotic and socialist—the first step in authoritarian takeovers—their votes are never legitimate, and any procedure that makes it easier for them to register is de facto a “steal,” an election stolen by people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Semantics aside, Stop the Steal was, and still is, an attempt to replace a democracy with a putsch.

         Trump’s 2016 Electoral College margin—he lost the popular vote to an even more unpopular opponent—was thinner than a rat’s ass. A quirk here or there (plus the WWF entertainment factor) got an unprepared, cartoon-reality mountebank into office.

         The different sample of eligible voters in 2020 was, as noted, because of COVID and the belief that Trump was winging it in office. But a real census wasn’t taken and never will be. There hasn’t been a truly elected president since Dwight Eisenhower, and there probably won’t be one as long as selective ineligibility under Jim Crow rules, fungible technology, voter intimidation, Citizens United, political entertainment wars, and social media are in play. Plebiscites are chaos systems, more so when you add in a virus and software. We still don’t know who really won in November before George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Rutherford B. Hayes strode into the White House in January with only minor fuss—no riots or attempted coups.

         Proud Boys and Oath Keepers only seemed like centurions for a moral majority. Trump’s delusion was like the myth of Prince Gautama growing up in a palace where he never saw suffering or death. His carny career fell well short of finding enlightenment under a bodhi tree, but he shared with the mythical Buddha the initial perception that his palace was the real real world. Instead of inventing Buddhism, he invented its opposite: Trumpism, turning attachment into more attachment, suffering into making other people suffer.

How about the Steal that was? Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, detailed itin her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Biden had a huge unearned advantage in the back rooms of corporations, election wards, and high tech where Aristos funded and spruced his campaign. They hid the true contents and meaning of Hunter Biden’s laptop until it was too late (though Trump benefitted similarly from the meaningless email kerfuffle James Comey chose not to hide the first time—and the laptop was stolen).

       Hemingway was right: 2020 COVID voting rules favored Democrats disproportionately, expanding windows for absentee and harvested ballots and extending deadlines for posting and counting. The electorate was selectively enlarged. Legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan madeit easier for poor people to vote, to MAGA’s detriment. They stretched electoral semantics as if no more significant or less fungible than dog parks and loading zones. Aristos were, in fact, relieved that the pandemic gave them cover to change the rules because, as noted, Donald was considered a menace to themselves, their children and grandchildren, and the planet itself.

         Drop boxes, absentee ballots, unsupervised ballots at nursing homes, and the like might have flipped the winner in key swing states, but those were still legal voters. Hemingway’s real “Steal” came from Aristos and corporations priming an extra 14% turnout, not from a scam or switcheroo.

        This was even out in the open. Liberals bragged on it much in the way Trump boasted about his own boondoggles. Time magazine heralded it as “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”:

         In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEO’s. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. . . . After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”¹¹

          Having been punked once, they were not going to let it happen a second time. My friend and author, Dallas attorney Luke Lafitte (Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm), was flown to Western Pennsylvania at the last minute to keep an eye out for foos. He reported laughing with the Republican attorneys over a couple of Penn State beers, and I sent him audios of “There’s a Pawn Shop on the Corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” (Guy Mitchell) and “Shuffle on Down to Pittsburgh” (Lou Christie). Anything to get back to the fifties when Eisenhower was President and Trump was just a brat in Fred Trump’s nursery in Queens.

The fact is, just about everyone in mainstream media and big tech who could tilt the 2020 election Joe Biden’s way did, either from leaning on the financial and social-media scales or hiding Joe from his own gaffes and cognitive impairments and then burying the laptop story.

         Maybe people are fickle enough to be swayed by each red herring. I find it strange that mere money makes people change their votes, that polls vary from week to week. Are we that sellable and fitful a populace? 

         Hunter Biden was a manipulator and crook who had, if possible, as little respect for democracy as the Trump boys. His laptop as the Da Vinci code of the MAGA Right was real enough—Burisma was shelling out funny money faster than Boeing, and Hunter was Joe’s true shadow and bad boy. But those Trump lads and their Kushner in-law made him look like a hapless, cocaine-addled street urchin and starving artist. They killed more elephants and tithed at more decimals without monthly down payments. All four libertines should have been, at worst, a combined wash.   

         Yes, POTUS 45 got rolled. He was as canceled as a Confederate statue in Charlottesville. But it was a collateral event in a larger storm of fake news and false flags, with egregores flying on both sides. Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, noted rightly that politics is politics and that Trump was not the only one capable of hardball, “We often observed the irregularities that occurred during the 2020 election, the reality that Democrats effectively weaponized election changes that were the result of Covid, but ultimately it was important to catalog the various allegations and where there was hard evidence, or lack thereof, of actual theft.”¹²

That was where Lou Dobbs fell off the wagon, confusing the two. Partisans do what they can to elect their candidate, and that includes soliciting funds from people who have money to throw away and expect something in return, the sort of behavior enabled by the Citizens United decision, that cash is free speech. They use the levers of government (national, state, local) and the sway of corporate hierarchies (national, transnational, and foreign, despite the rules).

Trump lost the count on the field, but he also lost the game inside the game, and that’s what rankles him and the Stop the Steal crowd most. They are sore losers, using a double standard of righteous innocence. Mollie Hemingway’s rigged election is every election. Her neo-Federalist, MAGA-loyal argument comes down to an originalist view of poll-tax-like laws that were meant to keep the majority of people from voting. They didn’t work this time, and certain people, most of whom considered Trump divinely coronated and/or a Republican savior and patriots’ dream, were so addicted to their Moral Majority hype, Ms. Hemingway among them, that they believed in the sacred imperative of their own “majoritism.” 

Her Stop the Steal was accurate—the Democrats had figured out how to stop the Republican steal with their own.

 Radical journalist Christopher Hedges, hardly a Trump supporter, shined a different light on the “Steal” after he got wiped from YouTube overnight—something like ‘Trump is bad, but you guys were worse because you caused him’:

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction. 

What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a 10-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.¹³

          I agree with Hedges, and I confess that I too thought it was crucial to prevent a second Trump term at any cost, even rigging the results if necessary. Guilty as charged! I fell back on my neo-Liberal past and neo-Con bias. I forgot that Trump won the first time by calling the Democrats on their hype to their base, lies of convenience, and electioneering merde. The 2016 vote was lost for Hilary the moment Barack took a drink of Flint tapwater and said, “Yum, yum, tastes fine.” That was the epitome of the neo-Lib scam, from cannabis criminalization to drone fleets over Afghanistan captained in Florida to decriminalizing the mortgage-crisis criminals.

Yet I was terrified that the country wouldn’t survive another four years of a guy who thought that Finland was still part of Russia, that Slovenia and Slovakia were the same country, and who believed that diplomacy consisted of blackmail and being unpredictable. The nuclear football shouldn’t be in the hands of a three-year-old playing “She loves me, she loves me not.” I was relieved that Trump got rolled and that there were no fingerprints or actionable crimes.

          I didn’t consider it partisan pandering; I didn’t see Trump as a Republican, I saw him as a sadistic sociopath and a mafia-like don and crook. 

The “Stop the Steal crowd” shares my view; only they think that the country can’t survive four more years of Princess Kamala and Demented Joe, so they will similarly rig the 2024 plebiscite and Electoral College any way they can.

The guy who didn’t expect to win the first time probably should have taken his chips and gone home because it wasn’t just a parlor game for the Aristos and liberal class. Plus, the guy didn’t really want to serve anyway, he just wanted to throw his weight around, monetize the Presidency, and fly Air Force One to golf matches, and get to brag about his holes-in-one on taxpayer dimes. He mailed in his term. Mafioso love leisure, tributes, and graft even more than pleasure itself.  

To Trump, it was always who put on the best show, and the winner of that contest was clear. He was still putting on the show more than a year later. Whatever else you might say about Big Don, he was a marathon man.

Endnotes

9. Lou Dobbs, Fox Business News, January 5, 2021.

10. Carlos Lozada, “The Big Joke That Became the Big Lie,” The New York Times Opinion Section, September 25, 2022, p. 6.

11. Jim Troupis, “The Cancer of Election Fraud,” Americanmind.org, May 23, 2022.

12. Betsy Woodruff Swan, “Pence team couldn’t verify Trump campaign’s election fraud claims, new memo shows,” Politico, June 10, 2022.

13. Christopher Hedges, “On Being Disappeared,” ScheerPost, March 28, 2022.

3. SHOW ME THE KRAKEN

My third “steal” is an esoteric one: rogue permutations “haunting” tabulating networks, but from where?

         Well, those UFOs, made of unknown isotopes of common metals, flitting in and out of ordinary reality that hovered around nuclear sites in the U.S. and Soviet Union demonstrated how they could turn on and off launch commands.*

         Compared to deep silo encryptions and firewalls, Dominion software would have been a cakewalk. I go with my college classmate Sid Schwab, a retired surgeon whose book Cutting Remarks I published. He said, “A surgeon can kill you . . . and you’ll sleep right through it.”¹⁴ If UFOs can hack nuclear launch codes, they can flip elections, and we’ll sleep right through it. To a congress of Earth-protecting E.T.s, a second Trump term might have been the equivalent of nuclear winter.

         No one at Dominion or in the Democratic Party stole the election—the Dominion machines couldn’t turn Trump punches into Biden ones. That was a fantasy based on a Mission: Impossible plot.

         And as for that matching paper trail in Georgia, Dutch psychic Gerard Croisset proved the precognitive power of telekinesis. Replacing cards after the fact is psychic duck soup for interdimensional time-travelers. Read Douglas Adams’ hitchhiker’s guides to the galaxy for how to get a boat inside a bottle ex post facto.

         On the higher spheres, every election may go through a double-slit reality with alternate results. The real wheel remains in quantum spin. Perhaps Trump was a magician but in the service of a Blackwater-type intelligence—the quintessential Manchurian candidate, not only groomed by the Russians to sink the West but body-snatched by Nazi ghosts, Klingons, humanoid lizards, and Greys.

         Maybe a combination of deep-state CIA, FBI, and Pentagon actors, in concert with corporate CEOs, the world’s most skilled hackers and cyber- pros—a deeper “deep state” with undetectable means—decided to end Trumpmania. Their tools were inviolable. Ping-proof Dominion and SmartMatic hardware and software aside, anything in principle can be hacked; we have no idea what cyberwarfare is capable of these days.

         Stooges like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, and Roy Blunt were convinced; Newsmax was too, either that Biden won or that it behooved them to say so. When Karl Rove, Tom Cotton, and William Barr turn against Pepe, parties dumping more than tea and cryptocoins are underway.

         Only Election Truthers dug in. To them, as to Trump, the nation had folded like dog shit in rain. “You’re quitting! You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” Michael Flynn screamed at Trump impeachment lawyer Eric Herschmann. Turning to Trump, he added, “Sir, we need fighters.”¹⁵

         When Herschmann then asked Trump conspiracy-theorist attorney Sidney Powell why, if she had such a strong case, she had lost so many appeals, she replied that “it was because all the judges, both state and federal, were corrupt.”¹⁶

         “That’s your argument?” Herschmann responded incredulously. “Even the judges we appointed? Are you out of your fucking mind?”¹⁷

         POTUS Trump had fallen into the ultimate New Age booby trap: self-sabotage. In pretending that a Deep State, real or strawhorse, was vulnerable to a takeover, he tried to have it both ways: a malign and impregnable meta-power and a swamp he could drain—the emperor’s new clothes and a suit he could take to the Supreme Court. But the master crook was outcrooked, “out-nemessed” by a deeper deep state, his lies swallowed in a bigger lie. And they slept right through it.

         Everywhere the Trumpians searched, they saw or heard a sasquatch indicator—a tuft of fur, a pawprint, an alien turd, a humanoid yowl—so they went full yeti, magnifying each real and imagined perfidy into a menagerie.

A hillbilly dude at a 2021 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting—he went by the name Grizzly Joe—inadvertently spilled the beans when he turned the tables on a reporter, asking him rhetorically about a missing cryptid. His comments read throughout at two levels:

         ‘I gotta have the evidence. I gotta see it,” Joe said. “If you tell me you’re gonna release the Kraken, show me the freakin’ Kraken for crying out loud. Show me the freakin’ Kraken. Show me a piece of the Kraken. Show me something.

            “And don’t tell me to go to Mr. Pillow man’s website to get the information, and I click on there and you get a million sites, ads pop up and I’m still not gonna see even a fingernail of the freakin’ Kraken.”¹⁸

         Still not a chromosome, isotope, or mule!

It’s reassuring that someone, physical or metaphysical, deep state or kraken, had enough leverage to pull it off, just as it’s sort of reassuring if E.T.’s—time-travelers, tricksters from a parallel universe, psychoids, inner-earth dwellers—won’t allow our self-destruction. We may be part of a cosmic federation, our destinies entwined. The true Deep State may not even be in this dimension.

         Deep State or not, there can be no resolution or peace on this plane alone; the Deep Universe, with all its planes and polarities, is where the real work of creation is being done, and all sentient beings, forms, entities, beasts, and angels are at it together, to raise All That Is to the next vibration in the Great Dance. Only then will the Lion—can the Lion—lie down with the Lamb.*   

         We don’t know how the cosmic agenda works but, with Pluto headed toward Aquarius, it led next to a serpent march on the capitol.

Endnotes

14. Sid Schwab, Cutting Remarks, back cover.

15. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense is threadbare and irrelevant. But he’ll probably win,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2021.

16. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”

17. Harry Litman, “Trump’s impeachment defense. . . .”

18. Stephen Proctor, “Trump supporter at CPAC rails against election fraud lies: ‘Show me the freakin’ Kraken’,” Yahoo Entertainment, July 13, 2021.

4. MARCH ON THE CAPITOL

On January 6^th 2021, while State delegations were reporting their votes, Donald J. Trump, POTUS XLV, asked a gathering of his fans to halt the Electoral count and concommitant regime change with a coup. No way to counter-spin or nuance this:

         We won this election and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election. . . .  It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You can take Third World countries, just take a look . . . their elections are more honest than what we have been going through in this country. . . . [N]obody knows what the hell is going on. There’s never been anything like this. We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen. . . .  Think about it. Detroit had more votes than it had voters. Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than . . . they had voters and many other states also.¹⁹

         He was talking the way he was taught to talk, the way he had always talked, the way Fred and the mafia goons talked, spinning the myths in which they lived and starred 24-7. He was weaving it out of thin air, mixing fuckery and fantasy, but it had a megalomaniac momentum and paranoid veridicality.

         He said a whole lot more too, so no one should have been surprised when a materialized egregore propelled itself from the Ellipse down Pennsylvania Avenue with a goal of disrupting the vote, stopping Biden’s certification, and getting justice for themselves and their President. It wasn’t a viable coup, but it was a coup (as well as a lynch mob), and it would have killed if the opportunity had presented itself:

         We fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution. . . . After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you.²⁰

         People “exchanged looks of astonishment and delight.”²¹

         We’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. . . . Be ready to fight!²²

         To the child king, these were activations, poor man’s mantras, the sort of magic cheerleading he was accustomed to manifesting, improvising as he went along. His goal was to inflame the rally and impose his unhappiness on Congress, Mike Pence, and the nation, and he succeeded:

         The mob was ready to “tear Pence limb from limb,” former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman noted on MSNBC Saturday. It was “as dark as it gets,” he added, calling it a “set up” by Trump. He angrily responded to a chilling video of Trump supporters on Jan. 6 in which one can be heard saying that “Pence just caved,” before adding that “we’re going to drag [that] motherf**ker through the streets.”

        Trump already knew by then that Pence had decided he would not aid his effort to overturn the 2020 election, noted Litman. Yet Trump still indicated to his supporters before they breached the Capitol building that Pence could be pressured into rejecting the electoral votes.

          “Trump goes out to the crowd and pretends … it’s all up to Pence,” Litman emphasized. “He knows that Pence has already decided, but keeping it open like that is designed to induce , , , murderous rage in the crowd when they do find out.”

          Once Trump’s supporters discovered Pence was not going to reject the electoral votes cast for Joe Biden in key states, the crowd became “absolutely inflamed,” he continued.

          “We have testimony , , , that it was no joke,” Litman said, referring to the hearings of the House select committee investigating the insurrection. “They were ready to tear him [Pence] limb from limb. So Trump plays this dishonestly in such a way to rev the crowd up to its maximum level of violence. Really sinister.”²³

         In the performance piece, Pence gets torn from limb to limb or hanged, but it’s not real, so he is brought back to life when the play is over. Because it isn’t a play, Trump is trapped between two powerful desires, to obliterate Pence and to resurrect him chastened. He can’t have both, but he tries to in the way that an autistic person tries to create a self-contradictory mirage. 

To MAGA loyalists, the call to action was unambiguous, as real as “real” gets, from a real POTUS in the lineage of Washington, Jefferson, and the Roosevelts. They militarized with increasing resolve. Then they broke through barricades, smashed windows, kicked down doors, punched and tased guards, and took over the Capitol building briefly while Trump watched on t.v., replaying his favorite moments, giddy in prank and delight.

         That wasn’t his coup. That was his Zeusian fit of thunder and lightning to scare mere mortals and pols, though it could have served his coup if he had gotten himself down from Olympus and into the Iliad. The coup was in the dashboard behind the hoopla.

         He had a scheme. It was a Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme, but it hung together if the dominos fell and balls rolled into their holes setting off pendulums whacking weights into other weights. It was concocted by Algonquin J. Calhoun, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, and Sidney Powell: Get Pence to reject Democratic electors for the six or seven states that Trump decided to claim he had won, throw them back to the legislatures for stooge MAGA slates, then have the legislatures authenticate these Republican replacements. It was ingenious in its way, a last-ditch attempt to reinterpret the 12^th Amendment to the Constitution and bend rules that were more dubious and malleable than most people, even those paid to know, realized. Business had been conducted for generations by gentleman’s rules and common law, nothing more obligatory or constitutional holding succession in place. But Trump was neither a gentleman nor a rules guy.

Trump’s trouble was, it was based on the notion that he had the majority of the America populace and a friendly deep FBI and military behind him. That was a requirement for a real coup. He didn’t. He didn’t even have his Vice President or most of his own party. And more than half of America would have, in the trope of George Conway, still husband then of his Senior Counselor Kellyanne, crawled through glass to stop him.  

At very least it would have created a constitutional crisis and given him a pretext to call out the troops. Matt Taibbi pointed out the grandiosity on both sides, Trump on the power of his phantom army and the Democrats in trying to pin the non-phantom version on him. It was a fake showtime coup fronting an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine doomed to break down at the marble or the latch:

         I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup.” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t [spend] 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says, “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it.²⁴

         The March on the Capitol is difficult to characterize because it was many things at once:

•It was the aggregate outcome of Trump’s presidency and governing style: dog whistles producing temporary autonomous zones. That the assault was conducted by Trump’s Rent-A-Mob cannot be minced or nuanced away. He levied the full force of the “Stop the Steal” egregore and, like zombies, the crowd advanced to its post-hypnotic command. Donald called the march a “love fest”; I’d modify that to “a demagogue’s idea of a love fest” as well as a sociopath’s view of “love.”

         Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled. “It’s us versus the cops. . . . Every law maker who breaks their own stupid fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung. . . .” One man was “holding a coiled noose. People yelled, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’” Another said to a cop, “We can take you out.” Somebody yelled, “Shoot the politicians! Fight for Trump. . . . Where the fuck is Nancy?”²⁵

         Memes turned into political theater. Political theater became an actual riot During the French Revolution, events of Pluviôse and Thermidor played a similar role, albeit more bloodily with a working guillotine.

•It was the climax of a collision between Trump’s delusion of authoritarian rule with the reality of a still functional democracy and deep governing bureaucracy.

         Before the 2022 House hearings on the January 6^th love fest, even knowledgeable Americans didn’t realize how little Trump understood the Presidency, even after four years of ostensibly embodying it, and how much he still thought of himself as a combination of godfather and king who could order anyone to do his bidding—also how much he favored appearance over effect and how poorly managed his temper was, how easily he crossed lines of civil society and basic good judgment. Sebastian Murdock recounted Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the June 28^th meeting of the committee, a Caligulan tragicomedy:

         Former President Donald Trump knew his supporters were armed with weapons the day of the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol attack, but insisted they be allowed to watch him speak before the riot.

          “I heard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags [metal detectors] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here,’” said Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. . . .

            Hutchinson recalled that Trump had been informed by Secret Service that his supporters had brought weapons to his rally shortly before the attack on the Capitol. Those weapons included bear spray, spears, guns and flagpoles used as weapons.

           Trump, however, was apparently fixated on the crowd size and demanded more of his supporters be allowed to bypass metal detectors to watch him speak. . . .

           “He was furious because he wanted the arena we had at the ellipse to be maxed out to capacity,” Hutchinson said of Trump’s demeanor. . . .

            Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with them, according to the testimony. As his supporters ― many of them armed ― began the walk to the Capitol, Secret Service officers whisked Trump away in his presidential limo, but the then-president demanded he be taken to the Capitol. . . .  

            “The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’ To which [Secret Service agent Bobby Engel] responded, ‘Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing,’” Hutchinson testified, recounting a story another Trump aide had told her.

         An “irate” Trump then attempted to grab the steering wheel and reached towards Engel’s neck. . . .

        “Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel and when Mr. [Anthony] Ornato had recounted the story to me [Hutchison said] he had motioned towards his clavicles.”²⁶

          We learned later from the January 6^th Committee that “the fucking president” wanted 10,000 National Guardsmen to form a protective phalanx for him as he marched to the Capitol, straight from Hollywood’s Roman Empire or a past life. Aides laughed behind his back—that he was going to march to the Capitol when they had never seen him walk the length of a golf course without a motorized cart.

         In another part of her testimony, Hutchinson showed how Trump’s January 6^th behavior was part of an extended tantrum by someone who was never taught how to lose, or permitted to lose:

        [F]ollowing a meeting between Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr in early December 2020, after Barr had told the Associated Press there was no evidence of fraud, Hutchinson recalled walking into the White House dining room and found a smashed porcelain plate and ketchup dripping down the wall. Trump had thrown his lunch at the wall in a fit of rage.²⁷

                  She also said that Rudy Giuliani had told her that it was going to be “‘a great day.’ Why? she asked.

“‘We’re going to the Capitol. It’s going to be great. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful. He’s going to be with the members. He’s going to be with the senators.’”²⁸

It was like delighting in the re-run of a film about Cincinnatus or Ceausescu on a street surveillance webcam.

         Trump called her testimony “fake news.”

•It was a cumulative “white supremacy” Mardi Gras militia drill, a Tea Party, a Sadie Hawkins whoop: “Let’s go fuck them up!” It was preparation for the real thing, after the Great Collapse and Inland Sea.

         I mean, what would have come next if they had taken over the Capitol and killed a few Aristos? They didn’t have guns, soldiers, or aircraft to carry out a coup, not yet. Instead, they rehearsed, laid groundwork, and developed language and tactics. They ran a proxy scenario in Trumpian finery.              

•It was the grand finale of the Trump Reality Show and the opening salvo of another ceremony. It was the end of the game and the commencing of something that won’t be a game. Super-journalist Mark Danner imagines an alternative outcome to January 6^th, 2021, with a different Secret Service agent, a cowed Mike Pence, and a shamelessly determined and power-hungry Republican Congress voting Trump back in office and leaving the Democrats to plead before a Republican-stacked Supreme Court:

         There in his chic black overcoat he would have waved, smiled, thrust his fist in the air as the tens of thousands of his faithful, far and near, raised their voices in a bloodcurdling roar. And finally, after shaking scores of hands, taking a few selfies, and perhaps offering an inspiring word or two through a megaphone, he would have led the crowd up the steps, as the cheers rose deafeningly and the little screens of the cell phones held aloft conveyed him making his triumphant way up to the domed temple in thousands of miniature images.

            For had the president chosen to stride up those steps, who would have dared stop him? His followers would have fallen in behind him and the Capitol police would have fallen away before him and he would have breached the doors himself, his gold-orange hair shining beneath the mythic white dome in the crisp cold sunlight of that historic January day.

            Is that how Donald John Trump, forty-fifth president of the United States, had imagined it? And if so, what did he then intend? Would he have led his chanting, flag-waving followers through the ceremonial doors, past the looming statues, down the marble hallways, and into the Senate chamber, there to face squarely his white-haired, stalwart vice-president, poised in frozen shock on the dais? With his Senate supporters gathered around their victorious leader, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, would President Trump have smiled up at Mike Pence, held out his famously small hand, and demanded the certificates certifying the electoral votes of the “stolen” election? And would Pence, a man who had shown himself until this very day to be one of the most obsequious public officials in American history, have dared refuse? And then perhaps, in a dramatic gesture for his rowdy minions and the senators and the congressmen and the television cameras and the whole world watching, Donald Trump with his own two hands would have torn those tokens of legitimacy asunder.²⁹   

•It was QAnon in real time, made for YouTube, cell phones, and FBI re-runs.       

•It was old-fashioned civil disobedience, capping seven months (or four years) of exploratory disobedience, a cancel-culture escalation from Charlottesville to Minneapolis and Portland (Oregon), from Tuscoloosa to Lansing to D.C.

•It was recreational violence, ritual vandalism, gang initiation, experimental transgression, criminal entitlement, exercise of open carry, militia machismo, and trial by lynch mob. It was “We’re taking our house back. You shoot and I’ll take your fucking ass out.”³⁰

         It may not have been a real coup, and casualty figures may have been inflated, but they did gas, shock, and pummel Capitol police officers, many of whom were Trump voters, and they would have murdered Congressfolk if they had had time. They intended to stop the electoral vote, but they needed Mike Pence to collaborate. The three and counting Supreme stooges would presumably handle the rest. But Pence wouldn’t play—he was too old-school—and the Supreme Court wouldn’t either. They didn’t want to be a pretend tribunal in a banana republic.

           It was a coup. What Trump and his cohorts believed, not unreasonably given how coups are carried out in banana republics that don’t have bicentennials, was that they could throw around a bunch of rounds and fireworks and, once more, force Pence to dj the main event, reject those swing-state Biden electors, send them back to those GOP-controlled state legislatures and, with the ostensible backing of Republican House members, use the Rube Goldberg machine to hold onto power without the military—as if the Aristos and Pentagon would have stood for that. . . .  But Trump had already seen how his bullying and chutzpah tended to cow everyone in his path—why not Senators and the Supreme Court?

         Journalist Sonam Sheth summarized “the six-step plan for Vice President Pence to unilaterally throw the election to Trump, something Pence did not have the legal or constitutional authority to do. But Trump who wholeheartedly supported the plan, pushed Pence publicly and privately to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s electoral victory:

            A federal judge skewered Eastman and Trump last month over their efforts to subvert the election.

            After “filing and losing more than sixty suits, this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means,” US District Judge David Carter said in a scathing ruling, adding that the “illegality of the plan was obvious.”

            Trump and Eastman “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Carter wrote. “Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory.”³¹

         You have to give Eastman credit. A loyal Trumpian waterboy, he grokked that pomp and circumstance could be more compelling than law. It didn’t matter if it was a jerry-rigged argument. The idea was to be so loud and convincing that the MAGA Mission Impossible force would somehow get their marionette back into the Oval Office.

       Election conspiracy theories that are tied to evangelical apocalypticism bypass rational discrimination about what can work and what can’t. The MAGA legions didn’t care; they went straight to a bible-driven vigilante ‘taking back of America.’ Evangelical crusaders provided an ideal vehicle for Trump to sacralize his own unevangelical agenda. Like FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, he could put on the royal robes and mantle when necessary to preach either women or power. Journalist Jon Ward describes a “spiritual warfare” that played a much greater role in January 6^th and its subsequent revivals than initially thought:

         Two weeks after President Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, a group of Christian pastors stood on stage inside a nondenominational church in a suburb of Phoenix, whipping the congregation into a frenzy of prayer mixed with violent and bloody imagery.

After 45 minutes of singing, and a request for money, and another 45 minutes of remarks from a featured speaker, the real show began: A rock band began playing anthemic background music while a procession of self-proclaimed “prophets” came to the stage to weave a tale of war between good and evil. . . .

“Let there be the roar from the army of God!” yelled one Florida pastor named Donald Lynch, pumping his fist as hundreds of people stood around the stage jumping up and down, raising their arms in the air and crying out. “Release the roar! Release the roar! Out of your belly!” [For real noir, it should have been David Lynch, Dennis Hopper, and the Sandman.]

Lynch spoke of a vision he claimed God had given him of an evil giant — symbolizing Biden and the Democrats —and of instructions he claimed God had given him to deal violently with that giant. [It was Christianized djin warfare and the reappearance of the Welsh dark man of the forest.]

“God said, ‘Do you have the stomach to finish the job? Put your foot on his chin and expose the neck. Pick up that weapon and find you are strong enough to wield it,” Lynch said, his husky voice straining. He began to shout. “Finish this! Finish this! I say finish this!”

It was pandemonium. It went on for over an hour. And this same scene was repeated in churches over the next month in seven states then-President Donald Trump was trying to throw out millions of legitimate votes in a bid to stay in power: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. [It was an attempt at old-fashioned Jehovan purgation, circa 1000 AD.]

Roughly two dozen religious leaders traveled to these battleground states over the course of a month, holding revival meetings where they mixed the rhetoric of violent spiritual warfare with prayers for the reinstatement of Trump in the presidency.³²

[And you are surprised that this cowed every aspiring Republican politician? Trump had once again worked chaos magic.]

         This isn’t new for either America or the world. It went on in Persia, Rome, France, Saxony, Germany, and Rwanda.

•It was the moment when ordinary politicians like Mitch and Kevin realized that the “show” was real, the hyperbolic rhetoric neither hyperbolic nor rhetorical—and that encouraging sociopathy as means to political ends was like a pyromaniac doing a controlled burn.

         That’s where we still stand, between half-baked ideologues and their own stale sanctimonies, in a maw of meretricious performance art and mock crusades.

         Little Marco, Josh Hawley, and the others woke up like Indiana Pence, “These are crazy people and now they’re in our house and could kill us.” The line between pretend vigilantism and true target practice had been crossed; there were ex-military dudes and hunters carrying guns, looking for legislators. They were trigger-happy and in lynch mode. They spoke openly about it later: “We broke into the Capitol . . . we got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain but we didn’t find her.”³³

         They would have if she had turned the wrong way in the hall. They would have murdered Pence. That would not have been to Trump’s ultimate benefit.

         More to the point, the warlocks touched Ben Franklin’s implements, the stations and laptops of powers, and saw that they were empty, nothing but petrified wood, paperweights, and stale runes.

•It was a revolt against intellectual elitism, scientism, social snobbism, mandated decorum, Aristo duplicity, classist control, and a technocratic takeover of health freedom, the God code and Christic vibration. The anger over Anthony Fauci’s contribution to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute and his bumbling cover-up in that co-conspiratorial Nature Magazine article—the street didn’t need to read the publication to pick up the vibe—extended to much of the technocracy, though they did prize their own guns, tasers, and smart phones. 

•It was as much Abbie Hoffman as Enrique Tarrio, Jr. That there is no longer a distinction between symbol and reality, or corporate fascism and neo-Liberalism, means that any attempt to overthrow an American government will mix allies with enemies, and patriots (either way) with informers and spies.      

•The assault was a subconscious ritual that will continue to ripen as long as Aquarian energy is driven by Piscean hypermaterialism through clogged conduits. There is no reason otherwise why vegans, anarchists, and naturopaths should be marauding with Oath Keepers and Proud Boys under QAnon’s kōans and a Confederate flag. A friend confided, “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, always have been. But I don’t know who’s who anymore. I mean, who’s the reactionaries and who’s the progressives?”

         Scorecards are obsolete, uniforms irrelevant. The reactionaries have become the ones standing up for health freedom and food security, while the Liberals support Big Agri and Big Pharma. Who is Left and who is Right when anti-vaxx conspiracists join the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter outside Barclay Center to protest Kyrie Irving’s not being allowed to play, when the Canadian government sends out Environmental Agents in Hazmat suits to poison rivers in New Brunswick on behalf of First Nations? Even the police don’t know which law or order they are defending. Who is pretending to liberate us as they bind us in chains? 

         Do you think that Derek Chauvin was anything more than a shoddily trained, traumatized, deer-in-the-headlights underclass bully, a sacrificial lamb and scapegoat for Liberal posturing and white guilt? Democratic Party cowardice in pinning their long-term complicity on the same poor dude they will call on the next time some scary-looking guy is loitering outside their gate or stalking their daughter is as laughable as it is unconscionable. When Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi calls the cops, do you think he or she is going to care whether Derek Chauvin or Denzel Washington shows up. [Paul Pelosi did have to call and clearly didn’t care.]

•In a 1960s poem “The Alchemist,” Robert Kelly recommended taking the politicians out of the building into daylight and showing them “the fire & energy of at least one immediate star.” Otherwise, he warned, “we will walk forever down the hallways into mirrors and / stagger and look to our left hand for support & and the sun / will have set inside us & the world will be filled with Law.”³⁴

         Filled with law—that’s what authoritarian politicians on both sides of the aisle have in mind. Show them the fire & energy of at least one immediate star—in less literary terms, that’s what the January 6^th mob did—showed the Aristos the local daystar. And still we stagger and reach out for hands that aren’t there. And, as Mick Jagger sang long ago, none will ever do. Rising seas and failing banks testify to performance art as governance.

•Anyone who claims they were only White Supremacists, Right Wing seditionists, and Trump acolytes—though that’s exactly who they were—is missing the point. They were showing the heads of the town the sort of hydrogen fusion that supports their every yawp and breath, the privilege and gifts they take for granted, the photon flow behind each volt of photosynthesis, caviar, scotch, transportation, stock option, graft, pork, and privilege. They were attacking, if we didn’t know it (and they didn’t either) the theft of identity and freedom by a high-tech transhumanist hegemony, a medico-pharmaceutical monopoly, a used-car oligarchy, a surveillance state that figured out how to dupe the worst of communism and the worst of fascism into serving each other (see the next chapter on Ukraine). They were making a stand against the multinational elite and a liability-free plutocracy that seeks to take over space-time.

         They may not have grokked the machine in the garden, but they feared the demise of everything that made them human, the agency and liberty to pursue life, happiness, and everything the fuck else.

         Despite their Trumpian definition of “human,” cowboy-militia tactics, alt-right playbook, and absence of compassion and social responsibility, they were evolving from a rowdy, pugnacious adolescence in which rude boys, proud girls, and dead white zombies stage fascist theater and perform testosteroned ass-kicking. Their zodiacal vibration was not that far from the rasta battle cry: “So if you continue to burn up the herbs, / we gonna burn down the cane fields.”³⁵ That’s herbs with an aspirated Jamaican “h” for cannabis (and coups).

         We don’t know what January’s dark day of the soul will bear in coming decans. Having passed through the underworld, participants may yet molt into benigner battalions and kinder gods. But the head of the snake can’t be placated or strong-armed away; it must be met and converted. When dragons no longer look like Asian ornamentals, they will still be energy waves in the atmosphere. That’s the carpet on which Aquarius will enter, the rest of the zodiac rearranged into his tail.

Endnotes

19. “Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally Before US Capitol Riot,” sfgate.com, January 13, 2021.

20. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2021, p. 34 and Danner, “Be Ready to Fight,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 11, 2021, pp. 4 and 6 (rearranged by me).

21. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” p. 34.

22. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” p. 34 and Danner, “Be Ready to Fight,” p. 4.

23. Mary Papenfuss, “Trump ‘Induced Murderous Rage’ In Insurrection Mob, Says Former Justice Official,” Huffington Post, June 18, 2022. I have rearranged this quote for readability.

24. Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians,” TK News, Substack, January 7, 2022.

25. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” pp. 34-36.

26. Sebastian Murdock, “Trump Knew Supporters Had Weapons On Jan. 6 But Didn’t Care, Top Aide Testifies,” Huffington Post, June 28, 2022.

27. Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup,” The New York Review of Books, October 6, 2022, p. 39.

28. Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup,” The New York Review of Books, October 6, 2022, p. 39.

29 Tom LoBianco, “Trump was alerted that Cabinet considered using 25th Amendment, aide testifies,” Yahoo News, June 28, 2022.

30. Mia Jankowicz, “A judge dismissed claims by a Capitol riot suspect that he shouldn’t be held responsible because Trump put him up to it,” Business Insider, February 24, 2021.

31. Sonam Sheth, “GOP Rep. Chip Roy complained that ‘frigging Rudy needs to hush’ as Giuliani led Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election,” Yahoo Insider, April 15, 2022.

32.  Jon Ward, “Radical beliefs in ‘spiritual warfare’ played a major role in Jan. 6, an expert argues,” Yahoo News, February 16, 2023.

33. Lauren Frias, “2 women charged in Capitol riot said they were ‘looking’ for Pelosi ‘to shoot her in the friggin’ brain,’” Business Insider, January 30, 2021

34. Robert Kelly, “The Alchemist,” in Grossinger (editor), The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century, p. 131.

35. John Holt, “Police in Helicopter,” AllMusic, 1983.

5. SATURNALIA

During the March on the Capitol, various figures masqueraded as Q (or as if “sent by Q”), in buffalo robes, frontier hats, deer antlers, and red, white, and blue costumes, waving Confederate and MAGA flags. They swarmed and celebrated, sat in the presiding officer’s chair, defaced Nancy Pelosi’s office, and generally behaved more like buffalo and vandals than tourists. They imitated seizure of power while they held cell phones aloft on hand grips and posed for selfies, but they invoked the chaos magic of the actual occasion, which was ironically to advance the succession they were trying to reverse. What they smashed were their own shibboleths and spells.

         A few aimed for the real thing. Militarily organized and armed, though mostly not with rifles or automatic weapons, they stun-gunned and beat Capitol police officers. Old soldiers turned into MAGA mercenaries.

They were probably practicing for ten or twenty years down the road when states break the Articles of Confederation. The U.S., like Renaissance Europe, will disintegrate into a series of duchies, tribes, and nation states. Texas will be its own republic again. Ecotopia will claim the coastal Northwest. Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota are big enough each to go solo. Eastern Oregon and Washington and Northern Nevada and California will join Idaho, making it the third largest nation-state after Alaska and Texas.

         Once upon a time, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark journeyed into a new world—rivers, waterfalls, herds of elk and antelopes; unknown birds, plants, and medicines; hot springs, mountain ranges, salmon runs, and tribes and cultures outside the Eurasian worldview. Now Mountain State noir stretches from Colorado City to Vegas, Nevada, to Moscow, Idaho

         Hawaii will return to the Pacific confederacy as PKUA, the Polynesia Kingdom of Atooi. There are presently fifteen Pacific nations in a covenant that includes the natives of Australia; Tahiti; Tonga; the Fiji Islands; the Polynesian Triangle, made up of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia; and New Zealand. The Maori are lineal descendants of Hawaiian boatpeople, the map of New Zealand interpreted as a transposition of Kaua’i onto a southern sky and sea. The power to enforce natural law will arise from the spiritual Circle of Nations, as kings and queens of Tahiti and Polynesia will regain moral authority over Atooi and establish the kingdom of aloha everlasting.

         When I studied American history in seventh grade, the Articles of Confederation went right past me to the Constitution. I missed the fact that colonies had to be federated: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (which included Maine), the Providence Plantation, and the Province of Carolina (which included both Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee), let alone the real meaning of the Louisiana purchase, dark war of conquest with Mexico followed by the transitory Republic of Texas, Kansas and Colorado Territories, the California Republic, and then Lewis and Clark as well as how relatively recently the Pacific Northwest was settled. I read most of the Landmark history series in grade school, but I missed the gist and application. The United States of North America is a jumble of tiny nations, enclaves, royal land grants, and jurisdictions bound by an artificial membrane and map. The Articles of Confederation were no mere failed Constitution. They were essential—and foundational—for declaring independence and constitutional governance. The European Union followed suit a few centuries later.  

         All this can slowly come apart, timed by transits of Quaoar and Sedna in the Kuiper belt.

         Trump was always mercurial and retrograde, in a hurry to get nowhere fast. His tantrum didn’t gain him another four years—and it was the madness of King George to think that it would. The same sort of haste and hurrah doomed Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy; it dooms all megalomaniacs, the moment at which their ceremony concludes its magical purpose.

         The raid on Senate and House chambers, with makeshift weapons, Pan energy, and unlikely goals, was the closing act of the Trump regency. It was as abortive as a paramilitary raid and as explicit as a parable. We saw supernatural beings descend into brief human form and enact a fable scripted by an imperator. We saw masks, costumes, props, and instruments of ritual magic. We watched brief irregular round dances and mudras, a purging of ghosts and ancestors by patriotic jesters. It was a show for the ages, and it sowed seeds for generations to come, as the lengthening shadows of climate re-set the status of space-time.

Under the title “That Ol’ Time Ritual Religion,” Secret Sun blogspot dubbed the insurrection a “Saturnalia,” citing the Roman celebration of Father Time (Saturn), which (Secret Sun averred) would have fallen around January 6 or 7 by the old Julian calendar. Washington D. C.’s Capitol Hill, the site of the riot and breach of the legislative order, was named after Capitoline Hill (Mons Capitolinus), one of the Seven Hills of ancient Rome. Formerly Saturnian Hill (Mons Saturnius), it was situated between the Forum and Campus Martius. The term Capitolium (from caput, “head”) designated only the temple of Jupiter before being extended to the hill itself.

         By calculation of Secret Sun, QAnon’s invasion came seventeen days after the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn—and “Q” is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet.³³ Such ex post facto alphanumerical synchronicities are conspiracy theories that scry from putting tarot cards, or animal messengers, back in their box.

         Likewise, the resemblance of the 9/11 hijackings and demolition of the World Trade Center to the Tower card, the sixteenth greater trump (a citadel struck by lightning, figures falling) has been widely cited as Nostradamus-like.

         If we regard the January 6^th 2021, spectacle at the Capitol as a Saturnalia, then it resurrects a Roman holiday and festival of merrymaking, culminating in a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn. An elected King of Saturnalia, known in later European times as “Lord of Misrule,” gave absurd and disruptive orders to gathered celebrants, which they then carried out in a spirit of fun—a ritual restoration of Saturn’s Golden Age. Secret Sun put it this way:

         Today was a special occasion—it was the 17th day of the Great Heavenly Reconciliation, and no expense was spared to put on the greatest ritual the world has seen in 20 years. Only the best for the reunited kings of Heaven, right?

            Everyone enjoying their traditional Saturnalia pageant? It’s been a lot of fun watching Jupiter Dolichenus AKA Ba’al Hadad return to his temple on Capitoline Hill, don’t you think? 

            Well, fun for everyone except the woman who was chosen for the traditional Saturnian blood sacrifice. But you know what they all say: there can be no true religion without sacrifice. . . .

            [T]he unlucky duck was Ashli Babbit, an Air Force veteran with high security clearance. Weird coincidence, eh? Here’s another—a Twitter follower pointed out Ashli’s similarity to Asherah. Asherah being the consort of—wait for it—Ba’al Hadad.³⁴ [Secret Sun can’t tell conspiracy from synchronicity.]

         We saw the sign of Q. We saw the Lord of Misrule instruct a mob to go to the Temple of Saturn and set time retrograde. The invaders came dressed as Eurasian and Middle Eastern gods integrated into regencies of Jupiter and Saturn before the first denouement of the West, the irruption of Vandals, Huns, and Hans.

         Jupiter Dolichenus, a Slavic-Sino immigrant who ran a Masonic-like cult in the late Roman Empire, was present—he came as Hadad-Baal-Teshub, an Akkadian-Hebrew-Hurrian hybrid god, carrying Thor’s hammer. Others in attendance included Davey Crockett (King of the Wild Frontier), Buffalo Bill (bison hunter, Pony Express driver, and founder of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show), Betsy Ross (now a real-estate broker in Arizona), along with assorted Buffalo soldiers, Aurignacian shamans, patriotically attired temple maidens, and MAGA hierophants.

         The oracle deck was represented in full view. Wotan, the god of mayhem and bloodletting, performed Eleusinian oblations. Declared Jupiter Dolichenus, “The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win.” He added, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I walked through an open door, dude.”³⁵

         Carl Jung saw that door ajar in the onset of World War II:

         Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbors and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.

            Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. . . . The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were not the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness.³⁶

         The Proud Boys heard the rustling too, but they had insufficient ordnance, and the Capitol was fortified behind ceremonial maché to the level of Planet Dune.

         Still, who let those dogs in? Secret Sun wondered as much: “[H]ow did all these guys get into the Capitol Building? . .  . they just waltzed in. You can’t get behind a Macy’s jewelry counter without a mall cop showing up.” Secret Sun concluded:

         “Something wild, dark, new and absolutely unknowable is rising out there as we speak, something that will ultimately lay all of their works to waste. And nothing can stop it. That’s precisely why we have this frantic ritualism happening all the time now. Nothing new, really. It gets like this before every civilization falls.”³⁷

         That’s the truly ominous thing about the March on the Capitol: it didn’t look entirely wrong or out of place, and that’s why everything thereafter has been slightly different. The Great Saturnian Wheel is turning and, with it, the era of peremptory principalities. Saturnalia is not the only ceremony breaking through the masks of secularity; we should expect future busks, soyals, shembes, tohis, and gorseddaus.

In any case, it was definitely a china shop and also definitely a bull.

   Endnotes

36. Secret Sun Blogspot, “That Ol’ Time Ritual Religion,”  January 7, 2021.

37. Secret Sun Blogspot, “That Ol’ Time Ritual Religion,” January 7, 2021.

38. Rick Schapiro and Michael Kosner, “Capital rioter in horned hat gloats as police hasten to arrest rioters,” NBC News, January 7. 2021.

39. Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition.

40. Secret Sun Blogspot, “That Ol’ Time Ritual Religion,” January 7, 2021.

6. LOSE THE BUM!

The January 6^th March created shifting politics of convenience. It was at once the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 and a rowdy tourist event that got out of control. Concordia University sociologist Marc-André Argentino noted how swiftly Trump supporters pivoted to blaming the mob on Antifa in MAGA costumes or on CIA infiltrators. To them, the invaders looked less like NRA patriots than Left Wing pranksters or Deep State moles. Propagandists have no sense of creative chaos or irony.

         “All of a sudden,” wrote journalist Caitlin Dickson, “when they realized . . . that it wasn’t the revolution they expected, then they really pushed the false-flag narrative.” The attack on Congress “had morphed into a ‘part of this massive plan to try to destroy America and more specifically, Trump.”⁴¹

         When Trump more or less conceded (briefly), acolytes rationalized, “It’s just a ruse. He had to say that to protect the mission. Our journey is just beginning . . . trust the plan. The 5D chess move is coming! Wild times are ahead!”

         Republican pollster Frank Luntz canvassing Trump supporters marvelled at the phenomenon, “He’s become the voice of God for tens of millions of people, and they will follow him to the ends of the earth and off the cliff.”⁴² The energy was like no focus group he had conducted and was hard to explain. Once apostles bond with their godman, he could be a weaver with a jackass’s head or a yogi with 74 Rolls Royces, but they stay as loyal as a gosling to a mother goose.

         Believers didn’t see a grifter or a despot, they saw Orange Jesus.

         Trump addressed the events from the safety of his quarters in a typical martyr’s fog, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long.”

         Sacred? Wasn’t it obvious that he meant Numero Uno, not great patriots? It was pure rhetoric, the star-spangled banana.

         For some insurrectionists, the spell was broken. They turned against 45, declaiming him as a traitor to his own cause: “Lock him up and execute him,” said one disillusioned loyalist. “The poor little rich bitch is covering his own assets.”

         His supposed enemy was Aristos, internationalists, Davos technocrats, and the Great Resetters. Problem was, Trump was a vested member and fellow traveller, a tech-loving Aristo and wannabe potentate. He was a closet fascist and terminal Narcissus captivated by his own reflection because, without it, he didn’t exist.

Nick Fuentes, host of the America First podcast and unofficial chief of the white nationalist Groyper Army, similarly saw through the act, “People were willing to die for this man and he just threw them all under the bus. That’s the only thing that’s shameful about the events of the past 36 hours.”⁴³

         “What did you expect from a New York City liberal?” asked a cowboy in a gathering of cowhands at a café in rural Oklahoma. The Okies had played him as he played them.

         “Fuck you, Trump you left us on the battlefield bloody and alone,” declared Proud Boys sergeant-at-arms Ethan Nordean on Trump’s last day in the office. He added later, “Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. . . . Yes, he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us . . .  and it never happened. Now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guy’s lead and never questioned it. . . . We are now and always have been on our own. So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and shit on us on the way out.”⁴⁴

        As my stepfather used to say about New York phonies decades before Donald came on the scene from Queens, and I will pass his advice on to MAGA disciples, though they don’t want to hear from me: “Lose the bum!” Play your own hand and let’s see what you’ve got. You don’t need him!

Albert Watkins, attorney for Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman, cited his client’s Asperger’s-like susceptibility while invoking the large number of tricked and misled Americans among the Capitol mob: “[T]hey’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers—they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.”⁴⁵

         A peace-maker, mediator, and vegan, Jacob had a manic side vulnerable to possession by political voodoo. He went a little amok and paid an asymmetric price.

As a false prophet, Trump occupied the satsang between a zombie apocalypse and a real liberation army, more Scrooge McDuck or Vince McMahon than Moses or Mao. He wanted to rule from midnight munchies and cola sloth. There was no real fight in him, though he was a maestro of threat. He wasn’t going to give up his class privilege. In any real revolution, he would morph back into the ruling class. Much of his base forgave him because, in his shoes, they would have, too.

         Journalist Cheryl Teh described the illusion of power and patronage that Trump cast:   

         Gordon Sondland, a one-time ambassador to the European Union, said working for former President Donald Trump was fabulous at first, but went bad very quickly. “Over time, though, I realized that working with Trump was like staying at an all-inclusive resort. You’re thrilled when you first arrive, but things start to go downhill fast. . . . [E]ventually, you begin to wonder why you agreed to the deal in the first place.”⁴⁶

Trump’s adulation of vaccines reflected not only their home-town branding (Trump Warp Speed) but a sixties mind that took its cues from mass merchandizing: Hilton, Tiffany’s, Cadillac, Proctor & Gamble, Pfizer, the Mirage, Mr. Clean. He liked hydroxychloroquine and bleach for their off-brand luster and a chance to appear the smartest guy in the room.

         A paranoid devotee of the Medical Industrial Complex, once he instigated Warp Speed, he had to be pro-vaxx. A large portion of his fan base didn’t understand or want to understand. They considered any vaxx enthusiasm misguided. The following dialogue, as Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser accompanied Anthony Fauci through a neighborhood, is probably from the Left rather than the Right, but it’s the same argument:

One man challenged the renowned doctor and the Democratic major by saying that “the people in America are not settled with the information that’s been given to us right now. So, I’m not going to be lining up taking a shot on a vaccination for something that wasn’t clear in the first place.”

 He pressed Fauci and Bowser about the length of time it took to develop the vaccine and said, “Nine months is definitely not enough for nobody to be taking no vaccination that you all came up with.”

Bowser defended the vaccine by saying, “The only reason I’m talking to you right now, as close as we are, is that I’ve been vaccinated,” as she stood about six feet from the man on the front porch of his home. “But if thousands of people like you don’t get vaccinated, you’re going to let this virus continue to percolate in this country and in this world.”

“Something like the common flu then, right?” the man interjected.

Fauci [then] defended the vaccine by saying that the technology to develop it had been in the works for 20 years, and that in 2020, approximately 30,000 people died from the flu compared to the reported 600,000 deaths by COVID-19 as of June 2021.

The man appeared unmoved, challenging the data by saying, “Again, that’s you all’s number.”

The man said he “definitely” would pass on getting vaccinated “because when you start talking about paying people to get vaccinated, when you start talking about incentivizing things to get people vaccinated, it’s something else going on with that. [Your] campaign is about fear. It’s about inciting fear in people. You all attack people with fear. That’s what this pandemic is. It’s a fear, it’s fear, this pandemic. That’s all it is,” he said as Fauci and Bowser walked away.⁴⁷

         Trump fared no better with his own crowd.

“He needs an intervention from a friend,” said [Wayne Alan] Root . . . a longtime political commentator and conspiracy theorist, “because he’s the greatest president of my lifetime. I love him. I will always love him . . . . He’s been right on everything except this issue [the vaccine]. He’s so horribly wrong on this issue.”⁴⁸

         Sorry, Wayne; that was no incidental deviation.

         A woman from the MAGA audience in Orlando commented on Trump’s 2022 pro-vaxx road show with broadcaster Bill O’Reilly: “He said take the vaccine, but we all booed and said no,” she recalled. “He heard us loud and clear because the Amway Center was packed. We let him know ‘no’ and a couple of us even hollered out, ‘It’s killing people!’”

         Then came the article’s prefab “vaxx be praised” mantra: “There is no scientific basis to the claim that the vaccines are killing people. In fact, they have demonstrably saved thousands of lives. But Moore is indicative of the extreme anti-vaccine sentiment consuming the base of the Republican party–a monster that Trump himself can no longer control.”⁴⁹

         He could never control the advanced snake that he unleashed, for it has many heads. Among the heads most unhappy at Trump, was pseudo-journalist Alex Jones remarking on his podcast: “Hell, we’re fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden and the New World Order and Psaki and the Davos Group. And now we’ve got Trump on their team!”⁵⁰ Demented and inhumane as Jones is, he is unpredictably gonzo. On Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, he tweeted: “It’s like some homoerotic, you know, thing over Hitler. That is, kinda, what’s going on. There’s this Hitler fetish. And no, I’m not into dudes in fancy, you know, peacock military uniforms.”⁵¹

No, Trump is not indispensable to MAGA. Lose the bum!

Republicans are stuck in a political Catch-22. They can’t attack Trump or the January 6^th riot without wrecking their brand. Yet they can’t get broader power for their brand without repudiating election denialism and QAnon hyperbole, unless by authoritarian takeover and by actually fixing elections. And they can’t admit any of it publicly. The Dominion suit exposed the hypocrisy of Fox, Tucker Carlson, and crew:

         Host Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, as well as others, disparaged Trump’s henchmen, including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani in messages — casting doubt on claims that Dominion’s machines had rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor, according to the legal filing made public on Thursday. Dominion alleges that the network’s hosts gave Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani a platform to lie about the voting process.

“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS,’” the filing states, which cited excerpts from evidence collected in the suit. The nearly 200-page court filing includes text messages, internal emails, and depositions Dominion gathered via discovery from Fox News over the past few months. . . . [Like Grizzly Joe said, “Show me the freakin’ Kraken!”]

Carlson texted his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, two days after Election Day 2020 warning that the network’s decision to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night would have severe repercussions for Fox News.

“We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson messaged Pfeiffer on Nov. 5, 2020, according to the filing. “Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

Pfeiffer responded that “many on ‘our side’ are being reckless demagogues right now.”

“Of course, they are,” Carlson wrote. “We’re not going to follow them.” He added that Trump was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” [So what side is Tucker on? Or is he going to play it both ways with Trump-taught duplicity?]

On Nov. 13, per the document, Carlson texted Pfeiffer that Trump needed to concede “that there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election, and later texted that Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, was “lying” about having evidence for election fraud.

In another text exchange a few days later, as stated in the legal filing, Carlson repeated his concerns to Ingraham, writing that “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham replied, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson responded, “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”⁵²

Lose the bum! He’s not interested in you or America or making anything but himself great. Again, he doesn’t love America; he hates it, and Americans, who they are, what they look like, and how they behave. I define “stooge” as anyone with a fraction of the equity of the conman to whom they are sending their hard-earned wages.

Lose the bum!

I define nitwit as gay and trans haters who somehow fall hook, line, and sinker for a drag queen, George Santos, and elect his drag ass to Congress. I define as chump any Ron DeSantis supporter who doesn’t see the closet drag queen in his homophobic, hyper-macho performances.

And any country that can’t keep a verified crook and grifter out of high office, let alone its presidency, is at risk of rot from the core despite all its economic and military merits. Trump with his Disneyland cast of Stooges and Edward Lear characters is a national death wish, per conservative writer Charles C. W. Clarke: “[He is] ranting like a hobo in a dilapidated public park.”⁵³ Except that that park is everywhere, and his audience includes half the elected Republican officials, while the Democrats counter with an obsolete rudderless ship. 

Lose all the bums!

Instead of Trump versus Biden, I’d like to see a bi-partisan ticket, maybe military vet and former NFLer Anthony Gonzalez with military pilot Tammy Duckworth: courage versus bloviation, national unity versus Left and Right authoritarianisms.

 Yet the bum still has a third of the country wound around his pinky. Carlos Lozada writes:

         Special counsel reports don’t deter him. Vote counts don’t deter him. Not even the Constitution fazes Trump, whose recent call for the document’s “termination” is the ultimate battle against paper. His initial response to the Jan. 6 committee’s conclusion that he committed multiple federal crimes reflected a standard Trump tactic. “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me,” he declared. “It strengthens me.” Trump always tries to turn paper fights into personality fights and then rallies people to defend him. For Trump, personality beats paper, and the support of his people beats everything. . . .

Personality, paper and people are not just three ways to understand Trump. Even Haberman admits at the end of “Confidence Man” that, despite her best efforts, “almost no one really knows him.” They are also three lenses through which to make sense of the politics we are living through and the history we are writing. In her book, Haberman suggests that what began as Trump’s “personality-driven populism” has hardened into a longer-term political realignment. In “The Divider,” [Peter] Baker and [Susan] Glasser conclude that “there will be no return to the pre-Trump era of American politics.” [Robert] Draper wonders if both Trump and [Marjorie Taylor] Greene have become victims of their success, if they risk being “drowned out amid the Greek chorus of MAGA supplicants.”

One of the great questions of this time has always been whether Trump changed the country or revealed it more clearly. The answer is yes; it is both. He changed America by revealing it. On Jan. 6, Trump was the man who could win the country back for those who yearned for him long before they imagined him.⁵⁴ [Orange Jesus!]

I will add a piece of personal Trumpiana here:

         My cousin Mark Etess perished on October 10, 1989, when the main overhead blade and tail rotor broke off his leased helicopter in Jersey over the Garden State Parkway. He and two fellow young execs gaped in horror as their vehicle plunged onto the median near Forked River and exploded in a ball of fire. They had mere seconds in which to comprehend their transition from worldly luxury to the end of secular time.

         Was it accident or a deed more foul? Chief operating officer of Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal at the time, Mark was thirty-eight years old with two young children. The trio was returning from a Midtown press conference to promote a forthcoming junior welterweight match between Vinny Pazienza and Hector Camacho at Trump Plaza.

         They were apparently collateral damage—someone trying to send a message so direct that even a narcissistic thug couldn’t mistake its intent. One rumor had the Russian mafia giving the Donald a Zen slap, Slavic style; another blamed domestic gambling interests, warning the upstart to stay out of Vegas. To a reporter, Trump said, “I was meant to be on that chopper.”

         Or perhaps, per the police report, two rotors synchronously hit metal fatigue.

         After hiring a private detective to look into the matter, Mark’s widow was visited by a pair in black with East European accents, not Pleiadians. After their terse warning, she elected not to put her children at risk. Or at least so the family scuttlebutt went. Who knows after numerous intervening Jewish raconteurs?

         Thirty years later, my Aunt Elaine told me two side stories. Her son had negotiated handshake deals with numerous performers for gigs at the Taj Mahal. After Mark’s death, boss Trump used the absence of signed documents as an excuse not to honor them. “You want to discuss the matter?” he said to an unhappy Perry Como. “Your deal is with Etess. Go see him.” He pointed. “He’s at the cemetery. That way, down the road.”

Elaine’s younger son Mitchell was supposed to be on the flight. “Thank you, God,” she sighed, “for not taking both of them!”⁵⁵

Trump wants to run again in 2024. He has multiple reasons, none of them patriotic. He wants another shot at Sleepy Joe: Rowdy Roddy versus Captain America. He assumes that more people are looking forward that than an old-fashioned campaign: politics as Hollywood with ugly people. 

         He wants to wreak revenge on a roster of enemies. He’s a sadist, plutocrat, and recreational vandal. He wants to finish blowing up the experiment in democracy. His love of America is actually hatred for everything American. He’s bored with anything less than the full spotlight. Once he experienced that, one bimbo looked like another.

         He wants to wipe liability for a scorecard of crimes going back to pubescence.

         He wants to lounge around the Big House, drink sodas, eat junk food, get waited on after midnight, play Uber with Air Force One, and turn his brood into a Royal Family again.

         He craves mud fights and applause.

         He wants to raise money by cult appeals and re-launch the Trump Brand. It was the easiest bucks he ever made.

Initially, 45 was as thrilled by his Saturnalia as 43 was by Shock and Awe. But U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq unleashed a golem that had been locked in permafrost since Babylonia and Persia. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and gang thought they were crushing a Third World gnat when they were kicking a hornet’s nest. The Islamic State was merely the first of the leviathans to emerge from pre-Egyptian catacombs.

         It was never about Citizen Trump. He was a blimp in a Saturnian superwind. MAGA was a gimmick raised to a brand, then a sigil and egregore. As he sat before his telly, refusing requests from his advisors, allies, and family to call off the mob, he relished the show with every embittered sinew. He said to the RINOs, “See, some folks are apparently more upset than you by the Steal. You gonna doubt me and let me get cheated out of office. Well, dig this!”

         MAGA’s answer, down the road, will be: “Well then, dig this, boss!”

I see four interpretations of the Insurrection on Capitol Hill: Left and Right Wing political, and Right and Left Hands of QAnon,

         •Left Wing political: Trump is a delusional madman. Those were sorts of vigilantes and deplorables who brought motorcycles to Sturgis and tried to kidnap and hang the Governor of Michigan. Trump sent them to the Capitol to stop the count and overturn a democratic election. The havoc was even worse than the optics—there’s a reason why five people died. The insurrectionists carried nooses, guns, and zip ties; they wanted to hold a kangaroo court and hang Mike Pence. A police officer was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher, MAGA’s own women were trampled and shot. That blood is on Trump’s hands; he unleashed an American Kristallnacht.

Invoke the 25^th Amendment. Get the nuclear launch codes out of his hands.

         •Right Wing political: We deplore the violence and invasion; it was inexcusable. We are the Law-and-Order party. But there’s a barge full of horseshit here. Five people didn’t die because of the riot, and no one was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher or snuffed with bear spray. The New York Times retracted. Democracy was never in danger. It was patriotic enthusiasm, hyper-tourism, First Amendment political expression that, for a small percentage, got out of hand.

         Pelosi and Schumer, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, stop your hypocrisy! When Black Lives Matter crowds turned into packs and began burning and looting businesses last summer—and yes, people died in those riots too, and livelihoods were lost, notably in urban ghettos—you excused, justified, even applauded them as freedom fighters and democrats in action. Those riots collectively make January 6^th look like Octoberfest with a few too many beers. Do only rednecks cross your line?

         Two insurrections, each with its own grievances and “cancel culture,” light up each other in the American psyche? You can’t have the Invasion of the Capitol without superfly gangs and Antifa stooges masquerading as social-justice warriors. One vandalism begets the other.

         •Right Hand of QAnon: The Storm, the day of reckoning for the pedophiliac cabal; FBI, CIA, and Secret Police fanning out at the sign of the breach of the Capitol, putting Satanists and pedophiles on trial, executing them by firing squad, rope, and guillotine, reinstalling the Trump regnancy.

         When that didn’t happen: Antifa false flag.

         •Left Hand of QAnon: Saturnalia.

Endnotes

41. Caitlin Dickson, “After failed attack on Capitol, QAnon asks if it can still ‘trust the plan,’” Yahoo News, January 9, 2021.

42. Jake Lahut, “Ex-GOP pollster Frank Luntz says ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ after ‘unity’ themed focus group goes off the rails,’” Business Insider, Yahoo News, January 21, 2021.

43. Nick Fuentes @NickJFuentes, Twitter, January 7, 2021.

44. Sebastian Murdock, “Proud Boys Leader Charged in Capitol Attack Feels Betrayed by Trump: ‘You Left Us,’” Huffington Post,May 14, 2021.

45. Erin Snodgrass, “’QAnon Shaman’ lawyer makes offensive comments about Capitol rioters: ‘They’re all f—ing short-bus people’,” Business Insider, May 18, 2021.

46. Cheryl Teh, “Gordon Sondland said working for Trump was like staying at an all-inclusive resort: ‘You’re thrilled when you first arrive, but things start to go downhill fast,’” Business Insider, October 20, 2022.

47. Brianna Herlihy, “Fauci, DC Mayor Bowser rejected as they sell COVID Vaccine Door-to-Door,” Fox News, March 20, 2023

48. Kelsey Vlamis, “A right-wing radio host said Trump needs an ‘intervention from a friend’ after the former president advocated for the COVID-19 vaccine,” Business Insider, Yahoo News, December 29, 2021.

49. David Smith “‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour,” Yahoo News, February 5, 2022.

50. Kelsey Vlamis, “A right-wing radio host said Trump needs an ‘intervention from a friend’ after the former president advocated for the COVID-19 vaccine,” Business Insider, Yahoo News, December 29, 2021.

51. Zachary Petrizzo, “Alex Jones Goes to War With Kanye West and Nick Fuentes Over ‘Homoerotic’ Hitler Fascination,” Daily Beast, September 6, 2022.

52. Charisma Madarang, “Tucker Carlson Calls Trump ‘Demonic Force’ in New Legal Filing,” Rolling Stone, February 16, 2023.

53. Ed Mazza, “Conservative Columnist Shreds ‘Deranged Hobo’ Trump: ‘Lost His Grip On Reality,’” Huffington Post, January 26, 2023.

54 Carlos Lozada, “How the House of Trump Was Built,” New York Times Opinion, January 1, 2023.

55.Richard Grossinger, Out of Babylon, Cambridge, Maine: Lammastide forthcoming, 2024.

7. THE EIGHTH SPHERE

At the heart of post-modernism is a mostly unexamined conceit: anything that feels the least bit visionary, heartful, or hopeful is rejected or ridiculed because the zeitgeist is committed to the existential death of the planet and universe, a final deliverance from the ambiguities of colonialism, capitalism, quantum-entangled particles, and the crisis of consciousness. Modernity cannot solve its own reality, so it would just as soon throw it back in.

         Though it looks like the end of the world or of civilization, it isn’t; it’s a spell, an induced apocalypse, a thoughtform that’s taken hold and is so persuasive when you’re inside it nothing else seems real.⁵⁶

         The educated elite buy into a dark, self-flagellating verdict across the echo chambers of its ordained media zone, in the politics of suspicion and zero-sum rivalry and negation, and in Nobel committees’ repudiation of spirit and celebration of suffering and martyrdom. Anything counter to apocalyptic philosophy is considered puerile or pabulum.

         Our current world phase is Atlantean: ancestral atavism plus rapt worship of machines, potions, and cyborg identities—robots fashioned of gears and algorithms, life forms scanned by black magic, alembics and athanors in the wet markets of the Empire, life converted to synthetic biology and biological warfare.

        But, despite appearances, the gloom-and doom hallucination has been slowly lifting, shedding its carapace. Its shadow is deepening, as shadows will when a new star rises. It was a conspiracy against Earth, against the power and vitality of what our existence and planet really are. Reality was a molecular shell devoid of soul, which science tells us alone is real.

We needed an industrial revolution to free the serfs and found suburbs and shopping malls and get us out of a demon-infested world. Along the way, we lost witchcraft, spirit guidance, and magic. We stopped believing, in anything.

         Trump was hanging on so desperately because he took the eternal return of the old order— Saturnian reality—personally. He tried to be himself forever. Saturn wants his festival—Time Itself—never to end. That is why Saturn never leaves.

MAGA served Piscean evangelicals as well as the Eighth Sphere.

         In her “starseed calling,”Azores-based psychic Patricia Cori proposed that the secret purpose of new technologies is to damage or disconnect the twelve-stranded DNA Code or God chip within us, “leading to the robotization of our species, the creation of soulless chimeras . . .  and enslavement of sovereign souls.” She adds:

          Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Elon Musk… these individuals are openly discussing the merging of humans with technology in the media, in conferences and public events, massaging the mass mind into believing it is a good thing that we leave our natural biology behind, to merge with computers. In a recent speech he delivered at a World Economic Forum gathering, Klaus Schwab’s top adviser, Yuval Noah Harari, told an audience of his peers that humans are “hackable animals” and that, in the future, we will acquire superpowers we could never have imagined, and apparently that we are going to learn more about ourselves than we had ever dreamed possible because of it. His position, as supreme spokesman for the transhumanist agenda, is that we should get used to the idea that we are not “mysterious souls” at all, and that the idea of free will is nothing more than a pitiful illusion.⁵⁷

          Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt claimed that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”⁵⁸

         “Beneficent” is a delusion, confusing DNA for the God code which comes from All That Is via the Monadic and Atmic through Causal, Astral, and Etheric planes, imperceptible though these be through our operating system.

         Phases of the transhumanist fantasy go back to the golem homunculus and its activating bindis: a conviction that our conscious agenda must gain everlasting primacy over our unconscious shadow. The machine, already no more than a projection of our brain into organized matter—microtubules, synapses, and virtual memory—encompasses both the luminosity of consciousness and density of incarnation (like the sky which is both transparent and opaque). Countercultural scholar Erik Davis called our new “science” TechGnosis, meaning the porting of “data-souls out of the body and into a digital otherworld. . . .”⁵⁹

         Our incarnation and destiny as humans rest on a translation of our humanity into the mechanism and AI: glorified abacuses, motherboards, and clocks.

A deeper encrypted alphabet permeates Eurasian religions from Kether of the Hebrew Zohar and Brahma of the Hindu Vedas to rabbinical messiahs of the Apocrypha. On the Zohar’s Tree of Life, the final signal or sephira, Malkhut (Kingship), has remained partially intact yet, as exiled Shekhinah (Persephone)—the feminine divine immanence—sinks onto the material plane. It is her-in-us that we are trying to revive and restore. The Eighth Sphere has separated us from the Magdalene code and vibration and put us into the current matrix and its zombie trance. According to blogger marcohanuman:

The Eighth Sphere is the great deception, the great illusion, the great seduction. In our post-modern reality:

• It’s a world of Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram at their worst.

• It’s every man-woman-boy-and-girl with a mobile dildo.

• It’s Prison Planet Earth, no escape; vaccines are there now.

• It is globalist control of all human beings right down to the DNA level.

• It is satanic ideology that turns all values upside-down.

• It is a fake media culture with systemic lies and propaganda.

• These are false-flag operations where people and cattle run into the fold for slaughter.

• It is Hollywood, perversions, amorality and the degradation of society and civilization.

• It is systemic corruption, mafia rule and global fascism.

• It is eternal wars, genocide, divide and conquer.

• It is a global banking system whose main cause is the slave chains of debt.

• It is global technocracy, where the whole man is quantifiable and manipulable.

• It’s the new normal, the transhumanist reality where all human beings on Earth submit with face masks, social distancing, censorship and ‘willingly’ (in fear that is) give up ALL civil rights.⁶⁰

         It is also the recoil of our own AI. It took the internet, 1999’s ectoplasmic matrix, twenty or thirty years to fill in a surrogate reality so that pretty much every pawn and pixel was accounted for. It will take AI, 2023’s fully populated and carpeted Halloween party, less than a year to create an even more vivid “porn hub” with suction to separate body-minds from souls. AI is the internet’s internet.

You don’t have to believe this lock, stock, and barrel to intuit a Saturnian spider with Plutonian transits, zodiacal trances, and quarterly reminders of Mercury retrograde.

When devotees gathered in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza for the resurrection of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash off Nantucket, literally assembled at the site of his father’s assassination in 1963, they were conducting a “calling” in the only way they knew, given the fog of messianism and agitprop.⁶¹ The pack seemed delusional, absorbed in cult narcissism, but they were attempting divination of the planet’s death field. They were claiming the right to make up their own stories, even if they didn’t believe them.

         It’s what happens when untrained worshippers enter an astral zone without compasses or avatars; everything gets tossed everywhere. They weren’t wrong, they were a thousand years too early, as they arranged themselves in a giant Q.

Endnotes

56. This is my retransmission of an Ellias Lonsdale psychic reading.

57. Psychic medium Patricia Cori discusses this in her various Starseed books and her self-published title, Hacking the God Code: The Conspiracy to Steal the Human Soul—How to Preserve, Protect and Enhance Your DNA as You Ascend Out of the Matrix.

58. Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI),” tabletmag.com, June 14, 2022.

59. Erik Davis, TechGnosis, p. 119.

60. See the website magazine www.nedersteetageage.com for my source.

61. Nicholas Reimann, “QAnon Supporters Pack Site of JFK Assassination in Hopes JFK Jr. (And Maybe His Dad) Will Return,” Forbes.Com, November 22, 2021.

Chapter Seven

Ukraine

1. Pandora’s Jar

I finished The Return of the Tower of Babel initially in February 2022 with “Saturnalia,” but the Russian invasion of Ukraine encompasses or supersedes many of my prior topics. I wrote drafts of this chapter’s Sections 2 through 7 between March and September, 2022, but broader moral and geopolitical issues have played out since. I added this preamble and will post the others next with updates.

Though the release of spirits or energies by Vladimir Putin’s so-called special westward operation are not curses or evils in the sense of Hesiod’s tale of a girl who opened a container meant to be kept shut by humans—more a jar or amphora than a box—they are shifts in the world order of the last forty or seventy years depending on how you count. My earlier description of the war attempted to take all its causes into account. while this section’s overview summarizes more current priorities.

•The German genocide and concentration camps of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stand out as a singular abomination of the last century, though they were hardly isolated acts of dehumanization, genocide, sadomasochism, and enslavement. They stand out partly because they took place in supposedly civilized Europe and because their anti-Semitic, anti-gypsy, anti-gay rhetoric and follow-through were so abhorrent and dehumanizing that even those who carry out near identical acts these days in India, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc., publicly dissociate themselves from their Hitlerisms. Though there were also complex economic and political causes for the rise of the Third Reich and Second World War, their significance faded after the liberation of the concentration camps. Bestiality, the technology of mass murder and dispossession, and unabashed premeditated genocide overshadowed national ambitions.

         That brings me to Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Putin presents himself to the world as a sane, honorable man, in fact a counterforce to Naziism, but when you bomb cities, schools, factories, hospitals, apartment buildings, power grids, and infrastructure; set loose armies with encouragement to rape, loot, torture, dismember, and murder civilians as well as each other (and not just in Ukraine but Chechnya and Syria); use prisoners as cannon fodder; hire mercenaries to kidnap children from war zones and take them into your territory to indoctrinate them against their parents and homeland; and evidence no scruples against or place limits on carnage, terror, and extermination well outside the Geneva rules to achieve raw territorial goals, then any rhetorical distinction between you and Hitler is moot. I also don’t imagine that you have run up any less karma. 

•NATO is not the First Earth Brigade or a mere peace-loving defensive alliance, but Putin’s response to its geopolitics and his punishment of the Ukrainian people for wanting to be part of Europe is militarily and practically out of scale and morally impoverished, and will solve nothing for anyone, short or long term. Putin’s genocide is as matter-of-fact and drug-spiked as Hitler’s but even colder and more gratuitous. He earned the hatred of the Ukrainian people, at best an unending guerrilla war replicating the Soviet Union’s ultimate bleed-out in Afghanistan, and the consolidation of regional powers wanting to stay independent. If the eastward expansion of NATO required a Russian countermove, savvier, cheaper, and less miscreant options were available.

•An East-West geopolitical alignment was inevitable because of 1. twenty-first-century ecological and demographic forces, 2. a couple of generations born since the internet, and 3. a growing global population’s competition for finite technologies, resources, and infinite algorithms and information. (No, Dr. Fukuyama, history did not end with the fall of the Berlin wall despite a tech utopia, or dystopia, of jets, telegraphs, toasters, transistors, copiers, software, xenobots, drones, and 5-G, and a collusion of capitalist and communist nations in a chimera of freedom and bubble worlds governed by political parties and marketing groups.)

Russia and China feel similarly blocked by the West, geographically, culturally, and in terms of currencies and banking systems. Two collectivist nations orginating in Communist revolutions have turned into capitalist oligarchies that still don’t buy into the Western world order. While China is a more cohesive cultural, economic, and intellectual force than Russia and a greater contributor to global culture (from numbers and medicines to chi and Confucianism), together they are pushing against Euro-American restraints on their ambitions. The Chinese may be privately aghast at Putin’s brutality, vulgarity, and vandalism, but China is aligned with Russia on a Eurasian axis, and Xi and his cronies are not certain that they won’t commit the same crimes in Taiwan or have not committed them in Tibet, Xinjiang, Gansu, and Ningxia.

In any case, it is no longer viable for the West to base a global order solely on its own definition of territory, security, and international law, though I question whether Russian and Chinese definitions coincide with each other much beyond the use of collectivist language for one-party rule and the strategic similarities between Ukraine and Taiwan. China is still much more Western, with its Taoist and Buddhist legacy and transfigurations, than Russia with its throwback Crusades Christianity and Ottoman orthodoxy.

•The Russian and Chinese definitions of the world order are retro-colonialist and fundamentally authoritarian and hegemonic. It may not be the world’s future but a past imperial phase. Still, Putin and Xi agree, as long as they are part of the gang in charge rather than one of the underlings, authoritarian governments are the way to go. We worked or clawed our way up to the top, so let’s be everlasting boss pals as long as we and our regimes live.

         The problems with this are demographic (not enough people want to raise children in dictatorships), fiscal (not enough workers throw themselves into making money for the party or king), and imaginal (people are less creative under constant vigilance and redaction by Orwellian bureaucrats). That’s what the Ukrainians and Chinese in Taiwan are willing to fight for: freedom, good old dull-as-rain freedom in place of bullying, incarceration, and pogrom.

If Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia are not countries, then Tibet, Taiwan, Poland, Hungary, and Finland are not countries either. They are parts of empires, of spheres of influence. Journalist John Haltiwanger summarized Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s view in the context of a presently irresolvable war:

Blinken said in a new interview with NPR that there’s a slim chance of Kyiv and Moscow reaching a peace deal as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin behaves as if Ukraine is not a real country: “Vladimir Putin has to give up on his notion that Ukraine is not its own country, that it needs to be erased from the maps and subsumed into Russia. He’s already failed at that. But he seems to continue to believe that that’s what he’s trying to achieve. And unless he’s disabused of that notion, it’s hard to see how peace can really move forward.”

. . . Blinken also told NPR that any peace agreement would need to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, otherwise it would not be a “just peace and a durable peace.”

“If we ratify the seizure of land by another country and say ‘that’s okay, you can go in and take it by force and keep it,’ that will open a Pandora’s box around the world for would-be aggressors that will say, ‘Well, we’ll do the same thing and get away with it,'” Blinken added.

Western leaders and officials have repeatedly warned that if Russia wins in Ukraine it could inspire other world leaders with imperialistic ambitions to act on them.”¹

^•The invasion of Ukraine suggests the neo-imperialist and neo-colonial reptile brain running hominid geopolitics. Aside from a friendship of dictators who celebrate the same birth year and hardscrabble upbringings, Xi supports Putin because they share similar ambitions. Like Napoleon and Hitler, they have appetites for their neighbors’ lands, citing historical boundaries, which fluctuate, as justification.

         But why? In a world map adjusted for economics, Apple, Google, and Amazon are bigger than Russia. Plus, China and Taiwan have a much more delicate and complex territorial standoff than Russia and Ukraine, though it is the same principle: regional claims and East versus West. Taiwan is the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors and a significant contributor to other parts of global technology. A Chinese attack on the island would disrupt world commerce and be nearly as detrimental to a future China as to a future Taiwan.

What about something more contemporary like a corporate merger or stock option?

We see how successfully the Chinese Communist Party protected its assets in Hong-Kong and reduced its karma in Tibet. There surely are better ways to have “One China” than missiles and bombs dropped on civilians and operating factories, perhaps something more like One God, Two Paths. Adding Taiwan by force will add something more like and it may also be mutually assured destruction.

The CCP response to Nancy Pelosi’s unnecessary visit to Taiwan was as reptilian a threat-display as modern war dances get—jets and ships maneuvering around the island like mechanical dinosaurs, wolf packs, and ape bands, though it was preferable to Putin’s paroxysm in Ukraine. And Pelosi’s confrontational hiss was just as reptilian.

•My support for Ukraine is based on admiration for the courage, imagination, and ironical humor of the Ukrainian people. I accept that Ukraine harbors corruption and prejudice, but I don’t buy its portrayal as one of the most corrupt countries on earth. My support is also defined by where I’d rather live. Ask yourself. Would you rather live under the Zelenskyy regime or under Putin;s Kremlin? While censorship is also increasing in the United States under pressure from both the Left and Right and is also an issue in Ukraine, the dilemma of a Russian teenager is atavistically Soviet:

The Year 8 student drew a picture showing a woman standing underneath a Ukrainian flag, shielding her child from rockets flying towards them, with a Russian flag painted below.

[The girl’s father, Alexei] Moskalev in an interview with OVD-Info earlier this year said the school’s arts teacher and principal were unnerved by the girl’s drawing.

“They kept saying: ‘You see what you’ve been teaching your child? Just look what she drew,’” he said, quoting a conversation when he was summoned to the school the following day.

“(Maria and I) were led into the police car and students were watching. It was as if we were terrorists who were being detained.”²

Unless you’d rather live in Russia, to take the Russian side as an act of political and intellectual virtuosity is hypocritical and sanctimonious.

•Is it not bizarre that the two groups most strongly supporting (or rationalizing) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are the authoritarian Right, exemplified by Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the Tea Party wing of Congress, and some of my old friends and colleagues on the Left who nurse CIA conspiracy theories going back to the John F. Kennedy assassination and including 9/11 and UFOs? These concur in a view of American sabotage of Putin’s many attempts to get a peaceful solution to matters of security on Russia’s Western border and protection of Russian speakers in former Soviet-bloc republics. Do you believe that Putin made such attempts or merely virtue-signalled them?

The “Make America Great Again” Right loves the Kremlin’s white, Christian, anti-gay, anti-art, repressive, authoritarian regime. The reactionary Left despises American capitalism, colonialism, and neo-Liberal entitlement and suspects a corporate transnational conspiracy in the works, so they would cut off their nose to spite their face and support a polity they couldn’t live in. Both sides mistrust the Deep State and technocrats. I agree with them on transhumanism, vaccines, and the spiritual vacuity of the West, but I don’t agree on the invasion of Ukraine, either its cause or its goal.

•While Tucker Carlson is a useful, if often disingenuous, voice on “health freedom” and uncritical “woke” self-righteousness, I don’t view him as a legitimate journalist or well-informed, self-critical source. Like other “news” personalities who have taken over the media, he creates cartoon realities and stages puppet dramas, not all of which even he believes in. It is political theater and network entertainment wars—opioid candy. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was shocked at Carlson’s gentrification of a Putin-based marionette during his Fox News dramas:

“[Putin] stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape, and destruction. That’s what he stands for.” [That’s a quote from Boris Johnson.]

Both before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Carlson has been accused of parroting Kremlin talking points. In fact, according to Mother Jones reporting on a leaked war memo, back in March 2022, the Kremlin instructed Russian state media to feature Carlson as much as possible because of his criticism of the US and NATO’s role in Ukraine.

Shortly before the invasion, with tensions already high, Carlson said on Fox News: “Democrats want you to hate Putin, anything less is treason.”

And after the war broke out, he continued to echo pro-Putin talking points. In May 2022, Carlson baselessly claimed that the US government’s involvement in Ukraine was aimed at deposing Putin as “payback for the 2016 election.” [That’s a MAGA oldie but goodie.]

In July 2022 he suggested that Italy posed a bigger threat to the world than Russia because of its slightly larger economy. “The Italians, in other words, are in a better position to take over the world than Vladimir Putin,” he said.³

         Again, this is political theater with little concern for consequences. It’s on the level of “Bomb Iraq and Create ISIS But Have a Good Cover Story.” The news, and not just on Fox, has become a battle of plausible deniabilities.

•Putin’s verbal attack on the West sounds like something from a Jacksonville, Florida, or Calhoun, Georgia pulpit. A substantial portion of his anathema to Westernization of Ukraine is based on a conservative fundamentalist childhood that goes deeper than mere communism or subsequent KGB training. There is a reason that Putin never learned Esperanto English. At least Xi Jinping, on his first trip out of China as a young man in 1985, spent two weeks on an agricultural fact-finding mission in the U.S. Midwest and stayed for three nights in the spare bedroom of a Muscatine, Iowa family he revisited twenty-seven years later as vice-president of China, renewing old friendships. This was never in Putin’s repertoire.

Along the lines of MAGA hatching QAnon, demonism of the West is widely shared in rural Russia—how widely we don’t know, but widely enough for Putin to think that pretty much any ghost story of his will play. In a February 21, 2023 speech to lawmakers, military officials, and veterans in Moscow, he went full gonzo and Billy Graham:

Apparently in an attempt to up the ante . . .  he offered a new twist on the Kremlin’s tired claim that Moscow “isn’t at war with the people of Ukraine.”

Instead, he suggested, the battle next door against “neo-Nazis” in the “Kyiv regime” is also an attempt to protect Russia from rampant pedophilia and gender-neutral pronouns.

“Look at what they are doing in the West…. They distort historical facts, do not stop their attacks on Russian culture, on the Russian Orthodox Church,” Putin said. “The West is perverting the family, the national identity. They are making pedophilia the norm in their lives, and priests encourage same-sex marriage. Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.”

“The Anglican Church is planning—so far only planning—to look into the idea of a gender-neutral God. What do you say to that?” Putin said.

“We are obligated to protect our children from degradation and degeneracy,” he declared.⁴ [This wouldn’t pass in “Arizona, take off your rainbow shades,” per Mark Lindsay, but it plays in Red Square and the exurbs, per vampire blues.]

Daily Beast news editor Allison Quinn continued her American pop-cultural look at Kremlin wraiths and hobgoblins. They are a bit flakier and more extreme than Ron DeSantis’ new Florida but from the same playbook of scare tactics:

Vladimir Putin may not be able to count on a victory in Ukraine, but if nothing else after 12 months of war Russia can at least take the honors for the most deranged propaganda.

From murderous war pigeons and mutant Ukrainian soldiers to satanist cults and organ trafficking, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has descended into some of its most desperate babble yet to try and keep Putin’s war afloat over the past year.

Despite that claim being repeatedly debunked during the first eight years Moscow waged war against Ukraine, Russian state TV got in step and doused viewers with a frenzied firehose of “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” and “de-Nazification” claims. . . .

That narrative had long been so provably false it was almost laughable, so Putin’s army of media lackeys tried to up the ante with “proof”: a photo of Ukraine Azov fighters holding up a swastika flag that turned out to be photoshopped; menacing top-secret battle plans by Azov and the Ukrainian Defense Ministry featuring a bizarre blend of Russian and Ukrainian; Ukraine’s commander-in-chief wearing a “swastika bracelet” that didn’t exist; “foreign journalists” bemoaning the horrors of the Kyiv “regime” who were actually Russian bloggers.

Despite all the propagandists tying themselves into knots to sell the Nazi narrative, the Kremlin soon figured out it just wasn’t working. . . .  [S]ecret telephone surveys conducted on the orders of the Kremlin revealed that most Russians didn’t understand the meaning of the word “de-Nazification.” [iPhone ownership was subsequently banned among officials—“Give them to your children and use either Russian or Chinese models.”]

“After that, it was a mess—every week we looked for new words, but we couldn’t find anything favorable,” one source close to the Kremlin said.

(It certainly didn’t help that Russian troops themselves began publicly calling BS on the Kremlin’s claims, with one soldier sent to Ukraine admitting in an interview with iStories that he and a colleague had a shocking revelation upon arrival: “I told him, ‘Do you even realize that we’re the fascists?’”)

It was around that time that the Kremlin pulled out the big guns: birds loaded up with “bio weapons” that somehow “selectively target” only certain ethnic groups (Russians).

“At least two species of migratory birds were identified, the routes of which pass mainly through the territory of Russia,” Igor Kirillov, head of radiation, chemical, and biological defense of the Russian Armed Forces, told Russian media.

The avian terror was discussed on all the country’s big channels, including the notorious trash peddler Channel One. Soon enough, it became clear that the latest tall tale was not so much helping the war effort as it was sparking a wave of outrage at local pigeons.

“Attention! In Ukraine, 36 U.S. laboratories have been infecting birds and rodents with diseases (plague, cholera, etc.) intended for us … for 20 years. Please! Do not attract pigeons with bread! Protect your families (and mine) from infection,” read one panicked [notice] taped at the entrance to a Russian apartment building in Belgorod.

Bird discrimination aside, it was obviously clear from the get-go to the Kremlin’s spin doctors that fearmongering was a crucial weapon to be used—against the country’s own citizens.

The “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” narrative soon branched out into other popular bogeymen: Ukrainian satanists enlisting the help of “otherworldly forces” by writing “evil” symbols in blood, for instance. [No doubt sigils and runes on buildings and fake crop circles in fields.]

RIA Novosti, one of the country’s most “authoritative” state-run news organizations, was among the first to start pushing the Satan worship narrative, claiming as early as March 2022 that signs of “black magic” had been found in Ukrainian headquarters. Warmonger and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov soon began referring to Ukrainians as “satanists,” while state media continued to routinely quote “cult experts” to endorse the claim, and “de-Satanization” soon became the new mission of Russia’s war. Lawmakers and the Russian Foreign Ministry . . . jumped on the “Ukraine is run by satanists” bandwagon as well. [You can’t make this stuff up!]

(Never mind that all the while, the Kremlin’s most “holy” authority, Patriarch Kirill, was unabashedly cheering on the murder of Ukrainian civilians, which he framed as a mission from God to save the world.)⁵

         A distaste for shifts of spiritual, gender, artistic, and cultural perspectives in the West has affected Trump and Putin similarly along with a sense of exclusion from the fun. They each prefer all-out macho thuggery, coercion, ridicule, and cis whores. Neither is particularly eloquent in his harangues, but Putin’s tortuous rage resembles the Gospel According to Elmer Fudd.

•A secondary argument of Carlson and the MAGA Right is that China is the United States’ real enemy and that wasting attention and resources on combating Russia is a mistake. This is substantially driven by anti-Asian bias as well as exploitation of widespread hillbilly bigotry by politicians. Unbelievably, numerous Americans believe that all Asians are deserving targets for insult and attack and, as Donald Trump so elegantly put it, those people vote. Both major United States parties are in adversarial competition with each other in a game of China baiting and promoting platforms of conflict, even war, with a country that offers America more synergistic possibilities and potential cultural and technological collaboration than Russia. The Chinese view of ownership and copyright is also collectivist more than corporate; they believe that tools, technologies, and applications, once discovered by humans anywhere on the planet, are available to the whole species or and fair targets for skilled espionage. Likewise, once assimilated by Chinese anywhere, they are an asset of transnational China. For that, they need to look no further than American corporations and missions and Pentagon war games for their model; they are still amateurs at invading and taking over their neighbors’ lands, property, and talents and imposing a global, ocean-to-ocean military presence. Yes, the United States is intentionally boxing them in. From an American view, humanity is still game theory more than teamwork or TikTok, and new patriotic young Chinese, even hip Westernized ones, still root for the home colors.

Furthermore, despite Carlson’s inflated rhetoric, Russia is never going to seek an alliance with Republican America over one with communist China. Donald Trump’s bromance with Putin is puppy love compared to the full-blown Putin-Xi affair.

•It is generally known, and not disguised by the Kremlin, that Ukraine is the key to a general Russian strategy for restoring as much as it can of the former Soviet Union, starting with the most vulnerable nearby republics like Georgia and Moldova, and then taking on even NATO members if they are successful. Russia needs Ukraine strategically and geographically for any sort of a re-Sovietization project. This is Putin’s dream, and there seems no price he is unwilling to pay to achieve it, as long as he doesn’t personally have to foot the bill.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expects that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine will continue until Putin realises that he cannot annex a large part of Ukrainian territory. . . .” Scholz said at a meeting with citizens in his constituency of Potsdam. . . .”But the Russian president is not yet ready to take this step,” Scholz believes. “The death toll that Putin is inflicting on his country and his young people for his imperialist dream is truly horrific,” he added.⁶

The Kremlin already controls Belarus despite no love lost between V. Putin and Byelorussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, each of whom is praying for the other’s early death and paying Slavic voodoo masters and witches to hasten the day. Putin’s creation of independentTransnistria and later intrusion into Moldova was brazen and shameless (per a recent news report):

Yahoo News has obtained an internal strategy document from Putin’s Presidential Administration that reveals Moscow’s plans for Moldova, the small country vulnerably sandwiched between war-torn Ukraine and a member of NATO and the European Union, and Romania. The document is part of a reporting collaboration with European news organizations: Delfi Estonia, the Swedish newspaper Expressen, the London-based Dossier Center, the Kyiv Independent, Rise Moldova, Frontstory, VSquare, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

[It] originates from the same Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation that produced a similar strategy . . . concerning Russian plans to annex Belarus. The Moldova strategy, according to the source who leaked it, was drafted in the fall of 2021, like its Belarusian counterpart, with input from Russia’s General Staff and Moscow’s main intelligence services: the FSB, SVR and GRU. . . .

On Friday, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, made a surprise announcement at a White House press briefing. U.S. intelligence, he said, had determined that the Kremlin was plotting to topple another European democracy. “Russian actors, some with current ties to Russian intelligence, are seeking to stage and use protests in Moldova as a basis to foment a manufactured insurrection against the Moldovan government,” Kirby declared.

As if on schedule, Moldova experienced an antigovernment demonstration on Sunday, just two days later. Thousands of people waving the blue, yellow and red Moldovan flag marched through the streets of downtown Chisinau, the capital, past the national Parliament and executive building. “Down with Maia Sandu!” they chanted, referring to Moldova’s outspokenly pro-European president.

Local police arrested 54 demonstrators for violating public order, almost half of them minors. Police also alleged that four bomb threats were made throughout the country, one at the international airport. The Moldovan Border Police, meanwhile, said it had stopped a suspected mercenary from the Wagner Group from entering the country in a week in which 181 other foreigners tried to do likewise. . . .

Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean, who only assumed office last month, was shown the document in a meeting room on the fifth floor of his office in Chisinau last week, a room adorned with EU and Moldovan flags. Recean, the former national security adviser to Sandu, confirmed that the contents of the Kremlin agenda reflect what he and many in his liberal government have long known. “The Russians have tried for a very long time to make sure Moldova does not have sovereignty over its foreign policy,” he said.

According to David Kramer, a former State Department official, “While barely recognizing Moldova as a separate state, the document treats Moldova as a pliable satellite over which it can exercise control and influence, while seeking to block Western influence. It is typical of the Kremlin’s attitude toward all its neighbors and underscores the objective of maintaining a well-controlled sphere of influence.”⁷

         None of these countries is allowed to exist independently; they are still considered a permanent part of Soviet Russia. The invasion of Ukraine is a special operation rather than a war because it is an internal police action.

•The Kremlin has a similar sense of manifest destiny to orchestrators of the Third Reich and American evangelical colonialists. It is sometimes hard to tell who’s king and who’s the king’s vassals. Chechnyan leaders sometimes can’t decide if they are victims or champions of Slavic chauvinism:

Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, has begun rattling off threats about attacking Poland after Ukraine. Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, suggested Monday that Russia should “denazify and demilitarize” Poland next.

“What if, after the successful completion of the NMD, Russia begins to denazify and demilitarize the next country? After all, after Ukraine, Poland is on the map! I will not hide that I personally have such an intention,” Kadyrov said on Telegram. “I personally have such an intention, and I have repeatedly stated that the fight against Satanism should continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”

Kadyrov warned Tuesday that the time has come for the West to fall to its knees before Russia, predicting that the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, would be over by the end of 2023. “The special [military] operation will be over before the end of this year. European countries will admit they have been wrong, the West will fall to its knees, and, as usual, European countries will have to cooperate with the Russian Federation in all spheres,” Kadyrov said, according to TASS. “There should not and will never be an alternative to that.”⁸

This attitude has deep, ancient regional roots; it didn’t need Vladimir Putin to express them.

•Putin doesn’t give a flying fuck about climate or bees or water or life. Though conducting rational, civilized diplomacy in Ukraine rather a very special military operation wouldn’t add up to even a few of his ally Xi’s coal plants in Africa, he is virtue-signalling that war trumps all. Symbolically he is shooting fire and ash into the atmosphere and shrugging, “Collateral damage.”

         There is plenty to be discouraged about on the planet, but Putin has put his own distinctive signature on the darkness, and he doesn’t give a flying fuck about that either. He and Donald Trump, as I will discuss in a few chapters, are mesmerized by similar Narcissus reflections and self-aggrandizements. They may even be manifestations of the same oversoul.

•I don’t think that, finally, the invasion of Ukraine has all that much to do with Ukraine per se, though it is a valuable chunk of European real estate and farmland. It is Putin’s and the Kremlin’s placeholder for a hatred of Western culture, individualism, and permissiveness and a desire for a nuclear-weapon backed confrontation with the West. Deep down, Putin really seems to believe that the West is out to destroy Russia, whereas it is merely a case of relative freedom versus lockdown strongman control. All freedom is relative under the veneers of either capitalism or communism. Putin hates the economic, aesthetic, and sexual style of the West, though he is an avid private participant in its most decadent forms. Neither he nor MAGA nor the Chinese Communist Party have a First Nations view of the spirits of the land and water and, without that, things are always going to end badly, e.g., in territorial conflict and the reptilian brain over sacred abode. The gods on Olympus still have not exercised their full powers; the real Iliad has yet to begin. Matthew Arnold spoke to this in his poem about the Palladium, the individual and world soul:

And Hector was in Ilium, far below,

And fought, and saw it not—but there it stood!⁹

Endnotes

1. John Haltiwanger, “Top US diplomat warns that if Ukraine gives up territory to Russia in exchange for peace it will ‘open a Pandora’s box around the world.’” Business Insider, February 14, 2023.

2. Nataliya Vasilyeva, “Russian girl who drew anti-war picture could be taken away from father,” The Telegraph, March 13, 2023.

3. Joshua Zitzer, “Tucker Carlson is infecting the minds of Republicans over Vladimir Putin, former UK PM Boris Johnson says,” Yahoo Insider, February 2, 2023.

4. Allison Quinn, “Putin Rants About Gays and ‘Traitors’ in Bizarro Speech,” Daily Beast, February 21, 2023.

5. Allison Quinn, “From Murder Pigeons to ‘Evil’ Forces: How Putin Sold his War,” Daily Beast, February 21, 2023.

6. Ukrainska Pravda, “Scholz Describes Condition for End the War in Ukraine,” March 25, 2023.

7. Michael Weiss and Holga Roonemaa, “Exclusive: Russia’s secret document for destabilizing Moldova,” Yahoo News, March 14, 2023.

8. Shannon Vavra, “Top Putin Ally Says He ‘Will Not Hide’ Intention to Invade Poland Anymore,” Daily Beast, February 7, 2023.

9. Matthew Arnold, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, Thomas Y. Crowell and Co.,1897.

2. EURASIAN FAULT LINES

Those false-flag troops didn’t just assemble and begin war games on Russia’s border with Ukraine in February 2022. Vladimir Putin had been engaged in guerilla and proxy warfare in Eastern Ukraine since 2013. The Kremlin launched Europe’s first all-out war since the defeat of Hitler in May 1945—almost 77 years of civilizational peace despite normal sparring and discord. The unstable border was exacerbated by Biden’s Presidential victory and inflamed a year after by his implied encouragement of Ukrainian membership in NATO. America had been warned for decades that Ukraine passing into the Euro-American sphere would be the sort of fuse for Russia that Taiwan declaring independence would be for China.

The deceptively effortless eastward march of capitalist democracies under a sanitized post-Soviet rubric of democracy had inured the West to the deeper history and ethnic makeup of the region, never an American strong point, in Somalia or Iraq either. Subsequent NATO disclaimers were sincere as far as they went or as far capitalist market freedom could count on its own idealistic doppelgängers. They read quite differently east of Baltic and Black seas.

Putin repeatedly warned the West that attempts to bring Ukraine into its orbit (like another France or Poland) would have sober ramifications. Russia would never allow a free Ukraine because, in the psycho-cartography of revanchist Russians like him, Ukraine and Russia were a single country. It would be almost like an invasion of Russia itself.

The current conflict represents the aggregate fault lines of the 1987-1988 breakup of the Soviet Union, as Moscow’s gravitational hold over its Eastern European empire continued to fade. The U.S.S.R.’s formal end termination was marked by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, though legal dissolution took place in 1991.

During the late 1980s, once captive nations peeled away incrementally, from the Baltic and Yugoslavian periphery to a harder Slavic core. Ukraine was at the heart chakra, melded to motherland emotionally like a Siamese twin. Kyiv’s declaration of freedom from Moscow came toward the end of initial fragmentation in 1991 and was never taken seriously in most of Russia.*

Deeper regional fault lines had been developing for millennia, initially among clans of wandering, intermarrying Eurasian tribes, then from the Middle Ages on. Multi-tribal Eastern Europe and Eurasia traded territories that merged and re-fragmented through centuries of conquests, empires, duchies, republics, and fungible boundaries. Conflicts among baronies and nation-states crested in regular border changes. Through this upheaval, polities within a greater, mostly Slavic region retained their own identities and languages so, during centuries of economic and political collaboration and discord, it was never clear where Russification ended and local ethnicities began. Each of the historic Slavic states, including of course Ukraine, had its own as well as a Russian ethnic and cultural identity.

Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian (or vice versa), as Vladimir Putin insists; their alphabets differ by four letters (runes), and their vocabularies have sixty-two percent agreement, about that of Dutch and English. They are not fully inter-intelligible either—plenty of “false friends” and semantic gaps. If Ukrainian were a dialect of southern Russian, the invading Russians wouldn’t have changed the road signs in eastern Donbas regions.

The Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648), effectively the first European world war, extended from Spain, France, and Italy to Scandinavia, and changed the map of Europe. World Wars I and II showed just how fluid its axes of power were, from the Baltics and Balkans to Berlin, Paris, London, Helsinki, and Dublin.

Russia’s experienced its own eastward-shifting centricity—from Kyiv to St. Petersburg to Moscow—translating shatter zones from the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion and the 1453 fall of Constantinople into a new “Slavistan” while reorienting—or orientalizing—the eastern part of the former Roman Empire. It became part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and then the Soviet Union. That’s an oversimplification but also a timelapse overview. Russia’s claim to empire precedes and supersedes the U.S.S.R. and is based on a Russocentric view of the eastward shift of European power and Christian identity. 

“Russia” was a nation-state that congealed out of a Swedish-Slavic melting pot. Depending on how you define it, Ukraine is either an indissoluble part of this state with Kiev as its original capital or a separate nation with Kiev also as its historic capital. Ukraine generally leaned east toward Moscow more than west toward Munich and Paris. A Ukrainian People’s Republic did enjoy a brief period of independence (1917 to 1920) even while it was being snatched apart by Germany, Poland, and Russia. Russia claimed most of its territory in 1920 and incorporated it into the Soviet Union where it remained until 1991. 

Biden’s actions notwithstanding, the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion was a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s slow—and then not so slow—burn over the 1980s and 1990s Soviet dissolution, which he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” By that, he meant a tragedy not just for Russia and the Russian people but for the civilized world. He proclaimed Russia as the third center of Christian civilization, following Paul’s Rome and Greek Orthodox Byzantium; its capital was Russian Orthodox Moscow (Orthodox and Christian even in its “communism”). This geopolitics dovetailed with Putin’s own imperial ambitions and his conceit of Russia as a world power in temporary remission.

In fact, there is no way to gauge where Putin’s personal aspirations end and his sense of greater Russian destiny take over. I had six history courses in high school and college before taking up anthropology in graduate school, and I have continued to ponder whether events are driven by cultures or individuals. An individual cannot operate outside a cultural context, but certain sea shifts could not have occurred without Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin. Would someone else have been “Alexander,” “Napoleon,” “Hitler” if they hadn’t? Anthropologists believe this as credo, while historians downplay the riddle.  

Putin was the offspring of the greater Russian zeitgeist as well as its driver. In his zero-sum assessment, if Russia didn’t anchor a Eurasian center of power and sphere of influence, NATO would fill the vacuum, imperiling a Christian socialist future for the world and a Russian future for Russia. He and his clique viewed the eastward expansion of Europe as not only an existential threat to their regime but a cultural abomination. As I talk about this worldview going forward, I will mostly leave it to readers to decide how much to attribute to the man and how much to a zeitgeist.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Putin continued to regard free Ukraine as a secessionist province, “a Bolshevik fiction” instead of a real country. He asserted repeatedly that it had always been part of Russia. Ukrainian nationhood, he contended, was concocted by Joseph Stalin solely to gain an extra Russian seat at the United Nations. He accused the West of opportunistically exploiting Stalin’s fabrication.

Ukraine may have been an artifact, but it was never a fiction. Its architectural and aesthetic landscape and folk and tribal integrity were as distinct from Russia as its matrilineal goddesses, topknot hairstyles, and motifs on pysanky eggs.*

Ukraine-Russia schizophrenia was driven by not only fluctuating geographical and historic borders but Russia’s own multiple identities and a conflicting arc of benign tolerance and manifest destiny. Ukraine was in the Russian imagination as a riddle within a riddle within a paradox, even as Russia straddled its own view of itself as a great empire and a more moderate nation.

Onto this whiplash was grafted the geopolitics of NATO, launched in 1949 as an intergovernmental military alliance of twelve nations partnering to counter Russian communist expansion following World War II. The Treaties of Dunkirk (the United Kingdom and France) and Brussels (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) were repackaged in a North Atlantic Treaty that added the United States, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland as signatories. Append an “O” (for “organization”) and you have a friendly acronym.

Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952, West Germany in 1955, Spain (after ousting Franco) in 1982. East Germany entered automatically with reunification. Other former Soviet satellites followed. The Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were accepted during a span from the late 1990s to 2020. Note that NATO didn’t openly court them. Despite Putin’s bouts of martyrdom and paranoia, allaying Russia’s security concerns was always integral to the treaty’s partners. Not everyone with whom I usually agree on political matters shares that benign assessment of NATO’s goals, but I will leave that matter for later and assume for now that surface intent is not just a charade.

Fourteen former Eastern Bloc countries in all joined NATO to preempt reintegration into a future Kremlin-run confederation. For the West to reject them was inconceivable under its rubrics of national sovereignty and anti-Communism. On the other hand, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova also sought membership but were put on hold in deference to Russia. Read into all this what you want.

Germany’s admission into NATO in 1955 led to the signing of the Warsaw Pact by nations of the Soviet bloc.

Now each organization, having pronounced itself purely defensive, regarded the other as an existential threat. Though NATO existed to resist, even reverse Russian expansion, it purported to be a security guarantor for the entire region, Russia as well. Then why not invite Russia as a member and forge a true consensus? When early post-Soviet Russia showed interest in NATO status, the very premise of Cold War villains a joint protection pact against them rankled some NATO ministers’ sense of its focal identity. 

Conversely, if Russia was just another country within Europe, why did it need a Soviet “union” to express its national identity?

This clash of rationales led to a precarious détente and looming civilizational crisis. As former Soviet countries dominoed from Russian to Euro-American orbit, Russia watched, winced, waited, planned, and mobilized. Putin knew that his remaining empire had too much geographical and military heft to be ignored or obviated.

He made this direct argument to NATO: why expand if the Cold War is over? He later cited Russia’s support for the U.S. after 9/11—he was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush in Christian unanimity; then he provided logistical intelligence for the United States in Afghanistan. He used to be one of the good guys.

The West’s failure to find a basis on which to affiliate Russia with NATO was a widening crack in a fault line that ultimately fractured in Ukraine. Not bringing Russia into NATO both did and did not make sense, but it made increasingly less sense after accepting Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and Latvia, let alone Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, which shared far more culture and history with Russia than with the West. NATO began to look “personal.”

 An ancillary argument could have been made—in fact, Putin made it—for NATO to be an alliance of the Christian West against the jihadist South, especially after the Afghan-Russia war and 9/11. Russia and China, who each faced jihadist threats inside their own borders, would have been candidates for such a pact—and in fact, an Interpol-level collaboration exists. Yet NATO cemented around its historic mission. Al Qaeda and ISIS were military triggers under a mutual defense pact, but Russia was an existential problem. Likewise, NATO was an existential dagger for Russia.  

Sino-Russian Mongolia attempted to join the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War but was turned down so not to provoke proximal China, a key Soviet ally. That sort of power-bloc sensitivity, central to regional stability, was overridden by the West’s moralistic march of democracy. Problem was, every place has its own semantics of democracy and freedom.

  Meanwhile, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, and Finland stayed militarily neutral inside Western Europe, a socioeconomic buffer to NATO-Russian hegemony.

In this unstable geopolitical environment, Ukraine became Putin’s line in the sand, his outlet for his Soviet nostalgia and pan-Slavic ambitions. Though he had aspirations beyond holding onto “the Ukraine,”* for Kiev to enroll in NATO, or even become affiliated with the Western alliance, was to remove the last measure of security Russia had against an Atlantic deluge. Even hints of Ukraine joining NATO were tantamount to war; it would have been like Canada reclaiming Maine or Mexico taking back Texas; It was a sundering of Russian identity, a separation of Siamese twins.

That ethos still didn’t make Ukraine a district of Russia any more than it made Poland mere Russian Pole-town. All Slavic nations had commuted their borders with Russia, with each other, and with other neighbors for centuries. Hungary wasn’t even Slavic; it was closer to Finnish. Even the founders of Russia and Belarus, their source Rus’ tribes, were semi-Norse, having migrated from the region of modern-day Sweden to the Black Sea.

Russia reál was a fable and myth, but also a strategy. 

Moralistic and emotional reactions to Putin’s invasion overlook several subtexts. During decades of smarmy diplomacy, NATO had been leveraging its advantage. Weapons cartels also happily armed Eastern Europe, notably in the former Yugoslavian republics, encouraging wrangling and genocide, their best marketing tools. NATO’s eastward swing was a financial bonanza for them—rifles, missiles, bombs, and grenades are as addictive as opiates. A NATO-Russia security pact would have been bad for business.

Other former Soviet duchies and republics—Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, and Moldova—instead of joining NATO settled into a buffer zone. But the Kremlin did not allow another ethnic enclave, Chechnya, to secede as an independent polity, retaining it by a brutal military operation in 1994 that set the template for 2022’s Ukrainian special ops. More than anything, the Chechnyan war established Putin as a potentate in Moscow while setting up a “proud boys” duchy with a capital in Grozny. He is even rumored to have provoked the war by “false flag” bombings within Russia proper, then blaming Chechnyan terrorists. That turned him from a president into an oligarch.

 

During decades of Sovietization, Ukraine had become intimately fused with Russia. It housed a third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a source of regional energy. The plant’s reactor meltdown in 1986 played a key role in the Soviet collapse, as Russia was unable to contain economic and ecological fallout.

Five years later, Ukraine pulled away from a dissolving U.S.S.R. with as little initial resistance as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and then Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Ethnic independence and fragmentation had momentum across Europe, in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom too where captive cultures sought to reclaim their former identities: Ireland, Scotland, Flanders, Catalonia, et al. Russia itself wavered on whether it sought Western-style freedom or reestablishment of its empire.

In the early 1990s, under Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his post-Soviet successor, Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin, Russia seemed to be well on its way toward democracy and capitalism—the pendulum swung West. When Yeltsin picked a former KGB officer to succeed him, he presumed that the Cold War was over, though he acknowledged his failure at fostering a true democratic economy and politics. According to The New York Times Russia correspondent Sabrine Tavernise, “Boris Yeltsin had left power in shame, apologizing on national television ‘for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous, and civilized future at just one go.’”

The Cold War wasn’t over, and the KGB mindset hadn’t mellowed. Under Putin, she added, despite NGOs, rock bands, “meticulously planted parks, bike lanes, and parking places,” Russia gradually lost a Yeltsin-era imperative of democracy and Westernization. She quoted a resident of Moscow, “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.’”^10. Prophetic words!

Few read the moment correctly, certainly not Bill Clinton’s State Department which, instead of negotiating with Russia and chaperoning it into a new Europe with other former Soviet states, continued to exploit the situation for the political and economic capital that could be milked from Soviet disintegration—and certainly not Barack Obama five administrations later who, during the 2012 Presidential debates, mocked Mitt Romney for calling Russia a foe. “Mitt,” Barry preached, “That’s twenty-years-old news. This is the future. We have underwater nuclear boats by the way called submarines.”

fter Putin’s invasion a decade later, denounced by Romney as an act of “impunity,” the former Republican candidate jibed that the eighties were calling again and we didn’t have an answer.

In 1994, before things got too messy, the Ukrainian government took what it recognized as a calculated risk, joining the world’s Treaty on Nonproliferation and agreeing to destroy—with Russian and American assistance—its portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in exchange for a guarantee of territorial integrity. On December 5, 1994, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed by Ukraine and three guarantors—the Russian Federation, the United States, and Great Britain. As his later actions proved, Putin didn’t consider the document worth the parchment it was written on. He thought it counterfactual and, anyway, abrogated by subsequent NATO expansion, though NATO was not one of its signees.

Signing the Memorandum without intending to honor it bought Putin time, a lot.

 Ukraine stayed in the Russian orbit for another two decades, from 1994 till 2013 when its Euromaidan revolution began. As its subsequent state of unstable disequilibrium became less Russian and more Western, revanchist elements in Russia stewed and assayed the failsafe point. Note the view of University of Michigan historian Ronald Suny:

The rulers of both Russia and China see the West-dominated “rules-based international order—a system that has dominated geopolitics since the end of the Second World War – as designed to uphold the global hegemony of the United States.

The two men’s stated preference is for a multilateral system, one which would most probably result in a number of regional hegemons. This would include, to be sure, China and Russia holding sway in their own neighborhoods.

Xi put the matter rather gently during his [March 2023] Moscow trip: “The international community has recognized that no country is superior to others, no model of governance is universal, and no single country should dictate the international order. The common interest of all humankind is in a world that is united and peaceful, rather than divided and volatile.”

Reflecting his more street tough style, Putin was more blunt: Russia and China “have consistently advocated the shaping of a more just multipolar world order based on international law rather than certain ‘rules’ serving the needs of the ‘golden billion,’” he said, referencing a theory holds that the billion people in the richest countries of the world consume the greatest portion of the world’s resources.

Continuing in this vein, Putin said the “crisis in Ukraine” was an example of the West trying to “retain its international dominance and preserve the unipolar world order” while splitting “the common Eurasian space into a network of ‘exclusive clubs’ and military blocs that would serve to contain our countries’ development and harm their interests.”¹¹

I will examine Suny’s analysis in more detail as I go along.

Most Americans’ view of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine os binary, distorted by longstanding simplistic narratives of colonization, tyranny, and revolution. The tendency to dichotomize conflicts became endemic after World War II. Them the Cold War baked in a fable of good guys and bad guys while overlooking America’s own territorial wars with Mexico and its Civil War. 

U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, respectively, followed an “axis of evil” script. The troika of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, with a neocon cast of thousands, imposed their exceptionalist ideology on an uncooperative globe. The W. Bush administration apparently believed that, after liberation, Iraqis and Afghans would renounce thousands of years of tribal history, conduct fair elections, and abide by the results.

Putting poultices over generational vendettas was the equivalent of sending Harlem and Hunters Point gangbangers to charter schools. The Bush-Cheney regime might as well have done what they were accused of—seize the oilfields and distribute a share of the proceeds to the locals. Russia wouldn’t have thought twice about liberating them with a far less equitable split. America’s superficial idealism collided with its own deeper liberation paradox. A Green Zone, Blackwater contractors, Abu Ghraib, improvised explosive devices, and snipers followed. 

The same sort of shallow perspective helped trigger a Japan-versus-United-States polarity in the Pacific, making the second World War truly global. Parochial Americans ignored millennia of samurai traditions and island kingdoms, responding more to a racist comic-book caricature of “stupid Japs.”

At the start of America’s shapeless and pointless war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld rebuffed an attempt by the Taliban, now that Al Qaeda was routed, to negotiate a truce. Our allies on Monday in a proxy war against Russian expansionism, the Pashtun fundamentalists wanted little more on Tuesday than recognition and amnesty. With xenophobia. Amnesia. and less than a thimble of historical perspective, Rumsfeld declared that America “does not negotiate with terrorists,” allying instead with local warlords while imposing his parody on facts on the ground and committing a generation to bloodshed and squandered resources—nineteen years of military stalemate and political quagmire with a bad ending guaranteed.

The W. Bush administration turned allies into enemies by prioritizing domestic politics. The War on Terror was a Republican godsend, and subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations couldn’t disentangle from the Bush-Cheney dogma. Putin rightly viewed all of the above as waste, incompetence, political and economic stupidity, and a unipolar world order.

In 1991, NATO had made an apparent promise not to expand eastward, a pledge that Putin declared, thirty years later, had been violated repeatedly, “vehemently, blatantly.”¹² Him blowing off the Budapest Memorandum was tit for tat.

But there was never such a promise. In February 1991, after the dissolution of Nikita Khrushchev’s wall in Berlin, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, responded to Mikhail Gorbachev’s request not to rub defeat in Russia’s face too harshly by asking him (according to a transcript of their meeting):

Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?¹³

The question was tacit and rhetorical at more than one level, a thought experiment more than an offer or promise. Back at home, the first Bush chided his old-time Texas colleague, telling him, “We prevailed and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”¹⁴

That viewpoint still drives the current narrative, meaning that the Biden administration and Republican mainstream in Congress have a greater stake in defeating Russia than reestablishing detente. Yet Putin’s invasion, though following a trail of missed opportunities and purported broken promises, was so vicious, cruel, and disproportionate, that it all but elided its own justification.    

After Bush I, the matter of limiting NATO expansion was taken up by members of Bill Clinton’s administration, first in discussion with Boris Yeltsin, then with Putin. Conciliation might not have worked, but it wasn’t even tried. Political jockeying and grandstanding took precedent. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a low-level conflict ever since.

In a 2022 speech before his invasion of Ukraine, Putin spoke bluntly to his dismissal by a blithe bounder:

I will say one thing that I have never said before in public. I will say for the first time that in 2000 when President Bill Clinton was visiting Moscow at the end of his term, I asked him how would America see Russia joining NATO. I would not give you all the details of that conversation, but the reaction to my conversation—look, well, let me put it this way. How did Americans really look at this possibility? You can see it in their practical stance. Open support of the terrorists in North Caucusus, ignoring our demands and concerns, withdrawing from the arms limitation treaties, and so on.¹⁵

Pent-up frustration over Russia’s being excluded from playing its “deserved” role in determining the new world order as well as setting its own security concerns hit a tipping point finally in 2021, but it had been fermenting in the private soul of Putin and collective soul of Russia since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Diplomats of the early nineties recognized that.

Clinton’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and secretaries of defense Les Aspin and William Perry, while not encouraging Russian membership in NATO, did not favor eastward NATO expansion either. They thought that it might weaken Russia’s fragile democracy and provoke conservative elements in the country. But Clinton was politically hamstrung after the Monica Lewinsky fiasco; he had no capital with which to put Russia in NATO or refuse the appeals of former Warsaw Pact nations, even if he had wanted to. Other diplomats were more alert to deadly forces being set in motion:

In May 1995 eighteen former US officials, mainly retired Foreign Service officers, signed an open letter expressing concern that NATO enlargement risked “exacerbating the instability that now exists in the zone that lies between Germany and Russia” and might convince most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them, rather than integrating them into a new European system of collective security.” In a New York Times op-ed, George Keenan, the dean of Russia hands and the architect of America’s cold war containment policy, agreed, castigating NATO enlargement as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”¹⁶

Twenty-five years later those chickens plus plenty of others came home to roost. A new European system of collective security had proven beyond the imagination, fortitude, and discernment of the parties. They kicked the can down the road; then the Eastern Bloc march into NATO began, culminating with North Macedonia in 2020.

In 2008 at a NATO conference in Bucharest, George W., the first Bush’s son, encouraged invitations to Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine on the heels of Albania and Croatia. A follow-up communiqué acknowledged “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.”¹⁷

Four months later, almost certainly not by chance, ethnic-Russian separatists drove Georgians out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and requested Russian military aid. They reestablished the former provinces as small nations with Russian bases on a precedent set by NATO in Kosovo and Montenegro. The Russian Georgian enclaves stand today along with a Russified slice of Moldova renamed Transnistria, a “country” larger than only Rhode Island among American states. These nations like little Russo-Vegases, lie between Absurdistan and the middle of elsewhere.

 In 2014, the Russians clinked two more nations out of Eastern Ukraine. After Euro-oriented Ukrainians drove out their Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych (see the next section), the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk declared their independence—or at least factions within them did. By 2022, Putin’s strategy included running Donetsk, Luhansk, Transnistria, and Crimea together, continuing south from Kiev to Tbilisi, Georgia: a new Soviet Empire.In Putin’s view, “Russia” was not a containable geography but a spiritual and blood nationality of Russian-speaking people throughout Eurasia. He was attempting to claw back as much of former Russian-speaking Soviet territory as he could, using the argument that the West had betrayed Russia. He had considered Baker’s rhetoric binding.

 Russia had also progressively Sovietized under Putin, reverting in phases to oligarchy and then dictatorship. While other Eastern Bloc states took advantage of sociopolitical liberalization and joined a world market with innovative technologies and consumer-driven prosperity, Russia remained reclusive and eremitic—not all of Russia but rural Red Russia. Moscow and other urban centers became as summarily Euro-Atlanticist as Prague and Budapest—metropolises with cell phones, punk bands, robots, tourists, and hovercraft. Greater Russia reverted to martyrdom and austerity.

In a sense, Moscow simultaneously embraced and renounced the West, allowing Euro-American styles, beliefs, and a free press, which gave Putin wiggle room to wean his country away from the Atlantic. For every Pussy Riot, there was an Anna Politkovskaya or Boris Nemtsov, a journalist or rival politician murdered under suspicion of orders from Putin. The West and Vlad hid behind shared plausible deniability. That left slack for business as usual. Putin didn’t revert to Stalin’s crony communism; he went straight to plutocracy and a puritanical gulag.

In the growing lesion between the West’s betrayal of Russia and Russia’s betrayal of the West, the Ukrainian pot continued to bubble. Ukraine did not emulate Russia in rejecting Westernization, a blasphemy Putin never forgave. Ukrainians followed the pied piper with his apothegms of democracy, consumption, corruption, and artistic, educational, sexual, and gender freedom. The bazaar was flawed, and the Ukrainian vessel was flawed, so consumer culture brought excesses, exploitation, and graft. Nazi-style fascism didn’t go away either. As in America, it donned populist stripes and flew nationalist flags. The Russian language was suppressed—why not? It was the voice of the conquistador.

 Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, like rural Russia, remained purist and nativist, which led to their marginalization and desire for separate nationhood in the Donbas region where historic, economic, and cultural ties continued into adjoining Russia. It wasn’t uniform. Just as you can have Birmingham in Alabama, you can have Mariupol in Donbas.

 Donbas isn’t a longstanding notion; it’s a portmanteau of “Donets Coal Basin,” which ecologically and economically encompasses a cross-border section of Russia. Where Ukrainian sovereignty extended into the Donbas, Russian language, loyalty, and nostalgia were prominent—not exclusive, just more passionate.

Meanwhile, Putin claimed in numerous contexts at different venues that he or Russia had been tricked by the West and that it was not a reliable partner in the Russian blue-collar sense of honor and handshake integrity. This continued through March 2023.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, visited an aircraft factory in Ulan-Ude and once again told the workers that the West had deceived him, which led to the start of the war against Ukraine:

“[After 2017] the problem of Crimea arose and we could not help but support the Crimeans. Then the problem of Donbas arose. For eight years we have been trying to persuade our so-called partners to solve the problem of Donbas peacefully. Now it turns out that they simply led us by the nose, deceived us, they are not ashamed to speak about it directly in public.”

Putin also told the workers that the problems in the world started after the collapse of the USSR, and that the West was trying to sway Russia after that and was creating a fifth column.¹⁸

The partial revolt of Luhansk and Donetsk became a flashpoint for Ukrainian breakup into enclaves and reincorporation into Russia. Fault lines and spheres of influence split local communities and gave Putin plenty of torches with which to reignite a geopolitical powder keg. The KGB guy turned out to be an old sentimentalist after all; he brought World Wars I and II back to Europe.

Endnotes

10. Sabrine Tavernise, “Putin’s War in Ukraine Shatters an Illusion in Russia,” New York Times online, April 9, 2022.

11. Ronald Suny, “The View from Moscow and Beijing: What Peace in Ukraine and a Post-Conflict World Look Like to Xi and Putin,” Yahoo News, March 22, 2023.

12. Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too Far,’” Review of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold-War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte, Yale University Press, 2021, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2022, p. 27.

13. Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too Far,’” Review of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold-War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte, Yale University Press, 2021, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2022, p. 27.

14. Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too Far,’” Review of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold-War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte, Yale University Press, 2021, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2022, p. 27.

15. Vladimir Putin, “Putin Says He Asked Bill Clinton About Russia Joining NATO in Year 2000,” RealClearPolitics, February 22, 2022.

16. Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too Far,’” Review of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold-War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte, Yale University Press, 2021, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2022, p. 27.

17. Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too Far,’” Review of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold-War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte, Yale University Press, 2021, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2022, p. 28.

18. Ukrainska Pravda, “Putin Tells Aircraft Workers in Buryatia How He Was Tricked,” March 14, 2023.

3. THE MAIDAN

The Maidan uprising, named after Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square adjacent to the main government buildings in Kyiv, began as a freedom and youth gathering on November 21, 2013, from seeds sown a day or two earlier. What was thought of as a one-and-done rally took on a life of its own, expanding, mutating, and reinventing itself into a boundaryless theater piece or political ceremony, going on for 93, 95, or 96 days, depending on count markers. If it had taken place in the West, it would have put holidays on calendars and inspired new civilizational themes. But if you want to hide a major historical event, Ukraine is a fair sinkhole. Stalin starved a million of its citizens without a Grapes of Wrath or Tale of Two Cities, at least onetranslated into English. In scope, duration, and impact, the Maidan surpassed the 1965 Watts and 1967 Detroit uprisings and the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots as well as street blockades in Paris, perhaps all of them combined. It ultimately overthrew a government and set the stage for the 2022 Russian invasion. Until Putin’s invasion, it was underappreciated.

         The Maidan was a celebration, fire ceremony, busk, battleground, and declaration of cultural soul. It had elements of Woodstock, the Grand Ole Opry, Burning Man, the New York Philharmonic in Central Park, the Beatles at Shea, Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on D.C., and the Dalai Lama at Gillette. Not only Eastern Orthodox patriarchs but representatives of just about every religion on earth participated because they all had parishioners in tribally fluid Ukraine.

         The event was filmed in meticulous detail by amateurs and professionals, their videos archived, sequenced, and co-produced as Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom in 2016 by Evgeny Afineevsky, an Israeli-American cinematographer. Netflix began streaming the documenatary after the Russian invasion in 2022. It is my major source for this section.

Throughout the uprising until President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight to Moscow by helicopter, the Kremlin called its shots remotely as it tried to apply a script validated in Chechnya and Crimea. A Moscow-loyal Ukrainian bureaucrat, Yanukovych began his political journey in 1997 as governor of the Donetsk Oblast where he was born and raised. By geopolitics, he leaned southeast, Russia-ward. He had been a member of the Soviet Communist party in his youth (1980-1991), but what aspiring politician of his generation hadn’t?

         Before becoming Ukraine’s fourth President, Yanukovych served as its ninth and twelfth Prime Ministers, appointed in 2002 by President Leonid Kuchma and approved by the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament in Kyiv. Yanukovych brought a consistent Ukrainian Russo-centric worldview.

         His first Presidential campaign culminated in 2004 with a controversial victory in a runoff election and, after he was initially declared the winner, his legitimacy was disputed by various international oversight groups, foreign governments, and a majority of Ukrainians outside the Donbas, all of whom believed that the election had been rigged in his favor.

           Public unrest led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court annulling the outcome. Rival Victor Yushchenko—do not confuse the two names—won a second runoff election. During the campaign, he was poisoned with dioxin in a likely assassination attempt, a centuries-old Rus tactic. His pockmarked face became a campaign talisman and personal insignia. Though the culprits were never identified, his near death followed a supposed “peace dinner” with Kremlin-backed politicians. 

           This citizen-driven re-do was known as the Orange Revolution after the signifying color of Yushchenko’s campaign. Yet Ukraine was geopolitically divided so, when Yanukovych ran for President again in 2009, he won for real. In the last weeks of his campaign, he called on his supporters to gather in the Maidan Nezalezhnosti if they suspected fraud, adding irony to the Euromaidan four years later.

A controversial and ambiguous figure from the get-go, Yanukovych campaigned on integrity in government and national sovereignty, and enough people believed him or were used to the Russified brand to accept him. His early political years were uneven, including a charge of participating in a gang rape in Donetsk. His political career added indictments as well as a few convictions for fraud, forgery, falsifying documents, and other irregularities, all of which were later expunged from the records. In 2006, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General closed his case for lack of evidence.

         Though unapologetically pro-Russian, Yanukovych backed affiliation with the European Union in what was likely a duplicitous attempt to forestall actual Europeanization while keeping himself in popular office. In 2013, while the Russian fleet was using the Black Sea at his invitation, Yanukovych publicized his ongoing trade negotiations with the European Union. He may have had legitimate ambivalence about the direction of Ukraine’s destiny, but he was authentically afraid of Putin, who no doubt communicated his displeasure whenever Ukraine listed West. Yanukovych also allocated nearly half Ukraine’s budget to his native eastern oblasts despite high population centers in the north and west. 

       As POTUS 4 moved chess pieces around himself, he accumulated astonishing wealth by plutocrat corruption and cronyism. Despite a monthly salary of $2,000 U.S., he was able to spend $100,000 per chandelier at his estate. His family, friends, and colleagues were legendary “robber capitalists,” his son Oleksandr deemed the richest of the neo-tycoons.

         After Yanukovych’s flight to Russia in 2014, he paid $52 million for a house in the resort district of Moscow oblast. No one in either nation was surprised.

On November 21, 2013, when inchoate groups began to gather in the Maidan square, they were protesting widespread government corruption as well as Yanukovych’s stall tactics in formalizing EU affiliation, putting his signature on legal paper. At first, expectations were modest; it seemed that the protest would fizzle out. Day by day, though, the assembly took on a life of its own: singing, chants, flag-waving, and community meals and camping out. Word travelled, and crowds grew, people parking blocks or miles away and walking, then joining the encampment, some bunking there for weeks or months. Collectively the Maidan began to chant—in Ukrainian—“Ukraine is part of Europe” and “We are Europeans.” That didn’t suit Yanukovych’s agenda, either personal or political, and it resounded poorly in Moscow, so he took out the Putin playbook.

         The special police unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—the Berkut, literally “golden eagle” or raptor force—was dispatched to clear the Square. Substituting iron for regular-issue wooden clubs, they attacked without restraint, casually breaking bones and causing brain damage. Male demonstrators formed a cordon around the women as they sang the ultimate protest song: the Ukrainian national anthem. As police assailed and finally overwhelmed the crowd, protestors dispersed, many reconvening at neighboring St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery and Cathedral. From temporary refuge there, they gradually reoccupied the Square and restarted the Maidan.

          Through November, as Yanukovych continued to dally on signing a real pact with the European Union, the gathering served as his witness and conscience. Protestors exposed that his ever-increasing demands on Brussels were bows to the Kremlin’s request that he evade any formal alliance. To those gathered, Yanukovych’s signing would speed Ukraine’s integration into Europe. Folks interviewed in the Square were candid, saying that they wanted “European freedom and human dignity.” Brussels, not Moscow.

            The Berkut police continued to try to clear the zone, routinely surrounding and beating those already on the ground, many not even part of the protest. The standoff escalated.

            On December 11, three weeks into a revolt qua celebration that was to last more than three months, the administrator of St. Michael’s began pulling the cathedral’s bells at 1 a.m., a racket that woke the city. It lasted till 5. He had seen enough and was calling a nation to acknowledge atrocities being committed in the immediate neighborhood and to join the Maidan. The first emergency ringing of the bells since Kyiv was surrounded by Mongol and Tartar hordes in 1240 was a prophetic reading of the moment. The energy of those clangs changed Kyiv’s vibration, and particles of tintinnabulation still hung in the air in 2021.   

          On December 17, Yanukovych informed the Parliament of a sudden substitute agreement with the Kremlin. Russia would buy fifteen billion dollars of Ukrainian bonds and reduce the price of Russian natural gas. Yanukovych spun this as an excellent deal that also did not preclude signing with the European Union. His recidivist hoax was scored at once in the Maidan. On getting word, the entire crowd chanted, “Shame, shame!” Putin’s invasion—taking matters into his own hands—was becoming inevitable.

       Day by day, the protest grew and morphed. Both fancy and funky pianos were carried into the street. Successive pianists played classical, jazz, and folk music as couples in tuxedos and funky rags danced. Other pro and amateur musicians played guitars and pounded drums and drummable objects. They paraded symbols of Slavic culture and witchcraft. Children painted on walls and each other. The blue and orange Ukrainian bicolor was displayed everywhere—as flags, clothing, tattoos, graffiti, and festive bunting, on thermoses, backpacks, and posters. The protest had become a combination music festival, exorcism, and Eurasian tea party.

         With the situation molting into unknown territory, the government upped the ante, sending Titushky to assist the Berkut. The name was derived from Vadym Titushko, a mixed-martial-artist who, with two allies, attacked journalists at a Rise Up Ukraine! rally in May 2013. Titushko rejected the etymology, grumbling that he was pro-Euromaidan. However named, the Titushsky were mercenary agents, a mix of street hooligans, hired thugs, and convicts released in exchange for showing no mercy while committing illegal acts, some in false-flag style. These Agents provocateurs, forerunner of Wagner Group mercenaries conscripted after the invasion bogged down, threw stones and street junk at the Berkut, but the crowd was disciplined and maintained its peaceful protest. People stood before the rows of officers holding up battle shields, begging, “Join us. We are your nation. Here are the people that you took an oath to protect. You are part of our Ukraine too.”

         Some Berkut looked confused, even ashamed. Yet there were enough Titushky in the crowd to assure mayhem. The Berkut responded with tear gas, then a crushing assault. Thirty people were beaten or shot dead, including bystanders and medical personnel trying to aid the wounded.

         After this asymmetric response, larger swaths of the community came to the Maiden. Bankers, lawyers, and former military officers risked their lives in a demonstration of Ukrainian solidarity. A new nation camped outside an increasingly isolated government. On New Year’s Eve 2014, thousands of people stood in the dark, holding up candles and singing the national anthem.

In mid-January, Yanukovych’s regime, probably on cue from Moscow, announced new dictatorial laws banning crowds, posters, helmets, and waving of Ukrainian flags. Maidan loyalists responded by putting pots, flippers, and other provocations on their heads, painting construction hardhats blue and orange, with “Fuck off” (in English) on a few. Using water for mortar and snow for bricks, they built barricades, heaping piles of tires, and hammering together boards as well. An “Occupy Maidan” cast with sixteenth-century ramparts turned the square into a post-modern stage for Les Miserables. Euromaidan had crossed a line of no return.

          Berkut and regime thugs responded in kind, outright murder now permissible. From rises and rooftops, sociopathic snipers shot civilians, women, children, and Red Cross personnel loading wounded people onto stretchers, as if taking target practice. They permanently blinded at least five. Bands of police ran through evacuation zones and makeshift hospitals, breaking glass beakers and vials, stomping on medicines. They torched nearby apartment buildings in which members of the opposition were thought to be housed, causing a five-alarm spectacle through the city center. Mountains of tires were set ablaze, adding to the firestorm. It was a dirge and purification.

         In the following days, Viking-style funerals crossed the Maidan and surrounding streets, as the dead were borne in open coffins to jazz-like requiems.

         On the night of February 22^nd, 2014, Yanukovych boarded a helicopter: destination Moscow. The Maidan was over, but the war for freedom had just begun. In the words of a columnist writing under the pseudonym Nathan Fischer, “Yanukovich left Kiev on routine business to Kharkiv, at which point protestors stormed the Presidential Palace, forcing [him] into exile. Most people would regard this as a coup. Or, as Putin quips, ‘Do you think they just went in there to sweep the floors?”¹⁹

         At the turn of events, Luhansk and Donetsk rebelled against the new government in Kyiv, proclaiming themselves independent enclaves. Yanukovych declared himself President in exile, Putin presumably his sponsor.

         The worm turned with regime change. The uprising in the Donbas was put down by Ukrainian troops with nyet-Russia triumphalism, a jingoism that would be labeled neo-Naziism by Putin: Kyiv is 300 miles closer to Berlin, hence 483 kilometers more German than Moscow is. But there wasn’t uniform Ukrainian preference of Russia to Europe even by Russian speakers in the Donbas, as would be demonstrated by later resistance.

         In February and March 2014, after the successful culmination of the Maidan, Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula, a ninety-percent Russian-speaking add-on to Ukraine. I say “add-on” because on April 26, 1954, by the decree of the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. under premier and Ukrainian native Nikita Khrushchev, the Crimea oblast was switched from a Russian to a Ukrainian Socialist Republic. Putin reversed that act with a special operation followed by an unsupervised plebiscite. It was his plan for Moldova, Georgia, and the rest of Ukraine, too.

         In July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile as it travelled high over the Donbas near Ukraine’s border with Russia. Its 283 passengers and 15 crew were collateral damage as well as a false flag for Ukrainian Russian favoritists and mercenaries to pin on Kiev. Putin may have had everything or nothing to do with an idiotic military dare, but it happened on his watch under Russian-Ukrainian command (as later proven by a court in the Netherlands) and it reflected his mood. It foreshadowed 2022: a deadly strike on unsuspecting commuters through modernity by a revanchist regime.

         On March 8, 2014, during the Russia’s annexation of Crimea, another Malaysian Boeing 777 went missing with 239 passengers and crew on a red-eye from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and still has not been satisfactorily accounted for. One of the three theories working theories for what happened to Malaysia Flight 370—the other two are pilot suicide and an American shootdown to keep tech assets in the cargo hold from going to China—is that three Russians aboard hijacked and crashed the plane in the South Indian to distract from the invasion or, more credibly though still quite fantastic, took it to Kazakhstan where Russia stole the assets, and Putin had the passengers and crew executed, and then tossed a barnacled-covered wing with its identification plate removed, either from that triple-7 or another, off Reunion Island so that it would wash ashore there.

That such far-fetched plots gained credence at all speaks more to the world’s assessment of Putin’s character—he seems to have no compunction poisoning, shooting, and defenestrating rivals—than it does to an airline mystery. 

To quell spreading guerrilla warfare and retaliatory military responses in Eastern Ukraine as well as (ostensibly) to allay concerns about routing civilian aircraft through the Donbas, the parties—both national and regional—signed a pair of Minsk protocols five months apart in September 2014 and March 2015. The documents had meager support on the ground and among military personnel, and the factions fought on as before. Russia sent in mercenaries and laid the groundwork for more false-flag provocations, alleging Kyiv’s violations of the protocols as a pretext. Each side accused the other of never intending to honor the agreement, and both were right to a relative degree. Minsk was mainly an agreement to pretend to sign an agreement.

         In mid-2022, MAGA politicians in the U.S. opposed to NATO’s support for Ukraine cited the protocols as a missed opportunity for a lasting peace. Their argument was that anti-Russian opportunism led America to exploit rather than end the revolt at its aborning, to use it to inflict an embarrassing defeat on Russia, a major Russian talking point. On the Fox network, Tucker Carlson lobbied for a Minsk 3. Under his proposed terms, Ukraine would join the EU but agree to stay out of NATO; internationally supervised plebiscites would be held in Donetsk and Luhansk to determine their status.

         This multiple oversimplification was meant as a signal and olive branch to Putin and, while it may contain elements of an ultimate peace pact, it was intended more as an isolationist “America First” rallying point to counter the Biden Administration’s helping to arm a Ukrainian resistance.

         The state of conflict in the Donbas incubated from 2014 till 2022. Putin delayed his full blitzkrieg, apparently letting Donald Trump go as far as he could in destabilizing Ukraine and weakening the Western alliance. He was also wary of Trump’s volatility, but caution would deter Putin only as long as his Manchurian candidate was furthering his desired objectives. Russia measured time more orientally than the United States with its unbroken entertainment regime and political theater, so V. took about a year for Crimea, letting his annexation and the punitive sanctions settle, while insulating Russia in expectation of further penalties. He was building up resources for the long haul. By then, the 2016 American presidential campaign was underway, and Vlad had a horse in the race. His pony paid off big-time.

         After Trump’s four years in office, Putin gave another twelve months for planning. By then he had accrued twenty-two years in office during which five American administrations had come and gone like windblown newspapers. He was a gamer in his prime, ready to deal.

As for the bulk of Ukraine, after the Maidan it gradually became as outwardly American as Chicago or Philadelphia. The new democracy wasn’t invited into NATO only from concern about the Russian response, but it didn’t have to be. Weapons, advisors, and infrastructure poured in from Poland, Germany, and the United States. There was no Russian stooge at the helm to intercept them. Perhaps the CIA played a role, reprising past performances in Teheran and Panama City—Putin claimed as much—but, if so, it was secondary to the Maidan spirit and impossible without a majority desire for Westernization.

         For the Kremlin, the outcome was not just a thorn in Russia’s side; it was de facto expansion of NATO and aninvitation to conduct its own rendition of diplomacy by other means: tanks, soldiers, mines, and missiles. It had practiced “special” operations by then in Chechnya and Syria. The Donbas was a worthy sequel. 

        On Putin’s behalf, consider the U.S. and NATO’s resumé at that point: support for the Muslim populations of Albania, Kosovo, and Croatia against the Slavs of Serbia—a generation earlier for the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—plus an implicit anti-Russian world view carried over from the Cold War. As Russian versus Muslim fault lines replaced communist versus fascist ones, the United States ended up invariably on the anti-Slavic side, a mostly unexamined tilt adhered to by Democratic and Republican regimes, sometimes in sequential “good cop/bad cop” fashion.

         Vietnam was the first proxy war against Russia—that is, against a Sino-Russian axis that pursued a different path to post-War industrialization with much greater central control. Then came Serbia and Kosovo, Croatia and Albania. Each time, the West sided with not only Muslims over Christians but Hitler’s World War II allies over Stalin’s and their own. Europeans have a longer memory for ethnic loyalties than do Americans.

The Maidan proved a practice run for both sides. During its 96 days, hundreds of civilians were killed, thousands wounded, and a ruler was deposed. Putin began his counter-invasion almost immediately in the Donbas, holding off on a full assault to see, as noted, how much havoc Donald Trump would wreak without him having to dip into his own treasury. He no doubt watched the Trump-Zelenskyy carnival with near pornographic pleasure, as Donald played into the Kremlin’s own Ukrainian false flag, domino by domino: Giuliani’s shadow foreign policy, Burisma, Hunter Biden, the missing Democratic server, and “quid pro quo.” After the show, Ukraine got its Javelins, but the narrative had been flipped in Putin’s favor. For alleged “Russian interference” in the 2016 U.S. election, MAGA had substituted “Ukrainian interference.”

         In 2014, the constabulary had worn Ukrainian uniforms, and the Russians were thrown out by a street festival. By 2022, after Trump had done his part; he was no longer an asset vis a vis Ukraine

The invading force of latter-day “Berkut” and Titushky were regular Russian military, then Wagner mercenaries and Titushky. They followed the Yanukovych-Putin script of indiscriminate murder, destruction, and terror. The leveling of Ukraine speaks to a dearth of imagination, compassion, and diplomatic skill as well as a tinderbox of Kremlin frustration. Before you assume that Putin won’t use chemical or nuclear weapons, look at the lines he already crossed in civilized Europe thus far in a mere “special operation.”

       From the perspective of NATO and the United States, the invasion was not a limited military operation but a war of conquest, vanguard of an attempt to restore the Russian Federation. In the American hinterlands, Vladimir Putin morphed from a mere Reality star, villain or paladin depending on your echelon of MAGA adoration, into a warlord in an undertaker’s suit with a very long table. In nativist parts of Russia and among a Slavic Moral Majority, he was a patriotic nationalist and hero, Peter the Great returned. Though Putin’s fervor for Christian heritage may have been convenient, it wasn’t as self-interested and duplicitous as, say, Trump’s “America First” evangelism. It was the driver that allowed him to look at himself in the mirror and smile back. He saw not just a partisan but Holy Russia.

Endnotes  

19. Nathan Fischer “Understanding Vladimir Putin,” IM1776.com, May 26, 2022.

4. HOLY RUSSIA

“Holy Russia” is a nativist concept that does not translate fully into Western geopolitics. Russki Mir, the sacred Russian world, encompasses Siberian shamanism, Khazar folklore, Tartar mythologies, Norse giants levitating boulders, pan-Slavic nationalism, the Russian Orthodox church, world literature starring The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, Mongolian throat singers, Lenin and Trotsky’s Marxism, Tchaikovsky’s concertos, the Bolshoi Ballet, a soulful gaze at the dark side of creation, and an occult inquiry that stretches from Slavic mysticism to the metaphysics of G. I. Gurdjieff to Kirlian photography and the parapsychology of the late Soviet Union. Even that doesn’t capture a Eurasia that is more devotional, ascetic, and ecstatically apocalyptic than the West’s mercantile polyglot. As an archetypal nationhood transcending both czarist Russia and Soviet Russia, Holy Russia transitioned from tribalism to serfdom to royalism to communism to oligarchy with its core intact, radiating from a history of kings and migrations along three rivers to the brave stand against the army of the Third Reich in Stalingrad where more than a million soldiers and civilians died in a winter defense of not just Europe but civilization.

In the cauldron of Holy Russia, conquest and religion have stayed fused, unchanged from ancient times, as if Russians were still Varangian Vikings or part of the Holy Roman Empire. Cossack horsemen and Christian Orthodox priests serve the same deity. Even through decades of atheistic communism, these institutions—chapel and palace—stood together, representing grass-roots moral rearmament. Gary Lachman tried to capture an elusive trope and omen:

The anticipation of a coming transfigura­tion, the return of Christ and the End Times, coupled with the transcendent beauty of the icons depicting the lives of the saints, fed the nascent Russian soul with a sense of expectation that more than once throughout their history bubbled over into something more apocalyptic. According to the ex-Marx­ist Christian existentialist Nicolai Berdyaev, Russians are either “apocalyptists” or “nihilists.” They are a people of extremes. With them it is either the millennium, or the void. With noises about “tactical nuclear strikes” coming from the Kremlin, one can only hope that Berdyaev was wrong.²⁰ 

Russki Mir is a durable egregore. You hear it a note of it at the end of the 1987 American feature film No Way Out when hero Tom Farrell played by Kevin Costner turns out—in a twist of both irony and synchronicity—to be Russian spy Yevgeny Alexeyevich. Who could look more American than Costner in his Navy uniform? His Soviet handler asks, “Wouldn’t you love to hear Russian again?  Imagine Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy.”²¹ As the lure of the homeland is set before Farrell, Costner turns into a Russian.

This is a bland, pop American version of a national longing that a former KGB operative, one of countless Vladimirs, evokes. Lachman cited a reading list presented by Putin to his governors after the annexation of Crimea. Providing not only moral justification but a prophetic vision, it drew on the writings of Berdyaev as well as Stalin-era philosophers Vladimir Soloviev and Ivan Ilyin. Lachman called it “a vision of a universal Chris­tianity arising out of Russia and bringing on the millennium  . . . , [the] sense that Russia had an historic des­tiny, that it was slated to play some dramatic role in future world events:

Ilyin was associated with a group of think­ers loosely known as the Eurasianists, who believed that Russia was not a nation in the Western sense, but a kind of organic being, a living entity, an extra-historical mystical unity, something like the German Volk but of a more Christian stamp. Like Oswald Spengler, Ilyin had a biological view of history, and saw civilisations as going through cycles of growth and decay. For Ilyin it was clear that the West was on its way out, and that a new civilisation was destined to emerge from the heart of Mother Russia. He also believed that the Bolshevik experiment would not last, and he envisioned a kind of theocratic state rising from the Marxist ruins.²²

            Putin’s Russia is a sort of theocracy, as its boss morphs from a Soviet khan to a holy-roller pope. With a maudlin sense of cultural contamination and victimization by the West, Putin celebrated his peremptory annexation of Eastern Ukraine in the fall of 2022 as reestablishing “‘grand historic Russia, for future generations. . . .’ Then he quoted from his favorite Russian fascist philosopher, Ivan Ilyin: ‘I believe in the spiritual forces of the Russian people, their spirit — my spirit, its fate is my fate, its suffering is my grief, its flowering is my joy.’”²³ That sort of rhetoric leaves MAGA in the dust. Putin’s neo-Soviet foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov chimed in that “the United States and allies want to stop the march of history.”²⁴

Gradually, politicians in the West have come to realize that the invasion of Ukraine is not just a strategic act by the Kremlin but a revival of the mission of Holy Russia:

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes it’s his “destiny” to recreate the Russian Empire, according to former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. During a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gates said that Putin had made it part of his vision to retake old territories to recreate Russia’s former geographic sphere of influence.

“Putin believes it’s his destiny to recreate the Russian Empire. And as my old mentor, Zbig Brzezinski, used to say, ‘Without Ukraine, there can be no Russian Empire,'” Gates said. “So he is obsessed with retaking Ukraine. He will hang in there.”

“I think that he does believe that time is on his side, that support in the US, support in Europe, and so on, will fray. And he’s doing what Russian armies have always done, and that is sending large numbers of relatively poorly equipped, poorly trained conscripts to the frontlines, in the belief that mass will overcome,” he added.²⁵

Willing cannon fodder in a Holy Russian crusade.

Like Donald Trump, Putin didn’t begin as an evangelical, though he was able to work his way from communism to Christianity without losing a prayer bead or Holy Mother on the way. Holy Russia is a more indigenous, textured religion than MAGA, Lachman drawing its picture as a KGB salvation-and-revival tour:

In 2016 [Putin] made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos in Greece, home of the mystical He­sychast monastic tradition that is so much a part of Russian history. The pilgrimage was televised by billionaire Orthodox national­ist Konstantin Malofeev for his Tsargrad TV channel 7.In 2017, Putin visited the newly rebuilt New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, which had been destroyed by the Nazis. Earlier, in 2005, he had Ilyin’s remains moved from Switzerland, where he had died in 1954, and interred in Moscow’s Donsky Monastery. In speeches validating the annexation of Crimea, Putin alluded to the “Third Rome” meme, begun by the monk Philotheus in 1511, when he told Prince Vasilii III that: “Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be.” The Rome that stood then was Moscow, which had been little more than an obscure backwater when, like Kyiv, the Golden City, it was laid waste by the horse­men of Batu Khan. When the Mongols left, power moved north, in Moscow’s direction and, after a brief relocation in St Peters­burg, stayed there. . . .

In 2014, during Russia’s earlier incursion into Ukraine, when it an­nexed Crimea, Putin brought back from Kherson–a city now occupied by Russian forces–a stone. This became the foundation stone of a 60-ft (18m) statue of Prince Vladmir the Great, founder of what in Russian history is known as Kievan Rus’, the “lost king­dom” of mediæval Russia, that in 2015 was erected just outside the Kremlin.This suggests strongly that one Vladimir identifies quite a bit with another. In AD 989 Vladimir I converted from Slavic paganism to Greek Orthodox Christianity at Kherson, where he married into the royal Byzantine family, acquiring a porphyrogenite bride in exchange for his baptism. This union formed one of several ties, mythic or factual, between Russia and the Roman Empire.²⁶

The fall of the Soviet Union may have freed once-sovereign nations from Kremlin rule and the enforcement of Russki Mir on their own nativities,but it had a different ring in the Russian heartland where anger and denial replaced celebration. How could Holy Russia be defeated by the weak and corrupt Euro-American West?

But the Soviet Union was less a late expression of the Holy Roman Empire than more truly the last Western colonial empire. The formation of a super-nation out of a federation of captive states—so-called Greater Russia—was disguised by the fact that its territories and hegemony were contiguous within Eurasia rather than lassoed from overseas. The Soviet version of Holy Russia may have been a sacrament in Russia proper, but it was imperialist propaganda almost everywhere else. Russia was no more holy in Kazakhstan or Poland than England was in Ireland and Rhodesia.

Contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Gelyevich Dugin characterized the world order opposing Russki Mir as “Atlanticism” or attempted world rule by a neo-liberal Western elite.* As Lachman noted, Dugin was echoing Ilyin: “In ‘What the Dismemberment of Russia Means for the World,’ written in 1950, Ilyin predicted what would happen with the col­lapse of the Soviet regime. It would mean ‘the Balkanisation of Russia,’ the parcel­ling out of its organic unity into smaller, separate, independent bodies, that the West would absorb, thus neutralising Russia as a world power.”²⁷

By a year into the invasion, the notion of “de-Nazification” was superseded by the claim that the West was trying to break Russia into conflicting duchies and nation states:

[M]any of the original rationales for the attack put forward by the Kremlin, such as “de-Nazification,” are no longer even mentioned. Instead, the key appeal Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Tuesday in his first state of the union address in almost two years was that, since Russians are fighting against the united West and not just Ukraine, they must consolidate behind the war effort for the sake of national survival. “The goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, to end us once and for all,” he said. “We will respond accordingly, because we are talking about the existence of our country.”²⁸

De-sovietization was a stealth Western attack on Russki Mir.

Dugin wasn’t a life-long Russophile. Lachman portrays him as an anti-Soviet punk dissident through the 1980s before his hooligan side turned fervently patriotic (while remaining punk). He ultimately converged with Ilyin, Evola, Bannon, and Trump in a millenary cult of Christian supremacy that prophesied a new golden age after the fall of the decadent West (Russia’s and their own decadences notwithstanding). Promoting “traditional” values, the restoration of Russia’s global influence, and a solidarity of ethnic Russians throughout the world, Dugin had urged a no-holds-barred assault on Ukraine for years, at one point rapping, “Kill, kill, kill!” Because he studied philosophy—a cerebral Derrida-Deleuze branch—he was known in the West as “Putin’s brain.” Lachman summarized:

Dugin cherry-picks the good bits from various totalitarian and fascist regimes, in order to Velcro together an ideology to counter the one truly evil so­cial/political/economic system at large today, liberalism. . . .   This comes across in Dugin’s partiality for the Apocalypse, which he is eager to kickstart. Impatient with Spengler’s Decline of the West, Dugin is positively itching to knock it down. He sees the imminent End Times as the result of a coming, unavoid­able, once-and-for-all smackdown between two archetypal world powers, which, in different forms, have been facing off through the ages. . . a planetary struggle between what he calls the Atlanticists, the maritime, mercantile, globalist nations, and the people of the mother of all continents, Eurasia, the largest land mass on Earth. This is the . . . death struggle between a declining but still powerful West and a rising Eurasia, hepped up on “passionarity.”²⁹

A translation of Dugin’s view of Putin’s march on Kiev expressed a rugged reactionary Russian hip-hop reality. It is worth reading for the role of Dugin and Russki Mir in Putin’s “special operation” (sic throughout; this is a rough rendition circulated widely after Russian troops crossed the western border).

This is not a war with Ukraine. It’s a comparison with globalism as a whole planetary phenomenon. It’s a comparison on all levels—geopolitical and ideological. Russia rejects everything in globalism—unipolarism, atlantism, on the one hand, and liberalism, anti-tradition, technocracy, Grand Reset in one word, on the other. It is clear that all European leaders are part of the Atlantic liberal elite.

And we’re at war with this exactly. Here’s their legitimate reaction. Russia is now excluded from the globalist networks. She has no choice anymore: either build her own world or disappear. . . .

Russia is building a global resistance camp. His victory would be a victory for all the alternative forces, both the right and the left, and for all the people. As always, we are starting the most difficult and dangerous processes. But when we win, everybody takes advantage of it. That’s how it should be. We are creating the assumptions for a real multipolarity. And those who are ready to kill us now will be the first to take advantage of our business tomorrow. . . .

What does it mean for Russia to break up with the West? It is the salvation. The modern West, where Rothschild, Soros, Schwab, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg triumph, is the most disgusting thing in the history of the world. It is no longer the West of Greek-Romanian Mediterranean culture, nor the Christian Middle Ages, nor the violent and contradictory 20th century. It’s a cemetery of toxic waste of civilization, it’s anti-civilization. And the sooner and more completely Russia is getting rid of it, the sooner it returns to its roots. For what? Christian, Greek-Roman, Mediterranean. . . European. . . . That is, to the roots common to the real West. These roots—theirs!—the modern West cut them off. And they stayed in Russia.Only now Eurasia is raising its head. . . .  [Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump could not have stated it any more eloquently.]

Russia is not Western Europe. Russia followed the Greeks, Byzards and Eastern Christianity. . . . Yeah with zigzag and deviations. Sometimes in a blind alley. But it’s moving. Russia is out to defend Tradition values against the modern world. It’s just that “revert against the modern world.” Didn’t you learn? And Europe must break up with the West, and the United States must also follow those who reject globalism. Then everyone will understand the meaning of the modern war in Ukraine.

A lot of people in Ukraine understood this. But the terrible liberal-nazist rabid propaganda has left nothing to do in the minds of the Ukrainians. They will return to themselves and fight together with us for the kingdom of light, for tradition and a true European Christian identity. Ukrainians are our brothers. They were, they are and they will be. A break with the West is not a break with Europe. It’s a breakdown with death, degeneration and suicide. It’s the key to recovery. And Europe itself—the European peoples—should follow our example: topple the anti-national globalist council. And building a real European house, a European building, a European cathedral.³⁰

This is Russian QAnon with its own pedophilia and “Great Reset,” artificial intelligence and the mechanical human in the wings.

In the current global, technocratic crisis of meaning, Dugin had issued an Evola-like clarion to a lost civilization and an arrow to the heart of neo-capitalist democracies with their failed values. What makes him so dangerous is a fiercely attractive, fashionably gangsta takedown of capitalism unveiling a new role for Holy Russia, resurrected from Soviet Russia, as world savior. Russia’s accumulated resentments are no longer Slavic nativism or Soviet colonialism but a global crusade against materialism and capitalism. Why not invade Ukraine to drive out the fascist atheists who have infested it?

Putin seized on Dugin’s engine of anti-Western nationalism as his own exonerating ontology—e.g. his brain. From this view, the Ukrainian experiment in democracy was fake as well as shallow.

Russia may have been just as technocratic and ecocidal, but it played Sparta to a Euro-American Athens as a way to change a post-cold-war rules-based order and narrative that Putin saw as favoring the neo-colonial Atlantic, subordinating Eurasian yuans and rubles to Atlanticist dollars and pounds (all money is printed nationalist symbols anyway, derived from shells and beads). Dugin and Putin’s own emerging “new world order” was centrally regulated, collectivist, heavy-metal, and Sino-centric, deriving its culture and sphere of influence from the Mongolian and Maoist East more than the Marxist European West. It wasn’t even socialism, it was unabashed oligarchy, but the world of power politics use labels and narratives to cover inconvenient takeovers and provide moral cover, to convince itself as well as its witnesses and victims.

The breach birth of a MAGA-Holy Russia alliance should have been no October 2016 surprise. Trump and his supporters may decry “Russia, Russia, Russia” as fake news and politically motivated probes, but the reality is not the stuff of John Le Carré novels. It is in plain Tucker Carlson view. In fact, Putin is now MAGA’s Manchurian candidate.

In keeping with post-Soviet evangelical revival, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow led an evangelical resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2013 debunking the Western New Age (cannabis, transgender, the occult, etc.) while calling same-sex marriage “a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse.” The “Eastern Pope” proclaimed that Western Europe had strayed from his brand of true Christianity. 

Standing in his company on Easter Day 2022, Vladimir Putin held up a single virginal candle, the blood on his own centurion hands doubling as a commemorative pretense of Christ’s holy plasma. It was hard to know what the Patriarch actually believed because Putin’s version of Russki Mir is like the mafia. Once you’re in, you’re in for life, popes as well as oligarchs. There’s no exit ramp.

When announcing the annexation of four Russian-controlled territories in Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—at the end of September 2022, Putin declared the “rules-based international order” to be “a sinister Western design . . .  one that was rooted in Russophobia.” He claimed that the West had “embraced complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the anti-religion of pure Satanism: ‘forced drug addiction,’ gender ambiguity and ‘the organized hunts of people as if they’re animals’—the latter,” guessed journalists Michael Weiss and James Rushton, “either a strange reference to American mass shootings or the popularity of Netflix’s ‘Squid Game.’”³¹ As if Putin were not a recreational hunter himself.

Neo-Christian fascism was built into an edifice west of Moscow, underwritten by the Kremlin treasury. Characterized as the “main church of the armed forces of Russia” (or the Red Army), its grandeur and symbolism go beyond a mere religious shrine. The church’s steps are made of melted parts of captured German tanks and fighter jets; its central Jesus Christ icon is painted on wood from a 1710 cannon car. Its walls are adorned with military orders, and its doors are guarded by giant archangels painted with swords. In its pomp and glory, this military cathedral rivals any Italian cathedral. An ironic March 8, 2022 Facebook post by Rüdiger Sünner summarized (sic throughout):

Originally, a mosaic of Putin and Stalin should also be hung in it, as well as a praise song on the annexion of Crimea (“The Crime is ours”). . . . The church also embodies the idea of a sacred Russia (“Russkij Mir”) [which brings] the Western world back to value such as homeland, family and Christianity. When you see the young soldiers, who are now being heated in Ukraine . . . you can know which religiously inspired propaganda they are exposed to.³²

There is no doubt that MAGA/Tucker Carlson/Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party favors Russia over Ukraine as it favors Christian fascism over freedom, and punishing transgender, same-sex marriage and erotic and artistic creativity as harshly as possible. The “traditional family” is a dog whistle for suppression of alternative lifestyles, even as “grooming” is a dog whistle not for pedophilia but sexual freedom.

In a post-invasion interview on Russian television on March 14, 2022, Dugin was in his glory, doubling down. When asked about the risk of a complete break of relations with the West, he turned the question around in classic Derridan fashion:

Well, I believe that relations with the West are in fact just beginning. If we talk about civilizations that are peers, that are balanced, and that are respectful towards each other, then now is actually high time to interact with the West and talk to it. It’s just that before, the West tried to simply speak for us, on our behalf.

It was imposing its models on us and demanded that we play their games. I’ve told you many times that I met with Brzezinski in Washington back in 2005. There was a chessboard between us. I asked Zbigniew: ‘Do you know, Mr. Brzezinski that chess is a game for two?’ He said: ‘No, I don’t.’ That is, [the West] was building a relationship with us as if we were not present.

They would move white pieces, then turn [the chessboard] and move black pieces. And now, suddenly, we have appeared. And we appeared with our own program, our own interests, values, and civilization. And they didn’t like it very much that the chess game became a game for two. Putin said: ‘No, I’m here, Russia is here, and you should take it into account.’

That’s what they’re not used to. They flipped the chessboard over, they threw some pawns in our faces, they began insulting us. However, in fact, the game is just starting. It is just starting. We are now approaching a situation in which the dialogue with the West is becoming real. A full-fledged dialogue with the West is becoming possible. . . . Now Russia has its own voice, its own stance and interests. Russia has its own civilization. When [Russian FM] Lavrov said that we were finally independent of the West and that now we will simply stop being dependent on the West. . . this means that we will become ourselves and will become interesting to the West.³³

Okay if you really mean this. Not okay if it’s fancy intellectual propaganda disguising neo-punk oligarchy and gangsta narco-tyranny. If you want to turn over the kingdom to Suge Knight and Death Row Records, you might as well hire the L.A. police instead of the Wagner boys.

 Dugin’s screed echoed jihadist rhetoric leading up to 9/11. If the West’s corruption, commoditization, and mendacity could provoke hijacked planes flown into buildings kamikaze-style, it could authorize bombardment of apartment complexes and hospitals in Ukraine. In Dugin’s view, the thrust of the argument was unchanged: philosophy and ethics were subsumed in military equations resembling the West’s World War II justification for the bombing Dresden. If Ukraine was becoming “neo-Nazi” or part of an Atlanticist anti-Rus alliance, then any response was legitimate.  

     I don’t have a say in the matter; I am part of the corrupt West.

    Lachman, certainly part of the rock-‘n’-roll West, characterized the Dugin-Putin doctrinal critique of Atlanticism this way:

       The more immediate character of this primordial bust-up is the new Cold War–recently heated up–between the hyper-lib­eral West, in which everything, even reality itself, is commodified, commercialised, and negotiable–Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History turning the world into a global marketplace–and the “traditional” culture of Eurasia, or at least Russia. It may be counterintuitive to think of Russia, home of gangster politics and ostentatious oligarchs, as a nation of “traditional values,” the last bastion of the true Christian faith. But cynically or not, this is how Putin has been portraying post-Soviet Russia, which was badly in need of a new identity. While the West gives way to various forms of gender-bending–or eradicating biological sex in toto–in Russia, traditional gender roles, like traditional family roles and a strong Church, are the order of the day.³⁴

They may be obeyed only in secret renunciation, but they are still the order of the day.

While I sympathize with Dugin’s philosophically surgical attack on modernism, I don’t see Putinism as more benign than Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban—more like from the frying pan into the fire. By the same frying-pan/fire token, reelecting the Trump crime family in the U.S. to succeed Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Dem kerfuffle would be like trying to survive a second dunking in the same flames.

Putinism is repressive, sadistic, merciless toward infidels and minorities, and even more technocratic than the Bezos-Zuckerberg matrix, especially when it comes to engines of war. It is also less successful at modernism. The “corrupt West” is still a mite more sentimental and lenient than collectivist Eurasia—just a mite when you consider corporate slavery, genocidal colonies, unchecked technocracy, AI, and ecological fallout of cowboy individualism.

Yet the West’s transnational eclecticism stretches from multilingual soap operas and Nicholas Sparks’ miracle tales to Buddhist nondualism and the ministry of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. That smidgen is not too bad compared to a gulag in place of a bardo journey, rigpa, and jubilee. Gangsta is never going to be a winning hand and was why the Maidan chanted: “We are Europe.” For Dugin, a special operation was necessary to cleanse this heresy. His “Europe” was weapons profiteers, personality cults, pedophiliac men’s clubs, playboy prurience, and epidemic spam and materialism. But he meant also to decontaminate gender freedom, avant-garde art, TikTok flashing, and any proposition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

Putin soon discovered that Russian purification, when accompanied by mass killing and maiming of civilians and the creation of millions of refugees, was unpopular not just on Western television but in many Eurasian circles too, and it was much more costly than he had budgetted. His propaganda mill had to work overtime to spin the special operation for his base and as a self-preserving mechanism for his regime. Far from immediately splintering the West with the spiritual and military vitality of Holy Russia, Putin ignited a new nationalism from Moldova to Kazakhstan while reviving long-dormant unity in the Atlanticist alliance. 

The real question always was: where would you rather live? Most Russian oligarchs preferred docking their yachts in Greece, Italy, and the Maldives, buying real estate in London and New York, and sending their children to schools there or in Geneva, Paris, and Los Angeles. Russki Mir does not play well even in its own diocese.

A fusion of Russian agitprop, Eurasianism, and KGB messianism with a surprisingly Green twist surfaced in 2013 during a meeting between Putin and Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, as described by Russian state media:

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regime’s continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE) Putin was so incensed over the Obama regime’s refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.

At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.³⁵

Though the attribution of the Monsanto mess to “Rothschild goons” and a generically demented West may be ambitiously propagandistic and anti-Semitic, it is not wholly wrong. Syngenta and Monsanto were death-wish factories churning away at the heart of the capitalist West—their more powerful successors are hard at work turning a planet into a sterile machine. Whether Russia is defending bees, the planet, and nature is disputable to the point of laughable, but the West’s failure to police its corporations and protect the Earth is not. Putin is no tree hugger or wasp devotee, but Barack Obama, for all his lip service and charm, was more Monsantan than Gaian or Green; his friendly rival Hillary was a Monsanto attorney.

A widely circulated statement from Dugin expresses a generic Holy Russian screed that would be amiably utopian, even Teilhardian and Blakean, if it weren’t duplicitous and Orwellian. There is a distinction between heart-centered empathy and mere weaponized coos. Dugan wrote—uncited but a decent deep fake if not authentic:  

We were born in a world where there is still love and we will die in a world where love will no longer exist. Love, the axis of Western culture, is now gone. Love depends on the quantity of pleasure, the price of each of the micro-pleasures taken by the cell. Everything here is dismantled, dismantled, placed on shelves, with a price tag attached to each beef fillet part of the body.

This is a fair rendering of the distinction between Thomas Aquinas’ “first freedom” (which has become a Western free-for-all gang-bang in a corporate pigpen) and his “second freedom” (which is supposed to be sacred and circumscribed for the benefit of the individual soul as well as the planet). Instead, Dugin’s pseudo-philosophical charade twists “love” into an unnegotiable pretzel.

Yet in continuing to take an Atlanticist march of history for granted, the Biden administration, like those of forerunners Clinton and Obama, didn’t read Russki Mir or accord Eurasianism reciprocal respect. They saw a giant gas station with a GDP the size of Spain’s. What they didn’t see was the petro-ruble’s challenge to the dollar in fiscal hardball or Dugin’s “third Rome.” The Republicans evinced more pragmatic empathy with Russian Aryan and Slavic ideals, but that wasn’t politics or traditional policy as much as common cause.

Holy Russia had another factor bringing it into par with other superpowers and dwarfing Germany as well as Spain: its Red Army, weapons stockpile, and nuclear-armed ICBMs. That should have carried coordinate weight when breezy decisions were being made in D.C. Nuclear deterrence—mutually assured destruction—didn’t just go away with the end of the Cold War. Putin declared as much, “Hey, dudes, did you forget our intercontinental warheads? You’re messing with the big boys.”

He recalled an indelible lesson from his childhood when he chased rats around the hallways outside his Leningrad apartment door: Don’t back a rat into a corner or it will jump onto your head to escape. Those taught by rats retain rodent sensibilities. Rats with nuclear arsenals and armies eventually also want to reap their value, especially when they don’t have competitive consumer goods with which to woo the world—there is no “made in Russia” to rival “made in China.” Putin didn’t want to let a good deterrent go idle and rust or watch Ukraine embrace the West while he was distracted by his own obscene loot.

Bottom line: I accept Dugin’s Holy Russia as a unique contribution to planetary wisdom. I don’t accept imposing it by tanks and missiles; I don’t accept its soul darkness. There are river spirits, mountain daemons, noonwraiths, nezhit entities, house spirits, djinns, charms, domovoys, witchcrafts, and forest Green Men in old Russia that do not alight or align anywhere in the West. Alkonost has the head of a bird and the body of a woman and sings in a revelatory voice, as she sends messages from other dimensions and the afterlife. These fairy and leprechaun inhabitants of Holy Russia encompass the sensuality and wildness of the human heart and carry an aspect of greater Gaian spirit. The world soul needs them, but this war is killing them too along with countless cats and grasshoppers.* You can say all you want about Russki Mir, but when you start firing missiles into hospitals, schools, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, you are no more than a bad guest.

Endnotes

20. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 38.

21. Kenneth Fearing and Robert Garland, No Way Out, script-o-rama.com.

22. Michael Weiss and James Rushton, Putin’s ‘annexation’ announcement changes little on the ground in Ukraine,” Yahoo News, September 30, 2022.

23. Jennifer Peltz, “On Ukraine, Russia repeats insistence that it had no choice,” Associated Press, September 24, 2022.

24. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 38.

25. John L. Dornan, “Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Putin believes it’s his ‘destiny’ to ‘recreate the Russian Empire,’” Yahoo Business Insider, January 29, 2023.

26. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 40-41.

27. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 38.

28. Fred Weir, “Putin frames war as protecting Russia’s existence. Are Russians buying it?,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 21, 2023.

29. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 39.

30. This rough translation of Alexander Dugin’s talk has been circulating on the internet.

31. Michael Weiss and James Rushton, Putin’s ‘annexation’ announcement changes little on the ground in Ukraine,” Yahoo News, September 30, 2022. See also Alexander Nazaryan’s translation on Yahoo News, October 2, 2022.

32. Sünner directed people to an online tour, which may or may not still be available by the time you read this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjkuti_HmFU]

33. Alexander Dugin, “Soloviev Live,” March 14, 2022.

34. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 39.

35. Volubrjotr, “President Putin Cracks Down on Monsanto’s ‘Bee Apocalypse,” politicalvelcraft.org, May 30, 2013.

5. PUTIN AND TRUMP: RAGE, MARTYRDOM, FOLLY

Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk at the U.N. and threatening to bury America, presumably under half-lives of radioactive dust, wasn’t any more mad-Russian than Putin’s grisly performances following his dispatch of troops into Ukraine. The former KGB case officer who unleashed the Red Army on Ukraine belied the charming philosophical dude discussing politics, art, and ice hockey with American filmmaker Oliver Stone in a documentary just five years earlier. Channeling Joseph Stalin, Putin invoked World War II and his nuclear arsenal and referred to Ukraine’s leadership as “a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” then for good measure “little Nazis” and “openly neo-Nazi” (it probably sounded even worse in Slavic).

         While it was ridiculous on the face of it to call a popularly elected Jewish president who had lost family members in the Holocaust the “Fuhrer” of a regime in need of “de-nazification,” Putin was repurposing the N-word to signify corrupt capitalist democracies and the hegemonic West. But he understood the West less well, if possible in a global internet era, than even Khrushchev because he insisted on isolating himself in a provincial Russian-language echo chamber, eschewing all other worldviews, belief systems, and texts or subtexts.

         He misjudged Ukraine, NATO, his own Army, the world, post-modernity, Finland, Poland, Sweden, Moldova, and the changing character of war and information. He tried to launch World War II with World War III as his cover but ended up with Libya, Stalingrad retro, Afghanistan redux. He was stuck in a time warp.

When his blitzkrieg, euphemized thuggishly as a “special operation,” floundered under Ukrainian resistance and a flow of weapons from NATO, Putin showed the degree to which he had morphed from an apparatchik to a fiery demagogue: “‘The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth onto the pavement,’ he said, shoulders hunched, staring down the barrel of the camera.”³⁶

         Psychologists and speech therapists analyzing his performance converged on a picture of a man in a delusional, almost psychotic state. Perhaps it was an act designed to unnerve the West. But the step from narcissism to sociopathy is a small and consequential one. The narcissist wants everyone to acknowledge his self-image, self-importance, and help him fulfill his desires—my pleasure should be your pleasure. Sociopaths expect to be indulged and, if they don’t get desired results, they take matters into their own hands and don’t care whose hide it comes out of. This is as true of a head of state unleashing armies and warplanes on civilian populations as it is of a wandering serial killer looking for victims to feed his id. Both deteriorate as they try to function above their pay grade.

         Though Putin is enamored by his own self-importance and intelligence, his face and posture show the strain pattern of trying to fill the body of a more powerful potentate. He looked more and more flaccid and janitorial as the months passed. Latter-day photographs of him have a walk-in, paedomorphic quality: flabbier flesh, the “lost souls” glint of a premature ghost. You would have needed a mob character actor to play a washed-out former KGB head—no more Steven Segal or Sean Connery doing judo. The group of Kremlin bureaucrats trying to preen like Cossack warriors whooping it up after the annexation of a swath of Eastern Ukraine looked more like a bunch of butchers and tailors at a mafia wedding.  

         Appearances don’t blunt the savage geopolitics of New Holy Russia, but they hint at why Putin transitioned so quickly from the remnants of detente to all-out war, rattling a coterie of oligarchs who had grown comfortable with their yachts and villas. Like Donald Trump, he had lost interest in the mere bureaucracy of graft and his own overflowing wealth. He needed something more to fulfill a glorious destiny he had come to believe in, melding self and nation. The more that reality seemed to frustrate his self-image and metonymy with Russia the more megalomaniac he became. Both Trump and Putin grew bored with pleasures of the flesh, with jewels, dames, and bank accounts and sought an elusive apotheosis. But life and samsara are limited and fallible, and the indestructibility of impermanence has frustrated far greater warriors than these, from kings of ancient Egypt and Alexander of Macedonia to Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.

         Putin’s alleged mental decline has been ascribed variously to a Napoleon-like inferiority complex from his short stature (identification with 12-time-zone-mighty Russia elevates him to a Google Earth geopolitical giant), an impoverished childhood during which he played games with rats, his germophobic isolation during the 2019-2021 pandemic, an addiction to steroids from his bodybuilding obsession, remedial Botox, consumption of any number of uppers and opioids in keeping with Hitler and some of Viking ancestors, thyroid or blood or bowel cancer, and a host of traumas, perceived insults to his person, and paucity of emotional intelligence.         

He seems a textbook case of wetiko psychosis (see Chapter Three, Part 10), which is an overall state of possession, encompassing body, mind, and spirit. Wetiko is a pathology diagnosed by First Nations clans but pretty much ignored by diagnosticians of the Western manual. In it, a swath of indigenous cultures not only saw psychological aberrations of human nature but discerned aspects of spirit war: nonphysical forces impinging upon and operating on our plane and blending with emotional disturbances.

Originating from a society that was liminally spirit-based in all regards, wetiko was not psychiatric in a Western but in a shamanic sense. While astutely emotional and cognitive, it is also innately magical and ghost- (or tcipayak-) based too. It needs to try to satisfy its insatiable desire for control by intellectually and economically manipulating and consuming life down to the molecular genetic level.

Before Columbus, Cabot, and the Mayflower, privations of Turtle Island winters led to metamorphoses combining cannibalism, selfishness, greed, sadism, and sociopathic narcissism in a tribal context, creating a crisis in which a borderline individual and his or her tribe could no longer hold or be held by each other; that is, maintain a healthy and reciprocal relationship. The person ceased being a socially responsible, caring member of the group and ran amok, exhibiting a mix of cannibal, thief, and loner: sociopath.³⁷ According to The Jesuit Relations (ca. 1681), which chronicles the travels of Jesuit missions in “New France” (the areas of North America colonized by France, ranging from Newfoundland, Quebec, and the Great Lakes, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico):

They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy; but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite–ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily, the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies, and, as death is the sole remedy among those simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.³⁸

Ojibwe author, linguist, and storyteller Basil H. Johnston offered a vivid description: 

The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.³⁹    

Publisher Ehud Sperling, with whom I discuss Ukraine, remarked that Joe Biden had the wrong approach. Calling Putin a war criminal accomplished zilch among fans of tanks marked with the Kremlin Z. Instead, Biden should have used reverse psychology: “What a great country Russia is—music, ballet, literature, philosophy, Sputnik, Mendeleev, but this empire stuff is so twentieth century; it’s beneath you.” In fact, in the twentieth century when it still worked somewhat, it was so nineteenth century.

         I have no idea what Elon Musk was thinking when he challenged Putin to a mano-a-mano fight for Ukraine, but his use of a manga-like trope subtly cued a sea change in power politics and the magnetic field, from plutocrat to technocrat, from Stalin to Tesla. Putin would never have accepted or even acknowledged the satire, but its irony and absurdity tried to pique his period-piece intellect. The stunt did, however, rouse his proud boys. Leader of the Chechen oblast Ramzan Kadyrov urged Putin to send Musk out of the ring in a body bag, then discharge him and his attack dogs to assassinate Zelenskyy and plunder Kyiv like their Viking ancestors.

       Musk’s prank was eerily on target. The casual slaughter of civilians and demolition of cities by Putin-dispatched armies was so brusque, casual, reptilian, and comprehensive that the world had as much trouble digesting the real-time bloodshed as it had catching up to an actual pandemic. In asymmetric warfare, tanks and missiles were battering computer banks and condos, while people living, in the words of first lady Olena Zelenskyy, “peaceful modern lives” with well-paying jobs and comfortable homes in the heart of 2020s civil society were left dead on their own sidewalks or turned instantly into refugees. Such is Putin’s true prowess and greatness: depravity, destruction, and debris.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, I thought of Trump as Putin’s stooge, a starry-eyed wannabe dictator, terminal narcissist, and closet sociopath eager to be taught and manipulated by a master. Ukraine changed that impression. I now see Putin equally as a wannabe Trump: a posturing macho man and aspiring reality star, a hatchet-bearing CEO, a bonkers war chief, albeit a real judo master instead of a rasslin’ fake and chicken hawk.

         Whether or not Putin and Trump share an oversoul, they seem to have sucked each other into their own personae on the planet, forming a global nowhere man, a meta-person with the same values, the same sense of entitlement, the same maudlin faux martyrdom, the same unearned pirated wealth, the same self-aggrandizement, the same inability to feel compassion or shame, the same capacity for fuckery, the same contempt for anyone not them or at their self-anointed echelon, the same inflated sense of their own wisdom and intelligence dwarfing that of even military and civilian experts, the same ability to cast waves of simultaneous fear and loyalty over a vast subservient constituency, the same taste in Eastern European femmes fatales, the same bogus religiosity behind a theocracy with themselves as god-king, the same insatiable appetite for expensive military parades and patriotic displays in support of their regime in the guise of the nation, the same sadistic desire to persecute Brittney Griner, LeBron James, and Colin Kaepernick while valorizing Georgia and Generals running back Herschel Walker, ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, cellist Sergei Pavlovich Roldugin, and Kid Rock, the same capacity to wreak damage and continue wreaking damage on an astonishing scale, the same insouciance about abetting a food or energy shortage or medical crisis, the same necrophiliac sadism regarding the suffering at their behest, the same doubling down and finger-pointing, the same smoldering resentment, the same hatred for modernity (except for one’s own palace and whores), the same phony piety. Who needs “Russia, Russia, Russia” or Hillary Clinton’s straw Manchurian candidate? That not only overlooks the forest for a few transplanted trees but misses the scale of two tyrants joining forces to take over the world. 

Trump makes corny jokes and melodramatic appeals, while Putin orders up real Armageddons like honey and praga cakes. Trump makes America great again by militaristic bombast and minor instigations, while Putin makes Russia great again by assassinating his rivals and sending his military into other countries. Trump has considered Mexico, the extent (much like Ronald Reagan) of his bravado in the hemisphere.

         They share a belief that you can bludgeon anyone into agreement or submission; a proclivity to judge others’ loyalty by their willingness to support their own deceptions; a belief that lying isn’t lying if in the service of national interest, meaning self-interest; the same unwillingness to listen to any advisor who doesn’t agree with them so that their echo chamber becomes smaller and smaller; the same tendency to turn viciously on anyone they think has turned against them; the same ability to turn retribution and consequences for their actions into rallying cries. The week that Trump faced indictment in Stormy Daniels case in New York State, Putin was dubbed a war criminal by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, different in scale but not in kind. They both think that the way to win is to declare victory whether you are winning or not and then demanding that your score sheet be validated; in Trump’s case, it was “Find me 11,780 votes” and sign my golf card; in Putin’s case, it was “Honor my plebiscites.” They project the same blasphemy of self-deification, the sense that while they alone are real, they represent the views of millions of others who need them (alone) to express it, the same jealous desire to eliminate anyone who does not acknowledge their sovereignty or take their side, the same hankering to execute op-ed journalists and political foes (Putin does it regularly and brazenly, Trump would actually like to). It’s remarkable how many of Putin’s associates, former associates, and rivals died prematurely by a medley of hits in a gory theater of the absurd. If this guy isn’t ordering his opponents murdered in routine order, then he is accompanied by a remarkable troupe of propinquities and avenging vampires.  

Like Trump, Putin doesn’t understand the accumulation and ripening of karma.

Both men presume to turn a national military into their own praetorian guard (Trump wished that he had had a personal force like Putin’s to carry out his January 6^th putsch); they have the same feeling that the world is so unfair to them, the same tendency to disproportionate payback for being ignored or disrespected, the same view that toughness means never backing down or admitting errors, the same penchant to pursue and valorize a goal even after it has gone south, the same belief that the only way out of a jam is to escalate, the same tantrum that says someone will pay for my unhappiness and I don’t care who or how many suffer in the process, the same disregard for the deaths they cause (in fact, a tendency to double- and quadruple-down in order to trivialize the corpses by Stalin’s reputed quantum algebra (“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”), the same lethal boredom and clinical depression relieved only by megalomania, the same tendency to create irreparable situations based on pathological narcissism while leaving everyone else (in a party or nation) in the lurch dependent on their next move (a move they won’t make because they in over their heads and subconsciously terrified), the same nostalgia for a world that no longer exists.

         Both men have a remarkable mafia-don-like ability to turn former rivals and critics into submissive allies and avid, vocal supporters, a supernatural combination of divine magnetism and royal terror. A supernal force seems to drive and preserve them; they can only be stopped by a silver spear. If the force withdrew its energy, they both might be shed like crustacean shells. I wouldn’t be surprised by their simultaneous demise.

Politically Trump’s MAGA tried to mimic Putin’s template: change the electoral rules; cancel opponents and make it look like suicides or accidents; rule as a despot, and claim super-patriotism at every opportunity. The difference is that Russia had no deep democratic heritage and Putin holds the reins of his own military, so he can be unbending in action, while Trump was unbending in bullshit. He didn’t have a private army or germinal KGB training (or even Beetle Bailey basic training), and his Proud Boys were not near the caliber of the Wagner Group.

       Yet there was a mutual admiration society. If Putin showed Trump how to remake himself as a career politician and party boss and become president for life, Trump showed Putin how to blow off all boundaries on avarice and plunder. Neither had to show the other: they confirmed what either had been doing for years, only upping the ante. Putin showed Trump that politics not real estate or branding was the path to obscene wealth—don’t forget who the richest man on earth is, the one with the biggest palaces and the most bombs; it is not a Saudi prince but a KGB case officer, outstripping Musk and Bezos and the narco-lords.

Trump showed Putin that power without graft is a waste of time, though Putin took oligarchy to heart long before Donald came along. Former Russian diplomat to the UN in Geneva, Boris Bondarev, stated the matter bluntly on tendering his resignation: “Those who conceived this war want only one thing—to remain in power forever, to live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity.”⁴⁰

                  Trump and Putin both graduated from baubles, bimbos, and plebe adulation to fantasies of being King of the World. Donald had a Tony Soprano/Scrooge McDuck/Kim Jung-un version in his limo, while Vladimir had the millennial myths of Holy Russia in his sails. The false flag under which he proposed reconquering Eurasia was the pennant under which Trump hoped to replace democracy with a populist goon squad.

If anything, Putin has proven a less reliable carrier of nuclear launch codes because he has an itchier trigger finger or, if not, a dirtier nuclear mind. He told British PM Boris Johnson that he could kill him in one minute, a fake Freudian slip hiding a real one. Trump far too much wants to live and enjoy his possessions and achievements to court holocaust like a lady of the night.

         In his book on the return of Holy Russia (appropriatelysubtitled Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World),Lachman wrote: “There are individuals . . . who under no circumstances will admit to being wrong and who, if their authority is challenged, will wreak, to them, a perfectly justifiable vengeance on those who oppose their will. Russia, sadly, has been subjected to more than one of these characters.”

            He cited Ivan IV’s decimation of the population of Novgorod in 1570 “when his paranoia led to him building a wall around the city and spending five weeks torturing its inhabitants. In the end sixty-four thousand people were killed, to assuage his suspicion that the city was planning a revolt (it wasn’t).”⁴¹

      Lachman also reminded us of a prior Vladimir:

      In 2014, during Russia’s earlier incursion into Ukraine, when it an­nexed Crimea, Putin brought back from Kherson–a city now occupied by Russian forces–a stone. This became the foundation stone of a 60-ft (18m) statue of Prince Vladmir the Great, founder of what in Russian history is known as Kievan Rus,’ the “lost king­dom” of mediaeval Russia, that in 2015 was erected just outside the Kremlin. This suggests strongly that one Vladimir identifies quite a bit with another. In AD 989 Vladimir I converted from Slavic paganism to Greek Orthodox Christianity at Kherson, where he married into the royal Byzantine family, acquiring a porphyrogenite bride in exchange for his baptism. This union formed one of several ties, mythic or factual, between Russia and the Roman Empire.⁴²

         Putin would sabotage his own pipeline, slaughter hundreds of thousands of his own people without conscience, and destroy whole cities before falling short of his minimum goal of annexing his target zone of Eastern Ukraine. That’s his version of Trump’s “Stop the Steal”—a badge of loyalty and patriotism to Holy Russia, meaning his own regime. They were both able to trick millions of people into believing that securing their own power and protecting their dynasty meant patriotism.

To be a loser, for either man, is not to exist, a state of existential terror.

         Trump and Putin finally co-create an atavistic twenty-first-century king who believes in his right to stifle all dissent, by poison or forced defenestration when necessary; who becomes obscenely rich not by royalty but by stealing from his own citizens and acolytes.

Sadomasochistic exercise of power and graft for not just control but satisfaction aligns the American weird Right with Russian, Taliban, Saudi, Revolutionary Guard, Israeli Settler, and other despotic modes of justice: If you want to stop drugs, execute dealers. If you want to stop abortion or unauthorized marriage, execute women. If you want to stop homosexuality or transgender, have public executions and stonings. Replace schools with madrasas: an educated public is detrimental to control.

It doesn’t matter whether the levers and displays are communist, Sunni, Shia, or White supremacist, when surface totems are stripped away, fundamentalist dictatorships and wannabe dictatorships worship the same god. Trump and Putin both revel in situational lechery, devotional pornography, Christianized bondage, and what Emily Shurr called “patriarchal domination of women via financial control, fearmongering, erotic power dynamics, and sexual and emotional abuse” (see “Sex-Magic Interlude” in Chapter Three, “Cancel Culture”). For Putin, Brittany Griner proved as ideal a victim and public example as she would have been for Trump.

Of course, this isn’t just Trump and Putin; it is an international disease from the wards of Idaho and South Carolina to Kandahar, the African Horn, Latin America, Riyadh, and Iran.

         Alex Jones may be contemptible and opportunistic, but he nailed something generally overlooked about Trump, Putin, MAGA, Proud Boys, and a new fashionable White Supremacy and anti-Semitism, that it is driven partly by sexual kink. I quoted another version of Jones’ insight earlier: “There is this Hitler fetish. And no, I’m not into dudes in fancy peacock military uniforms that, by the way, got 22 million Germans killed. . . . Hitler was horrible, screw Hitler, burn in hell Hitler.”

It is delusion to think that Trump’s bromance with Putin would have prevented the invasion of Ukraine. Trump has on capacity for nuance—he would have either bombed Moscow or turned Kyiv over to the Kremlin. He has to act or tweet before the moment overwhelms his nervous system. He probably would have told Putin, “Take Kiev if that’s what you want; then get me that Democratic server and some Hunter Biden shit.” The two sociopaths would have had a hard time indefinitely skirting a nuclear exchange. Charm, bullying, and bluff have their limits, and Putin, as noted, has a limited sense of irony.

         Trump’s idea of painting warplanes with Chinese emblems and bombing Moscow to get Russia and China at each other’s throats was a joke, but that was the problem—joking is the extent of his relationship to mass slaughter. Like a bear staring down a hiker, his capacity for ambiguity is nil.

This is where Joe Biden brings the temperament, emotional intelligence, nuance, and a skillset that Trump lacks, including ways to achieve a strategic goal without a global holocaust. Biden also understands, from experience, the geopolitical layers in play and can navigate them. The Right-Wing conservative isolationists offer a simplistic zero-sum landscape like a chess amateur making checkers moves against a grand master.

Joe may be a petty crook and party hack, but he has suffered by G. I. Gurdjieff’s precept that only conscious suffering has any meaning and that the only cure for pain is the pain. He has learned empathy, compassion, and patience; he can feel as well as observe what is happening. Even if he is mostly playing political games instead of actually trying to solve problems, he cares about others’ suffering, whereas Trump and Putin don’t give a shit about pain not theirs, in part because, they can’t feel or imagine it.

         While Putin was attempting to perform a supreme strategy for Greater Russia, Trump didn’t even understand the geopolitical significance of Ukraine. For most of his life, he either never heard of the country or couldn’t locate it on a map. He can’t get past the MAGA mouse that roared, “They’re fucking corrupt. They tried to screw me. . . . .”  According to Charles Kupperman, his deputy national security advisor:

         [H]e had no sense as to why these alliances benefited us or why you need a global footprint for military and strategic capabilities. If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ we wouldn’t know what the concept was. He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history, how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.⁴³

       In fact, balance in general was out of his intellectual and emotional range.

       Putin may have mastered the concepts and contexts, but he was blinded by a zero-sum dualism that led him to a single sullen outcome well established in Russian history: eliminate anything or anyone in your way.

       There is only one remaining Russian oligarch, Vladimir the Vainglorious or Vlad the Vigorous, on horseback, shirtless, pectorals bulging. The rest are boyars, lesser princes and lackeys dependent on the czar’s patronage. They are disposable, dispossessable, jailable, poisonable or defenestratable at whim.

         Putin is not even fully human anymore; he is more like the holographic henchman of The Matrix, launching mechanical wasps to penetrate sanctuaries and information systems.

      In the “Michael” teachings and other channeled systems as well as ant entomology, there are warriors-kings born with warrior souls. They view the world as a soldier does, in terms of troops and battles. They cannot be merchants or philosophers. Warrior energy is the vibrational cocoon out of which they were hatched. For Putin, peace and markets are capitalism; war is sexuality, self, and survival.

Endnotes

36. Alexander Smith, ‘’He’s clearly angry’: People who study Putin are alarmed by his latest speech,” Yahoo News, March 17, 2022.

37. For the material on wetiko psychosis, see Richard Grossinger, “Paul Levy’s Conversion of First Nations Cannibalism to Global Sociopathy,” Afterword to Paul Levy, Undreaming Wetiko: Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus.

38. Ruben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Volume 46, London: Forgotten Books, 2019, p. 263.

39. Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Supernatural World of the Ojibwe, New York: Harper Collins, 1995., p. 221.

40. Mia Jankowicz, “’So ashamed’: Russian diplomat quits over Ukraine invasion, attacking Putin’s circle as corrupt and obsessed with luxury,” Business Insider, May 23, 2022.

41. Gary Lachman, The Return of Holy Russia, p. 154.

42. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 39.

43. Robert Draper, “This Was Trump Pulling a Putin,” The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2022, p. 41.

The phrase “sexuality, self, and survival” comes from bioenergetic healer Stanley Keleman.

6. WAR

It is war. By any other name (“special military operation”), it is Orwellian bunk. The tanks rolled out of the Battle of the Bulge onto the roads and streets of Ukraine, skipping almost eighty years during which the world otherwise voted for modernity and got colorized. In Belgium 1945, they were Nazi tanks; in Ukraine 2022 they were tanks of a replacement fascist regime launched against an incipient democracy. In that sense, they were still Nazi tanks, but Russia was the party needing de-nazification. It also wasn’t the first time that Russia’s military rolled over Ukraine, delivering scorched earth, tactical starvation, and genocide, more like the thirteenth, the twelfth being Stalin’s.

The optics were pure reptile brain in action, projecting homotopy onto landscape so that vestigial dinosaurs came to life as metallic military vehicles and warplanes, imposing their lobes’ cognitive, psychic, and emotional prerogatives. Putin’s onslaught reprised the joke that French take the bus locally but drive their Peugeots to visit other countries, whereas the Russians visit Europe in tanks.

          What once looked like communism versus capitalism (1960) or consumerism versus jihad (2001) has regressed into authoritarian nativist regimes versus multicultural multi-gender societies, though from the Russian standpoint, it is decadent money-grubbing Aristos versus salt-of-the-earth peasants.

To level cities and murder civilians over a dispute of values and ideology or politics is overkill—“an eye for an eyelash” stuff—but it is the definition of warfare: legalized hunting and killing of humans by other humans. Games take over from life: Squid games, survival games, dating games, political games, war games. Nothing engages compulsive gamblers quite like the casino. The richness of life evaporates in rolls of dice and strategies to defeat your opponent, though as a pro star, I forget whom, remarked, “If it’s the ultimate game, why do they play it again next year?”

In civil society, conviction for the premeditated murder of even a single person leads to imprisonment or the death penalty; even robbery can get you fifteen to thirty flat time. Yet Putin orchestrated a pandemic-scale spree of slaughter, theft, burglary, rape, vandalism, and murder, along with billions of dollars of vaporized equity and major disruptions in global food, energy, and material chains, and then tried to pass it off as a special operation or diplomacy by other means. That is beyond culpability or conscience. Yet Putin expects exoneration and maybe a Nobel Peace prize. War crimes don’t exist per his remark that in wars people die and stuff gets broken, too bad.

         But he erred in falling for his own fabulism. He assumed that the people of Ukraine were unshakably Russian beneath an interim Westernized veneer and would accept liberation and a return to the fatherland much the way that Kevin Costner’s movie character did (or it at least would not put up meaningful resistance). After all, topknots, better an unruly cousin than a deceiving stranger. Yet the Red Army wasn’t welcomed with trumpets and flowers, nor did it install on jiffy-lube time a pro-Russian regime and a new Russophile puppet in Kiev. Instead, it instilled fervent hatred for Russia and a desire for revenge that may yet arrive in Moscow, by courier or missile. A droll rendition of the Ukrainian view of Russia would be, “The last time you came, a million of us died, so welcome back!”

         In 2022, no one was going to welcome Soviet-style governance or Russian tanks in their towns. Even Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Putin’s water boy in the EU, ran from the optics. It looked too much like Budapest 1956 when the locals expressed their foul mood by hanging the bodies of Russian soldiers from meat hooks in the streets.

         Likewise, in most of Ukraine, a Euromaidan plus a generation or two of freedom had dissolved much of the holdover Slavic loyalty. A Slavic Iron Curtain was about as appealing as sharia law. After decades of the Western mercado, Kremlin lockdown had less appeal than “decadent consumerism”—consumerism was more fun. Again, this is where American Proud Boys and the Russian punk Right meet: a forgoing of freedoms to achieve a controlled, strongman society. Both groups enjoy imposing Taliban-style justice.

         There was a reason why, on August 23, 1989, thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians parked their cars on the highway, got out, and formed a 420-mile chain of linked hands from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius. That heart radiance was shone to penetrate the darkness of Kremlinism, the same veil that Vladimir Putin celebrates as an energy grid against a corrupt West.

The nativist Russian view, backed by Ukrainian Russophiles, is that Ukraine is nonviable as a nation, meaning that on its own it nazifies automatically—loses its Russocentricity; it can’t achieve a separate identity because the Russian aura is that big.When its populace starts to look more like Orlando than Leningrad, it requires extermination. Otherwise, the mange and miasm might spread to Russki Mir itself.

         So, for de-nazification, substitute de-Westernization, de-neoliberalization. Through Dugin’s Rus Orthodox lens, the Woodstock Festival, Burning Man, and gay marriage are as “Nazi” as German Youth parties and ritual sacrifices in the Bavarian forests. NATO and West-based transnational corporations camouflage a vestigial Fourth Reich with their tropes of democracy–such welcome, Wernher von Braun; bring your rockets.

         It is not that there aren’t Nazis in Ukraine, it is more like—where aren’t there neo- and little Nazis?

The fact is, cryptofascism resurfaces throughout Eurasia in imaginal and paramilitary cults, masonic-like lodges, fighting clubs, Christian militias and crusaders, and dabblers in ceremonial magic. The same irregular tropes built the Church of the Red Army.

         The Russians could be just as “Nazi” as the Germans (or not) depending on the moment. After all, Germany is now perhaps the most liberal, multicultural democracy in modern Europe, while “Holy Russia” is as much about Russian blood being better than Ukrainian, Polish, German, French, or English blood as Nazi eugenics were about the power of Aryan blood.

         Forget blood as a measure; old-fashioned ethic nationalism is obsolete. 23andMe finds the DNA of all groups mixed together—Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Aryan, Turkish too. Every day, Italians discover that they are actually Swedes, and Irish or Scots find that they are half-Italian or half Greek.

The Russian view that Ukrainian nationhood was a Western import foisted on a deluded populace and that few Ukrainians would be willing to die for it proved a major misjudgment.Even Russians in the Donbas knew “that Putin does not actually care about Russian-speaking Ukrainians as human beings but only as living testaments to the Russian empire’s right to rule Ukraine, according to the dictates of his abstruse ethno-national mythology.”⁴⁴ Putin doesn’t even care about his own soldiers; they are orcs, cannon fodder. He put them into a war zone without training, a plan, working weapons, ammunition, or intelligence. From there, they trenched into Chernobyl’s Red Forest like sacrificial lambs. He got the Wagner group to pull criminals out of prisons—better to die quickly in waves around Mariupol honoring the homeland than to rot in bastilles. If they were won the lottery and survived, they got their freedom. New York Times reporter James Verini summarized a theater of the absurd:

         For all of Putin’s talk of rectifying history, his troops bombed without regard for it—without regard for Russia’s own history. This hypocrisy was always in the background of Kharkivites’ conversations about the war. . . . Worse than hypocritical, worse than ironic, they pointed out, the siege was sadomasochistic. Suicidal. Russia claimed Ukraine was Russia, so in invading Ukraine, wasn’t Russia invading itself. . . ? [This paradox might be expressed in the riddle: how much ordnance would the U.S. use in re-taking Kansas City or Seattle? What restraint would be shown based on the knowledge that they would have to rebuild whatever they bombed and tore down?]

The Russians were as indifferent to their own lives as they were to those of their victims. Just look at how they treated their troops, sending them into battle undertrained, underfed, uncommanded, leaving their corpses on the battlefield to rot. . . .

            Putin claimed that Ukraine has been unjustly sundered from Russia before coming under the sway of Western stoolies. ‘Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land—that is, Ukrainians—have called themselves Russians.’ It was a story line he pursued for a good decade by the time of the invasion, with increasing insistence, and with the help of increasingly tortured historical subplots . . . .

And the false consciousness he saw in Ukrainians? Being Ukrainian. He was telling them that their nation, sovereign these 30 years, was a mistake. That it didn’t have the right to exist. In fact, that it didn’t exist. That they didn’t exist—except perhaps as Russians.”⁴⁵

         In all but the most draconian terms, Putin was no liberator —“not unless liberating us means killing us,” as one Ukrainian fleeing Mariupol told a reporter as Putin and his team were bombing his home town off Google Earth. An outraged, grief-stricken woman told another journalist (through a translator), “We don’t need liberation. We were happy living our lives, doing our jobs, feeding our families. You came to liberate us. From what?”

         Putin’s (and Dugin’s) answer would be: ‘from falling into the trance of false freedom and pseudo-prosperity of self-centered Western individualism and false democracy.’ Unlike chalets in Switzerland or Finland, her house lay in someone else’s reserved buffer zone. Vladimir the Great would rather burn it and its village to the ground than see Western oligarchs, bankers, and transnational jetsetters get it. “Sphere of influence” was being imposed as part of a new world order.

         Power politics trumped prior morality. Ukraine was being dismantled because it didn’t support the notion that people exist primarily to contribute to a sphere of influence; it resisted Russian zoning. “Kiev” may be integrated into Russian culture and part of essential Russian-ness, but that’s an affectation and abstraction for those living in Kyiv. Shouldn’t they have a say about who they are? Should Russian heritage be foisted onto them because some Russians require it? That said, they might be more inclined to look favorably on Russia and their Russian heritage if the Kremlin hadn’t turned the country into an oil and weapons equivalent of a narco-state? If everyone living in Russia who wanted was given the chance to go to the West or a Ukraine-like nation, the country would empty out. It is already emptying out. Why should those already in Ukraine be clawed back?  

Dispossessed Tibetans and Uighurs feel pretty much the same way about China: how do we avoid participating in your eternal return of war games and imperial grandeur and get to live our own lives? As for Taiwan, does it not matter what the residents want? Per my comments earlier in this chapter, why not make a business and tourism deal between the polities rather than wage a war of mass destruction? Does the reptile brain always get seniority over common sense?

Yet for China, an independent Taiwan is an insult and international crime.

For Putin, Ukrainian self-determination is a punishable offense. 

Inside the Kremlin’s information bubble, many Russians did believe that Ukraine’s citizens were being seduced by the West and were functionally nazified. If to de-nazify meant to kill every Western-leaning Ukrainian and wipe out Euro-Ukrainian cities, then that be the new normal, blessed by Patriarch Kirill himself. Eliminate all vestiges of national Ukrainian identity. Anything that’s not faithfully Russian is, by definition, venal Nazi. This leftover World War II baggage was just as applicable to Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990s Balkan conflict.

         In the words of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—who I have come to think of the Kremlin’s Rudy Giuliani, Putin’s alter ego: protégé, idolater, enabler, and homunculus—the Ukrainian government was not just a capitalist abomination but literally ahistorical; it could exist only as a mummery, a neo-American version of a Slavic Renaissance Fair. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refuted Senator Rand Paul’s echo of these Russian talking points: “When everything came to a head, it is abundantly clear, in President Putin’s own words, that this was never about Ukraine being potentially part of NATO, and it was always about his belief that Ukraine does not deserve to be a sovereign, independent country.”⁴⁶

         Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev was even more condescending and definitive, saying that “Ukraine ‘will disappear because no one cares about it.’ After that, he ‘argued’ that Russia ‘does not need Ukraine.’” He went on “to say ‘that Europe, the US, Africa and Latin America, Asia and Russia do not need Ukraine, either.’” He later said that “‘Ukrainians do not need Ukraine,’” and that “‘Russia started the war because Ukraine was part of Russia.’” That evoked plenty of responses:

“They sure are spending a lot of money and ruining hundreds of thousands of families, letting soldiers die at the expense of something everyone will forget and doesn’t matter?” “Russia will disappear. No one needs it, or wants it. The world is tired of Russian behavior. We will break Russia into many small nations, who will soon never remember that there ever was such a thing as Russia.” Russia will disappear as no one will care about it after the great partition. All the subjugated people in Siberia will get their independence. As will the subjugated people of the South Caucasus. Finland can take back the territories that were lost. Ukraine can annex the western oblasts to serve as demilitarized buffer zone. A new homeland will carved out for the Tartars. After all that, Russia will be just Moscow and St. Petersburg, and no one will care about it.” “no-one would care if you disappeared, Medvedev . . . .”⁴⁷

In Putin’s machinations it was always a long-overdue Russian Civil War, reclaiming the rebel West—all others mind their own business. The template wasn’t Joseph Stalin but Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. You don’t cross Ivan. Lachman explained why:

         In 1570 Ivan the Terrible, miffed at some perceived slight and paranoid that the citizens of Novgorod were planning rebel­lion, had a wooden wall built around the city to prevent anyone from escaping, and then embarked on a month of slaughter. The exact number of the dead varies with different accounts, but it was in the thou­sands, and it was only one of Ivan’s many displays of horrific cruelty; he was one of the “Right Men” Colin Wilson has written about – individuals who under no circum­stances will ever admit to being wrong, a personality trait not lost on Putin.⁴⁸

Putin’s nominal adversary Volodymyr Zelenskyy may not be a pure hero because there are no exemplars insofar as there are no unentangled roles. To the Kremlin, Ukraine was another Absurdistan. The same unchecked market forces driving American farmers, fishermen, and homeowners off their properties and out of their communities was underway in the Ukraine both before and after the Maidan; the festival itself changed nothing. Zelenskyy was part of an oligarchy too.  

         To Putin, the failed comedian was seemingly a welterweight in a heavyweight ring, a pansy ballroom dancer, an actor who played a president in a movie before running for office, no match for a Soviet master spy and black belt. He looked like a pushover even more than fawning Donald Trump. But that’s why they play the game. For Zelenskyy, it was initially an act; then it wasn’t. Everything is an act at first; that’s how folks learn.

         After the scripting, Zelenskyy became who he was, what his lineage made him. Sitcom star and corrupt oligarch were wiped away by his willingness to die for modernity, even among cons and con artists. He began to purge them. He didn’t flee with his family and equity. He drew samurai courage out an unseen reserve and became not just a Ukrainian hero, but a model of male valor for the world and for Hollywood scriptwriters looking for new versions of brave, admirable men to replace overworked John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Pierce Brosnan, and Liam Neeson characters.

        Trump, who tried to bribe a perceived fifth-rate stool pigeon for dirt on the Bidens with heedless avidity, proved the weaker politician and chickener hawk. Both men converted media stardom and influencer status into power—a by-product of the commoditization of celebrity personhood—but the Ukrainian clown presented an actual platform, even in his cinema role, and people voted for it. The MAGA mountebank presented only a cult of personality.

         As Zelenskyy was putting his life on the line, refusing to leave his new dacha, the script turned starkly real. His words became as eloquently quotable as Winston Churchill’s. He may have been an actor who learned his lines, but so was Winston, and so were the models for Shakespeare’s orators and kings. When Zelenskyy told American journalists in the bunker, “This isn’t a game. This is real,” he meant, “This isn’t a play. It’s real in a way that doesn’t cut through American trance theater. Your ‘war’ was always ‘over there.’ Well, I’m over there even though you can watch a movie of me playing a comedian here pretending to be there.”

         Of course, Free World admiration only angered a warlord who, by proxy, routinely blackmailed, poisoned, jailed, shot, and bombed enemies and opponents. Journalist Robert S. Becker framed Putin’s bullydom:

           [G]enocidal war crimes don’t just happen: they result from a mania to crush an already bloodied (sub-human) foe. Especially in the fascist mode, unprovoked takeovers seek not just economic predation but to co-opt the heart and soul of a (decadent) culture. Putin’s militarism qualifies as a messianic bombardment by a presumptive master race — plus warning others not to impede Making Russia Great Again.⁴⁹

                  Dead bodies with bound arms and signs of torture on the streets of suburban Kyiv, amputated ears, heads, and castrations in the Donbas spoke to a mob of Titushky goons, mercenaries, recreational killers, and wannabe mafiosos. Many of the soldiers didn’t know what they were doing in Ukraine, so they located themselves by the lowest common denominator of looting armies millennially across seas and steppes.

         Relics of Putin’s revenge include a young boy striding alone into exile with a bag of candy and toys; graduating high-school girls posing yearbook-like on tiers of their bombed-out school; a woman carrying her cats in slings while wheeling suitcases, heading to Poland or Moldova; Boy-Scout-age soldiers showing off their weapons in shy camaraderie with numb smiles; a ballerina with a machine gun.

In occult lore, the astral field is inherently polarized and every part of it is polarized, so there is no way out of dueling mirrors. Troops throughout history have discovered this: the soldiers they slaughter are themselves in different costumes.

         Americans followed the same basic script at Abu Ghraib, torturing and humiliating Iraqi men with water boarding and electrodes on genitals. Army Reservist Lyndie England marched captives around naked on four paws and leashes. The Russians had no equivalent sense of humor or leisure time; they played shooting gallery and conducted gang initiations on civilians carrying groceries or on bicycles like the Berkut during the Maidan. Using stolen cell phones, they blackmailed mothers for the lives of their sons, asking for money in exchange for not sending an execution video next. A Ukrainian post on social media sarcastically described the “liberation”:

         Russian soldiers liberated thousands of Ukrainian homes from: combat toilets, armored TV-sets, fighting laptops, tactical earphones, clothes, makeup . . . and thousands of other dangerous NATO items. . . . Let their deeds be forever remembered.

         A caption on a doctored photo of helicopters dangling washing machines over a demolished Kharkiv read “Special Military Operation. With consummate irony, images like these became instant postal stamps.

        The Kremlin claimed that the atrocities were fake: Western propaganda or Ukrainian false flags. Their denials turned quickly obsolete in an age of cell phones, drones, satellites, hacking, and WiFi. Red Army indecencies were visible and audible to multiple eyes and ears.

The Russian narrative on Ukraine is driven by a mythologically literal reuse of history. People not born during World War II or too young then to contribute relevantly to the narrative nonetheless carry. They act as if Ukraine were a mere continuation of the War War II version of Ukraine or of the fascist enemy to the West, which it both is and isn’t but mostly isn’t.

As the West armed Ukraine to defend itself against a Russian takeover, the automatic response of Kremlin-allied factions in Russia was not to see a separate nation wanting to develop its own geopolitics and culture or a new Germany in a new Europe but a millennial morality play of betrayal and payback. On the Russian side, it is played out with not only Nazi myths and blame but fascist encryptions and gematria: 

After weeks of resistance, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that, along with allies, the country would provide 88 of the battle tanks to Ukraine, effectively giving Kyiv more firepower to launch new offensives. The Biden administration was also expected to announce a deal to send 30 M1 Abrams tanks to the country.

The Russian Embassy in Berlin was among the first out of the gate after the news broke—offering a bizarre, if not deranged, take: “Berlin’s decision signifies the unequivocal refusal of the Federal Republic of Germany to recognize historical responsibility to our people for the terrible, timeless crimes of Nazism,” Russian Ambassador Sergei Nechayev said in in a statement.

The statement went on to say the tanks would also put an end to “postwar reconciliation between Russians and Germans” and “take the conflict to a new level of confrontation.”

Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, joined Russian diplomats in offering up far-fetched Nazi comparisons.

“After a flogging by Washington, Germany will send 14 tanks to Ukraine. Closer to summer, deliveries of gas chambers are also expected,” Simonyan tweeted.

TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called European leaders “Nazi scumbags” and argued that the delivery of Leopard tanks to Ukraine makes all of Germany a “legitimate” military target for Russia.

He claimed Germany has “forgotten its historical guilt” and must pay for it.

Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin’s man in charge in occupied Crimea—one of the territories Ukrainian authorities may use the tanks to take back—published what he said were the schematics of Germany’s Leopard 2A4 tank on Telegram.

“I am sure that everyone will be able to find more detailed information about the vulnerabilities of this… on their own, and the command will provide our fighters with everything necessary to destroy the descendants of the fascist ‘Tiger’ and ‘Panther’ [tanks used in WWII],” Aksyonov wrote.

Pro-Kremlin pundits unanimously bent themselves into knots (and broke their brains) trying to prove a global Nazi conspiracy.

“Tank conspiracy. 14 Challenger tanks will be supplied by Britain to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And it was also announced that Germany will supply the Armed Forces of Ukraine with 14 Leopard tanks. Is this some kind of secret number they have, 14? It turns out yes. 14 is a secret fascist number,” wrote political analyst Sergei Markov, noting that 14 “is the number of words” in two slogans used decades ago by the American neo-Nazi David Lane. “Thus, the number of Challenger and Leopard tanks is a secret message from the governments of Britain and Germany: ‘We know that these tanks are for the Nazis,’” Markov said.⁵⁰

Certainly no one in modern Russia was alive at the time of Napoleon, but his campaign is remembered almost biblically, and its consequences are more current in Russia than France: “Russia on Sunday scolded Emmanuel Macron over remarks about wanting to see Russia defeated, saying Moscow still remembered the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte and accusing the French president of duplicitous diplomacy with the Kremlin.”⁵¹

Russia’s apocalyptic mood suggests a World War II version of World War III even as World War 1 returns to the Donbas battlefield. Medvedev, the Kremlin’s voice of doom, chants this testament to the West:

An ally of President Vladimir Putin warned NATO on Thursday that a defeat of Russia in Ukraine could trigger a nuclear war, while the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said the world would end if the West tried to destroy Russia.

Such apocalyptic rhetoric is intended to deter the U.S.-led NATO military alliance from getting even more involved in the war, on the eve of a meeting of Ukraine’s allies to discuss sending Kyiv more weapons.

But the explicit recognition that Russia might lose on the battlefield marked a rare moment of public doubt from a prominent member of Putin’s inner circle.

“The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of Putin’s powerful security council, said in a post on Telegram. “Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends,” said Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012.

Striking a similar tone at what he described as an anxious time for the country, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said in a sermon for Epiphany that trying to destroy Russia would mean the end of the world.

Medvedev said NATO and other defense leaders, due to meet at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday to talk about strategy and support for the West’s attempt to defeat Russia in Ukraine, should think about the risks of their policy.

Putin casts Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine as an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West, and has said that Russia will use all available means to protect itself and its people.⁵²

But the hypertextual West, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek shows, has a near monopoly on irony:

The rise of private armies in and around Russia has led to some genuinely funny developments. For example, last year, former members of US and other Western armed forces organied a voluntary military unit to fight on the Ukrainian side. With pitch-perfect irony, they call themselves the Mozart Group–a direct riposte to the Wagner mercenaries (both names being of a German composer).⁵³

Literality like territory will only get you so far. The problem with battering a nation into submission, as the Russians found out in Afghanistan and the Americans in Iraq, is that, without hearts and minds, you need a full-time occupying army. It takes mercenaries and collaborators: an Assad family, a Chechen warlord, or Byelorussian dictator to hold land. As I noted above, the Slavic nativism that Putin offered wasn’t as interesting to Ukrainians as a transnational blend of races, languages, and genders that was happening elsewhere across the planet wherever authoritarian nationalism wasn’t the driver. It made Holy Russia look stagnant and backward.

       But Vlad was following the superpower sphere-of-influence script. If U.S. forces could cross oceans to blow up far-off villages and cities in Vietnam, Grenada, Serbia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, et al. then he could bomb away in what he considered still part of Russia. How was firing explosives into civilian zones of Mariupol and Lviv different from dropping ordnance on Belgrade, Baghdad, and Kandahar?

What Americans imposed on Iraq and Libya with Shock and Awe, on Vietnam with napalm and deforestation, was in principle and volatile mass what Putin delivered in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine. In fact, it would take Putin years of such activity to draw even with Bush, Obama, and Netanyahu regimes.

         Russian propaganda on the internet made this point, ignoring that two wrongs still don’t turn a right:

           Vladimir Putin asks very important questions, but will there be anyone from the west to answer him?

          1. Are there sanctions against Israel for the killing and destruction of innocent Palestinian women and children?

          2. Are there sanctions against America for killing innocent women and children in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam and even stealing their diamonds and gold?

          3. Were there sanctions against the United States and France for the killing of Muamar Qadaf and the destruction of Libya?

         4. Has an American or NATO soldier ever been punished for raping and torturing innocent women and children from all mentioned countries?

         5. Are there sanctions against France for causing crises and unrest in several African countries?

          Though Putin was more unapologetically brutal with fewer regrets than the West, the self-entitled right to demolish a country with modern weaponry is as American as it is Russian. If Putin is a war criminal, so were Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama. In New Babel, War Crimes and Peace Prizes converge.

         When in 2001 George W. Bush, as newly elected President, looked into Putin’s eyes and got a sacred sense of his soul, finding him straightforward and trustworthy, what he saw was his own reflection. That is, he couldn’t see a soul, only an agent’s trained façade that allows him to hide anything behind a guise of anything else, Christian virtue for instance. The same skill set had gotten W. elected.

Ukraine fighting back and proving difficult to subdue changed the plan on both sides. If this war’s endgame doesn’t go from a spreading theater of battle to tactical nuclear weapons, a World War, and the end of civilization, then someone is going to have to lower expectations and look for an exit ramp. Without it, the current situation will lead to the decimation of Ukraine, an expansion of the Russian invasion into neighboring countries, a war between Russia and NATO, or an overthrow of the Putin regime. None of these will come cheap or be final:

Tibetan lama Ngawang Tsoknyi Gyatso proposed that even if this planet were destroyed by nuclear bombs (or by greenhouse gases), it would be re-created from its karma elsewhere in the universe, and that doesn’t just mean another planet in another galaxy; it also means that the thoughtforms generating this reality will continue generating it at a frequency of All That Is, and the rest will follow. If necessary, a whole other universe will appear. Tsoknyi Rinpoche couched his “physics” in punctilious Buddhist theory:

Even hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs detonated at the same time will not stop dualistic mind from creating more emotions. If someone were to kill every single human being in this world, dualistic mind will still continue making emotions. Through the power of

karma, all these minds would take rebirth in some other world and continue in the same way as before.⁵⁴

Already Russian loyalists, equivalents of QAnon and MAGA, are weaponizing their rhetoric and raising the stakes, menacing Poland, the Baltics, and Western Europe. What could be more nihilistically maudlin than newscasters, bloggers, and government spokesmen threatening nuclear attacks as Western arms began flowing into Ukraine and the sacred invasion floundered. One Vladimir-Zhirinovsky-style ultranationalist wondered aloud many seconds it would take a Russian ICBM to get from its silo to Paris, Berlin, or London—enough time maybe, he proposed, “to say, ‘Hello, goodbye, but life is short and a tragedy anyway, everyone dies.”

         “We will start over with a blank slate,” agreed another.

         This is a Samuel-Beckett-like parody. Beckett wasn’t a Russian, but he was a Dostoevskian nihilist from the first wink of mind in a cradle.

Aleksey Zhuravlyov, chairman of the nationalist Rodina political party, chimed in, “One Sarmat missile and the British Isles will be no more.”⁵⁵

Russki Mir, Dostoevsky’s Russia, and nihilist punk Russia converge:

As the bodies pile up from Russia’s war against Ukraine, Kremlin mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov is urging Russians to welcome death. “Life is highly overrated,” the propagandist said in his program on state-run TV on Monday. “Why be afraid of what is inevitable? Moreover, we’ll go to heaven. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another.”

He went on to question why people would let their fear of death “influence their decisions.” “It’s only worth living for something you can die for, that’s the way it should be,” Solovyov told viewers from his warm TV studio.

His comments came after Russian forces suffered one of their most devastating setbacks on the battlefield, with hundreds of newly drafted troops killed in a Ukrainian strike on a facility housing the fresh cannon fodder on New Year’s Day. . . .

The mass casualties set off an uproar in Russia, with lawmakers hilariously threatening to make Ukraine “answer for” killing Russian troops who had invaded their country to kill Ukrainian civilians.

The deaths also triggered a round of furious finger-pointing by pro-Kremlin military bloggers, many of whom accused top military brass of “negligence” for what they called the “tragedy in Makiivka.” Russian-backed authorities in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, where the strike occurred, meanwhile blamed the Russian troops for giving away their locations by using their cellphones. [Cellphone security is one of many items that mark a difference, not taken seriously enough, between recreational or imposed warfare in which security is optional and a battle for national survival and one’s own cities and households in which nothing is optional.]

Nearly a year into the war, the Kremlin seems hell-bent on keeping it going at all costs—even if that means hundreds of thousands more will have to be summoned to face likely death on the battlefield in Ukraine.

An obscure group calling itself the “Soldiers’ Widows” seemed to appear out of nowhere this week to call on the Russian president to do just that. In an open letter published on Telegram on Monday, the mysterious group urged Vladimir Putin to declare a general mobilization and block all military-age men from leaving the country.

“Now is not the time to get cold feet,” the group wrote, urging Putin to be more like Josef Stalin, who “didn’t think about any ratings or dissatisfaction of dissidents” in his quest for “victory.”⁵⁶

                  A couple of months later, after the International Criminal Court at the Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin and the United Nations denounced forced deportations of Ukrainian children to Russia as war crimes, Medvedev tried to show who was the tougher rapper:

         Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has suggested striking the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague with one of Russia’s hypersonic missiles. . . .

In a lengthy and furious Telegram post on Monday, Medvedev wrote: “It is quite possible to imagine a hypersonic missile being fired from the North Sea from a Russian ship at The Hague courthouse.”

The Putin loyalist also wrote mockingly about the court, suggesting that NATO would not retaliate because the court is “only a miserable international organization, not the population of a NATO country.”

“That’s why they won’t start a war either,” he added. “They’ll be afraid to. . . .”  Medvedev also advised the court’s judges to “look carefully into the sky.”⁵⁷

Even Žižek, hardly a fan of the corporate intellectual West, took ironical delight in the gutter spiral of existential discourse in Duginland:

Russia’s apparent reversion to warlordism has been abetted by a strain of Russian religious fundamentalism that openly celebrates death. Some Russian clergy have been telling their congregations that they can “become themselves” only through the act of killing. The “special military operation” in Ukraine, they are told, is a struggle for “all of God’s creation.” As one of Putin’s chief propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, said in a New Year’s message on Russian television: “Life is highly overrated. Why fear what is inevitable? Especially when we’re going to heaven. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another. Don’t let fear of death influence decisions. It’s only worth living for something you can die for, that’s the way it should be … We are fighting against satanists. This is a holy war, and we have to win.” Likewise, Magomed Khitanaev, a Chechen theologian and Russian army commander, portrays Ukraine as a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah: “We’re asking: Oh, Ukrainians, why did you permit gay parades in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa? Why did you permit it? Why didn’t you come out against them, against your government that was overtaken by fascists? Without shame before God, people, they are openly, manifestly spreading their filth.”⁵⁸

They were, each in their way, giving subconscious voice to Putin’s problem: too many warheads and rubles and not world enough or time: mortality against a vast treasure on hand, the same limitation that leads Western technocrats like Bezos and Musk to try to develop Life Extension and Consciousness Singularity with stopgap cryonics if necessary. They need more decades to enjoy their accumulated wealth.

         That is Trump’s problem too: showtime in search of life. When you get bored and the old pleasures dull, you take it out on someone who’s living and creating. What right have they—has anyone—to desert me, my cause and greatness, for their own lives? A personal version of spheres of influence.

         Overlooked is the role of boredom—deep, nauseous, enervating, soul-deadening, terror-inducing ennui—in generating mass murder, destruction, and mayhem. A truly bored person can wreak havoc on a family, a community, a country, or the world. Throw in an army and an arsenal to express their boredom and you get Comrade Putin in Ukraine or Herr Hitler in Europe. Authoritarianism will impose its boredom on anyone in gunshot. Historical overviews are the icing; the cake is unexamined neurosis and despair. It’s what happens when spirituality and the search for God are replaced by religious politics, and radical art by propaganda. A Hopi myth put it well:

The Creator said: “I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realization that they create their own reality.”

The eagle said, “Give it to me. I will take it to the moon.”

The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”

The salmon said, “I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.”

The Creator said, “No. They will go there, too.”

The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”

The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there.”

Grandmother, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth,

and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, “Put it inside of them.”

And the Creator said, “It is done.”⁵⁹

         It’s also what happens also when a generation or two of Russian equivalents of punks, mean girls, slackers, deadheads, rednecks, neo-Nazis, and rappers grow up and find themselves restless in a nuclear-armed gas station. Put them in a militia, and they become MAGA thugs and January Sixers, chicken hawks boasting about kicking ass on Ukies, dills, and topknots, signing Instagram tags on the walls of homes where they raided and raped. That’s your Red Army, Vlad, but then you are just as bored as Big Don. The choice, of course, was to double-down

         The Russian leader has unleashed a wave of repression not seen since his KGB hero Yuri Andropov ruled, jailing citizens for the slightest hints of questioning of his official line, a mix of Russian imperial and Soviet nostalgia that has been rushed into curricula for schools and universities across the country. Artists, writers and actors have been hounded from their jobs for even suggesting critical views, their works and exhibits replaced by new ones scrubbed for adherence to the neo-Soviet “traditional values” Putin wrote into law. Schoolchildren denounce teachers and parishioners priests for suggesting peace instead of war.

To shore up support, his government has doled out cash payments to citizens in the country’s impoverished regions and shut down the few remaining media outlets that challenged the official state version of events. In stage-managed events lavishly covered by the state media, Putin maintains the image that the war is far away, rarely referring to it directly, highlighting economic successes, new welfare benefits and renovated clinics. That was the message of his state-of-the-nation speech this week, which blamed the conflict on the US and its allies but offered no hint of when it might end. Instead, Putin offered new benefits to veterans and their families, touting the value of combat experience as the “best school of life.”⁶⁰

The Free World might not be truly free, but at least people get to plan their day after brushing their teeth. If Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the authoritarian wing of the Republican Party have their way, that be ended here too. They will impose their punk tantra and fetal personhood on everyone. DeSantis may be even more recreationally cruel than Donald Trump; he’s got military training and discipline.

          What self-amused MAGA acolytes don’t grok is that Holy America is Holy Russia without the ikons. In the words of not always liberal Winston Churchill: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Around the topic of the West, NATO, and Ukraine, I have conducted an ongoing debate with a few long-time friends with whom I otherwise share a geopolitical and psychospiritual worldview. They prefer one of the others that have been tried. I call it “Marxist nostalgia,” not for Marxism itself, and certainly not for the Russian or Chinese version of communist, but for an inflated demonization of NATO and a lack of deference to the difficulty of defending, for lack of a better word, the “lifestyle” we share.

Where they see—to quote one—“an obvious coordinated global machine of murderous technocratic domination and control and the exploitation of popular psychic fascinations that today functions as a kind of consoling but deviated form of transcendence,” I agree totally without buying the “coordinated global” aspect. I don’t believe in the capacity of Aristos and oligarch to conduct a One World Order without Murphy’s law blowing it up well short of singularity. I think that our mess is more the chaos and muddle of samsara itself. The “obvious force of evil constellating around a planet rapidly being stripped of any kind of humanizing—much less spiritualizing– cultural life”⁶¹ is shadow energy rather than a coordinated cabal of evil.

Those who believe that Russia is our planet’s last best hope against a Deep-State One-World-Order hegemony provide a counter-narrative that exonerates Russian actions at multiple key points. It is like saying, if Russia is as bad as the obliteration of homes, schools, and families would make it, then America—the bad old capitalist red, white, and blue—has to be better than we can permit it to be. Here’s how the argument goes in action: 

            Your NATO expansion and Ukraine narrative is highly skewed. It’s getting said a lot these days, but it is completely false to maintain that Yeltsin and Russia were not given voluminous assurances that NATO wouldn’t expand into the Warsaw Pact countries. See a 2017 report from the National Security Archive. Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.*There’s so much to be said about the Deep State’s shenanigans in and designs on the Ukraine. It’s part of a longstanding policy of the Deep State bankers, well preceding World War I, in fact, to prevent a solid European connection with Eurasia, which of course would run through that country. Meanwhile, Ukraine, far from being some kind of liberal democracy, has long been infamous as the most corrupt country in Europe, a place of money laundering, human trafficking, Nazi revanchism, and plain old oligarchic control. Rather than have me argue the points, you might want to spend $10 and read 80 pages in Benjamin Abelow’s write-up, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe. If not, then read this piece by Jacques Baud, “The Military Situation in the Ukraine,” The Postil Magazine, April 1, 2022 ([he’s] the Swiss intelligence officer and UN peacekeeper who spent several years advising the Ukrainian military.

Should Putin have just out-and-out invaded the country? Of course not. He should have walked into the Security Council and screamed at the top of his lungs. Whatever you might make of his imperial ambitions, however, the Minsk agreements he fully endorsed simply required the Ukrainian government to give equal status to the Russian language and stop shelling the Russian population in the Donbass while granting them relative autonomy. Instead, he had watched Victoria Nolan’s coup while NATO worked by stealth to integrate Ukraine’s military into its system, while killing some 14,000 of the Donbass’ residents. Zelensky, who is a puppet, massed forces on the border of the Donbass days Putin invaded. Perhaps you listened to John Mearsheimer’s long briefing and found yourself unmoved. I hope this17 minutes with Max Blumenthal on Russell Brand’s show (starting 50 minutes in) will soften your stance that Putin’s attack on the Ukraine is principally motivated by his desire to reconstruct imperial Russia: “The Dark Truth About Bill Gates —#034—Stay Free With Russell Brand,” Rumble, November 14, 2022.

The propaganda campaign has been of a scare and vulgarity I’ve never seen before. BTW, there is credible evidence that the so-called Bucha massacre was a Ukrainian false flag production. Which isn’t to say that the Russians aren’t committing atrocities either. But clearly Putin went into the country intending to cause minimal damage and end his “Special Operation” as quickly as possible with a negotiated deal that left the Donbas legally in the Ukrainian state and the government accepting the inevitable loss of the Crimea. As everybody knows, early on in the war the U.S. sent an ambassador to Zelensky with the mission of preventing any such agreement.⁶²

I agree that there are nuances, in fact to just about everything, even Hitler’s death camps and Rwanda’s interahamwe. Nuancing is part of the innate dialectic of reality. Since we are incarnate in this realm, we are compelled to act and live and take positions by our actions and lives.

Still, I can’t picture the Vladmir Putin scheduling UN time, flying to New York City, and screaming at the top of his lungs in Russian before diplomats with little flags on their desks or it moving the needle if he did. He would stand as much chance as the Democrats in the United States have of budging the gun lobby after each latest mass murder by a disturbed person with easy access to deadly expression of his or her or their unhappiness.

I also don’t believe that Putin’s Special Operation was meant to cause minimal damage for any kinder reason than that he wanted clean streets in his new enclave and a first-round knockout on his resumé. I don’t see him politely accepting the Donbas in the Ukrainian state as a trade for Crimea, which he already had in hand. I don’t interpret the Minsk agreements as violated by Ukraine rather than by both Ukraine and Russia, neither of whom intended to honor them. I don’t agree that Putin is basically a moderate and a necessary force against the Deep State in the Aristo West. I don’t buy him and the Kremlin as innocent protectors and liberators of the Donbas or stewards of health freedom and bees.

         I suspect the attraction of apologists to what seems to me any counter-narrative to salvage an old conspiracist Marxist view of America, going back minimally to the Kennedy assassinations and encompassing 9/11 as a Bush/Cheney false flag.

         The Americans did mislead the Russians on expansion eastward, but that reflects the complex geopolitics of post-Soviet eastern Europe and legitimate fear of Russian recidivist expansion rather than a Machiavellian Trojan horse.

         While that doesn’t (again) make NATO the First Earth Battalion, I say, keep geoengineered transhumanism and throwback colonial wars separate. Don’t conflate all bio-labs with Fauci and the Aristos either—leave room for a technocracy of survival. The issues are incommensurate.

         I don’t doubt that there are biological laboratories in Ukraine and likely bio-warfare and gain-of-function research going on in some of them and probably swastika-waving pedophiles too, but so what! Where aren’t there bioweapons labs and perverts? They are part of all Military-Industrial and Medical-Industrial Complexes. To the East, they are hidden behind vodka and Russki Mir.

         If all the Ukrainian resistance was defending was “the most corrupt country in Europe, a place of money laundering, human trafficking, Nazi revanchism, and plain old oligarchic control,” Russia would have taken Kyiv in two hours. Instead, it encountered a baked-in Euromaidan.

         Even Putin’s twice-duped soldiers didn’t buy his narrative. Though some behaved like Tartar hordes, raping, killing, and plundering, others mutinied, self-sabotaged, or turned on their commanders and vandalized their own planes and tanks. When conscription was imposed, they fled across all available borders, EU and others. Tricked by a fairy tale of noble Russia, then by the fictive witch of Nazi Ukraine, those on the front lines rewrote the story in their own blood.

         They also had plenty to say in private about their commander, one of them, noting, “You won’t find any Nazis here because we are the Nazis.”

Then there is Putin’s own Shakespearean drama. Finnish President Sauli Niinistö framed it from outside the Kremlin echo chamber but from a neighboring country that had experienced recent Russian expansionism:

Niinistö has said that a sham referendum that Russia orchestrated in September 2022 is disturbing. After it, the Russian President stated that occupied territories “are in Russia forever”.

“I have understood that he bet on the war. He is playing poker, and he went all-in,” Niinistö said.

The Finnish President has added that he is still worried that Putin will go to the bitter end with no chance of victory.

In the interview, Niinistö highly evaluated the determination of Ukrainians and compared Putin’s actions in Ukraine with the start of Stalin’s winter war in Finland.

“These authoritarian leaders hardly understand that people in free democratic countries have their own principles and strong will,” he pointed out.

Niinistö has concluded that the best possible end to the war is one that seems fair to Ukrainians but does not leave a desire for revenge in Russia.⁶³

         This is not a mere hypothetical war game for those involved. It is how they will live their lives and plan their futures and children’s futures.

         A recording of a conversation that likely took place between Iosif Prigozhin, a music producer, and oligarch and billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov has leaked online and is gaining traction in Russia. . . . In the recording, two men discuss the possibility that military and security forces in the Kremlin want to blame Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu for Russia’s military failures in Ukraine. The person believed to be Iosif Prigozhin says that Putin “put them head-to-head against each other on the chess board” in order to “save himself”. His interlocutor, believed to be Farkhad Akhmedov, replies that Russia is a “president-ruled country” and that “the president will bear all responsibility” and “will be called to account”.

Akhmedov then says that the Russian government “f***ed us up” and “f***ed up our children, their future, their destiny”. Prigozhin agrees and says, “To be honest, they are of course all criminals.”

Prigozhin is also openly skeptical about Russian propaganda claims that Russia is at war with the West, saying that the Kremlin “lost to Kvartal 95” [President Zelenskyy’s comedy show before he was elected the President of Ukraine – ed.].

Akhmedov advises his interlocutor to “stay away from them,” meaning the Kremlin officials.

Referring to Putin, he says: “He will not reverse course, but he can’t go forward either. This is how he’ll be. There’s infighting. These people are like cockroaches in a glass jar; they’re already fighting one another. They’ll form groups. They’ll eliminate one person, then start attacking each other, going for each other’s throats. Drowning each other. Because they are drowning. They know this is the end.”⁶⁴

         The revolution eats its own or, as a Zelenskyy adviser put it on Twitter, “Spiders are eating each other in a jar.”⁶⁵                                               

There are three levels or interpretations of the Russia-Ukraine War. The first is Russian expansionism and pushback against NATO versus Ukraine’s desire to join Western Europe and Atlanticist culture. The second is the war of authoritarian regimes versus democratic ones originally partially in the communist versus capitalist post-war environment of the second half of the twentieth century. Those are pretty much obvious, though they could be categorized in other ways. The third has no name yet and no battle lines, but it has something to do with transhumanism versus humanism, artificial intelligence versus consciousness, and mechanism versus the natural world. It doesn’t line up with the first two “wars”; it crosses boundaries and is being waged on both sides because it is latent and they are still its projection. War is a stupid waste, but aside from being a hominid sport, it expresses a dormant desire for peace and reconciliation. I can’t explain that, but I would rather look to the stars than at missiles and tanks. 

On my March 11, 2022 Facebook page, I shared an image of Zelenskyy with a war-time quote, the post-modern spiritual version of Churchill’s “we will fight on the beaches”:

God sees everything and answers in such a way that you cannot hide. There is no such bunker where you can hide from God’s answer. Even if you destroy all our Ukrainian cathedrals and churches, you will not destroy our faith.⁶⁶

          A responding poster accused Zelenskyy of being an actor fed lines by the CIA. Another wrote: “This man was put in power by the US government, is propped up by it for exactly this catastrophe. He is the Colin Powell of this criminal invasion just as when the US needed a puppet to propagandize the world for yet another slaughter of the innocents.”⁶⁷

          A third poster responded as I would: “Parlor games. At this point, blown-up buildings and dead babies trump anything you have to say. Context time is over. It is war—in the moment. Empathic reaction overwhelms reason. Get back to us after the war.”⁶⁸

If bureaucrats destroy this world by unleashing nuclear arsenals, it will re-form in some other galaxy or dimension and continue to express its ripening karma in the medium of gravity or some other long-term equation.

Get back to us afterwards.

Endnotes

44. Eric Levitz, “Why Has Putin Brought Hell to Mariupol,” Intelligencer, March 23, 2022.

45. James Verini, “Surviving the Siege of Kharkiv,” The New York Times Magazine, May 22, 2022, p. 32.

46. Morgan Watkins, “’Ridiculous’: Rand Paul’s comments on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine blasted as echoing Putin’s propaganda,” Louisville Courier Journal online, April 26, 2022.

47. Ukrainska Pravda, “It will disappear as no one cares about it–Deputy Secretary of Russian Security Council “predicting” future of Ukraine,” April 8, 2023.”

48. Gary Lachman, “The Lost Kingdom: Putin and Holy Russia,” The Fortean Times, #418, May 2022, p. 36.

49. Robert S. Becker: “My Take: Putin’s messiah syndrome drives the invasion,” Yahoo News, April 9, 2022.

50. Allison Quinn, “Putin Lackeys Lose Their Minds Over Ukraine Getting Battle Tanks,” Daily Beast, January 25, 2023.

51. Guy Faulconbridge, “Russia tells Macron: Don’t forget Napoleon when you talk of regime change,” Reuters, February 19, 2023.

52. Guy Faulconbridge and Felix Light, “Putin ally warns NATO of nuclear war if Russia is defeated in Ukraine,” Reuters, January 19, 2023.

53. Slavoj Žižek, “Death and Glory in Russia,” Project Syndicate, Feburary 1, 2023.

54. Richard Grossinger, Bottoming Out the Universe, p. 183. Quote from Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Fearless Simplicity, pp. 46–47.

55. Brendan Cole, “Russian TV Hosts Discuss Nuclear Strikes on U.K, France, Germany,” Newsweek online, April 29, 2022.

56. Allison Quinn, Top Putin Propagandist Urges Russians to Embrace Death: ‘We’ll Go to Heaven,’ Daily Beast, January 3, 2023.

57. Mia Jankowicz, “Russia’s former president suggested firing a hypersonic missile at The Hague after Putin’s ICC arrest warrant: ‘Look carefully into the sky,’” Business Insider, March 20, 2023.

58. Slavoj Žižek, “Death and Glory in Russia,” Project Syndicate, Feburary 1, 2023.

59. Sad Jesus Facebook page, “Creation story from the Hopi Nation, Arizona,” shared from St Alban’s Episcopal Church.

60. “Russian Support for Putin’s War in Ukraine Is Hardening,” Bloomberg Report, February 23, 2023.

61. My friend requested anonymity.

62. My friend requested anonymity.

63. Ukrainska Pravda, “‘He is Satan’: audio of 2 prominent Russian figures allegedly criticising Putin gains traction in Russia,” March 26, 2023.

64. Ukrainska Pravda, “Finnish President is concerned that Putin will fight until the bitter end, with no chance of victory,” January 15, 2023.

65. Mykhailo Podolyak, quoted in Associated Press, “Explosion in Russian Café Kills Prominent Military Blogger,” April 2, 2023.

66. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Facebook, March 11, 2022.

67. Dorothy Payne, Facebook, March 11, 2022.

68. David Larstein, Facebook, March 11, 2022.

7. THE GREAT RESET

The Great Reset is a comprehensive conspiracy theory played in multiple keys. The Right queues “plandemics,” open borders, dragon vaccines, and manipulation of currencies with a goal of a One World Order. Such perceived menaces make allies out of Fox News and Putin’s Russia, while demonizing the United Nations, Davos World Economic Forum, George Soros, and BlackRock Equity.

On the Left, the Great Reset is transnational corporate control of resources and people—the Monsanto/Nestle/Microsoft Limited.. When convenient, it uses White Nationalisms’ Great Replacement Theory as a scapegoat or straw horse to promote its own post-colonial colonialism.

In Babel, opposites meld, while people believing contradictory things speak with a single tongue. For instance, factions on the Right and Left converge in a warning of a world takeover by technocracy, an omen elevated by advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI has recently been released to graze on the internet and expand, proliferate, and hatch new memes in concert with more penetrating 6G terahertz waves in WiFi grids and electro-optics satellites beaming artificial thoughts, enabling a complete ’bot takeover, as we breathe in googles of nanobots, quantum dots, and conductive metals, turning human into biomagnetic transceivers and the air into a dielectric conductor. See the works and YouTube videos of Elana Freeland. I am currently helping to edit her next two books.

The question of whether the weird stuff coming out of networks generated by hundreds of linked computers is emergent or already aware depends on how you define the emergent features of consciousness per se. If “emergent” means that it—we—were invented by algorithms, then, yes, AI might be emergent. “emergent” it means filtering flows from the Etheric and Astral plane—no, I don’t think computers can penetrate other fields and dimensions any better than less talented ping-pong balls can.⁶⁹

Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories address the origin of language and the relationship between neural and syntactic structures. Remember, all programs are written in languages, and all AI, even images, is derived from code (Chomsky’s politics, by the way, are incidental). The point here is that AI generated by using already existing logic strings should not be mistaken for thinking or creating logic strings and certainly not for consciousness with volition. The computing power of AI is impressive, condensing billions of years into seconds and finding infinite alternatives and variations for already used strings. In that form, it may map proteins and offer creative solutions for ocean pollution and climate change, but it cannot create meanings or learn intuitively the way a child assiumilates language. It can outplay chess champions, but it can’t invent chess and, if it did (by chance), it would conflate it with trillions of other less or more interesting games.

Our more urgent problem is being unable to tell make-believe people and fake actions from real people in actual acts, as if there could be a difference at the level of imagination and symbology. Nonetheless, deep fakes turn public identities into independent avatars and aliases carrying out proxy deeds; they dilute human writing, art, and designs with limitless unconscious networks of the same possibilities, as happened over a few billion years in the molecular design of nature or in subsequent conceptions of Mona Lisas and Hamlets.

The inability to tell a ’bot from a person and original art from aggregate poems and pictures is a convergence of humans becoming more synthetic and robotized at the same time that ’bots continue to consume gigabytes of human-generated garbage. At worst, this lost-in-translation phase might be followed by worshipping ’bots like golden calves, electing them to conduct governance, elevating them to kings of corporations, valorizing their knock-offs and NFTs, and forfeiting human freedoms to panels and bureaucracies created by superficial tautologies of social networks. After all, even some celebrity artists and authors are de facto ’bots playing with the noosphere. No wonder AI can write credible poems by dead poets for the New Yorker. Nationalities proposed as Halloween monsters, anti-trans legislators translated into drag queens and make-believe street scenes, party-goers, and nonexistent Gothics houses and rooms show that collective satire is sometimes more perceptive than individual farce.

Posting the gist of this argument on Facebook got a very intelligent comment:

People have no idea how deeply unidimensional and limited computational “reasoning” is. It can barely even be called reasoning. It is pure math, and nothing more. It is as ignorant to compare AI to sentient existence and the capacity of self-knowing as it is to imagine algebra and calculus to one day be able to calculate and express hunger or love. AI could never add up the elements or intensity of yearning or desire, only the statistically derived probability of their presence without any semblance of their complex myriad of potential creative impact.

Imitation is as close as AI will ever get. And only the insensitive (the scientific materialists who are the fundamentalists” of science, who interpret everything literally rather than symbolically, who have lost their human capacity to impute meaning and habitually relegate that faculty to others, to “experts” or to “authorities,” and whose understanding of human relationship is merely transactional) will be fooled. To be fooled by AI into imagining it could ever become sentient is a sorrowful combination of cognitive and spiritual ignorance.⁷⁰

AI carries some of the subtext of the Democrats’ and Republicans’ heightened concern about China, e.g., that the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to take over the planet by technology will degenerate into ’bots replacing the CCP with its own ruling algorithms. At that point, oligarchic authoritarian control will be inseparable from technocracy itself. This is where Xi’s alliance with Putin portends long-term danger: authoritarian syllogisms ridding the world of democracies and individualisms to make space for communal-hive regulation followed by synthetic organisms. That Great Reset is our entire “famn damily” back to the origin of language and stone tools, the Great Reset as the Great Fallback:

         The last vestiges of democracy in Russia are burning in the fields of the Donbas. Young men are being sent to the slaughter, their post-war tanks proving no match for modern Western kit or the motivation of Ukrainian soldiers defending their homes. Putin knows his only hope of victory – and of prolonging his tenure as the last great Tsar – is the total militarisation of Russia. This is an outcome that suits him well.

Moscow’s descent into a military dictatorship is now happening alarmingly fast. Putin’s United Russia party is promoting veterans of his war in Ukraine as candidates in regional elections, with the party’s secretary general ordered to give them his “full support”. The Kremlin’s rhetoric frequently invokes the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany, either directly or through the insinuation that Russia once again stands against fascism and Nazism.

This militarisation of his dictatorship is a sure sign that the ice is cracking around his citadel.  The dalliance with democracy after the end of the Cold War has not sat well with the ex-KGB autocrat, who craves power and control. Putin knows that Stalin and his close allies ruled with an iron fist, and that the removal of dissenters and those with democratic leanings kept them in power. It is this model that he is now turning to. . . .

The jailing of opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza this week is tragic but unsurprising. It removes a key dissenter for the rest of Putin’s days on this planet, and fits in with the pattern of attacks on the slightest signs of dissent, including the poisonings of Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skripal. It takes a great deal of personal bravery to express anything other than total obedience when dissenters seem to find themselves poisoned, jailed, or tumbling from balconies.⁷¹

         ’Bots just reboot.

Recently a Chinese diplomat let the authoritarian cat out of his unofficial pouch:

Asked about his position on whether Crimea is part of Ukraine or not, Chinese ambassador Lu Shaye said in an interview aired on French television on Friday that historically it was part of Russia and had been offered to Ukraine by former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

“These ex-USSR countries don’t have actual status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their sovereign status,” Shaye added.⁷²

This is how authoritarianism works, like a dash of salt in a recipe changing its taste. Between recent international law and ancient common law, how do nations gain or regain sovereign status?

France responded on Sunday by stating its “full solidarity” with all the allied countries affected, which it said had acquired their independence “after decades of oppression”.

“On Ukraine specifically, it was internationally recognized within borders including Crimea in 1991 by the entire international community, including China,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said.

The three Baltic states and Ukraine, all formerly part of the Soviet Union, reacted along the same lines as France.

“It is strange to hear an absurd version of the ‘history of Crimea’ from a representative of a country that is scrupulous about its thousand-year history,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential aide, wrote on Twitter.

“If you want to be a major political player, do not parrot the propaganda of Russian outsiders.”

China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.⁷³

When Great Reset opponents on both the Right and Left spout Russian talking points and condemn NATO and the West for provoking the Ukraine invasion, when they conflate bio-labs in Ukraine with Anthony Fauci’s gain-of-function in Wuhan—e.g., Putin invaded Ukraine to get rid of bio-labs and pedophiles—that crosses my boundary, putting debating points ahead of missiles on cities. As Mike Tyson is purported to have said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Everybody has a philosophy and a scapegoat too.

I am more optimistic about Creation itself, plus I believe in (1) the basic humanity and reclaimability of pretty much everyone and everything in All That Is, (2) that love is a more binding force than fear or greed, and (3) that the Aquarian prodrome is not a lizard takeover. I still believe in the American (and terrestrial) experiment and that incorrigible evil, meaning recreational tedium with sadistic amusement, will dissolve (along with its energetic artifacts feigning souls) in the Great Abyss.

         I’m not blithe. I see gathering Götterdämmerungs on and off the shores of the West. While China and Russia want to take down the whole of civilization and substitute their version, I don’t think that it represents the cosmic plan, just a punch in the mouth to get Creation to go deeper.

The Great Reset is everybody’s hope and everybody’s whipping boy. It’s why Inner Traditions’ archive of 5-D ascension rituals and crystal, archangel, dragon, and spirit-animal books and decks is the new Book of Mormon. On a drive in Maine this March, I listened to WEEI sports talk radio hosts out of Boston (“Fauria and Merloni,” I believe) use “ayahuasca,” “multiverse,” “5-D,” and” “astral” correctly. On another show, after debating Quentin Tarantino films for his birthday, they brought up a place in Australia where, like in the movie Flatliners, near-death visions are induced with low temperatures and psychedelics so that customers get to experience the afterlife. Fauria says, “The only demonstration of the afterlife I want is when it’s for real.” John Friedlander put the matter axiomatically in comments I transcribed from his class downloads:

         Since all consciousness expands in all directions, everything ultimately is sacred, even your worst actions, even other people’s worst actions. They may be lamentable, but they are sacred. . . . Your cells’ consciousness expands in all directions; Mother Earth’s consciousness expands in all directions. Your yesterday expands in all directions. Your today expands in all directions. . . .

And since all consciousness expands in all directions, ultimately each and every action is redeemed and experienced in this exquisite joy that arises out of the particularity of the experience. . . .

If you think of yourself as having an essence and arising from this essence, then the concept of absolute or real evil would be a being that had an essence whose objective it was to make the universe, or any part of it, less than it was before. And that simply doesn’t exist. Only human beings within their own subjectivity could be said to be trying to make the universe less. Evil arises out of ignorance and not out of an essential quality.⁷⁴

I’ll leave it there. The premise of this book is, in Babel no one has a monopoly on truth, though everyone fakes it, often most successfully to themselves.

Endnotes

69. I discussed this topic at length in my two embryology books and in Dark Pool of Light.  

70. Danute Kuncas, Facebook, April 20, 2023. What I quoted from Noam Chomsky: “AI tells us nothing about language, learning, intelligence, or thought .. what it comes down to is sophisticated high-tech plagiarism, glorified auto-fill. Conceivably someone will come up with a constructive purpose for it because currently there is none. It is very dangerous, not so much taking jobs from people, but dangerous because people take it seriously. There are already numerous cases of people being deluded that things created by AI are real.”

71. Hamish de Breton-Gordon, “Putin’s Russia Is Headed Toward a Military Dictatorship—and Total Collapse,” The Telegraph, April 19, 2023.

72. “Paris, Kyiv, Baltic states dismayed after China envoy questions Ukraine sovereignty,” Reuters, April 23, 2023.

73. “Paris, Kyiv, Baltic states dismayed after China envoy questions Ukraine sovereignty,” Reuters, April 23, 2023.

74. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth: Teachings from a Multidimensional Entity on Living Gracefully and Skillfully in a World You Create But Do Not Control, pp. 143, 237, 355, 333.

Epilogue

The Big Picture

Start with the relativity of time and space. Or a dance of spirals and spheres imposed by curvature, gravity, and mass, leading to planets, orbits, spins, twin helices, and galactic fissions. Then there are thoughtforms, symbols, territorial imperatives, mores. What is tbe driver?       

Throughout the world we see so many solid, concrete, and gigantic things—the earth is so big, the ocean is so deep, and mountains, buildings, and trees all appear to be so large and stable. Also, there are so many sentient beings, and each and every one of them looks very solid and permanent. But it we think about it, where do all these things exist? They all come from emptiness. The world and the whole universe are floating within empty space. Some time ago the universe appeared from space, now it exists in space, and it will eventually dissolve back into space.¹

         Birth on this plane doesn’t ensure a strawberries and butterflies world, nor did it ever, though some get to enjoy well-stocked pantries, peaceful pastures, and degrees of Proustian enchantment. Others are born into slavery, harems, mean streets, favelas, and with poisons in their veins, or with elephantine or thalidomide defects. A percentage of humans end up in gulags, bogus justice systems, and child armies, plea-bargaining away precious years and lifetimes. Something deeper must define this realm beyond its pleasure domes and good or bad luck. In Hindu country, they call it karma:

Karma, a traditional Sanskrit term rendered in English variously as “action,” “work,” or “deed”—or, more popularly, “payback”—is an energy, though it operates at a subtler frequency than electromagnetism or gravity and, as such, may participate in their formation. If gravity is mass plus motion plus relativity (the space-time continuum), then karma is a predisposition to particle acceleration and attraction—cosmic and planetary settings—as well as incarnation in them.

The breadth of karma is expressed by its multiple indices of action: simple cause and effect (gravity and mass, thirst and quenching of thirst), destiny (unmanifested deeds and events from previous lifetimes manifested in a present life), and potentiation of later effects (electromagnetic-like waves stored in the cosmos as Akashic memory).²

         On June 30, 2009, U.S. Infantryman Bowe Bergdahl walked off his post, a desolate Afghan hell-hole at a crossroads in Paktika Province under high command. In their vacuous bivouac, the troops had to burn everything not of relevance or current use: their own shit, plastic, uneaten food, garbage. The smoldering ashes fed a toxic ground fire that never went out.

         Bergdahl’s unit had recently traveled, at risk of dozens of lives, up a hard mountain to recover a piece of broken equipment that could neither be repaired nor moved. Wanting to call this lunacy to the attention of higher command, Bergdahl meant to hike to where the generals were. It was a misassessment of the treacherousness of the terrain, its demography, and his own Idaho superboy capacity. It was also a misassessment of the degree to which anyone anywhere in the top-heavy worm imposing this occupation on its carriers cared or even knew what was going on. The Afghan War was complex, obligatory kineses without context.  

          Bergdahl was soon caught by townsfolk, tinkers and tent hobos, and turned over to a local Taliban offshoot, which dispatched him dutifully to the Haqqani network, a border-crisscrossing crime family living off the gradient between open Afghan territory and federally administered tribal areas in Waziristan beyond rule of Islamabad or Lahore. They took him to Pakistan where he would be untouchable by the United States.

       During much of his five years in captivity, he was kept in a small pen like a dog, or chained in a dark basement. It became an advanced dark retreat in the heart of evil. He sustained injuries and illnesses—to his bones and skin and organs. One night, deep in timeless ordeal, he managed to slide his chains off and slip outside into the compound’s courtyard. He looked up and, in his own words:

        It was a completely empty night. Like . . . there weren’t any clouds. There was just no light pollution or anything like that. It was just a full sky of stars. And I’m just sitting there, and after so many months of being in the rooms, just being in that empty . . . like just this vast space above me, it was thrilling in the sense that things went so far beyond me, you know?

         It is just that relief of knowing that the stupidity doesn’t go any further than that little planet, or this little country, or a little house, or whatever it is, you know? If something is as big as that, then it’s almost like you don’t have to be scared.³

                  It is remarkable that he thought anything could be okay under the circumstances, knowing that he would soon be back in shackles and cuffs, taunted and tortured by Pashtun-speaking captors.

          Yet that is our greater situation in samsara. We have moments when we glimpse the full transdimensional heavens and know what we are and what this is. We feel the intrinsic joy of rigpa, the happiness within that drives the universe and isn’t affected by events or people, whether they be lovers or executioners. We don’t know it in words. We know by a sensation that radiates through body awareness and says: you you you you.

         Berdahl saw the real Great Reset: Earth itself passing through a zone of absolute space. Our planet is moving at almost 1000 miles per hour, but that is just its spin on its axis driven by a gravity of interacting spheres and the nature of space in time. We are also circling the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, almost 20 miles every second.

         That too is not where the real journey is taking place. The entire solar system with the sun and its planets is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 140 miles a second. Every second we travel 140 miles to a different zone of extragalactic space.

          The Milky Way is tucked in a remote corner of a local stellar cluster on the fringes of a Laniakea supercluster of 100,000 galaxies—from old Hawaiian lani (“ heaven ”) +‎ ākea (“ spacious, immeasurable ”)—stretching over 500 million light years. This great swarm, within which each solar system travels like a blowfish in an ocean current, is drifting toward the supercluster’s center at 25 miles per second. The supergalaxy itself is hurtling at 375 miles a second toward the Virgo Cluster, another humongous collection of galaxies some 45 million light-years away. Meanwhile the universe itself is expanding—red-shifting—at about 160,000 miles per second. That’s a lot of motion in stillness, sound in silence, reset in stability.

         If we think of cosmic space as a uniform, extensible expression of inviolable laws of nature issuing from the unbidden command of gravity, then all this movement is incidental until a collision or other cosmic crisis occurs; but if we think of interstellar space as an expression of interdimensional and transdimensional territory, then everything is changing all the time at cumulative rates relative to fixed points: apices of transmutation, superposition, precession, and transmigration.

         In that arena, we are moving irreversibly from a Piscean to an Aquarian kalpa in kali yuga, as we once moved from the terrestrial Middle Ages to the birth of cities to an industrial revolution to a digital age and the quantum beat at the heart of matter.

           My friend Sean Murphy tells me that he has been talking by Zoom with a woman in Singapore who herself has been communicating with an intelligence cluster from Arcturus (different platform, of course). Since Sean learned remote viewing from super-psychic Cyndi Dale, he hailed and apprised this intelligence and reports that it is truly remarkable, beyond anything happening here—very wise, extraordinarily compassionate, and as optimistic as a thoughtform can be upon finding itself in a scene of dust and fire, whether it be cephalopod or hominid, and despite every entity’s crisis of survival.

       What I intuit is that the Arcturian swarm, rumored to be in the ninth or eleventh of our dimensions, cares enough about us to pay attention where we are. It not only cares; it can’t not pay attention and be what it is. So that makes us and our sphere as latently and dormantly wise as it is, despite our warps. A vivid, engaging, and provocative reality has crystallized with us at this frequency, as Pandoran as it is Atlantean, for we interest beings and presences in many dimensions and transdimensional realms.⁴

         The Arcturian epiphany is what we’re about, what the angels are about, what consciousness is about, what DNA joining all life anywhere to all life everywhere is about, and what embodiment in simultaneity signifies, that one of us can’t exist without the other. We are interdependent on both Buddhic and subatomic scales. 

       It’s why one day a guy is running a financial-services corporation, the next day he quits, and a month later he is teaching astral projection and Reiki. A government bureaucrat is composing dragon oracle cards, not just Japanese, Chinese, and Norse dragons in fancy attire, not calendar symbols, crystal skulls, griffin-like and phoenix-like dragons of triage and danger, not bronze-orange pendragons—yes, all of those—but also energy-oriented dragon waves crossing galaxies and dimensions. Those are the actual source dragons.

        The laws of nature are changing, as the laws of psyche are changing. That’s how we will get to an Aquarian age, on turtle back, buffalo herd, and dragon waves, as long as those turtles, buffalos, and dragons are etheric. That’s also how we get out of the current clusterfuck. That’s how we will find peace and kindness and how humankind will pass through a gateway into the next tier and ultimately the twelfth dimension of All That Is. Buddhist-Pleiadian channeler Josh Reichmann lays out the plan:

1-    The First Dimension – a point or station of manifestation – Raw awareness

2-    The Second Dimension – Length and Width- awareness vibrating or moving – Perceived activity.

3 –    The Third Dimension – Length, Width, Height – Awareness with agency or choosing

4-     The Fourth Dimension- Time, Awareness of change, decay, entropy, evolution, mutation, death, rebirth unending

5 –    The Fifth Dimension – Perceiving time beyond the present- Akashic Records etc. Feeling with all senses into the elasticity of time and space.

6 –    The Sixth Dimension – Occupying space as different embodiments and perceivers or beings anywhere across space-time at will.

7  –    The Seventh Dimension – Occupying time and space at the same moment as different embodiments and perceivers at will.

8  – The Eighth Dimension – Occupying space and time as different embodiments at any moment.

9  – The Ninth Dimension – One or many embodiments or non-embodied state, formless consciousness awareness or manifest awareness body in multiple locations and times as multiple beings or awareness.

10. – Creator mind, manifesting universes within and across all dimensions

11 – Omniscient mind aware of all universes, creating as many as it wishes.

12 – Unfabricated, all form and formless realms at once. Inconceivable awareness.⁵

Yet here we are, in Length, Width, and Height. In WBEZ-Chicago’s “Serial Podcast,” narrated by journalist Sarah Koenig (she also told Bowe Bergdahl’s story in season two), “Episode One” of the third season (dealing with the Cleveland court system) was entitled “A Bar Fight Walks Into the Justice Center.” It featured a twenty-one-old woman, described by Koenig as pretty and slight. She stopped at a Cleveland pub with a lady friend and was repeatedly pinched and slapped on the butt by a male stranger. While this was going on, she was eyed hostilely and jealously by bruiser babes down the bar.

By the time a vintage brawl had run its course, the target of unrequested touching had been pummeled and stomped by both genders. Yet she was the only one arrested because she inadvertently socked an off-duty police officer trying to break it up. She was acquitted but did jail time, lost her job, and accrued court costs well beyond her means.

         Koenig asked her whether she knew the guy who took an interest in her butt. She didn’t. “Why do you suppose . . .?” Koenig started to ask.

“Because men are dogs.”

So it is: Trump, QAnon, Cancel Culture, Virtue Signaling, COVID-19, Deconstructive Backwash, Medical Tyranny, the Chinese Communist Party, Sudan, Saturnalia, Krakens, and Missiles. If there are twelve dimensions of All That Is and we’re gridlocked at three, we’ve got time and space to resolve all this and turn it into what it is. 

                  Endnote
1.Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche & Kenpo Tsewang Dongal Rinpoche, The Essential Journey of Life and Death, Volume 2: Using Dream Yoga and Phowa and the Path, pp. 58-59.

2. Richard Grossinger, Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2020).

3. Sarah Koenig, “Dustwun,” Serial Podcast, Season 2, WBEZ, Chicago, 2015.

4. Sean adds these turkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS45_L8fLLc. A look at them will change everything about your situation on this planet. As a friend said, there is more happening here than I was aware of a moment before—Hamlet remarked on that to Horatio on Elsinore’s ramparts.

5. Josh Reichmann, Channeling Twelve Dimensions: Awakening the Human Hyperform, to be published possible under a different title by Inner Traditions in 2024.

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*Readers may not know that Couliano was murdered in 1991, presumably by his homeland Secret Police, in a bathroom stall at the University of Chicago (where he taught)—still a Chicago PD cold case.

*My college friend Alan Powers inserted, “Learned a couple words here. Tsuris: aggravation, woe. My Yiddish is nonexistent, though my doctoral advisor Leonard Unger and his friend Saul Bellow translated the first four lines of Eliot’s “Wasteland” into Yiddish, over lunch at the UMinn Faculty Club.

* I am reminded of one biologist’s trope for fisher cats, ground hogs, and ferrets, “Kill them all and let God sort it out!”

xObsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder.

yStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

zEither way, the canonization of Trump speaks to an evangelical belief in his transubstantiation.

* My friend Nick S. who works in political news media writes, “You might consider changing the word ‘despite’ to ‘because of.’”

xI use the term Aristo, from aristocrat, in this book to describe members of the oligarchy: politicians, corporate executives, technocrats, and some pop and sports stars.

*A chaos-magic cryptologist describes synchromysticism as “the art of realising meaningful coincidences in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance.”⁸

*I address Area 51 and Roswell in my books Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: From the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs and The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos (which has a hundred-page concluding chapter called “Flying Saucers, Crop Circles, and Extraterrestrial Life”). I have also been working editorially with Keith Thompson, author of an early nineties title on UFOS, on what I think will be the definitive book on the topic to date, Cosmos Calling: UFOs and the Human Response (Sacred Planet Books, Inner Traditions, 2024).

*A friend in Dallas described visitors from Nigeria who, when he asked them what they most wanted to see in the U.S., like the Lincoln Monument or Grand Canyon, said, “Area 51.” Likewise, the minor-league baseball team in Las Vegas is not the Casinos or Ghost Dancers but the 51s.

*Reaction formation (from Sigmund Freud’s Reaktionsbildung) is a psychological defense mechanism: emotional anxiety is reduced by exaggerating its opposite tendency. See also mass formation in my COVID chapter.

*The Navajo creation god Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, is thedaughter of Long Life Boy and Happiness Girl, who, together, represent the passage of life through time. Literally the “woman who changes,” she used pieces of her own exfoliated skin and a medicine bundle made of mountain soil and buckskin, to fashion four couples, ancestors of the four Navajo clans.

*For my larger view on this, check out pretty much any of my earlier books but most recently Bottoming Out the Universe and Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms. I did a preliminary run on much of the same material in Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness and The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos. Before that, in Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity, I concluded that the embryo is the universe—meaning divine intelligence—writing itself on its own body, meaning DNA as a God code and matter as an elaborate thoughtform.

*Woody Howard, head of the drama and dance departments at Horace Mann, my New York City prep school decades after I graduated, told me about an event since he retired. A photo of a performance of the play The Foreigner by Larry Shue, showing students in Klu Klax Klan uniforms in a scene ridiculing the clan was removed from the wall by the theater. This is cancel culture at its most absurd, taking offense without historical context. Woody remarked that the school missed a “teachable moment,” as if forgetting the job of education. He also noted that many of the musicals in which he performed on Broadway and in summer stock —Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, Finian’s Rainbow, etc.— could not be produced in many of today’s venues. Cultural richness has been replaced by dogma along similar ideological lines to the Soviet Union of the Iron Curtain era.

*The rewritten 2016 paperback as opposed to the 1996 hardcover.

*The corollary of that is, “People who think the COVID-19 vaccines will stop the virus don’t understand the vaccines and don’t understand the virus.”

*The Enochian script for commanding spirits was delivered angelically to Elizabethan magician John Dee and his associate Edward Kelley, while the laws of Thelemite philosophy were dictated by “Egyptian” and other spirit guides to twentieth-century English therion Aleister Crowley.

*See my discussion in Planet Medicine: Origins (pp. 169-176).

*See the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon, directed by James Fox, and Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified, created byPetr Vachler, for corroboration of E.T. talents and skillsets by high-level U.S. and Russian military personnel.

*This is where Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms and Bottoming Out the Universe re-contextualize The Return of the Tower of Babel.

*Kiev, the Russian spelling for the Ukrainian capital, was used in Western media accounts before Putin’s invasion.

*If you want to experience Ukrainian spirit and identity first-hand, look at Ruslana Remennikova’s presentations in the Anthe section of Jovian Bricolage/Opera Jupiter. They are translated through her Jewish heritage and American upbringing, but she was born in Kyiv, and Ukrainian energy flows through her sound healing and 12-stranded DNA activation. I call it “angelic ferocity.”

*Ukraine is literally “U” for “at” and “krai” for “edge,” implying, to Putin and other royalists, “the edge of Russia.”

*As the war progressed through 2022, Russian spokesmen changed “Atlanticist” to “Anglo-Saxon.”

*On August 21, 2022, the car driven by Dugin’s 29-year-old daughter Darya was blown on the Russian highway, a device probably intended for her father in a trailing vehicle or perhaps a Kremlin false flag. Once ontology takes place on an actuarial battlefield, erasure stops being hypothetical or a podcast. Dugin should have expected in-kind blowback. Incendiary rap is not healthy for anyone; ask the spirits of Tupac and Biggie.

*Slavic Studies Panel Addresses ‘Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?’ https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early.