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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-223145692017-02-15T22:29:20.025-05:00The X SpotThe ramblings of either a fool, an iconoclast, or both on subjects near and dear to him.X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-89337149988355714172017-02-11T17:11:00.001-05:002017-02-11T17:17:01.664-05:00The X-Spot: Year Eleven
Thanks for dropping by. As you can tell by my last post, I didn't have much time. It's a good-news/bad-news kinda thing.

I thought I'd try to kickstart an ambitious series last summer when I had the opportunity to make money. I know that sounds rather pedestrian, but one of my freelance gigs expanded, offering a new opportunity. Not only did I work for them an extra three months in 2016, but I'm doing my other main gig at the same time presently. So my meatspace friends and family have seen about as much of me as you have.

The situation won't last forever. And I plan to get back to that ambitious series, one that I'm sure will ruffle some sensitive (albeit well-deserving) feathers. It'll be like old times. Really.

I've been flirting with the idea of starting a podcast based on the blog. I'm not sure of what the format should be, though. I was thinking of an interview show, but there are plenty of those. I was also thinking about doing something along the lines of a radio drama, similar to The Golden Ganesh. I was also thinking of something that would sound vaguely NPRish without sounding too much like Serial. I'm even less sure about how to start and maintain a podcast, although I remember saying something similar to that about blogging lo so many years ago. If I'm consistent at all, it'll be the case that by the time I finally get into podcasting, the medium will be at its peak or past it.

If you guys have suggestions, I'm all ears.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-66245492042066947812017-01-31T22:29:00.002-05:002017-01-31T22:29:29.472-05:00Another Place Holder
If you check out the time-stamp of this post, you'll see that it went up just before the close of January 2017. I just got home from the office(s).

And that's my January, so far. No time for writing my own stuff.

I'm hoping things mellow out soon. And I wouldn't have written this post except that I at least want to post something once a month so everyone knows I'm still here.

If you're still here when I'm finally able to post something meaningful, you have my sincerest gratitude.

Stay well, my friends.
X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-24059253351378261592016-12-31T14:09:00.000-05:002016-12-31T14:09:42.391-05:00Just a Spoonful
2016 was a trying year, perhaps for all of us. For me personally, it was marked by two health crises within my family that had me in and out of emergency rooms and ICUs. The office were I do the bulk of my freelancing was especially turbulent, as a corporate restructuring had me putting out fires in Las Vegas, LA and North Carolina among other places when I had my hands full here because we were short-staffed. I contemplated not returning, but a gig is a gig.

Then, post Brexit, there was the national election here in the US. Don't get me started on that.

In 2016 I mourned the passing of a childhood friend, and one of the old gang from New York, a dear woman, who happened to be a former HaMossad leModi'in uleTafkidim Meyuhadim (Mossad) agent. The former was literally the girl-next-door. The latter gave me a few pointers about X-Spot things long before I had ever heard of blogging. I was also saddened by the deaths of Prince Rogers Nelson and Carrie Fisher. While I'm not given to taking special notice of celebrity demises, both Prince and Fisher had something in common with my friends: they were personally good to me. And I don't forget kindness.

On the other hand, the health crises have now resolved, so this year I didn't have to mourn the death of two beloved persons close to me: my father and a cousin who's more like a big sister. In the past month I got a gig that funded a supercalifragilisticexpialidotious trip to New York a couple of weeks back, where I caught up with a few old friends from academia, among them my dissertation advisor, my former officemate and her partner. I don't get a chance to talk about heady stuff very often. And as surprising as it seems, I miss discussing the squabbles of department politics. I also got to touch base with the Mossad agent's widower, something I hadn't been able to do in past trips to New York because he was so ill. He walks with a cane, and is noticeably thinner, but he's otherwise as fine as can be expected, just slower.

I got to meet a few new people, too. One is the young guy now teaching all the course I once taught at the university. Good thing I like him. Otherwise, I'd knock his block off for replacing me. I also had a fascinating conversation with a very interesting college freshman who's passionate about cartooning. I had fun checking out his website, which is sorta hit and miss–you can tell the kid's got talent but that he's still just a kid. And then there was the Irish wedding party that decided to drag me along in a wild pub crawl---just like back in the good old days where stuff like that happened at least once a month.

The holidays were especially good in that I got to spend quality time with my nephews. I even got them to speak in complete sentences, on occasion, as opposed to the usual grunts and "uh-huhs" they've given me since hitting puberty. The fact that the elder one is in college, and that the younger one is now in the market awes me when I realize that so much time has passed.

I experienced 2016 as a pretty crappy year topped off by an ironically fantastic December (give or take a few bumps). So I see it as one of those years you just have to muddle through, one of those times that challenge you to the point where you're forced to up your game. In short, it's really bad tasting medicine. Thankfully, I had a little sugar at the end to help it go down.

I'm hoping your 2016 was better than mine. I'm hoping your holiday season was at least as good as mine, although I can't see how that's possible. And for all of us I pray for a better 2017.

Happy New Year, and may the Divine bless you.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-91572361794108962772016-11-22T02:00:00.000-05:002016-11-22T18:50:42.836-05:00Mark Lane (1927-2016)

Mark Lane, a man whose name figures into a lot of conspiracy tales, passed away on 10 May this year. He left behind a wife, three daughters, four grandchildren, and a checkered legacy.

Lane undoubtedly did a lot of good deeds during his eighty-nine years. He served in US Army Intel during WWII. He then left the military to study and subsequently practice law. Most of his early clients were indigent, many of them African American and Latino. During this early phase of his career, he complained about how the press' racial bias distorted coverage of his clients, saying "It was clear that the right to a fair trial was diminished in many instances by prejudicial pre-trial publicity."

In 1959, Lane joined former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the Committee for Democratic Voters, a leftist organization attempting to thwart what they saw as corruption within their own party. The following year, he ran JFK's presidential campaign in New York, while also working to elect future Congressman Alfred Santangelo. The year after that, he won a seat in the New York legislature, where he served for a couple of years. He left office after his arrest for participating in the Freedom Ride protests in the American Southeast.

It was as a Kennedy supporter that his life and career would take an irrevocable turn on 22 November 1963. Only weeks later, in January 1964, Lee Oswald's mom, Marguerite, hired him to represent her late son. Spurned by the Warren Commission, his subsequent investigation would become one of the most fundamentally important statements on the matter, convincing many serious-minded people of the probability of a conspiracy in the assassination of the President. It began with the publication of a 10,000-word article published by the National Guardian, a progressive newspaper founded in 1948 by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage and John McManus.* From there he published a number of books, including three of the most influential tomes on the JFK assassination. The first was Rush to Judgment (1966); followed by Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991); and Last Word: My Final Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (2011).

A prolific writer, he churned out a number of other books on a number of other topics while keeping up his political and legal careers. In 1968, he ran for President as a nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party.** He would later co-write the screenplay for the 1973 film Executive Action, starring Burt Lancaster and Will Geer.*** In 1974, he took on the American Indian Movement as a client, subsequently leading to his defense of leaders involved with the Wounded Knee incident.

Yes, by many accounts, Lane did many good things during his eighty-nine years. Yet, he undoubtedly did a lot of questionable things. What's worse, there's the possibility that he might have done some horrific things.

For starters, Lane proved to be a divisive figure in the very anti-war movement he sought to promote. His advocacy for the Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) forged a rift between that group and another pacifist organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In a series of speaking engagements with famed actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda, Lane spent much of his vitriol lashing out against American atrocities committed in Vietnam in sensationalized, and in some cases unproven, fashion. The CCI subsequently saw his actions as counterproductive to the movement and cut ties with him. As former CCI member Tod Ensign said in a paper for the March 1994 edition of Viet Nam Generation: A Journal of Recent History and Contemporary Issues:

It was a mistake to think that celebrities like Jane Fonda and Mark Lane who were used to operating as free agents would submit to the discipline of a steering committee. We should have placed them, instead, on an advisory panel where their visibility and political and money contacts would have been used without having to tangle with them on broader strategic and tactical questions.
Figure 2. Lane (far left) with Fonda (far right).

The VVAW were a bit more reluctant to distance themselves from Lane and Fonda, for their fundraising efforts were valuable. But they too severed there relationship to Lane shortly afterward.

More problematic was Lane's representation of the Peoples Temple and its founder, Rev. Jim Jones. He happened to have been on site in the Guyana Jonestown compound when the mass suicides and murders took place. The fact that he lived to tell the tale, and the fact that he agreed to represent the cult in the first place, led Mae Brussell and subsequent researchers to question his true loyalties and intentions. Some of his actions connecting Jonestown to the Martin Luther King assassination, and his background in Army intelligence led some to question whether or not he served as a government agent, whose job was to confound the issues in official conspiracy investigations by creating straw men, ineptly handling evidence, and assisting suspected CIA assets such as Rev. Jim Jones.

Lane would also represent the Liberty Lobby, an offshoot of the John Birch Society, in a lawsuit brought about by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Former CIA Assistant Executive Officer Victor Marchetti published an August 1978 piece in the organization's official organ, The Spotlight, wherein that he claimed Hunt took an active role in the JFK assassination. Shortly before his death in 2007, Hunt himself confirmed this in a series of audio recordings dictated to his son, St. John. But in 1978, Hunt denied the association, prompting him to sue The Spotlight for defamation. Lane managed to get a federal appellate court to overturn a $650.000 judgment. Eventually retried in 1995, a jury found that Spotlight had in fact not defamed Hunt.

The fact that Lane would champion such a rabidly right rag like The Spotlight is in some ways understandable, since he was, in principle, defending a position that he had maintained since 1964: namely that President Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy, and that Hunt and others like him participated in it. On the other hand, some saw his support of the Liberty Lobby to be highly problematic, and in some ways fueled speculation about whose side he was really on.

The question of Lane's intentions and purpose will play heavily in the upcoming series, when we'll explore his actions and their consequences in the representation of arguably his most famous living client. Meanwhile, we can only let time sort out whether the recently departed Mr. Lane was more sinner than saint in the long run.

____________
* Not to be confused with The Guardian (UK), originally founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian.

Although Mrs. Oswald hired Lane, the Warren Commission rejected his request to represent him during their investigation. They instead appointed American Bar Association President Walter Craig to represent Lee.

**Filling out the ticket as the Vice-Presidential nominee was his good friend, comedian, activist, author and conspiracy researcher Dick Gregory. Together, they wrote about the Martin Luther King assassination in a 1978 book titled Code Name Zorro.

***The other credited screenwriters: Robert Ryan and former Hollywood Ten sacrificial lamb Dalton Trumbo.
X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-89229088769543411722016-11-22T01:30:00.000-05:002016-11-22T01:30:20.934-05:00The Eyes of Texas Hated Him Too

The above video briefly touches upon the hatred of President John Kennedy within extremist right-wing circles, and the concentration of such circles in Dallas.
X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-7819987820494112082016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:002016-11-22T01:00:00.151-05:00What Did I Do?
Imagine that you're a young undergraduate student playing hooky so that you can watch President Kennedy's Dallas motorcade come by on 22 November 1963. Imagine that you're approximately five minutes away from Dealey Plaza. As Jack goes by, waving at you and everyone else, you're entranced by Jacqueline and what she's wearing. The moment passes, and you go back to your car, never realizing that the President has been mortally wounded.

You find out in short order about the assassination. You phone home to your parents in Illinois to tell them what's just happened.

Do your parents react with horror? Do they try to comfort you, telling you that justice will prevail and that Kennedy's legacy will go on?

I suspect my parents might say something along those lines. Yours would too, probably. But the parents of a Dallas Coed named Claire Conner told her something that would shock you as much as it did her. They told her, in all seriousness, that she might need a lawyer.

Why would authorities suspect Conner of a Presidential assassin? Because, she and her parents were charter members of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right-wing group that had declared JFK a communist and Soviet Agent. As very visible and vocal enemies of the President and his policies, especially his attempts to end Jim Crow in the South, the JBS had an obvious motive to kill the President.

Figure 1. Conner Lecture Clip on the JFK Assassination.

In her 2014 memoir Wrapped in the Flag, Conner chronicled her birth into a family whose ideology bordered on fascism. She recounts how, as an adolescent, she joined the JBS upon her parents' insistence. She chronicled her ardent work for the movement up until her mid-thirties.

Conner describes her eventual breakup with the JBS as a slow process that began with her questioning of the racial policies and beliefs espoused by the organization. Her defection from the JBS to moderate, then liberal, then progressive politics came at a steep price. It's clear that she loved her parents, and even took care of them during their declining years. Yet, from a certain point on, they would forever call her a "traitor" to her face, never respecting her opinions or newly directed political activism.

Wrapped in the Flag is on my reading list. I'll get to it eventually. But I've listened to approximately four hours of Conner's interviews and lectures now. These are fascinating, and not just because of her personal story. Rather, it's her personal experience as a former-Bircher that has given her a very sharp and insightful critique of right-wing politics, its goals, its strategy, its sociology and its psychology.

What's more, Conner offers a very unique historical perspective on the increasing power of the John Birch Society and its ideals within American politics. I'll examine two of her most jarring observations in the next post.
X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-36004628597699057972016-11-17T15:31:00.003-05:002016-11-21T11:59:08.745-05:00Your Blogging Dollars at Work
I know some of you have had problems accessing the site and leaving comments. I'm hoping that everything has been worked out. If it hasn't, well, time for Plan B.

If you're wondering about the new layout, the old one kinda bit the dust. Certain facets of it simply stopped working. Our wonderful friend Fatty designed it, and it was such a gift that I was loath to let it go. Alas, it has lost its usefulness.

I tried as much as I can to mimic her original design. I have some features to add, and tinker with (which I mostly do at the test site). But I hope to have the blog fully operational very soon.

Thank you all for your patience, your intellectual contributions and your company.
X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-3271856019002295232016-11-04T18:11:00.002-04:002016-11-21T11:59:43.319-05:00Prologue: Barbarians at the Gate
In a Smithsonian piece published three days after his death (27 February 2008), conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley recalled a 1962 conversation with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, and others. Goldwater had become a fan of National Review, the periodical Buckley founded and published, and he wanted Bill's advice.

You see, the Senator had a problem. He wanted to run for US President in 1964, but realized that much of his support was coming from a group of far-right extremists calling themselves the John Birch Society. As he explained to Buckley:

Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society. Russell, I'm not talking about Commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks, I'm talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.
Former candy magnate Robert Welch founded The John Birch Society in 1958. They were fervently opposed to integration, racial equality and other goals of the civil rights movement, as was Buckley. They were ultraconservative and staunchly anti-communist, as was Buckley. Many were intelligent and erudite people of the upper and upper middle classes, as was Buckley.

Yet, Buckley didn't like the JBS. Quoting Russell, he wrote "...Robert Welch was a man disconnected from reality." Consequently, he saw the organization's entire agenda as similarly delusional. In large part this stemmed from previous statements by Welch that strained all credulity. The worst: in an unpublished draft of his 1954 book The Politician, Welch flatly accused then-President Dwight Eisenhower of being a Soviet agent:

And it seems to me that the explanation of sheer political opportunism, to account for Eisenhower's Communist-aiding career, stems merely from a deeprooted aversion of any American to recognizing the horrible truth. Most of the doubters, who go all the way with me except to the final logical conclusion, appear to have no trouble whatever in suspecting that [Ike's brother] Milton Eisenhower is an outright Communist....But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.
This paragraph did not make it to print. However, it circulated widely enough for many conservatives in and outside of the organization to have seen it. Buckley thought the charge quite reckless, for it undermined the integrity of the democratic process. Worse, the JBS seemed to have no problem leveling accusations of "communist agent" or "treason" against those refusing to walk in lockstep with them.

Hence, Goldwater's problem. He believed that in order to gain enough votes for the Republican nomination, and ultimately the Presidency, he needed those JBS members and sympathetic fellow travelers to shore up his political base. The question that arose in this meeting with Kirk and Buckley centered on how to criticize the loony founder (Welch) without criticizing, and thus alienating, his followers.

The 1964 RNC National Convention in Daly City, California was, to put it mildly, intense. Goldwater had not done much to disassociate his campaign from the John Birch Society and other paleoconservatives. Much of the vitriol stemmed from the shouting-down of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (NY) and other moderates as they spoke. Although recent polling indicated that 62% of Republicans preferred Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton to head the ticket, the overwhelming support of Birch and like-minded delegates propelled Goldwater to the nomination.

The platforms of that year reflected many of the tenets and policy initiatives of the Birchers. For example, 70% voted down a platform plank to accept the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beforehand delegates had received as many as sixty copies of A Choice Not an Echo, in which arch-conservative and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly complained that "a few secret kingmakers in New York" were forcing moderate "Wall Street Republicans" like Rockefeller down the throats of the GOP. And Schlafly wasn't the only one foaming at the mouth hinting at a rigged election. In a 2008 article for Smithsonian, Rick Perlstein puts it as follows:

Goldwater's finance chairman, Bill Middendorf, warned campaign aide Dean Burch that 'the 1952 tricks will be used again': planted stories, whispering campaigns, threats, cajolery and the 'shanghaiing and spiriting of delegates and alternates to distant points.' Goldwater delegates were warned to be on the lookout 'for unexpectedly easy companionship from new-found female friends.' They were to contact the Goldwater headquarters on the 15th floor of the Mark Hopkins immediately after landing at the airport and to travel around town in pairs along pre-timed routes in radio-equipped cars. They used walkie-talkies only as back-ups, because these could be too easily tapped into—as, indeed, they had tapped into Scranton's.
With all this rabid paranoia running rampant in Daly City, it would make sense for Goldwater, the eventual nominee, to do as best he could to calm everything down. Instead the nominee embraced the extremism, and the growing, and more vocal, endorsements from the John Birch Society. And in arguably the loudest dog-whistle heard in American politics, Goldwater attempted to justify/legitimate this movement in his acceptance speech:

Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And—and let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Figure 1. Goldwater Acceptance Speech (1964 RNC)

The general election didn't go all that well, despite the triumphs of the primaries and convention. In the technical jargon of political scientists, Lyndon Johnson handed Goldwater's nuts to him on a silver platter, winning 61.1% of the popular vote, and 90.3% of the electoral vote. Goldwater won only in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, :Louisiana, and his home state of Arizona. Or more simply, he won his home state and the Deep South.

Despite the inroads the Birch Society had made into the Republican Party during the 1960s, this influence met with resistance among other conservatives, some of them openly critical about their efficacy, viewing them as somewhat buffoonish, or narrow-minded. Consequently, the organization faced scathing attacks from the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and eventually Goldwater himself. Because of the negative light they cast upon conservatism, which of course resulted in a humiliating ass-whuppin' in 1964, the Republican party did its utmost to expel the JBS from its ranks by the end of the 1960s.

Yet, as one former insider would tell you, the JBS never went away. It simply changed tactics. As a result, the one-time pariah of legitimate Republicans would come to have considerable say within the party come the Twenty-First Century.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-41926723194962653412016-11-01T17:39:00.003-04:002016-11-01T18:34:14.512-04:00Prologue: The Right Way?

In this strange election of 2016, we've been hearing about all sorts of historical firsts and historical parallels. One that keeps coming up is the comparison between current Republican Party nominee Donald Trump and his 1964 counterpart, Senator Barry Goldwater. The above clip amplifies the similarities between that election cycle and this by having the actor in an iconic Lyndon Johnson campaign ad repeat, almost verbatim, his original 1964 message in the above YouTube post.

William Bogert, the man in both the 1964 and 2016 videos, recited dialogue written for him by professionals. Yet, as he has told Rachel Maddow and others, the statements reflected his true sentiments. Bogert was (and still is) a Republican. Trump, Senator Goldwater and the hardline, right-wing extremism they represented, genuinely frighten(ed) him. Indeed, Goldwater seems to have frightened him so much that the last Republican he voted for was former NYC Mayor John Lindsay, who shortly afterward officially switched to the Democratic Party.

Now if you're wondering how that kind of voting record squares with the idea of being a Republican (and not in name only), then you need to look at the watershed political year of 1964, during which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King openly worried that the GOP was quickly becoming "the white man's party." Before then, there was a visible liberal presence within the GOP, represented by such statesmen as Lindsay, Sen John Cooper (KY), Sen. Jacob Javits (NY), and Gov./Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (CA). Although the Republican Party of that era did not lack conservatives (former VP Richard Nixon, for example) some (mostly Southern) Democrats of that time were reactionary right almost to the point of being extremists, among them Senators Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and Jessie Helms. Some of these men stayed on their side of the aisle, but many of them switched parties after 1964.

So Bogert wasn't/isn't all that unusual, politically. After 1964, there were a number of Republicans deeply dismayed by the pall descending over their party, a party in which they found themselves having less and less say.* A political movement had begun to seize control of the GOP. Although many of the conservative Republican standard bearers would denounce them in the late-1960s, and would deliberately attempt to block its direct involvement with party matters, the movement nevertheless clung to the Republican Party instead of forming a party of its own. Some of it's main tenets and platforms would eventually become the mantra for most Republicans seeking office at the local, state and national levels. Other beliefs weren't so much openly stated, but rather implied through a deft bit of circumlocution, what we commonly call today "dog whistling." The rhetoric and philosophical positions espoused by the Tea Party, Matt Drudge, Glenn Beck and later Trump are really nothing more than the direct (decoded) pronouncements of these previously coded statements.

In short, this movement, fringe as it was, had considerable impact on US politics in 1964; a punch that's still felt in the jaw of 2016.

What is this movement? Well, I can give you a lot of different organizations that represented it, but in the interest of brevity we'll only concentrate on one of them......

......in the next post.

_______________
*Former Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman (NJ) gave voice to this idea in her 2005 book It's My Party Too, in which she decried the declining power of moderates and centrists within the party. That same year, she also formed It's My Party Too (IMP-PAC), a political action committee dedicated to supporting moderate Republicans.
X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-89513981191090324142016-10-13T19:14:00.003-04:002016-11-01T18:34:14.518-04:00Prologue: A Spook in Crispy Mississippi
On the night of 21 June 1964, three men, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, disappeared just outside of Philadelphia, MS. They represented the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), CORE was one of the "Big 4" organizations dedicated to African American civil rights during the 1960s.

Schwerner and Goodman, both white native New Yorkers, had worked for some time in the civil rights movement. They came to Meridian in 1964 and hooked up with Chaney, a black activist, who introduced them to Meridian's local African American community. The three men and Schwerner's wife, Rita, spent the earlier part of 1964 organizing black voter registration drives in Mississippi.* As spring waned, Goodman and the Schwerners got the idea of creating a space to serve as a headquarters for their voter registration efforts and other civil rights actions. Chaney subsequently brokered a deal with clergy and elders for space at Mt. Nebo Baptist Church.

Days before their disappearance, the three were in Oxford, OH where Michael organized training for new voter registration volunteers at Western College.** Just then, they received word that someone had burned Mt. Nebo Baptist to the ground. The three drove Schwerner's station wagon to Meridian to investigate. Shortly after their arrival, they vanished.

The Mississippi Burning case, as it came to be known, attracted publicity not just nationally, but globally during the forty-four days the three went missing. In one respect, the notoriety was unusual. After all, scores of real and suspected civil rights activists had gone missing by that point.*** None of them received any national attention. Yet, it became quite clear to those close to this case why the civil rights movement, and its martyrs hadn't gotten this kind of publicity in the past: unlike Goodman and Schwerner, the others were all African American. In a television interview given to reporters Rita Schwerner put it tersely and bluntly:

It is tragic, as far as I'm concerned, that white northerners have to be caught up in the machinery of injustice and indifference in the South before people register concern. I personally suspect that if Mr. Chaney, who is a native Mississippi Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance that his case, like so many others that have come before, would have been completely unnoticed.
It would later unfold that on the night they went missing Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney during what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. They left after their release several hours later. Deputy Price followed Schwerner's station wagon in hot pursuit, along with at least nine other co-conspirators, all of whom belonged to the White Knights, a KKK offshoot.**** Participants shot Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman at point blank range, and buried them beneath a privately owned dam with the help of a bulldozer, which just happened to be standing by.

While the disposition of the murder and manslaughter charges has become the focus of history, one of the most bizarre aspects of this historical event occurred when it was still a missing persons case. As reported in a 24 June 1964 edition of the Guardian (UK):

President Johnson has sent Mr Allen Dulles, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to lead the investigation. Some of the civil rights organisations see this as a curious choice, asserting that Mr Dulles has rarely shown himself as their friend.
The selection was curious indeed, on so many levels and for so many reasons. Dulles' prior background as a civil servant was almost exclusively in the area of espionage. As an attorney, he was a specialist in corporate law, not criminal law. He had never demonstrated any public interest on the subject of African American civil rights. And in 1964, there were aspects of both corporate law and Intel that many Blacks and sympathetic Whites would have seen as either apathetic or antagonistic to their concerns.

Dulles not only ran the missing persons investigation, but apparently expanded his role in Mississippi. According to many sources, the former DCI took this mission as an opportunity to meet with African American activists, many of them from SNCC. The general thrust of these meetings consisted of Dulles' efforts to sell the idea that Uncle Sam was indeed interested in advancing black civil rights. He also urged activists to tone down their more abrasive tactics.

If you're thinking that a ruthless and dedicated cold-warrior such as Allen Dulles had some streak of morality that would lead him to champion racial equality, then the truth is going to let you down hard. Dulles actions, and the DOJ appointment, had little to do with fair play, or justice. Instead, it had everything to do with realpolitik.

You see, by 1964, African American civil rights had become a serious and urgent national security issue. The reasons for this are twofold, but both stem from circumstances brought about by the Cold War.

The first reason had to do with government fears that the USSR might effectively mobilize African-Americans as fifth columnists. During the 1930s, the Communists were the largest political party that openly advocated racial equality. As a result, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and other black intellectuals took a long, sober look at communism as a possible solution to racial injustice; most subsequently rejecting it. Public officials began to worry that the more African Americans were mistreated at home, the more "susceptible" they could be to overtures made by Soviet agents, who could then recruit them into espionage, sabotage, propaganda efforts, you name it.

Just as bad was the possibility that Blacks could deliberately slow down production towards, and contribution to, current and future war efforts. One could easily imagine that someone repressed by his government wouldn't just selflessly come to that government's aid time and time again. In response to labor and civil rights activist A Philip Randolph's declaration that African Americans should actively support US Cold War policy, a 26 December 1949 Militant editorial put the issue this way:*****

By this answer he [Randolph] gives a go-ahead signal to the very same ruling class that is responsible for the oppression and segregation of the Negro people at home—for a war that will be a projection on the international field of the same reactionary policies that they are pursuing in the United States.... Not only the Soviet masses but American workers and Negroes have a stake in preserving this system, for its destruction in a war by U.S. imperialism would mean a new lease on life for dying world capitalism. The strengthening of capitalism in turn would mean the strengthening of all its institutions, including the institution of Jim Crow which Negroes are fighting to end."
The second reason involved the nature of the Cold War itself. As you probably know, a political rift between the US/UK governments and that of the Soviet Union led to what former Prime Minister Winston Churchill decried as an "Iron Curtain." This ferric veil effectively separated Eastern and Western Europe into two spheres: the latter loyal to the United States and her allies, the former under the dominion of the USSR.

But that was just Europe. There were tons of other countries around the world in the Americas, Africa and Asia -- what many Westerners imperiously refer to as "Third World" nations. And the bulk of these states had abundant natural resources in terms of oil, agricultural products, minerals, labor, et cetera. Many of these places also held strategic value because of their ports, infrastructure, terrain, or some other reason.

If you are one of the two superpowers going strong in the wake of World War II, then it would behoove you to forge alliances with these non-European countries. That way, you can get the best trade deals from them. You might even be able to broker an exclusive deal with them, if the price is right. You can also solidify your military position if you can convince them to station your soldiers and hardware. You could also be in the position to exploit or take control of that country's national resources if they lack the wherewithal to stop you.

Whatever you intend to do with this potential ally, you'd have to be aware that the other superpower is competing for the exclusive affection of that same non-European state. You're then stuck in the position of having to sell your nation's way of life over that of the other guy..

And that's where the US found itself in deep, deep trouble. It's kinda hard to sell the American way to someone who perceives the American way as hatred, domination, persecution and exploitation of people who look like her.

In her 2000 book Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Professor Mary Dudziak (Emory Law School) gave an example of how this problem played out in real life:

Early in the Kennedy years a black delegate to the United Nations landed in Miami on his way to New York. When the passengers disembarked for lunch, the white passengers were taken to the airport restaurant; the black delegate received a folding canvas stool in a corner of the hangar and a sandwich wrapped with wax paper. He then flew on to New York, where our delegation asked for his vote on human rights issues.******
To be clear, the machinations of such government actors as Dulles don't imply that African Americans received equal accommodations and suffrage simply because Uncle Sam decreed it. Because of economic and historical factors, civil rights would have eventually come to the US through African American struggle anyway. We can more accurately see government's participation here – and later in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act – as having a catalyzing effect. In other words, it simply sped up the process. Moreover, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and other astute civil rights leaders understood this dynamic, and deliberately leveraged the international situation to hasten the advent of legal equality.

Hence, the problem inherent in the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner became the global attention given to it. While world leaders might grant some forbearance to discreet civil rights issues in other lands, that support could continue so long as the violations remained discreet.******* These murders, on the other hand, were in the open, thanks in large part to the ethnicity of two of the victims.

So the big-time US government interest in solving the case should come to us as little surprise. But, of course, Uncle Sam never really solved it, and justice was hardly served. All local, county and Mississippi courts refused to prosecute.******** An all-white jury. which included a Klansman, convicted only seven of the indicted conspirators in a 1967 federal trial for the denial of civil rights. Three were acquitted. None of the convicted men served more than six years.

In 2005, an interracial jury convicted Edgar Killen, then eighty years old, of manslaughter and sentenced him to sixty years. I doubt he'll serve the entire term, but eleven years later he's still incarcerated at Mississippi State Penitentiary as of the time of this posting.

Meanwhile, Rita Schwerner attended Rutgers Law School, where she met her second husband, William Bender. She is currently an attorney practicing family law in Washington state, and soldiers on as a civil rights/social justice activist.

In 2014 Barack Obama posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. They have received memorials and honors in Mississippi, Ohio, Michigan, New York and elsewhere, including a cenotaph at the site of the new Mt. Nebo Baptist Church.

________
*The voter registration drives were pursuant to advice given to civil rights activists by President John Kennedy. JFK was of the opinion that such tactics as Freedom Rides and sit-in demonstrations were counterproductive, and could not produce the kind of dramatic results as voting.

**In 1974, Western College for Women merged with Miami University, located just across the street.

***Indeed, in the search for Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney, authorities found two such bodies belonging to college students Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore, both of whom had disappeared a month earlier. They also found the corpse of a young teenager, Herbert Oarsby, whose disappearance didn't seem to concern anyone outside his immediate community.

****There has been quite a debate over the years about how many people actually participated in this lynching, with some estimates doubling, and almost tripling this number. The indicted conspirators were Price, Travis and Horace Barnette, James Jordan, Jimmy Townsend, Edgar Killen, Billy Posey, Alton Roberts, Jimmy Arledge, Jimmy Snowden and Jerry Sharpe. The Department of Justice also won an indictment against Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, but failed to convict him. In all, authorities investigated twenty-one suspects.

*****The Militant was the official organ of the US Socialist Workers Party.

******I've heard audio accounts on various radio shows describing similar treatment to other foreign dignitaries visiting Washington, DC, with its surrounding segregated areas in Virginia and Maryland, but cannot find them to document them here. Apparently, the CIA and/or State Department sometimes had to intervene with restaurant owners and hoteliers so that these people had places to eat and sleep.

*******For example, the adoption of Apartheid law in South Africa met with varying degrees of disassociation with the country, despite the civil rights abuses that had occurred earlier.

********Many point out that the government of Mississippi had a conflict of interest in the prosecution of this case. Not only were two law enforcement officers involved, but their intelligence on Michael Schwerner -- his whereabouts and activities -- were given to Deputy Price and Sheriff Rainey by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (Sov-Com). Founded in 1956 as a directorate of the Governor (i.e., as an official part of state government), Sov-Com spied on numerous civil rights activists and other supposed "communist agents."

The implication of state government in a murder conspiracy could have possibly led, or at the least enticed, contemporary Mississippi courts to coverup the involvement of other conspirators. Even if Sov-Com played no role in the actual conspiracy to murder, or for that matter the arson of Mt. Nebo, it still gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. And the mere appearance of a conflict is a violation of many different professional ethics codes.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-73389643567829042212016-09-15T15:08:00.001-04:002016-09-15T16:10:36.210-04:00Prologue: Martyr Shaming

On 21 March 1965, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, political activist and NAACP member, drove her late-model Oldsmobile to Selma, AL so that she could participate in a series of civil rights marches led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.* Earlier that month, she had seen a similar march turn violent when local authorities attacked peaceful demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses, an event known to history as Bloody Sunday. A subsequent march two days later resulted in the brutal clubbing death of Unitarian minister Rev. James Reeb. Searing, outraged by the injustice as witnessed on her television screen, she made the decision on 16 March to join the effort.

The marches took place over four days, during which time Liuzzo joined other protestors, and stayed with African American families. On the last day of protests, 25 March, Dr. King spoke to the crowd of 25,000, noting the success of the protests which he called "a shining moment in American history."

Liuzzo volunteered to drive demonstrators from the marches to their homes later that day, accompanied by a young black civil rights activist named Leroy Moten. They were nearly finished in this task when, driving along Route 80, a car pulled alongside them and shot a volley of bullets into the Olds, which subsequently came to a stop after crashing into a fence. Someone from the other car checked on the victims to verify they were dead. Liuzzo, suffering from two head wounds, had died instantly. Moten was uninjured. But covered in Liuzzo's blood he managed to feign death long enough to fool the assailant, who then fled.

In the shooter's car rode four men, all of them members of the Ku Klux Klan. Authorities took three of them -- William Eaton, Eugene Thomas and Collie Wilkins -- into custody the following day. President Johnson immediately announced the arrests, and commended the FBI in its speedy resolution of the case.

Today, those who've heard the name Viola Liuzzo know her as the courageous heroine she actually is. But that wasn't the case in 1965. Contemporary accounts reported public antipathy to either her racial views, her commitment to them, or both. Many openly condemned her as a terrible mother, a petty criminal, a thrill-seeker, a junkie and, worst of all, a slut.

A 2 April 1965 Ladies Home Journal Article, "Murder in Alabama: American Wives Think Viola Liuzzo Should Have Stayed at Home" by Lyn Tornabene, quoted a focus group of eighteen "northern suburban housewives." The author asked for their personal opinions of Liuzzo. Their responses:

[Respondent 1] She was wrong in leaving her home and going down there and meddling into something. I feel sorry for what happened. It was a shame, but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.

[Respondent 2] In her mind she probably did exactly what she felt was right. But how could she do it, knowing the situation, and knowing there was a chance of her not coming back with children at home? [emphasis Tornabene]

[Respondent 3] She had no right being down there, whatever her feelings were. It wasn't her situation. If it were something that happened in Detroit, then yes.

[Respondent 4 -- in a voice characterized by the author as 'angry'] I want to know who was taking care of her children,**

[Respondent 5, replying to the above] It didn't matter. A mother's place is in the home.

The article then published the results of a nationwide poll to the following question:

No matter what your own opinions are on the question of voting rights, do you think that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit civil-rights worker who was killed in the Alabama shooting incident, had a right to leave her five children to risk her life for a social cause, or not?

Nationally, 55.2% of those polled answered "no," 26.4% said "yes" and the rest had no opinion. Regionally, the ratio varied dramatically, with 61.2% of southern respondents answering "no" compared to 15.6% yes.

Shortly afterwards, the KKK published a special edition magazine titled Nightriders: The Inside Story of the Liuzzo Killing. Adorning the cover was the gory, blood-spattered image of Liuzzo's corpse slumped slightly to the right in front of the Oldsmobile's steering wheel. Inside were salacious accounts of her heroin addiction and black boyfriends in Detroit. One story featured a photograph of two models, a black man and a white woman, making out in the grass. Someone circled the woman's head and wrote above it "Is this your mommy?" on a copy before mailing it to Liuzzo's surviving children. The clear implication was that Liuzzo didn't travel all the way to Selma for any noble cause. Instead, the trek from Detroit was little more than a sexual holiday with Moten and a host of available black studs.

And where did all this BS on Liuzzo come from? As it turns out, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In his 2005 biography The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, Dr. Gary May (History, University of Deleware) disputed the FBI's direct involvement in the smear campaign against Liuzzo, explaining that the slanderous reports originated in the investigation of Detroit police commissioner Marvin Lane, who compiled it pursuant to the request of Dallas Country Sheriff Jim Clark. Clark had solid connections to the KKK and the White Citizens Council.*** It's thus Dr. May's contention that Sheriff Clark got this information directly from Detroit, and spread it among his WCC and KKK friends.

Obviously, whatever Commissioner Lane sent might or might not accurately reflect Clark's report of that info. Moreover, Lane's information was probably inaccurate to begin with. Either way, the assertion is completely without merit. But the real problem with May's contention is that we can prove that the FBI actually spread false sexual rumors against its perceived enemies, as it did against actress Jean Seberg. We can also show that if the FBI didn't directly peddle the narrative of Liuzzo as dope fiend and interracial nymphomaniac to the press, they certainly did so within the walls of the Department of Justice. In a 21 April 1983 op-ed column, Jack Anderson summarized the contents of formerly hidden FBI documents showing that the Bureau had an active role in defaming Liuzzo:

My associates Tony Capaccio and Indy Badhwar have examined hundreds of internal FBI documents, which make clear that the FBI's behavior goes shockingly beyond negligence....

...Director J. Edgar Hoover marshaled the Bureau's resources to blacken the dead woman's [Liuzzo's] reputation....

Within 24 hours of Mrs. Liuzzo's murder, a summary document prepared for top FBI officials reported: 'Mrs. Liuzzo had puncture marks in her arm indicating recent use of a hypodermic needle.'

In another FBI memo to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach later that day, Hoover repeated the puncture mark story and added an additional item:

I stated the man himself [referring here to Viola's husband, James Liuzzo] doesn't have too good a background, and the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in her car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.

This scandalous material, shunted about through the corridors of the FBI, had to have come from either Lane's investigation or Clark's characterization of its material, one or both of which were fraudulent.

I say fraudulent because the FBI's own investigation flatly disproved the innuendos. According to the autopsy, Liuzzo had not engaged in recent sexual activity. While she did have puncture marks in her arm, these were not caused by hypodermic needles, but rather very fine shrapnel caused when the bullets shattered her car window, as easily determined by the post mortem. And there were no traces of either illegal narcotics or alcohol inside her body at the time of death. And the fact remains that parked cars don't crash into fences. Liuzzo and Moten were clearly in motion at the time of the shooting, and it's kinda hard to steer when you're necking with another person. So despite the fact that they immediately knew these allegations against Liuzzo were untrue, the FBI continued to circulate this story for some time after, and made no attempt to correct the misinformation given in popular media.

Question: why would the FBI spend so much of its time, brains and money to demonize, by all other accounts, a decent human being?

Answer: the Bureau had something to hide. You'll note that four men were in the shooter's car, but only three were arrested. The fourth man, Gary Rowe, was an undercover FBI informant, who had infiltrated the Klan under the government's direction. Rowe immediately reported the Liuzzo shooting to the FBI, thus explaining how the Bureau captured the others so fast.

So why not acknowledge Rowe's contribution to the case? Some would undoubtedly see him as a hero.****

Rowe was himself a complex figure, and it's murky to this day whether his first loyalties were to the FBI, the Klan, or himself. Worse still, the public didn't know at that time that the FBI had infiltrated the Klan. If they knew, then Susie Q Citizen could legitimately question why Hoover didn't move to arrest Klansmen for the many, many violent crimes they committed during the late-1950s and early-1960s. She could also criticize the Bureau's seeming indifference to preventing future crimes. She could subsequently wonder if the Bureau really wanted to encourage violence against those advocating racial equality by protecting its personnel when they incited and participated in criminal acts.

Even worse, Rowe's information failed to result in a conviction of Eaton, Thomas and Wilkins for murder. After a hung jury led to a mistrial, a second jury acquitted them of all charges. The defense made copious use of the slander and libel against Liuzzo to influence the jury, who in effect seemed to say that she got what she deserved.*****

But there was something even deeper, something darker. According to Thomas, Wilkins and Leroy Moten, the shooter was not Eaton, as many had thought, but Rowe himself.

Figure 1. Moten interview for the 2004 documentary Home of the Brave.

In addition to the eyewitness statements, there were other reasons to think that Rowe might have pulled the trigger. Dr. May wrote about how the Klan constantly challenged Gary's loyalty, a dicey situation due to the fact that he actually was an FBI informant. He also mentioned Thomas' contention that a murder would prove Rowe's loyalty to the Klan once and for all. Most important was a telephone call to his handler shortly before the shooting, in which Rowe said that he was about to commit some violent action.

Slut-shaming Liuzzo let the FBI off the hook, in a manner of speaking. Focusing on her, and depicting her as sordid deflected more pertinent questions about the FBI's sponsorship of and failure to stop Klan atrocities.

Sadly, Liuzzo and her surviving family were neither the first nor last to suffer this form of defamation. The same people who accused her routinely denounced other white women working for the civil rights movements as "sluts," and/or any other contemporary synonym. This was especially true of Freedom Riders, many of whom hailed from non-segregated states. The depiction of northern white women as randy sex perverts sometimes strained credulity to the point of being humorous. In his 2004 book Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, Professor Randall Kennedy (Law, Harvard) quoted Nettie Adams, a Montgomery, AL Police Department employee, telling Life magazine in 1965:

This one particular couple on the lawn of St. Margaret's [Hospital] was engaged in sexual relations, a white woman [a skinny blonde] and a Negro man. After they were through, she wiggled out from beneath him and went over to another man.

Of course. Public interracial orgies in broad daylight must've occurred on a daily basis in Montgomery, AL during the early-1960s, right?

Actually, lynching was still an issue at this time. Southern black males would most likely be skittish to embark upon such an activity in front of hostile crowds and even more hostile police department employees. Moreover, Stokely Carmichael and other southern civil rights activists, knowing that the charge of "miscegenation" could undermine their work, openly discouraged interracial couplings, although they did not ban them. And some undoubtedly occurred between black women and white men, and between white women and black men; some of these liaisons resulting in marriage or other long-term relationships. But for segregationists, the exceptions proved that the white women participating in the civil rights movement were disreputable and of dubious character.

White clergy also fell victim to false charges of sexual impropriety during this time. John Howard Griffin, in later editions of Black Like Me, added several postscripts about his experiences after the first release in 1961. In one, Griffin told of a meeting with Dr. King and other Black leaders to discuss a crisis situation that had then emerged in New Orleans. A woman accused a local Jesuit priest active in the civil rights movement of fathering her newly born child. Although forensic tests excluded him as the baby's father, the padre never quite got over the stigma attached to the charge, with some reckoning that he might have slept with her, even if he wasn't the baby's actual father. King concluded the meeting with the recommendation that they all should be careful not to interact with persons of the opposite sex unless someone else were there as well.

As it would unfold, Dr. King's recommendation would prove ironic. Yet, he understood the destructive force carried by the false (or for that matter the true) allegation of sexual impropriety within the civil rights movement, especially when directed at white women and men of the cloth, two demographics characterized by the segregationist mind as paragons of chastity. For the bigot, this proved that the movement toward racial equality led to a societal or moral decay that corrupted even the most innocent of peoples.

For those who weren't segregationists, such as those eighteen northern suburban housewives interviewed by Tornabene, the gossip about sex might not find its way into open public discourse. But it could certainly lead to a puritanical condemnation of civil rights activism, especially if one can mask the prejudice by basing their hatred on other grounds (in this case, bad parenting). Never in this Ladies Home Journal article or survey were respondents asked to comment on the morality of Jim Crow, voter disenfranchisement, the murder of innocent victims or so forth. In fact, the questions posed by the surveyors explicitly told them to disregard those judgments. The subsequent vilification of Liuzzo and others like effectively distracted attention from the real issues facing the nation and humanity as a whole.

So one could see why the FBI had no compunctions about slut-shaming Liuzzo, Seberg, and probably untold others. As a method for stifling unwanted future political actions, and for discrediting historical political struggles, it works.

____________
*These marches were to protest black voter suppression that had nakedly occurred in Dallas County, Alabama specifically, and in the US southeast in general. These measures included intimidation through violence, or the threat of it, and literacy tests that were so difficult that very few of the Whites administering them could pass them. Usually these were only given to potential black voters. Sometimes, a much easier version was given to white voters. Click here to take the test yourself.

**In case you're wondering, Liuzzo's children were then, and would continue to be in the care of Viola's best friend, an African-American woman named Sarah Evans.

***Currently known as the Council of Conservative Christians, the WCC supported the major tenets of the KKK, and sometimes allied with them. Unlike the KKK, the Citizens Councils historically consisted of more affluent and politically connected people (e.g. Pat Buchanan and US Sen. Trent Lott), prompting comedian Dick Gregory to describe them as "The Klan, but without the sheets."

****Indeed, a 1979 television movie, Undercover with the FBI, starred former NFL quarterback "Dandy" Don Meredith as Rowe. The flick depicts him as the hero who thwarted the KKK, and gave justice to the Liuzzo family.

*****Federal prosecutors subsequently indicted and convicted Eaton, Thomas and Wilkins on a charge of conspiring against Liuzzo to deprive her of her civil rights. They each received the maximum sentence of ten years. One of their attorneys, Arthur Hanes, Sr., was the ex-Mayor of Birmingham, AL, a ten-year FBI veteran and a contract agent for the CIA. He would later represent James Earl Ray.
X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-61857396007037283842016-08-31T10:29:00.000-04:002016-08-31T10:29:10.419-04:00Prologue: Don't You See the Threshold?
As mentioned earlier, I have found a certain profundity in the remarks of researcher Lisa Pease when she says that many good people simply "cannot wrap their heads" around the idea of conspiracy. I have wondered why for quite some time. You can easily see why some of the more whackadoodle and wingnut stories of conspiracy lore can cause serious minds not only to laugh them off, but to also dismiss any thought that strikes them as similar. Of course, they might not be similar in any real sense, but rather connected in various ways, most often by the lumping of all dissonant or parapolitical inquiries into the category of "conspiracy theory."

In other words, my thought was that many intelligent people cannot consider a conspiracy argument because they have prejudged against it. They therefore don't see any conspiracies. Ever.

Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, featured an episode that gave me a new idea about how to look at this problem. Conspiracy researchers, by and large, view the mainstream mindset as one of institutional (mostly media and academia) ignorance of, or indifference to, the evidence of conspiracy, and the validity of that evidence (when it is indeed valid). If institutions are aware of, and therefore understand the implications of, valid evidence, the tendency is to cover it up, and attack those disseminating the message.

For the most part, my feeling is that coverups are actually pretty rare. Because those in managerial roles have to internalize the codes of power within their profession in order to get promoted, or pats on the back, there rarely needs to be anything that formal. Institutions are more likely to censor themselves without prompting than to get censored by some powerful external entity.

Be that as it may, the Threshold Model of Collective Behavior (Threshold, for short) offers a pretty interesting take on this. It's quite possible (and just my own experience and academic research bears this out) that there are many institutional actors who give varying degrees of credence to the notion of conspiracy, whether they say so or not – or for that matter whether they condemn "conspiracy theory" or not.*

Gladwell used the story of Wilt Chamberlain to illustrate the concept. On 2 March 1962, in a game against the New York Knicks, Wilt, playing for the Philadelphia Warriors scored, by himself, 100 points in a single game – a record that still stands. To do this, he made twenty-eight out of thirty-two free throws, or 87.5% of his foul shots. For those who know the game, what made this all the more remarkable was the fact that Chamberlain was one of the worst free throw shooters in the history of the NBA, averaging just over 50% during his lifetime. But he shot a little over 61% in 1962, his best free-throw year ever. The reason was simple: for the first, and only time in his life, he shot his free-throws underhanded, what players refer to now as "granny-style."

Rick Barry, briefly Chamberlain's teammate with the Warriors, learned the underhand technique in high school at his father's insistence. Because it's much better aligned with the natural movement of the human body, it's a far more accurate way to shoot. Not surprisingly, Barry became the best free throw maker in NBA history, shooting 89% lifetime from the stripe.

Chamberlain stopped shooting underhand free throws in 1963. His rate plummeted until it reached an all-time low of 38% in 1968.

For many, the question would be why a player wouldn't continue a technique that proved successful, especially if it helped his stats (which could have earned him more money) and might have potentially helped his team win more games. It's not a question of ignorance. Chamberlain knew the benefits of shooting underhand. But in his 1992 autobiography A View from Above, he explained that shooting underhand free throws made him feel like a "sissy."

No other NBA player shot underhand at that time. And when Barry entered the league in 1965, no other player picked up on the style. At that time, many associated underhand foul shots with women's basketball. Hence, no one followed Barry's lead, even though many could have arguably done better than Rick had they adopted his technique.**

In a 1978 paper titled "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior," Dr. Mark Granovetter (Sociology, Stanford) explained the adoption of behaviors involves a social dynamic that includes what can best be described as a cost-to-benefit ratio. If the potential benefits exceed the potential costs, as determined by the individual, then she or he is more likely to engage in a risky behavior. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then he or she is less likely to engage in a risky behavior.

Commonsense, right?

In a group situation, however, the evaluation of costs and benefits can change depending on the people surrounding the actor, and the actor's personal Threshold. Here Threshold means the point at which the benefit outweighs the cost. This will vary from individual to individual. For some people, it doesn't take much for them to embark on a risky endeavor. Grenovetter would describe that person as having a very low Threshold. He calls such people "instigators." These are people who might say something like "I have nothing to lose," or "What's there to lose?" before taking a bold action of some type. These are people who don't have much anxiety about what others think of them, so they don't care if they're the only person doing it.

For others, it takes a whole lot more for them to engage in that behavior. This person would consequently have a very high threshold. Grenovetter describes such people as "conservatives."*** These are people who do care about what others think of them. So in order to engage in a behavior, they will have to see a many engaging in it before they even think of joining in. With respect to a basketball player like Chamberlain, we can see that he was in every other aspect of the sport arguably the greatest player of his era. He would have a lot of prestige to lose, versus the benefit of improving what he probably thought of as a minor area of his game. However, if there were a lot of other NBA players doing it, he would probably have continued doing it. It's just that he didn't want to be singled out as a "sissy."

One of the things about collective action is that it can serve to minimize risk to the individual participant. If "everyone's doing it," then the risk is shared, thus lowering the personal liability of the actor. But the shared risk does not diminish the expected benefit to the same extent, thus making the participant more willing to take the risk.

Granovetter cited studies of 1960s inner-city riots to demonstrate the point. Imagine a hypothetical situation where there are 100 angry people in an area, each with a different Threshold (as quantified by the numbers zero to ninety-nine). The person with zero Threshold throws a rock at a window, thus breaking it. The person with a one Threshold finds it easier to repeat the action, and subsequently breaks another window, thus prompting the person with the two Threshold to follow suit, whereupon the three and four Thresholds do it too. At some point, the participation is going to reach a critical mass to the point where even the ninety-nine Threshold will start hurling rocks. To an outside observer, this group of 100 might look like a lawless, unreasonable mob.

Yet, say instead of having a group with 100 different Thresholds you have a group where there's someone with a zero Threshold, a couple of two Thresholds, and no ones, with everyone else a three to ninety-nine. Would the riot still occur?

Utilizing a number of statistical analyses, Granovetter shows that the riot would probably not occur under those circumstances. The zero Threshold would go ahead and throw the rock. Even though they might want to repeat the action, the twos need someone else to do so before they do anything. Since everyone else has a higher Threshold, they won't take action either. So, to an outside observer, this group of 100 would seem peaceful and rational except for an angry lone nut.

You'll note that I used the term "probably" in the previous paragraph. As it turns out, the mathematical models also point to an exception. While the sheer number of people doing something might encourage a person to react, conservatives might take on the risky behavior more quickly depending on the identity and status of those at lower Thresholds. If the first five people to throw rocks at the windows were, say, a respected businessman, a doctor, an attorney, a movie star and an Olympic gold medalist, then the Threshold for person ninety-nine becomes much lower, because the risk now seems lower, making the action appear more profitable. This also works if those of lower Thresholds are personally known to ninety-nine, especially if they have special status (e.g., the pastor of one's church, one's grandmother, et cetera).

True, doing conspiracy research within academia is different than throwing rocks at a window, or for that matter shooting foul shots. Still, it's easy enough to apply the principal. We can see such researchers as Professors Cass Sunstein, Adam Vermeule and Popper as occupying the more conservative side of this continuum. Drs. Judy Wood (Mechanical Engineering, Clemson) and Jim Fetzer (Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Duluth) represent the other side as true instigators, with such academics as Dr. George Marcus (Anthropology, Rice University) occupying a space somewhere in the middle.

In terms of cost-to-benefit ratio we can see that, like Wilt the Stilt, the star professor and the rising grad student have mad skillz, for which they receive kudos, prestige, and, in the case of the latter, golden letters of reference. Weigh that against the potential cost of losing tenure, or not being renewed the following semester and the certainty of losing prestige among one's colleagues, and one can see that in terms of risk, many academics would understandably not risk giving voice to or openly researching taboo subjects.

One can also surmise that the cost-to-benefit ratio is extremely high in other institutions, such as within mainstream media and government.***** In all cases, the primary risk and costs are to the actor's social status within a group of peers, whether they be scholars, NBA stars or politicians and their constituency. Like Wilt, they don't want their colleagues to see them as intellectual or professional "sissies" either.

_________________
*For example, in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Dr. Karl Popper (Psychology, University of New Zealand, Christchurch) railed against what he termed "conspiracy theories" because of their tendency to foster totalitarian regimes. In context, however, Popper's notion of "conspiracy theory" somewhat overlaps the current popular usage of that term, but is not synonymous with it. His usage of the term more closely denotes what Dr. Richard Hofstadter called the "Paranoid Style in American Politics.". And Popper acknowledges the fact that conspiracy in and of itself is quite real, writing:

I do not wish to imply that conspiracies never happen. On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena.

And later:

Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted. But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproved the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.

**The podcast quotes Shaquille O'Neal as saying that he'd rather miss all of his foul shots than throw underhand. His career average was 52% from the line, only slightly better than Chamberlain's.

***The term "conservative" has no bearing on ideology here. Dr. Grenovetter points out that instigators and conservatives more or less equally populate the right and left sides of the political spectrum.

****In several previous posts I wrote earlier about Sunstein and Vermeule's "Conspiracy Theories" in which they outlined what they saw as causes and potential strategies for dealing with conspiracism. Dr. Wood stoked controversy by dismissing the official cause for the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11, instead hypothesizing that the buildings fell due to a directed free-energy technology. Dr. Fetzer has for many years researched the JFK assassination, and currently hosts his own podcast, The Real Deal, which covers such diverse contemporary topics as the Flat-Earth narrative and the Paul-Is-Dead rumor. Dr. Marcus edited a quite fascinating book titled Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, which offers a fair-minded critique of conspiracism in all its vices and virtues noting, as the title says, that paranoia can exist within reason.

*****One example: Former US Representative Cynthia McKinney (GA) lost her 2002 re-election bid after becoming a lightening rod for her outspoken parapolitical views. She was elected again in 2006, but lost her seniority in the House.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-43560439938383329242016-08-19T16:35:00.000-04:002016-08-19T16:38:22.385-04:00Prologue: The Artistic License of Revision
Although I cannot neatly catagorize it, I have gained insight from Malcolm Gladwell's sparkling podcast, Revisionist History. Gladwell, a writer who stoked tremendous controversy in such books as Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2007), and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), found success within popular markets, and some criticism among academics, who occasionally complain that he has distorted scientific findings by dumbing-down these tenets in presenting them to a general audience. Often, this takes the form of relying heavily on anecdotal evidence, that doesn't always fit neatly with the scientific finding in question. And in a few instances, further research contradicted some of his claims.*

And yes, I think that some of the criticism leveled against Gladwell is valid. And while I wouldn't recommend any of the above books, I would highly recommend the podcast, despite the fact that it's derived from the same formula: the practical application of various socio-psychological research in viewing either past or the present day issues.

The point here is that although he seems to have a knack for over-reaching conclusions, the research he presents is valid and fascinating in its own right, and I feel compelled to give kudos to him for exposing me to it. And Gladwell's contrarian take on conventional wisdom fascinates me. While I often have found myself at odds with Gladwell, I must admit that his counterintuitive, yet well reasoned arguments, merit careful consideration. To borrow from Dave Emory, I simply consider them food for thought and grounds for further research.

And it's with this in mind that I want to look at one of the scientific issues raised by Gladwell in his first podcast. It's the concept of moral licensing.**

Although a number of supporting studies appeared decades earlier, research in this area formally began at the turn of current century, in large part due to the research of Dr. Benoît Monin (Princeton, Stanford) began in 2001. Along with Drs. Daniel Effron (London Business School) and Anna Merritt, he published a 2010 paper titled "Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad," in which the authors described the concept as the personal or cultural forbearance to engage in otherwise immoral behavior based on a prior record of good deeds.

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral.
 The first example Gladwell used to illustrate this: the career of British artist Lady Elizabeth Thompson Butler. In 1874, she submitted a painting titled "Roll Call" to the Royal Academy of the Arts. In local exhibitions, the masterpiece had taken the country by storm.

Figure 1. Roll Call (click to enlarge)

In case you're wondering, the nineteenth-century art world didn't recognize contributions made by female artists. In fact, "Roll Call" became the first female work accepted by the Royal Academy. One could argue (quite easily) that the exclusion of women from the art world stemmed from sexism. On the other hand, the men populating the Academy in 1873 could counter-argue that no woman has ever met the very high standards the Academy explicitly laid out. So the following year, when they encountered a painting that clearly surpassed those standards, they were compelled to take it. Otherwise, they would have been guilty of hypocrisy, a moral failing.

If you think that this opened the door for Thompson, or women artists in general, then you'd be disappointed. The Academy denied her entrance into their ranks by two votes later in 1874, and wouldn't consider it further. The committee likewise snubbed subsequent paintings by Lady Butler.

Had the Academy not accepted "Roll Call," then critics could fairly say that it did so solely because of the gender of its artist. But afterwards, if they claimed later works simply not worthy (the evaluation of art is highly subjective, after all), then they could point to "Roll Call" as proof that they didn't discriminate on gender grounds. In other words, their one-time acceptance of Thompson allowed them to bar her and future artists without having to admit their animosity to women.

Gladwell leaves the subject of moral licensing here.**** But in truth the concept is much deeper and touches a number of aspects of life, including consumer and lifestyle choices in addition to its implications vis-a-vis tokenism and gender/racial/sexual-orientation prejudice.

In aforementioned paper, a review of numerous empirical studies establishing the state of the science, Drs. Merritt, Effron and Monin outline the two mechanisms behind moral licensing. The first they call "moral credits." One can think of this in crass terms as having a moral bank account – a good deed done in the past (a deposit, if you will), can be used later to pay for a naughty one (withdrawal) . Here, the person committing a transgression understands that he or she is doing wrong, but simply excusing it by pointing to something they did right, in effect canceling out the wicked deed. Everything evens out in the end.

The second mechanism, which they call "moral credentials," is in many respects more pernicious and subtler. Here, the actor does not perceive her or his moral transgressions as such. Instead, such a person would look back upon their history of good deeds, confirm to themselves that they are indeed a moral person, and see the transgression more in terms of a judgment call that's consistent with the actor's values and previous decisions.

In popular discourse, we can see examples of both moral credits and moral credentials just about everyday. We can see the latter in such statements as "Some of my best friends are Jews," proceeded or followed by a statement that is blatantly anti-Semitic. In this instance, the fact that he or she has Jewish friends establishes, in the speaker's mind, their lack of bigotry. Therefore, the speaker contextualizes the offensive utterance in terms of past behavior, and thus denies its immorality to him/herself and to others.

In her 1945 book Our Inner Conflicts, psychoanalyst Karen Horney gave an example of moral credits, when noting that neurotically aggressive personality types (i.e., those who would most readily become bullies), tend to be quite polite, even generous:

Just as the compliant type clings to the belief that people are 'nice', and is continually baffled by evidence to the contrary, so the aggressive type takes it for granted that everyone is hostile, and refuses to admit that they are not. To him life is a struggle of all against all, and the devil take the hindmost. Such exceptions as he allows are made reluctantly and with reservation. His attitude is sometimes quite apparent, but more often it is covered over with a veneer of suave politeness, fair-mindedness and good fellowship.
This passage from Horney brings up a number of questions addressed by Merrit, Effron and Monin in "Moral Self-Licensing." For starters, when we engage in moral licensing, are we trying to justify our actions to others, or to ourselves? How successful are we at it, and under what circumstances?

In regards to the first question, we obviously don't want people around us to think that we are immoral. So naturally we engage in moral licensing because we fret about how others view us, what the authors call "self-presentational strategy." Yet citing a 2006 study, they came to the realization that people also engage in moral licensing even when there's no one around to watch.*****

Research suggests that licensing is not merely a self-presentational strategy – instead, it seems to reassure the self that subsequent behavior is legitimate. Monin and Miller...showed that licensing occurred even when the audience who observed the morally dubious behavior knew nothing of the prior, licensing behavior, suggesting that self-image played a role in the phenomenon...present more direct evidence by showing that individuals who imagined doing something altruistic rated themselves higher on items such as 'I am compassionate' or 'I am helpful,' and that this change in self-perception mediated whether participants then felt licensed to prefer a frivolous product.
So how good is moral licensing at helping us get away with bad behavior? Depends.

In a 2001 study, Drs. Monin and Dale Miller (Princeton) examined racial and gender attitudes in hiring choices.****** Given the resume of five applicants, respondents had to choose which candidate to hire. Each of the resumes contained a photograph of the applicant, one of which was either an African American male, or a Euro-American female. The rest were white males. The researchers skewed the resumes so that either the black or female candidate was undeniably better suited for the position. In this case, 83% of the respondents chose to hire the "star" candidate.

This is analogous to the Thompson example where the decision to employ a white male could only be reasonably construed as prejudiced, and thus immoral. Yet, part two of the study seemed to show that the willingness not to hire a white male gave license to express racist and sexist sentiment. In the follow-up, participants discussed the viability of candidates based on race within a specific scenario: a police department was so racist that its only black cop left; it's now one officer short, and thus needs to hire a replacement. The researchers posed the question whether the position was better suited for a white or black candidate. As expected, the 83% of candidates who chose the African American or the white woman were more likely to say that a white male candidate was better suited for the job than a black one, whereas the 17% who refused to pick the star candidate in the previous scenario were more likely to say that race shouldn't be a factor in the selection of a replacement.

Here, we can see that most of the respondents (who were, incidentally, primarily white) selected the outlier candidate when his or her superiority was quite obvious (the authors seemed rather puzzled that 17% still chose a white male candidate). This indicates that when the line between right and wrong is clear, most will do what they see as right. But when the decision became more morally ambiguous – i.e., when the respondent could reasonably or not point to factors other than race in defense of their action – the more likely we are to license our current behavior/decision based upon our previous behavior, and the more likely we are to get away with it.

Of course, even that depends on whom the actor interacts with when engaging in moral licensing. If you begin a sentence with, "Now I have nothing against gays, but..." the licensed statement that follows might very well work with people who are not homosexual. If the recipient of the message is part of the LGBT community, however, they could very well interpret the licensing act in the opposite way. As Merritt, Effron and Monin explained:

This study examined Black and White participants' reactions to a White target who made a potentially offensive claim about African-Americans, varying whether he preceded his statement with the disclaimer, 'I'm not racist or anything, but…. ' When this preamble was added, White participants thought the speaker was marginally less racist, but Black participants thought he was significantly more racist.*******
There are many more facets of this concept that I don't have space to go into here. But in short, we can see moral licensing as this mechanism that allows us not only to commit immoral behaviors without fear of judgment, but also to negotiate between what we want, and what we know we shouldn't rightfully have. It's a dynamic that is as flexible and persuasive as the individual actors engaged in it at the moment. Moreover, it's universal. Drs. Merritt, Effron and Monin would tell you that it's not even bad all the time. They argued, for example, that moral licensing allows for doctors to perform triage in combat zones.

On a much larger scale, I ponder the implications of this research as perceived by Gladwell. In all the years we've covered and looked into pretty violent historical events, I'm often at a loss to understand how people can treat others so callously, or so cruelly. The possibility that this lay in a mechanism that touches everyone puts this into a clearer perspective. So when we talk about such things as racism, especially as it exists in the Americas (note: plural), we're talking about (1) dominion that is (2) enjoyed by majority society to the (3) disadvantage of minority society. Obviously, the desire to maintain this dominion runs counter to American ideals of virtue, freedom, fair-play, Christian charity and morality. Yet, the desire for dominion still remains.

In the past, and in the present, some have resorted (and still resort) to violent action to defend that dominion. But this then runs further afoul of what both majority and minority society would deem just, or acceptable. So one can see the advantages of, say, moral licensing over violence; hence it's pervasiveness. And because it's rooted in a mechanism that's intrinsic to the human being, I can thus get a better handle on this cruelty for the machinery exists within me too.

_______________
*For instance, in Tipping Point, he wrote that the advancement of ideas "...is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular set of social gifts." He divided these into three categories: connectors (people who network among many different social circles, and thus can bridge the gap between groups), mavens (people adept at introducing ideas and information), and salesmen (people with the charisma to promote the idea). Gladwell estimated that such people account for about 80% of the trafficking of ideas independently of mass media.

Several years later, research conducted by Dr. Duncan Watts (Sociology, Columbia) seemed to contradict this. In 2003, Watts successfully reproduced the results of Dr. Stanley Milgram's (Social Psychology, City University of New York Graduate Center). Small World study, popularly known as the Six Degrees of Separation study. In Watts' recreation, 61,000 participants managed to communicate an idea to eighteen targeted individuals through an average of six intermediaries. But only 5% of those relaying these messages met the criterion of either a connector, maven or salesman – considerably short of the 80% Gladwell's hypothesis would have estimated.

**Sometimes referred to as "self-licensing."

***Personal and Personality Psychology Compass, 4/5: pp. 344-57.

****Gladwell gave another example along the same lines, namely the tenure of The Honorable Julia Gillard, the first female Prime Minister of Australia (2010-2013). Gillard faced explicitly misogynist abuse while PM from political opposition that disguised that sexism with vague criticism supposedly about other things.

 *****Drs. Uzma Kahn (Marketing, Carnegie Mellon) and Ravi Dharm (Marketing, Yale) "Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice," Journal of Marketing Research, 43/2 (May): pp. 259-66.

******"Moral Credentials and the Expression of Prejudice," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81/1:pp 33-43.

*******The study in question, "I'm not racist but....I'm a Racist," was in the form of a poster by Alexander Czopp, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Tampa FL, 2009.
X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-71452592253680673892016-08-06T16:41:00.000-04:002016-08-06T16:43:57.907-04:00Prologue: The Past Is Present
We mostly deal with history on this page. While most people think of history as simply the past -- something done with, over, with no legitimate impact on the present – I would see it more in terms of a game recap. If you're in the sixth inning of a baseball game, your strategy on what to do heavily depends on a continuing evaluation of history. For starters, the score, reflective of what occurred in past innings, can determine if you bunt a runner into scoring position or if you risk the double play by swinging away. Your decisions also rest in the past performance of a hitter or pitcher (the main stats), the past performance of a hitter or pitcher against a specific opponent, stadium or game condition (known in baseball as the "splits"), and history of all the games played up to that point.

Our only guide to the present and future is our past. Sure, the past is often misleading – especially when distorted by such things as passion. But it's the most reliable guide we have. And such writers as Ray Bradbury and George Orwell articulated in many ways the latter's statement that those who control the past, control the future.

It's with this in mind that I offer below a few history podcasts that I have found interesting over these past two years. These are by no means exhaustive of the fascinating podcasts one can find. But these contain certain items that will be of import to the upcoming series.

You Must Remember This

Producer/writer/researcher and host Karina Longworth's podcast centers on the history of Hollywood and the movie industry with rather lengthy series on specific themes. A couple of these involve X-Spot material, the first examining Charles Manson's impact on late-1960s films.

The second, which more directly ties to the upcoming series, consists of a magnificent twelve-part chronicle of the HUAC/McCarthyism probe into the movie industry. Especially important is an episode that discusses the relationship and careers of two celebrities of that time, Lena Horne and Paul Robeson. While Longworth marbles its main themes throughout the series, this episode succinctly summarizes the very tight connection between communism and African American civil rights during the 1930s.

Obviously, one need not be a communist to support African-American civil rights. But the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) had made it a cornerstone of its public relations during the Great Depression, culminating with its political and legal support of the wrongly accused Scottsboro Boys. This would come to haunt Horne, Robeson, and a number of civil-rights activists during the 1950s as anti-black politicians and organizations exploited these earlier ties (which had mostly dissolved by that time) to cloak virulently racist agendas in the guise of anti-communism. Not surprisingly, Lena and Paul became targets of derision and subsequently blacklisted, despite the fact that neither were communists.*

Backstory

Drs. Ed Ayers (University of Richmond), Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh (University of Virginia), host this podcast, which takes an academic look at a number of historical topics in sometimes surprisingly insightful ways. For one thing, the show features a wide diversity of breadth that encompasses the history of gay, non-white and female Americans not as token asides (although one can find specific episodes devoted to topics along those lines). Rather, their depiction of the US, since the Seventeenth Century, often takes a look at how events and conditions affected disparate individuals, groups and organizations. We also get to hear from their guests who offer an immense array of scholarly insight, and (IMHO) just as important, a wide range of demographic, personal and ideological diversity.

There are a number of episodes that will have some bearing on this series. But the one that I want to single out, "Grassy Knolls," deals with the history of conspiracism. Although critical, the episode takes an unexpectedly fair look at the roles conspiracy and social paranoia have played in the development of the nation.

The Stuff You Missed in History Class

Currently hosted by Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey, this show exists within the constellation of Stuff, a network of podcasts highlighting arcane information. If you click on its sidebar, you can see that the homepage links to a number of sister shows that cover a number of different topics.

I once recommended this show to a cyberfriend, who sent me a nasty e-mail saying she couldn't listen to more than five-minutes of it. She apparently found the hosts to be smug, arrogant, or perhaps superficially omniscient, and shallow in its coverage of historical events and context.

That's hardly an endorsement. But I write the above to warn the reader that this podcast might not be everyone's cup of tea (if any podcast can make that claim).

To be fair, the podcast has its strengths in that it offers a decent survey on a limited number of history topics. Think of it more as a sonic version of Wikipedia, one that only contains a few score entries.

Several episodes of importance for the current topic here consist of a two-part series on the topic of redlining, and another two-part series on the life of civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin. The first series relates the cultural, legal and economic conventions that supported racial discrimination and segregation in the US; this occurred not only the southeastern portion of the country, but nearly equally throughout the nation. The second spotlights the career of an intellectual whom authorities incarcerated twice for being (a) black and (b) gay on a sunny day. One of his most important contributions consisted of his role in helping to plan the historical 1963 march on Washington, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King would give the famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Just as interesting were his later ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, and the neo-conservative movement that swept Ronald Reagan into the Oval Office in 1980.

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*Many continue to list Robeson as a communist. He was actually a socialist, who had many communists friends. He refused to name or denounce them during his Judiciary Committee testimony (he invoked the Fifth Amendment). He also refused to denounce the Soviet Union.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-83432571333470663092016-07-29T14:00:00.001-04:002016-08-06T16:47:24.653-04:00Prologue: The Columbia School of Crime Podcasting
The health crisis I suffered back in September of 2014 forced me into a few lifestyle changes. For whatever reason, I've more or less stuck with them since. Call it habit.

Among other things, I'm required to exercise daily. I've thus taken to hiking six miles a day. While this has had its downside – the wearing out of shoes, the occasional injury, etc – it's had one extremely large upside. I've gotten used to downloading a boatload of podcasts to accompany me on the journey.

The podcasts can be informative, naturally. They can just as often be mis-informative (this is the Internet, after all). More important, they have opened me up to a lot of diverse takes on some of the subjects I've pursued on The X-Spot, and some of the subjects I still wish to cover. Most, however, don't have direct bearing on conspiracy stories. Instead they shed light on a lot of secondary topics brought up by conspiracy research.

Whether you enjoy podcasts or not, I'd like to share a select few that will have some bearing on the upcoming series. I'll be separating some of these into categories over the next few posts, You might want to check out a few.

True Crime

Out of all the genres of non-fiction that I read (and I mostly read non-fiction), my least favorite is the true crime genre. The stories typically offer very shallow coverage of what are often complex events. There's a distinct right-wing law-and-order viewpoint of crime that tends to focus on the real (or alleged) pathology of the real (or alleged) culprit instead of on the complexities of human relationships that lead to violence. These consequently give us more presentation of story than evidence. And when you read about particular cases in other sources, you'll find that the establishment of guilt is nowhere as certain as what a writer depicts it to be (which really becomes noticeable when a conviction is overturned after publication). Moreover, the victims usually serve only as props, with little understanding of who they are or their overall importance in society. Simply put, true crime stories usually contain biases that are absolute, and generally boil down to a single narrative: people who are somehow different, or who have not completely assimilated into society are not just dangerous, but evil.

On the other hand, I consume a lot of true crime books, television shows, and as of late, podcasts. While the genre itself has shortcomings that make my eyes roll, it does yield information about investigation methodology, police and prosecutorial procedure, and public reaction to facts. In short, true crime stories give us a baseline for what to expect in crimes, investigations and adjudications on an everyday level. So when you're looking at cases with higher profiles, you can compare what authorities have done or not done with respect to their typical approach.

Criminal

Co-created by Eric Mennel, NPR alums Lauren Spoher and host Phoebe Judge, this show looks at a number of issues involving a wide range of transgressions, from diverse points of views. Depending on the episode, you can hear extensive interviews with victims, the wrongfully accused, the guilty, and the families of each.

Some episodes examine the motive behind an offense, such as the story about a counterfeiter and her boyfriend. Some examine transgressions that may or may not rise to the level of criminal activity, and how that might differ from state to state (for instance, an episode in which the interviewee habitually gave the finger to cops). Some, such as the episode highlighting murder ballads, discuss the cultural and sociological implications of both crime and crime reportage. Some look into police malfeasance and conspiracy/coverup, such as a story about the shooting of former Reds outfielder Bobby Tolan's son by Belaire, TX cops.

No matter how small the infraction, Criminal illustrates the human reality and complexity of even minor violations. And for that alone, it's worth a listen to.

Sword and Scale

This series, created by host Mike Boudet, often suffers from one of the most irksome qualities of true crime: namely an exclusionary examination of the presumed pathology of the accused or perpetrator, sometimes to the point of taking armchair psychoanalysis to the extreme. His signature opening, promising to present a "...show that will reveal that the worst monsters are real," misses the point that monsters neither exist, nor do they commit crimes. People do. Thus, the complexity of human interaction that so enriches Criminal is comparatively absent here.

Be that as it may, Sword and Scale has its laudable points. While it often wallows in the cheap and sensational aspects of a story, it doesn't always. And Boudet and his staff (Heather Sutfin, Robert Walsh, and Jesus Rodriguez) routinely do yeoman's service to ferret out information, and provide the listener with primary textual sources, including 911 calls and recordings of actual courtroom proceedings, with considerable context. And unlike many true crime producers/authors Boudet will address the nature of justice, and the frustrating plight of the wrongfully accused. And to his credit he has allowed space for skeptical (in the good and proper sense) examination of conspiracy stories, such as in his interview with Johnny Gosch's mom, Noreen.

Like The X-Spot, Sword and Scale often contains graphically violent verbal descriptions, and is thus not suitable for children or the sensitive. It nevertheless gives a good deal of easy-to-understand information about both criminal activity and criminal investigation.

 Serial

The now-familiar plink-plink of the piano has come to signify one of the most widely celebrated true crime narratives in recent memory.

And for excellent reason. Serial is about as good as true crime gets, and is very different in its scope, approach and outlook from other products of that genre, which in no small part explains a lot of its massive popularity. Whereas the genre typically features a smug certainty, producers Julie Snyder, Dana Chiwis, Emily Condon and host Sarah Koenig were anything but confident that they knew what happened on the night of 13 January 1999.

It's this uncertainty that allows us a better grasp of a particular case. Very few things or events in this world are cut-and-dry, black-or-white. So while Koenig, her staff or we cannot completely dismiss the thought that Adnan Syed murdered his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, we can nevertheless concede that there were numerous, reasonable doubts that should have exonerated him in the first trial, among them the glaring mistake in the analysis of cell phone records, and the shakiness of the star witness for the prosecution. Exacerbating this lack of evidence was the manipulation of said witness (and other witnesses) by police and later prosecutors, the ineffectiveness of his primary counsel because of health reasons, and the overt anti-Muslim prejudice espoused by an early prosecutor, and (at least) one member of the jury.

For me, one of the key moments occurred during a conversation between Koenig and her private investigator, a former police detective, during which she blurted, "Aren't all facts happy facts?" When her PI explained to her the policeman's job more or less as serving the narrative by the prosecution that it should give everyone pause to think that such could lead to inaccuracy. And this is something that we see in both wild-eyed conspiracy tales and tone-deaf debunkers of conspiracy hypothesis–the exclusion of facts that give depth to, context to, support or prove an opposing viewpoint.

The second season of Serial, which focuses on the plight of US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, is in many respects superior to the effort of season 1, but has not enjoyed the latter's wild popularity. If you haven't heard it, check it out.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-45018874423317690042016-07-18T19:31:00.000-04:002016-08-06T16:42:29.922-04:00Prologue: They Hate Him
We've explored here a number of parapolitcal topics over the past ten years. In each, the purpose wasn't so much to prove, or disprove the specific conspiracy explanations of an event. Rather, the purpose was to clarify the issues involved.

The term "conspiracy theory" is misleading. There are few theoretical issues (in the academic sense) within conspiracy culture. One could more accurately call it speculative journalism or history. Mae Brussell, Alex Constantine, John Judge, David Emery and many others have devoted their lives and careers to finding out the hidden information, the lacunae, which riddle many official narratives. Most of this darkness comes about through deliberate and systemic efforts to keep information out of the hands of the public, whether through dint of official secrecy (i.e., classification) or through the propagation of comfortable stories to the exclusion and ridicule of others.

Much of the press and academia presently use the term "conspiracy theory" as a pejorative. Given some of the racist, nativistic and anti-Semitic ideation at the fringes of conspiracy culture-- a facet which gets a lion's share of public attention--one can see why many good and intelligent people would understandably have a knee-jerk disdain (and sometimes disgust) for any explanation smacking of conspiracy. Yet this reaction is primarily an emotional one, not a rational one.

We like to see ourselves as reasonable, wise, and autonomous thinkers who can judge a story or issue solely on its merits. But it's difficult to maintain objectivity if authorities of all stripes and flavors have deemed an entire line of inquiry "wild-eyed crazy" (pathological), "moronically oversimplified" (unintelligent), or "profoundly ignorant" (held by the un- or under-educated who don't know how the "real world" works).

 One finds great challenge in merely posing a conspiracy question within the media or academia without experiencing some degree of backlash--which sometimes includes the termination of employment and the resultant hardship to the professional involved and his/her family.* But the social sanctions against looking into possible conspiracy are usually much more subtle, entailing such things as glass ceilings, personal mockery, derision, mild harassment, but most critically ostracization. And no one wants to be "that guy" or "that gal" who's "duped" by a lot of kooky stuff.

Conspiracy is hardly a kooky subject. On any given business day there's some prosecutor somewhere in the USA who's putting away a defendant on a conspiracy charge. Conspiracy, after all, is simply the agreement by two or more parties to perform an illicit act. There's an inherent difficulty in proving conspiracy to a reasonable doubt standard because one has to show that the agreement took place.** Yet, it's possible to do this when one has access to the necessary resources.

The assumption that conspiracies never occur within circles of authority might possibly stem from stereotypical notions of criminality. It's common to see crime as part and parcel of a particular class or type of people, who often occupy society's lowest rungs. In the popular mind, those who are well-educated, or from good families, or have high income (especially if they aren't African American) are often not seen as criminals, even when everyone stipulates that they have committed a crime.*** Although we might laughingly joke that professionals lie (and in the case of attorneys cheat), we still don't tend to view these instances as criminal activity. And even when there is a provable criminal act among elected officials, or wealthy corporate types we tend to see it as an aberration, or not serious to begin with. Indeed, the prosecution of white collar crime is comparatively lax, despite the fact that it victimizes far more of us, and for far more money than street crime.

After delving into this subject for as long as I have (almost twenty years now), it's very curious (and often frustrating) to me that when evidence merely suggests conspiracy within lower elements of society, many will tend to shrug their shoulders and say something to the effect of "So what?" or "That makes sense. They couldn't have done it by themselves." But if there's evidence that strongly suggests that those who have power over our lives might have colluded in criminal activity, many people will go out of their way to believe otherwise. This is something noted by others as well.****

So the story eventually becomes only partly about the event itself. Understanding also requires attention to why there is widespread belief in the non-conspiracy explanation even if it is irrational or implausible. There remain those informational gaps, and the speculation that covers them up, of course, but there's often enough of the puzzle exposed to render non-conspiracy explanations highly doubtful, in an objective sense. And given that the missing information is often held by those accused of conspiring, commonsense would tell us that people do not tend to hide that which proves their innocence.

Some things eventually dawned on me.

At this time I feel compelled to digress to the topic of institutional betrayal at some length. But in the interest of brevity, let's table that thought, at least for awhile. Instead lets start with an idea that everyone can agree on: namely, no one likes to get flim-flammed. Con artists realize not only this, but something much deeper, something critical to their success. You see, only about 7% of victims ever report the crime to begin with. The reason's obvious. The admission that we've been taken usually elicits a far harsher judgment against us than it does the perpetrator. Friends, family and strangers who know about the theft will often ask something along the lines of "How could you be so f-ing stupid [or greedy, or needy, or lustful, or naive, or gullible or fill-in-blank]?"

There are usually many times during a con where red flags arise. The victim might have varying degrees of alarm about one turn of events or another. But a skillful grifter knows that in deceiving a mark, the mark is often a willing ally. The more deeply one invests in the con, the more impetus there is to find a reason--any reason--to believe that the false hope they actually purchased is in fact not false. Otherwise, they would have to admit to themselves that they are either f-ing stupid, or greedy, or needy, or lustful, or naive, or gullible or fill-in-blank. The confidence gamer is consequently quite aware that the victim will believe any lie that makes sense. They won't question it. They won't look into it further. In fact, victims, upon seeing problems within a con's structure, often will not pull out of a fishy venture, or find some other way to mitigate risk. In fact, they'll often double-down on the con, investing even more resources into it.*****

When it comes to institutional skullduggery, and our stake within it, there's likewise the tendency to see something is wrong with an official view. Like the con, the signs and evidence of conspiracy are abundant, and foreboding. And for the same reason as the mark, many have a personal stake in the integrity of the institution's promise, and thus will have compelling reason to believe anything other than that which would force them to admit that something untoward has happened. It should therefore come as little surprise that there are those who have made a cottage industry of promoting the stories that reassure us that criminal activity--especially of the coordinated kind-- has not occurred within officialdom.

Likewise, the degree to which some have bought into the notion that conspiracy explains everything are also prone to this type of reasoning. This is especially true in organizations like Lyndon LaRouche's, where conspiracy is intertwined with dogma and a spiritual or quasi-spiritual belief. In either case, the investment in the conspiracy or anti-conspiracy point of view is so large, and the personal stakes for adherents so great that objectivity and facts cease to matter. Each side has skin in the game, and each will desperately dig in to defend these beliefs, so long as they have enough of a narrative or reason to continue believing.

Yet, there's a fundamental difference between the con man and the institution when it comes to perpetuating a falsity. The institution has far more ubiquity, power, authority and resources than the swindler. The cheat cannot, to a large extent, legally forbid public disclosure of proof. Institutions can. And even if not legal, the institution can still have a better chance of getting away with it, and for a much longer time. In the case of governmental malfeasance the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the government is the only body legally authorized to investigate itself. Furthermore, institutions, through public relations, can enlist great public support for their version of events. All it takes is a willingness for large enough sectors of society to buy repeatedly the explanatory fictions that it provides.

The available tools of institutional deception include a number of items. For starters, there's the power of the term "conspiracy theory" itself to steer discourse in predictable, and thus controllable directions.****** Another would be the development of straw men, or in other words citing (or perhaps creating) weak or tangential arguments that one can easily tear apart.

The most effective means for doing this consists of propagating texts that are emotionally gripping, and extremely well written. They read or come off as novels or dramatic works. And they all serve to strengthen the official or dominant line. Often these accounts have much in common with the most entertaining conspiracy tales in that they are very long on narrative, and very short on facts or evidence. And what little proof there is usually lies out of context, is often debunked by more compelling evidence, and sometimes made up out of whole cloth.

Before I conclude this post, I'd like to point out that when we talk about "official versions" we often should clarify what we mean. There is the "official story," the story that becomes the dominant narrative because it is deemed true by police, courts or other official bodies. There are, what I like to call, "quasi-official" stories in which there is a dominant narrative, that is contrary to official findings. Often this occurs when public understanding about a topic comes chiefly from a pop culture source, such as a movie or TV show that takes dramatic license with the people involved, the context and the events. And then, there are stories where there are two or more official findings. As you would expect, these versions are often at odds with each other.

So, it's with this in mind that I approach the next series to appear here on The X-Spot. It's a story where the evidence for conspiracy is quite strong, and the evidence of non-conspiracy quite weak. It's also an instance where there are three distinct official findings, two of which involve conspiracy explanations.

As you might expect, the two conspiracy explanations have, to date, received comparatively little discourse in mainstream venues.

And that prompts us to examine why that's the case. It also compels us to wonder why the non-conspiracy finding has become the dominant narrative.

______________
*In this blog, I've mentioned the stories of Professor Ward Churchill (University of Colorado at Boulder), and Dr. John Mack (Harvard Medical School). I've also delved at length into the story of Fox News investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. I only briefly mentioned the name April Oliver, a CNN reporter who produced a controversial network documentary about a purported conspiracy involving the assassination of US military defectors in Vietnam.

With one exception, the above were fired for either taking a conspiracy position, or for simply giving serious consideration to a conspiracy hypothesis. Harvard attempted to fire Dr. Mack because of his research into the possibility of alien abduction, but could not because of his tenure and exemplary record of research and publication.

**For a good example of a criminal conspiracy and the difficult FBI investigation that finally proved it, check out "The Fix Is In", episode 168 of This American Life.

***I saw this on the local news a few weeks back. Despite the fact that everyone, including the culprit and his family, stipulated that he took a gun to school and shot up four (fortunately surviving) classmates, the shooter's mom nevertheless declared that he "wasn't a cold-blooded criminal."

Well, since humans are by definition warm-blooded, and are really the only species capable of committing crimes (according to current law–past law is a different story), then that would seem to be true of all people who transgress.

Less flippantly, one is a criminal because he or she executes a criminal act. Note here that the mother's concept of "criminal" had nothing to do with criminal activity, but rather a certain designation of person. You can probably take a good guess at the type of individual she would see as a true "cold-blooded criminal."

****Researcher Lisa Pease has often made the observation that many good people simply "cannot wrap their heads around" the notion of conspiracy.

*****An excellent example: record-breaking swindler Bernie Madoff told the New York Times that the banks and hedge fund managers who invested, or encouraged others to invest in him, had to know that something was wrong:

In asserting the complicity of others, Mr. Madoff pointed to the 'willful blindness' of many banks and hedge funds who dealt with his investment advisory business and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.

They had to know,' Mr. Madoff said. 'But the attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know.''
In other words, these institutions and professionals knew that they had bought into a very dangerous venture. Yet, they invested even more money (one, up to $38 mil) despite these misgivings.

******In one example, Michael Hastings, an award-winning reporter for BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone, disclosed via e-mail to friends and colleagues, sixteen hours before his death, that he was under pressure and surveillance by Intel because of he was then working on a story about DCIA John Brennan. This was after he had written a well respected expose on NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal. Within a day after the fiery automobile collision that claimed Hastings' life, a number of mainstream outlets were already using the term "conspiracy theory," to describe potential dissenting opinions that could arrive in the future, after the public received all the facts. This effectively discredited any questions concerning a possible connection.

Granted, Hastings' death could have resulted from a car crash and nothing more (the official story). Yet, if someone writes that he is under pressure from the CIA and FBI, and then dies hours later, I see little imprudence in asking questions (of for that matter exploring it) about a possible connection between his demise, and pressure bought about by two institutions, whose relationship with the writer was evidently antagonistic.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-45020110041724497682016-06-30T11:13:00.000-04:002016-08-06T16:42:52.712-04:00Quietly Getting Back in the Game
I haven't done a good old-fashioned series for the past three years.

The reasons for this are numerous. It's not that I've run out of things to write about. In fact, I've got quite a few things that I really want to weigh in on.

Truth is, The last two major series took a lot out of me. They were contentious and stressful. I used to brag that my life is boring, but it used to be kinda weird. Yet, in writing about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and Theremy, my online life began to get weird too, with old intrigues from my past coming out of the blue to haunt me, and new ones rearing their ugly heads. Even the Paul-Is-Dead series, which I considered at the time as little more than vamping, presented an element of high strangeness. As a younger man, I could tolerate riding that turbulent wave. In fact, I could enjoy it a bit. Now, however, it just gets on my nerves. I'd honestly rather kick back, pour a Diet Coke, and listen to the Reds game on the radio after a day at the office.

Then too, things have changed here in meatspace. I've been writing for other people for so long, it's more of a chore to write the things I really feel driven to write about. And after the cancer scare, I've undergone some major lifestyle changes that require daily attention that can take anywhere between three to five hours.

In the meantime, I've spent a good deal of time researching a number of topics, writing fiction and thinking about the future of this blog. I'm currently considering turning it into a podcast, and have recently corresponded with Panoply and other networks to assess the viability of doing so.

The time has also given me ample opportunity to reflect on the blog itself. I've been fielding e-mail comments and questions on previous posts and series from diverse sources – from crackpots to scholars (assuming disparity). This has given me an opportunity to add to my knowledge on these subjects, and I thank those of you who've firmed up what were once merely speculations, given substantive observations, alerted me to updates, challenged my contentions, and given me encouragement.

At the same time, when looking back at all this stuff that I've put here over the past ten years, I began to wonder how I did all of this.

No matter. Whether I want to or not, I reckon it's time to get off the sideline and back into the game. I don't care if blogging is passe. It's a medium I've come to know, and I should be exploiting it as long as Google affords me this space.

So in a month or so, I'll be embarking on a new series. And it's a big one. I'm waiting to get some resources from Amazon, so I'll be going slowly at first. But I intend to post at least once a week come August.

I'm telling you this for two reasons: (1) it's the end of the month, and I've got to post something; and (2) now that I tell you that I will do it, then I will most likely force myself to do it, despite the fact that I'd rather be sipping Diet Coke and listening to Marty and the Cowboy.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-77555425327337875352016-05-31T14:25:00.001-04:002016-07-24T00:10:12.053-04:00Assailing the Tender Age: Opening the Secret
I alluded to this story back in 2013. It dealt with the extension of the Hollywood casting couch to child actors, some of whom became household names. Most of them will most likely remain obscure.

Last year, Oscar-winning film maker Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil, West of Memphis) released An Open Secret. The film generated considerable buzz, especially within conspiracy circles, because of its (a) subject matter, and (b) scarcity.

An Open Secret tells the story of a number of child actors who became victimized by a fairly sophisticated pedophile ring, which operated under the aegis of movie industry titans, and indifferent investors from as far as Wall Street.

Included are interviews with Todd Bridges and Corey Feldman. But their stories are hardly the ones Berg chose to focus on. Even more compelling were the ones of children who just didn't make it, and paid permanent consequences for the experience.

What raised the ire of many following this story was the movie's lack of distribution, and Hollywood's resistance to promoting the film. As David Robb explained in a 8 May 2015 post for Deadline Hollywood:

The ad line for An Open Secret, the new documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors, is 'The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You to See.' After talking to the film's producers, it's easy to see why. Executive producer Gabe Hoffman wouldn't name names, but said, 'We went to everybody and anybody at all the biggest companies and got turndowns everywhere.'

Consequently, the film received extremely brief runs in New York, Seattle, Denver and LA. Unless you lived near one of those metropolises at the time, you've probably never heard of it, let alone gotten the chance to see it.

Like many following this particular story, I had wanted to see the movie since last summer. Then lo and behold! Last week, someone posted the entire thing on YouTube.

After finally getting a look at it, I can tell you that the information is eye-opening, the narrative's emotionally gripping, the approach sober and rational, and the pace perfect stride-for-stride. Amazingly, Berg managed to get through this topic without pandering to the salacious or the prurient. While it's clear that she is only sympathetic to the victims and their families, she neither judges nor condemns the accused (only one of which gives her an interview).

I'd have been more than willing to shell out twelve bucks to see it, in a theatre no less. But I'll take it as I can get it, stuck as I am in the Midwest. I don't know how long the YouTube thing will last. But I highly recommend viewing the film there or anywhere else you can find it, if for no other reason than to watch a skilled master ply her craft.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-31627013455035210062016-04-01T07:25:00.000-04:002016-04-01T07:26:11.247-04:00Fatale Instinct, Dahlink

Ten years ago today, I correctly identified the late-rock star Robert Palmer as Linus Van Pelt, of Peanuts fame. But within the past twenty-four hours, I've come across solid evidence proving the true identity of another iconic animated character.

It's all in the below video. But you have to watch it closely to see the signs.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-3770364838291010132016-03-29T16:15:00.001-04:002016-03-29T16:16:36.423-04:00Pardon the Interruption
A month ago, I was set to type my usual state-of-the blog anniversary post when a set of issues invaded my personal life. Specifically, two people close to me faced serious health crises. I have since spent a good deal of the last six weeks at work, ICUs and hospital rooms while living in a persistent state of anxiety. I couldn't really think of blogging at the time, or collect my thoughts, or even concentrate on writing.

The good news: both loved ones are still here, and recuperating. Now, it's not so much a time of crisis, but rather the start of major lifestyle readjustments. Things are still touchy, but a good deal will be off my chest by April 15, when a scheduled minor surgery (local anesthesia even) will take the biggest danger off the table.

So...to continue on with the state-of-the-blog.

 I spent some time researching several new topics. There has also been an interesting development on a story that I've begun here (Assailing the Tender Age). But in the last twelve months, a couple of very good, intelligent and knowledgeable persons have directed my attention to three former series appearing here, and that has consumed much of my X-Dell time over the past year. They've given me much to think about and explore. I don't think I'll post any updates to those series here, but, if I write about them at all, I'll post them on one of my other blogs.

 While doing research into these areas, I thought I'd vamp on the topic of conspiracy in a series of posts that I thought would end the blog. I'd been meaning to do that for some time, but kept delaying it to the point where I thought, well hell I'll save it for the end. Yet, now is as good a time as any, I suppose.

Many former peers ask me why I'm interested in this subject. Undoubtedly, they're asking this within a paradigm that processes information in a very strict way -- a way in which I've also been trained. Sometimes I feel this is unnecessarily restrictive and narrow. And given the tendency, in this publish-or-perish context, to obsess over angels-on-the-heads-of-pins arguments, important questions are left unaddressed. These questions have much to do with the nature of power and democracy, and sometimes deal with the conflicts between consensus reality and empirical observation.

 I've found valuable purpose in academic rigor. All conspiracy investigators should be aware and critical of sources, knowledge gaps, and, most importantly, their own biases. These are paramount concerns of the scholar, but not necessarily the YouTube poster. And one can see the increasing one-upsmanship of the latter as she or he makes one hypothesis or the other more outrageous, and consequently more entertaining than those preceding it, thus leading to increased hits, attention, and possibly even monetary remuneration.

 At the same time, much of the wildest speculation occurs in response to institutional failure to candidly address valid and pressing public concerns. There have, to this date, been only a handful of scholars who have investigated, or are seriously researching the substantial possibility of conspiracy where the stakes are high, most notably (and ably) Dr. Phil Melanson (Political Science, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth). Otherwise, we don't get much pertinent information about the distribution of power and wealth from academia, media or government.

 For example, we all most likely learned about various wars in our history classes. Only a tiny fraction of us (if any) studied the espionage that supported these conflicts. There are some classes in Intel that I've seen around the country, at various universities. I've even seen an accredited institution that offers classes and degrees only in intelligence studies. The lecturers of said courses often have a background with CIA or military intelligence. While that obviously makes a certain sense, it nevertheless prompts the question of whether these instructors are mixing education with some measure of indoctrination/propaganda. At the very least, we have little reason to assume that their viewpoints are neutral or objective.

 Most of the information we get about espionage comes from off the streets; or more accurately off screens large and small, where CIA's Public Affairs Office (PAO) has performed yeoman's service to increase the Agency's presence in Hollywood. Tinseltown's main business, of course, is the production of myth. The current myth of Intel contains in large part narratives of professionalism (or competence), reasonable adherence to the law, and purely national security missions.

 Still, when one digs into the topic, he or she almost immediately has to confront the enormous degree of deception and complexity that occurs within intelligence operations. And after awhile, something else becomes clear: the national-security mission of many intelligence services around the globe have either become entangled with, or have downright devolved into, instruments of domestic political security.

There are other topics of concern here. Yet the above alone should give us all pause to think. I mean, the Church Rockefeller and Pike Commissions (not to mention the Senate Select Committees on mind control chaired by Sam Irwin, Daniel Inouye and Ted Kennedy) gave us ample evidence that Intel had become an apparatus for preserving the political security of the status quo. It's therefore not unreasonable to think that this arm of power saw the US public as an enemy threat. And we can also see that Intel had no compunctions about lying to the public. What's beyond speculative is that the domestic ops exposed by these five official bodies violated US law.

And what is a conspiracy? The collusion of two or more parties to execute a crime or transgression.

Despite the frequently naked bureaucratic agenda of institutional information, many people are satisfied with answers they easily receive about senseless or strange events and situations. They're thus not inclined to look much more deeply into them -- assuming they actually have the time, energy and wherewithal to do so. Yet, there are some who aren't satisfied for whatever reason. Perhaps they've been burned or shafted by political or industrial power. Perhaps they have weird lives full of anomalies that they can't explain through the informational limitations of official or authoritative sources. Perhaps they have political or spiritual creeds that morally bind them to oppose abuses of power.

 In any case, one can hardly expect such an individual or organization to accept at face value the talking-point responses often doled by established channels -- especially when they deny, downplay or just plain dismiss glaring inconsistencies as "conspiracy theory." One might also expect said individuals or organizations to collate the information that they have and make the best guesses that they can.

 To put this bluntly: so-called "conspiracy theory" exists for a number of reasons. Some of them are legitimate. Some are not. But in either instance, the curt dismissal of a conspiracy explanation becomes very similar to the sudden and irrevocable acceptance of same by true believers. Neither side cares to do the gruntwork of investigation. Neither addresses the valid objections raised by the other. Neither acknowledges their own prejudices (if they are indeed aware of them, or subjects them to any challenge.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-15839243530286588182016-02-11T08:51:00.002-05:002016-02-11T08:51:27.598-05:00The X-Spot, Year Ten
Hard to believe that it's been ten years to the day since the first post. Truth was, I thought I'd have the blog five years or so.

As I've slowed down the rate of posts over the past two years, I thought I'd go ahead and post a series that I thought would end the blog. I pictured ending it with some commentary about the nature of conspiracy, its vices and virtues and so on. But since I was in the middle of researching several other topics, I took the opportunity to put the series up a bit earlier than expected.

I planned to write something more in-depth, since there's been a lot brewing from older series, here. But something's come up within the last twenty-four hours. Until that resolves, I'm not going to have any time to post anything. I'm hoping to hear some good news within the next five hours or so.

X. Dellhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-72273560660090612212016-01-31T12:19:00.000-05:002016-01-31T12:21:22.015-05:00Just Kidding, Mae
Haven't had much time lately, to research and write. So this month I'm posting a few humorous observations on the subject of conspiracy.

I hate conspiracy theorists. I'm sure they're all working together somehow to bring down society.
--andygosmore, Sickipedia.org:

Remember that voice on AOL that said 'you've got mail'? Turns out it was the NSA.
--Hayden Black

Ever since the government's spying scandal was exposed, sales of the novel 1984 have jumped 6,000 percent on Amazon. Yeah, 1984 shows how scary it would be if society tracked everything you do. And if you want to read it, just buy it on a website that tracks everything you do.
--Jimmy Fallon

The CIA now has a Twitter account. Don't bother checking, they're already following you.
--Warren Holstein

I was going to become a conspiracy theorist, until I heard what the government and their secret aliens do to conspiracy theorists.
--Hugh Jerection, Sickipedia.org:

I disapprove of every conspiracy of which I am not a part.
--Joke Buddha

Under the headline "USA Denies Torture," a CIA spokesperson explained, "You say water boarding. We say Ice Bucket Challenge!"
--Joker Z

NSA leaker Edward Snowden somehow managed to get out of the U.S. with all their information. Now where is he? He's in Russia now, going to be in Ecuador or wherever. He remains at large. Now what are the odds out of 350 million Americans, the only one the government wasn't watching was him?
--Jay Leno

It's that time of year again when all the conspiracy nuts are online with their batshit crazy 9/11 theories. My personal favourite is the one about 19 Muslim blokes finding the wherewithal to launch a coordinated terrorist attack on a national level.
--Widowwarmer, Sickipedia.org:

The CIA played horrible songs over and over to torture detainees. So maybe Scott Stapp's claims of being in the CIA are true.
--Adam Wolf

Conspiracy is always inspired by conspirators.
--Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-70765406729986555832015-12-19T23:00:00.005-05:002015-12-19T23:03:01.667-05:00And So This Is Christmas

So this is Christmas,
And what have you done?
Another year over,
And a new one just begun.
–John Lennon, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"
I know this is gonna sound like a refrain as tired as the "Hallelujah Chorus," but I really had no intention of posting any more Beatles-related material on this blog.

And I wouldn't have, except that our friend Bluejay Young recently alerted me to the White Feather Foundation, a nonprofit charity founded by Julian Lennon in 2009.* It's mission, as stated on its homepage, is to "...embrace environmental and humanitarian issues and in conjunction with partners from around the world... raise funds for the betterment of all life." Among these partners are Hart House, which provides respite care for disabled Gambian children; St. Thomas' Lupus Trust, which raises awareness of Lupus, provides copious information about the disease on its website, and sponsors research carried out at St. Thomas' & Guys Hospital; ForestNation, a "social business" that plants trees in developing nations for every tree-kit purchased by Western consumers; and other noble causes.

Some of the projects currently undertaken by WFF include relief to Nepalese earthquake victims; the provision of clean water in Malawi, Rwanda and Ethiopia; and Amazonian conservation. Arguably its most poignant mission is the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship for Girls, named in honor of Julian's mother, who passed away earlier this year.

On its "About Us" page, Lennon explained the genesis of the foundation:

Dad once said to me, that should he pass away, if there was some way of letting me know he was going to be ok – that we were all going to be ok – the message would come to me in the form of a White Feather. Then something happened to me, whilst on tour with the album, Photograph Smile, in Australia. I was presented with a White Feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder, from The Mirning people, which definitely took my breath away.

The White Feather Foundation was created for the purpose of giving a voice and support to those who cannot be heard. The tribal elders asked for my help, as I could bring awareness to their plight and to others who were suffering the same. Having had the White Feather bestowed upon me, I knew this endeavour was to be part of my destiny. One thing for sure is that the White Feather has always represented peace to me, as well as communication.
In the previous Beatles series, I came to the opinion that the individual members, their business partners and families embarked upon a continuing endeavor to foster a more positive culture. What struck me about the White Feather Foundation was how neatly it fit into that vibe. I was also struck by the seemingly magical story behind its creation. As you probably know by now, I'm not really big on matters spiritual as much as I am the psychological processes that lead us to such. But I will concede a certain magical quality to the Yuletide. Consequently, the ambition and beneficence of WFF, coming when it did, struck a (ahem!) chord with me.

I'm hoping it strikes a chord with you too. At this time of year, we're in the habit of tossing a few coins in the kettle of our local Salvation Army chapter, or donating to other worthy causes. Perhaps you can add WFF to your shortlist of honorable organizations worth giving to. I've dropped in a few coins myself (only a slight understatement), and plan to do more once the freelance checks start coming in. (Actually, it's a direct deposit, but you get the drift, right?)

Feel free to match my tuppence with your own donation. To screw up an old folk tune, one man's hands might not be able to take a prison down. But when one and one and fifty make a million, we might see how far these feathers can fly.

 And happy Xmas to you all.
________________________
*Official statement: "The White Feather Foundation is established under the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a charitable trust registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under number: 268369. "
X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-59751561719084183222015-11-22T02:14:00.003-05:002016-07-19T01:09:11.812-04:00Stylistically Paranoid

On 21 November 1963, only hours before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set off a firestorm of conspiracy accusations, one professor kick-started a rapidly growing anti-conspiracy movement.

On that date, Dr. Richard Hofstadter (History, Columbia University) gave a lecture at England's prestigious University of Oxford. He would later publish it as an article titled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."* In this essay, he examined the degree to which irrational beliefs caused some special interest groups to accuse their political opposition of scheming to gain power, or otherwise get their way.

Not surprisingly, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" became an important document for self-described cynics, skeptics and anti-conspiracists. I have read very few anti-conspiracy books or tracts that don't give it some mention, if not an in-depth review. While many anti-conspiracy works have some mild criticism or disagreement with Dr. Hofstadter, they reverentially depict him as an intellectual grandfather for a school of thought that's highly critical of conspiracism and conspiracy researchers.

By now, you're probably waiting for me to trash "Paranoid Style," or Dr. Hofstadter in the way I did "Conspiracy Theories" by Professors Adam Vermeule and Cass Sunstein. Truth is, I have no such inclination. As shocking as it might sound, I have tremendous respect for this paper. I think it's f-ing brilliant. While I obviously disagree with some of what Hofstadter says (here and in other works), I would say that most of it is so spot-on as to be prescient. I highly recommend taking ten minutes out of your life and reading it.

Since my disagreements with "Paranoid style" are in large part minor, I'll shove them aside for now, and maybe get back to them in a later post. My actual point of contention isn't with the article per se, but rather the context in which anti-conspiracists cite and present it. In looking at this work, one has to keep in mind not only the actual content, but the circumstances that compelled Dr. Hofstadter to write it.

If you haven't clicked on the above link, I'll summarize "Paranoid Style" as briefly as I can. In the introduction, Hofstadter immediately took pains to define what he meant by "paranoia." He stressed he wasn't speaking in a medical sense, but in a metaphoric one. This is important because, as he posits, if we were merely looking at actual mental illness, than conspiracism in and of itself wouldn't be much of an issue.

I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
The second thing that Hofstadter does in the intro is to give several brief examples of paranoid political thought: McCarthyism of the 1950s, the gold conspiracy of the 1890s, and anti-Catholicism of the 1850s. Although he mentioned in passing that the political left occasionally engaged in the same specious reasoning (e.g, the US slave conspiracy of the mid-1800s), he saw more systematic, widespread and dangerous use of the paranoid style persisting in the hardliner-right wing faction of American politics.**

In the next two sections, Dr. Hofstadter illustrated political paranoia and subsequent actions with examples of several venerable conspiracy pariahs: the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Roman Catholic Church. Each of these, he points out, contain a specific narrative in which Americans presently have some unspecified power that a shadowy outside force wants to take away from them. For example, some Americans saw Illuminism, an historic attempt within Freemasonry to reform itself in accordance to rationalist principles developed during the Enlightenment, as an attempt to replace religion with science. In this instance, religion is already the establishment, and its trying to protect itself from what it considers a foreign influence, coming directly from Europe via the ultra-liberal heathens inhabiting the northern East Coast.

Similarly, the vast majority of Americans were Protestant. In fact, to this day, JFK remains the only non-Protestant US President. But from the Nineteenth Century up to Kennedy's election in 1960, the fear remained that the Church wanted to control the world through one universal government headed by the Papacy. The church would wield this control through puppet leaders, as it allegedly did during the days of the Holy Roman Empire. This fear of a Vatican Candidate, openly expressed by such notables as Norman Vincent Peale and Rev. Billy Graham, forced Kennedy to bend over backwards to show that his allegiance was to the established American government, not to a foreign outside party that wanted to take it away.

The next two sections, IMHO, are the most important. In describing how paranoia influences contemporary politics (i.e., the 1950s and early-1960s), he noted an historical shift in the overriding conspiracy narrative that began after World War II. The new story held that Americans used to have power, but have now lost it to some hostile party. In this vein, Sen. Joseph McCarthy would claim that forty-nine (or 100, or seventy-seven, or whatever) communists had infiltrated the US State Department. In this tale, we have an institution of power (State Department, US Army, FBI, CIA, Hollywood, etc.) that once did the bidding of the American people. But now, after infiltration by hostile agents, these institutions were now corrupt and behaving atrociously. Hence, there's a certain "Take Back Our Country" attitude among those who adhere to this philosophy.

The remaining part of the paper is arguably the weakest, and its vitriol in some measure undermines some very valid criticisms of conspiracism that I have mentioned before. Again, I would prefer to look at those issues later, and focus on its strengths.***

Before examining "Paranoid Style's" content further, we have to understand the context of Dr. Hofstadter and his times. Born in 1916, he became intimately involved with leftist politics at an early age, joining the Communist Party of the USA in 1938. He left CPUSA the following year, realizing he could never adjust to the party's insistence on orthodoxy. He realized that going in. But, as he explained, "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... my fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it."

Thus, it's no surprise that he levels his criticism in "Paranoid Style" almost exclusively at the far-right of American politics. This paper was specifically a reaction against what he saw in McCarthyism and later in the emergence of the John Birch Society, which by 1964 had seriously radicalized the right-wing faction of the GOP.

And this leads to another issue: namely the applicability of Dr. Hofstadter's observations to what we have come to know now as "conspiracy theory."

You see, Hofstadter really does talk about paranoia in the same way that most of us would understand the term applying to "conspiracy theories," but only to a limited degree. That's by no means the primary focus of this paper. For the most part, he isn't talking about an outre "parapolitcal" movement on the part of those with limited means to propagate a cause–a political fringe, so to speak. Rather, he's talking about a mainstream point of view, that has ample access to public attention and elected officials.

In other words, what Dr. Hofstadter described in "Paranoid Style" wasn't so indicative of the work exemplified by Mae Brussell. Rather, we can see it more readily in such commentators as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Matt Drudge, and others populating the talent pool of Fox News. Here, we have a similar narrative concerning the dispossession of power by so-called "liberal elites" that have somehow co-opted the nation in an ill-defined way.

That Dr. Hofstadter is making this observation specifically about mainstream right-wing politics is not lost on political pundits, who aren't shy about criticizing him and/or "Paranoid Style." As George Will wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece dated 15 April 2008:

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree....

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a 'paranoid style' of politics rooted in 'status anxiety,' etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension. ****
To say this paranoid style has nothing to do with "conspiracy theory" as we understand it would simply be dishonest. We can point to such conspiracists as Rayelan Allan, Alex Jones and Fritz Springmeier, and say that they completely embody the paranoid style described by Hofstadter. Yet, it's not the paranoia of these individuals and their followers that set them apart in this regard, but rather their unabashed right-wing partisanship. Ironically, most of what such notables publish on their sites, or talk about in radio interviews, maintains and defends a power that Hofstadter and his friend, Dr. C. Wright Mills (Sociology, Columbia University), would call the "ruling class." Looking closely, one can see the narrative spouted by such conspiracists as not that different than what is on Fox or other News Corp media in substance. The difference is not the core belief, but rather the extremity to which such a belief is taken.

Regarding the extent to which Dr. Hofstadter would see a similar thinking on the left, we could point to some of the commentators on MS-NBC, or the ill-fated Air-America. Hofstadter would probably agree with a substantial deal of their viewpoints. What would irk him about these two entities is their tendency to--like their right-wing counterparts-- demonize opponents as evil, dangerous, or at best completely clueless. Of course, one could point out that the polemic of right-wing media preceded more limited liberal expressions of this type in the mainstream. Consequently, liberal polemics were a reaction against this very iteration of the paranoid style. But Hofstadter, in other writings, stressed the need for consensus within a democracy. As the our-way-or-the-highway approach to determining public policy has shown, especially in recent years where government has literally shut down because of refusals to compromise, extremism and inflexibility keeps the public from exercising any power at all.

In hindsight, it would appear that Hofstadter's main beef wasn't really with conspiracism itself, but rather the utilization of conspiracism in fostering the type of extremism that threatened consensual government.

Conspiracism is probably as old as our species. At the very least, it's as old as written history. We're the creatures that we are, after all. We not only collude with each other for some type of misdeed/transgression, but we suspect that others might do that very thing to us (how dare they!).

On the other hand, anti-conspiracism is relatively new. Trust me. I think that this is coincidence and nothing more. But I do find it fascinatingly ironic that one of the most potent and seminal expressions of anti-conspiracism occurred less than twenty-four hours before arguably the grandest conspiracy in US history.

A conspiracy rooted in the same political paranoia described by Dr. Hofstadter.

_______________
*First published in the November 1964 edition of Harper's magazine.

**Later during the 1960s, Dr. Hofstadter would accuse student anti-war activists of a similar simplistic mindset. While I believe he was somewhat short-sighted/narrow-minded/just-plain-wrong on this point, again, that's perhaps a discussion for another time and place.

***Just a brief summary of that remaining part: after prudently and carefully refusing to ascribe psychological/sociological diagnoses to those involved with conspiracism, Hofstadter regrettably engages in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis and sociological theory that ascribes personality, intellectual, or moral defects and machinations among the politically paranoid. Chief among them is a description of what most of us now would recognize as Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

...Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: "the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque."
While I, and perhaps most of you, might feel some vindication or validation from these words, directed as they are to McCarthy and others of his ilk, we should note that this is a diatribe, and highly emotional. And that's the source of its true appeal, I'm afraid.

****Interestingly, Will put the term "status anxiety" in quotes, as if this were the point of "Paranoid Style." Hoftstadter actually used these terms together in other writings, but not here.

X. Dellhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-22314569.post-70670958919468255402015-11-22T01:39:00.002-05:002015-11-22T01:39:42.294-05:00Because He Was There
Below is part one of five brief YouTube videos documenting Mark Lane's interview with former Dallas police officer Roger Craig. Craig had a fascinating story to tell. And he didn't mind sharing it, despite the danger of doing so. As I have written earlier, numerous attempts were made on his life in the years following the JFK assassination. In fact, this particular interview took place in 1975, shortly after Craig survived an ignition bomb that blew him up in his car. Although he survived (obviously), the incident left him paraplegic. He would die from two gunshot wounds to the chest only weeks after this conversation.

Lane, an attorney by trade, applied to represent Oswald during the Warren Commission proceedings. The Commission denied the request. Lane nevertheless continued to investigate the case, and managed to film interviews with numerous witnesses, among them Craig.

If you're wondering what made Officer Craig such a compelling witness, the title of this post pretty much sums it up.

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X. Dellhttp://email@example.com