For Radio New Jerusalem

February 8, 2019

To the Readers of Radio New Jerusalem:

I have been meaning to sit down and write this all up for some time now, but as I have mulled over in my mind exactly what it is I want to say, situations and circumstances have kept changing.  Please bear with me as I proceed now to update you on various things of which you should be made aware.

First of all, the obvious: Radio New Jerusalem has reverted from being a daily news reporting site to a news site portal.  There were several reasons for this, but first and foremost, the daily hit counts on this news page just simply did not justify the hours of research and preparation that went into compiling it five days a week.  I was waking literally in the middle of the night to comb through various Catholic, secular and arcane sources, from which I would post links to those articles, videos and information that I thought told the story of that day’s news.  While this was something I enjoyed doing, the stress and strain of it resulted in compromises to my health, and, try as I might to produce a quality product, the daily hit counts on the news page averaged, at their peak, something under 300 per day – peanuts in the global digital market place.  Those who did visit this page regularly offered me virtually no feedback or criticism, either positive or negative, and this created an attitude in me that I was piping and you would not dance, playing dirges and you would not mourn.  It was time to take a step back, so as family converged on us for the Christmas holidays, I decided to suspend daily updates so as to better determine what future course, if any, Radio New Jerusalem should pursue.  This is still somewhat up in the air.

The compromises to my health mentioned above were not so much physical as mental and spiritual.  The midnight news routine did contribute a fatigue factor that certainly played a part in what ended up being something of a breakdown, but primarily the cause was an ongoing state of clinical, major depression exacerbated by increasing and excessive (for me anyway) alcohol consumption.  I have struggled with depression for several years now, and what I came to learn the hard way is that treating depression with whiskey is akin to fighting fire with gasoline.  The end result was a state of encroaching misery and deepening despair, and a ride on an emotional roller coaster that had fewer and smaller “ups,” and increasing and ever more precipitous “downs.”  After making my life (and my wife’s) hell in the weeks after the holidays, I decided something had to be done, and discovered what I needed in a product called SAMe, an acronym for S-Adenosyl-L-Methione.  This is a substance that occurs naturally in the body, and among the benefits of it are mood stability and improved liver health and function.  Since I can attest to an improvement in the former and suspect it may well be the result of an improvement to the latter, I believe I was deficient in this substance.  Further, removing alcohol from my daily diet has produced a sharpened mental acuity, and so, for the first time in many moons, I sit down to write…

My purpose in relating all of this publicly is for no greater reason than to make a clean breast of the aforementioned situation and circumstances so as to make my readers, few though you may be, openly and honestly aware of the foibles and pitfalls of my life.  I do this so that you may judge among yourselves whether or not these stated and admitted weaknesses detract from my credibility as a witness, as the ground I intend to cover in writing here is controversial to say the least.  And, as I related nearly two years ago in an article titled “What Is Truth?”, there have been those in my life who have sought to destroy my credibility in an effort to strengthen their own.  In short, while I may suffer from a formally undiagnosed mental illness, I am not crazy, and there is a difference.  In the end you “pays your money and you takes your choice,” and since I offer this up for free, what do you have to lose save the time it takes to read it?

Enough about me.

As we move deeper into the new year of 2019, there is a vast amount of information being disseminated through a wide variety of sources, and contained within it are the usual misconceptions, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and just plain outright lies that belie the myriad of flaws within the human condition. Since it is these very flaws which also taint, to varying degrees, the human perception, we would do well to consider the words of my dad’s old Italian-American buddy in the Army Air Corp, who used to say in his New York tinged Italian accent, “The good Lord he expecta you to use-ah you goddamn head.”  In the 21^st century mainstream media even the good Lord himself is routinely denied, and his expectation replaced by the words of an evil and invisible intelligentsia, mouthed through a motley collection of overdressed sock puppets, “Believe what we tell you.”  And many do and so the advice of the good Lord thus goes largely unheeded.

Catering to those who do choose to use their heads is the so called “alternative media,” which in recent years has grown from what was once a small trickle into what is today, thanks to the burgeoning internet, a raging torrent of data ranging from basic news gathering and reporting to the widespread dissemination of conspiracies, theories of conspiracies, and arcane and esoteric knowledge and information of all sorts.  The internet, like Alice’s Restaurant, has become that place where you can get anything you want, and as the old saying goes, “If you get what you want, may you want what you get.”

Blinded by their own hubris, the movers and shakers of the corporate media were once content to overlook with a certain disdain the growing professionalism in the “lesser” media they looked down their collective nose at, dismissing it all to the masses huddled in front of the television as a do-it-yourself home brew of “conspiracy theory nonsense.” This view from the ivory broadcast tower prevailed as assumed truth until the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States demonstrated that a significant enough number were getting their news and information in this “alternative” way so as to defeat the bought and paid for darling of the global elitist left, Hillary Clinton.  And as President Trump has continued to point at the arrogant and false reporting of the “rust belt” media as “fake news,” the response from the talking heads in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and bureaus elsewhere has been to respond, “No! You’re the fake news!” as if this was some elementary schoolyard urination match. And, incredibly, they continue in this response while at the same time persisting in the same falsehoods, half truths and spin that inspired the president’s comment to begin with.  It’s as if they are bent on using as their credo those words misattributed to Herr Goebbels, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”  And one of the things that prompts me to write again is the legitimate concern that this yet may prove to be so.

The seminal event that spawned the transformation of the American news media from a journalistic endeavor into a propaganda service for what has come to be known in our time as the “deep state” was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. 

From the moment of the first news bulletins on that Friday afternoon announcing that, “The president has been shot in Dallas,” until coverage of the funeral mass ended on Monday afternoon, the nation’s attention and the cameras of the then three major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS were focused on coverage of this event and nothing else.

On Sunday morning, as my mother was trying to hurry my father along in getting dressed for her Uncle Archie and Aunt Grace’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration in St. Johns that afternoon, I was sitting by myself in the living room watching the coverage of Lee Harvey Oswald being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail.  I didn’t find this particularly interesting, and was watching only to kill time in a manner that would keep my dress clothes clean and my mom’s focus on my dad and not me.  Suddenly, a man in a dark suit stepped forward, thrust has hand into Oswald’s midsection, and after a muffled “pop” the scene erupted into mayhem and chaos.  I remember a reporter exclaiming in an understandably excited voice, “Oswald has been shot!” and this brought both mom and dad into the living room to see what was going on.

“What happened?” My dad asked.

“Oswald has been shot!” I repeated.

After watching maybe a few minutes of this, with Oswald now being loaded into an ambulance that seemed to appear out of nowhere, my mom insisted that my young eyes didn’t need to be watching any more of this horror and insisted that I turn off the television set.

On the way to St. Johns, a 30 mile drive from where we lived in Alma, the radio was left off and my mom, dad, two sisters and I rode along in silence for the most part.  What little conversation there was centered around Ma halfheartedly telling us little stories of Grace and Archie, while no one else cared or said much of anything. 

The golden anniversary celebration was at Archie and Grace’s home, and besides our family and my grandmother, I remember Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen, my great Uncle Carl and Aunt Hazel, and a few other older people I didn’t know being there.  After a semi-formal dinner that was geared to Aunt Grace telling stories of their life together while Uncle Archie, true to form, smiled, nodded and remained mostly quiet, the women cleared the table and went to the kitchen to wash dishes and gossip, while the men retired to the living room for coffee and conversation.  Someone, probably Uncle Bill, produced a bottle of whiskey from a jacket pocket and spiked the coffee, while Uncle Archie pretended not to notice and went to the kitchen and found me a glass of Vernor’s ginger ale.

By the second cup of coffee, the conversation had become an animated discussion of the national emergency at hand, and what I noted was that while the natural lines of a political discussion among this group would have usually been drawn between Uncle Archie and my dad as Republicans, and Uncle Carl and Uncle Bill as staunch Democrats, today there was none of that.  The killing of the president was serious business, and the business as usual - good natured arguments as to which party had the most scoundrels and ne’re do wells (which by the third cup of coffee would end in a tie) was today off the table.

Now Uncle Carl was, in appearance, a cross between Aristotle Onasis and Anthony Quinn.  A homily and bombastic little old man with a heart of gold, he somehow managed to be obnoxious, and at the same time affable, and could get away with remarks and comments that neither lesser nor greater men would dare make.  He was prone to tirades, and the words that rolled out of his mouth did so unfiltered and with no concern for the opinions of others, even and perhaps especially the always dignified Aunt Hazel.  On a weekend visit to their home in Toledo once, Aunt Hazel wanted to take the women folk shopping, and so when Uncle Carl and my dad and I found ourselves in the JC Penney store at the local mall, Uncle Carl proceeded to show off for us by approaching an attractive young female associate and asking, “Say, honey, do you have a place here where a fella can go to drain his pickle?”  As the somewhat taken aback young lady dutifully pointed Uncle Carl towards the restroom and he waddled proudly off in that direction, I heard my dad, in bemused shock, quietly utter the name of our Lord and Savior under his breath.   

As the sun broke weakly through the gray and white ragged clouds on this cold and sad Michigan November Sunday afternoon, I’m sure those men present at Archie and Grace’s house fully anticipated the tirade that was to come from Uncle Carl concerning the disturbing events in Dallas, and, as expected, he did not disappoint.  After a litany describing the various and obvious security lapses of parading the president through an open area in an open car, and some salty commentary on “that bastard Lyndon Johnson” and “that son of a bitch J. Edgar Hoover,” and after my dad had managed to interject a remark on the stupidity of the Dallas Police Department, Uncle Carl summed up his tirade on the Kennedy assassination thusly: “I’m telling you this stinks to high heaven and there’s more to it than meets the eye, dammit!  If this Oswald punk killed Kennedy all by himself, and killed that policeman, why did somebody want to shoot him?  Couldn’t they wait until he was fried fair and square in the electric chair?  You think the police marched his ass right out in public where this asshole could shoot him because they’re that stupid?  Don’t you think cops know better than that?  Hell, I know better than that, don’t you?  Find out who had this little son of a bitch shot and you’ll know who killed Kennedy, and it all would have been a hell of a lot easier to figure out if somebody hadn’t just shut up the one man who could have told them all about it!”

The afternoon drew to a close with Uncle Archie and Uncle Bill still convinced that Oswald was a crazed lone gunman who had killed Kennedy on his own, while my dad tended to agree with Uncle Carl that there were too many unanswered questions and disturbing lapses to come immediately to that conclusion.  It is interesting that some five and a half decades later this conversation and debate continues, and that the line of demarcation wasn’t then, and never has been, drawn along party lines.

As we drove back towards Alma in the gathering darkness, I finally heard firsthand the report on the radio that Oswald had died and realized that I had actually seen a man killed live and in person on television.  It was an uneasy feeling, and I didn’t like it much, regardless of what Lee Harvey Oswald had or hadn’t done.  And I found Uncle Carl’s words somewhat haunting.  If Oswald alone was guilty as was assumed officially then and now, who would want him dead?  The logical answer, even to my ten-year old mind, was obvious: no one.  I had seen firsthand, with my own eyes, how vulnerable the police had made him, and I realized that Uncle Carl was right: cops aren’t that stupid.  And the news media was smart enough to see it if I was.  They were right there filming it.  They knew and said nothing.  They lied.  There was more to this than met the eye, and I have believed it from that day to this.

My point in relating this story, beyond sharing the entertainment value inherent in the person of Uncle Carl, was to suggest that just as everyone can remember where he or she was when hearing the news of the Kennedy assassination, so everyone should remember the same thing about one’s first realization that the news media was lying about it.  Everyone who distrusts and disbelieves the mainstream, establishment news media must have similar stories of coming to consciousness.  This one is mine. 

As I stepped up efforts in the selective reporting of alternative news during 2018, it was my sincere hope and prayer many would come to remember that this coming to a greater consciousness took place using the news service provided at Radio New Jerusalem.  Maybe some did.  And while I have often said that the first half of my life was about learning how to succeed, and the last half has been about learning how to fail, I don’t consider Radio New Jerusalem a failure as much as a humble effort to inform that has, in a vast sea of information driven by a new online media reality, simply run its course and finished its task.  And given the prophetic nature of this task, this is more ominous than it sounds. 

Those who never do come to the realization that what we see, read and are told is a tightly managed package of lies, half-truths, spin and deceits can, perhaps, best be described in a term coined by alternative media pioneer and legend Bill Cooper: “sheeple.”  I have gone under the assumption, as have many others (including the late Mr. Cooper), that there are also a considerable number of souls in this world who are simply ignorant because the mainstream media (and society as a whole) are experienced, polished, and very capable of lulling the masses into an induced state of false well being.  Perhaps these individuals could better be described as “sleeple,” and it is they who are the targets of what many are now calling the new “Great Awakening:” the beginning of a second American Revolution.  Yet it goes way beyond this.

While the long-term future of Radio New Jerusalem is weighed in the balance, in the short term I intend to take the opportunity provided to weigh in on a new phenomenology of the 21^st century that questions the very nature of our being, and which suggests that various forces, in and out of human control, tear at the very fabric of a reality that we have always taken for granted to be constant.  The Q-Anon phenomenon, child sexual abuse and pedophilia in high places, Luciferianism and the New World Order, the physics and metaphysics of CERN and the so called “Mandela Effect,” geoengineering and weather control versus the global warming hoax, the dangers of run away technology in the form of artificial intelligence and the “singularity,” and, last but certainly not least, the tensions present in a Catholic Church in which the Real Presence of Jesus Christ now comes into full blown, immortal conflict with the enthronement of Lucifer within the Vatican: these are but the guideposts on the journey to the onrushing apocalypse.  A journey that begins, curiously enough, when the door to this alternative reality is opened with the key of knowledge: the knowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t alone and neither are we.