TBR News August 21, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. August 21, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for August 21:”Little by little it is becoming increasingly evident that Donald Trump is, to be kind, extremely eccentric. And there is also no doubt whatsoever that his behavior in business as well as politics is not that of an honest man but rather that of a self-important and thoroughly dishonest manipulator. He lies constantly, does very weird actions such as trying to buy Greenland and such like. Actually, when he found out that Chinese firms were purchasing important minerals from Greenland, he came unglued and made a bizarre effort to block them. All this did was to convince the Danes, and most of Europe, that he was unbalanced to a degree. He is infuriating the Chinese and in a recent press conference, not only insulted them but added the staff of Fox News (hitherto a strong supporter) of “treason” and other misbehavior. Just yesterday, Donald insulted American Jews by saying that if they voted Democrat, they were committing treason against him! All of this is a matter of public record and all of this is a strong indication that our President has severe and increasing mental problems.”
The Table of Contents
- Explainer: What early U.S. presidential polls tell us about the 2020 race
- Trump accuses Jewish Americans of ‘disloyalty’ for voting Democratic, in antisemitic trope
- Shock in Denmark after Trump, spurned over Greenland, cancels visit
- Can Trump lie his way out of a recession? That actually might not work
- Trump and Putin: The Prospering of Treason
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
Explainer: What early U.S. presidential polls tell us about the 2020 race
August 21, 2019
by Joseph Ax
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Anyone paying the slightest attention to the Democratic presidential campaign has likely seen headlines on the latest “horse race” opinion polls, highlighting one candidate’s rise or another’s decline.
Campaigns trumpet, or minimize, the numbers depending on how they fared. But with the first nominating contest in Iowa still five months away, what do these surveys really tell us about will happen in the November 2020 presidential election?
The quick answer: Early polls should be taken with a grain of salt, or perhaps even a full shaker. But they can offer a snapshot of where the race stands today and at least some insight into where it might go in the months to come.
Here’s a guide to reading, and understanding, polls at this stage of the outsized, 23-candidate Democratic contest:
HOW ARE POLITICAL POLLS CONDUCTED?
Professional pollsters rely on answers from a sample of people – anywhere from a few hundred respondents to 1,000 or more – intended to represent a much larger population.
In political surveys, pollsters are often interested specifically in registered voters or likely voters. Many more people say they will vote than actually do so, forcing pollsters to use other data, such as past voting behavior, to estimate the probability of casting ballots.
Some pollsters rely on phone interviews. Others, including Ipsos, which conducts surveys for Reuters, employ online questionnaires. All polls have a margin of error – a measure of confidence that the results reflect the broader population – calculated based on the size of the sample.
WHAT DOES HISTORY TELL US ABOUT POLLS AT THIS STAGE?
National presidential primary polls – that is, polls that measure support for one party’s candidates – this early in the election cycle have been a mixed bag in predicting the eventual winner.
In August 2007, Hillary Clinton held a nearly 20-percentage point lead across a dozen national polls over Barack Obama, who would capture the Democratic nomination the following year.
The man who would win the Republican Party’s nod, John McCain, hovered around 12%, with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani leading the pack with support from nearly one-third of respondents.
But in the 2016 cycle, both the eventual nominees, Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, held significant leads in the polls by August 2015. Like this year’s Democratic contest, the Republican field from which Trump emerged was enormous by historical standards.
Past results are not necessarily an indicator of what will happen this time around, experts warned.
“We only have this happen every four years,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president at Edison Research, which conducts national exit polls. “It’s not like we have thousands of examples.”
HOW TRUSTWORTHY ARE PRIMARY POLLS?
Primary polls are considerably less predictive than general election polls pitting two nominees against each other.
For one, voters’ preferences are more fluid ahead of primaries, in part because they cannot rely on party affiliation alone to determine their choices. In a general election, most voters flock to the candidate who represents their preferred party.
“Primaries are a lot harder, because there isn’t that partisan signaling,” said Chris Jackson, who runs the public polling unit at Ipsos.
The size of the Democratic field this cycle may also contribute to the uncertainty by giving people so many options.
Voters may engage in strategic behavior, shifting allegiances based on how candidates are performing. Howard Dean led most Democratic primary surveys in 2003 until John Kerry, the eventual nominee, won the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, sending him skyrocketing in national polls.
Name recognition also plays a major role at this stage, when many Americans simply are not focused on the campaign.
That said, name recognition is often based on factors that reinforce a candidate’s strength. Joe Biden, who is leading most polls in the 2020 Democratic race, is well known because he was a vice president for two terms and has deep ties to the party’s establishment.
Analysts expect turnout in 2020 to hit levels not seen in decades, given the high level of political engagement in the era of Trump. That introduces more uncertainty for pollsters, who must make assumptions about voters who have not historically cast ballots but who are likely to do so next year.
“The pollsters don’t really know who’s going to show up in a primary,” said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who studies polling.
General election polls at this stage – pitting Trump against various possible Democratic nominees – are virtually meaningless, according to research by the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight. That’s because they are asking about hypothetical matchups involving candidates who remain unfamiliar to many Americans.
SO WHAT SHOULD WE LOOK FOR?
Some analysts suggest looking at tiers of candidates, rather than focusing on small differences between individuals, to get a better sense of who is in the best position.
At the moment, Biden stands in a class by himself at around 30% support, with a second tier comprised of U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren holding at half that figure. Another handful of candidates, including U.S. Senator Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, make up the next group.
Lenski said polls often include other information beyond the top line figures that can illuminate which candidates have more potential upside.
For instance, some polls will ask respondents to identify which candidates they support aside from their first choice, or to say whether they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each candidate.
Among lesser-known candidates, someone like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is polling around 1% and has poor favorability ratings, has less room to grow than someone like U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is also at 1% but is well liked by those who have heard of her.
Given pollsters use different methodologies and have varying track records of accuracy, it’s better to look at several polls for a more reliable snapshot. When considering trends, such as whether a candidate has gained or lost support over time, comparing previous surveys from the same pollster will yield more accurate results.
WHAT ABOUT STATE-BASED POLLS?
The biggest advantage of state-based primary polls compared to national primary polls is they reference actual elections, since there is no national primary.
A candidate who shows more strength in polls of a key state – Iowa, for example – might pull off an upset and gain momentum throughout the rest of the campaign.
State polls also have a greater margin for error because they rely on smaller samples.
Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Cynthia Osterman
Trump accuses Jewish Americans of ‘disloyalty’ for voting Democratic, in antisemitic trope
President’s remarks seemed to refer to a perception that Jewish Americans have a dual loyalty to both America and Israel
August 20, 2019
by Edward Helmore
The Guardian
Donald Trump used an apparently antisemitic trope when accusing Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats as showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”.
The remarks came as part of a barrage of disparaging comments that threaten to re-ignite an ongoing feud with the Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They seemed to refer to a perception that Jewish Americans have a dual loyalty to both America and Israel.
Trump, who recently encouraged Israel to block Tlaib’s visit to see her family in the occupied territories, lashed out after the congresswomen criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for denying them entry, vowing that the Israeli leader would not “succeed in hiding the cruel reality of the occupation from us”.
Calling Omar a “disaster” for Jews, Trump said he didn’t “buy” the tears Tlaib had shed Monday at an emotional press conference during which Tlaib talked about her decision not to travel to Israel to see her elderly grandmother, who lives in the occupied West Bank.
“Where has the Democratic party gone?” Trump asked reporters at the White House. He then went on to apparently refer to Jewish Americans’ supposed loyalties to Israel and how voting Democratic was disloyal to the country. “Where have they gone, where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Accusing Jewish Americans of having dual loyalties to America and Israel is widely seen as an antisemitic trope. The comment provoked immediate condemnation from a raft of American Jewish leaders.
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, pointed out on Twitter that charges of disloyalty “have long been used to attack Jews … It’s long overdue to stop using Jews as a political football”.
J Street, the progressive Jewish American lobbying group, released a statement in which it called Trump’s remarks “dangerous and shameful”. It noted that 70% of American Jews voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in the 2016 presidential race, adding “this vast majority of our community rejected and continues to abhor the xenophobia, bigotry and extremism of Donald Trump and his allies”.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who is a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination, also waded in. Calling himself “a proud Jewish person”, he said: “I have no concerns about voting Democratic. And in fact I intend to vote for a Jewish man to become the next president of the United States.”
This is not the first time that Trump has been castigated for invoking the “dual loyalty” antisemitic trope. In April he called Netanyahu “your prime minister” in front of the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.
Shock in Denmark after Trump, spurned over Greenland, cancels visit
August 21, 2019
by Nikolaj Skydsgaard
Reuters
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Danish leaders expressed shock and disbelief on Wednesday over U.S. President Donald Trump’s cancellation of a state visit to Denmark after its prime minister rebuffed his interest in purchasing Greenland.
Trump’s proposal at first elicited incredulity and humor from politicians in Denmark, a NATO ally of the United States, with former premier Lars Lokke Rasmussen saying: “It must be an April Fool’s Day joke.”
But the mood turned to shock when Trump called off the Sept. 2-3 visit after Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called his idea of the United States buying Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, “absurd”.
“Total chaos with @realDonaldTrump and cancellation of state visit to Denmark. It has gone from a big opportunity for strengthened dialogue between allies to a diplomatic crisis,” former foreign minister Kristian Jensen, a member of the opposition Liberal Party, said on Twitter.
“Everyone should know Greenland is not for sale,” Jensen said of the world’s largest island, which has considerable mineral wealth and a U.S. military presence at the Thule Air Base under a U.S.-Danish treaty dating to 1951.
Frederiksen, who had been due to hold talks with Trump in Copenhagen, planned a news conference later on Wednesday.
She said earlier this week Greenland was “not for sale” and she hoped Trump’s proposal was “not meant seriously”.
“SHOCKING”
“(Trump’s cancellation) is very, very shocking, when it is about a very close ally and a good friend,” Soren Espersen, the foreign affairs spokesman for the hard right Danish People’s Party, told Danish news agency Ritzau.
He described Trump’s decision as a snub to Queen Margrethe, Denmark’s head of state. Trump and U.S. First Lady Melania Trump were formally invited to Denmark by Queen Margrethe in July.
“It shows why we now more than ever should consider (fellow) European Union countries as our closest allies. The man is unpredictable,” said Morten Ostergaard, leader of the Danish Social Liberal Party. “Reality surpasses imagination.”
Trump, whose “America First” policies have resulted in strained relations with the EU over trade and other issues, said on Sunday that a U.S. purchase of Greenland would be “a large real estate deal.”
“Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary general and Danish premier, said Trump’s cancellation could work out for the best. “The Arctic’s security and environmental challenges are too important to be considered alongside hopeless discussions like the sale of Greenland,” he said on Twitter.
Greenland, which is gaining attention from world powers including China, Russia and the United States due to its strategic location and mineral wealth, is self-governing but underdeveloped and relies on Denmark for economic support.
“I think it’s sad (Trump) is not coming, because we could have had a lot of demonstrations showing that we don’t agree with his politics, and especially his climate politics,” Hans Pedersen, a landscape architect, told Reuters in Copenhagen.
A six-meter (20-foot)-tall inflatable blimp depicting a baby version of Trump, most recently seen at a protest in London, will reappear at an anti-Trump rally to be held in Copenhagen on Sept. 2 despite the president’s no-show, organizers said.
Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a lawmaker from Greenland’s opposition party Inuit Ataqatigiit party, said she was not surprised at the cancellation but it underlined the territory’s importance.
“The U.S. is an interesting ally for Greenland, but we also wish for Greenland to remain in the union we have today.”
Additional reporting by Andreas Mortensen; Editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Mark Heinrich
Can Trump lie his way out of a recession? That actually might not work
Of course Trump’s fans will back his silly, racist lies — but some might not appreciate him wrecking the economy
August 19, 2019
by Amanda Marcotte
Salon
Donald Trump’s propaganda apparatus is mighty — much more resilient and effective than any of his business endeavors ever were in the decades before he ran for president. While most Americans haven’t bought into Trump’s lies — which are up to an average of 13 a day — his base of supporters, who have way more power, in our undemocratic system, than their actual numbers justify, gobble up every ridiculous assertion emanating from the Oval Office.
But there’s a good chance at last that this capacity for self-deception among Trump diehards will be tested. Economic reports increasingly warn of a coming recession, likely to be exacerbated by the pointless trade war with China, which was largely launched as an ego boost for Trump. So Trump and his allies are clinging to their favorite strategy — lying their heads off — in order to convince his followers that the U.S. economy is going great.
But it’s one thing to lie about stuff that doesn’t directly affect the average Fox News viewer, such as migrants at the border or the behavior of anti-fascism activists. Convincing voters that they aren’t losing their jobs or taking an economic hit is a much harder trick to pull off.
On Monday, Maggie Haberman published a New York Times article reporting that Trump’s main response to reports of a possibly looming recession is to go into full conspiracy-theory mode, accusing his own hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve and the news media of conspiring against his re-election chances. As usual with Trump, there is no concern for anyone else, such as the millions of Americans who will be surely be hurt by any significant economic downturn. Only Trump matters to Trump, and he is panicked because a recession could lose him the election, which, not incidentally, would free federal authorities to arrest Trump for various alleged crimes.
“The Fake News Media is doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election,” Trump tweeted Thursday, apparently seeking to spread the outrageous theory that shadowy forces would wreck the economy for the sole purpose of damaging him politically.
“Mr. Trump has repeated the claims in private discussions with aides and allies, insisting that his critics are trying to take away what he sees as his calling card for re-election,” Haberman writes.
With Trump, it’s never certain if he actually believes these conspiracy theories or is simply browbeating aides and underlings into toeing his propaganda line. Either way, what’s clear is that his Fox News and Fox Business allies have enthusiastically embraced Trump’s demands to tell him soothing lies about the direction of the economy under his, uh, stewardship.
Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who is generally so wrong about everything that it’s best to assume that the opposite of what he predicts is true, went on “Meet the Press” Sunday to preach the need for “optimism,” saying, “I sure don’t see a recession.”
Peter Navarro, another Trump economic adviser and the guru behind his trade war with China, was also on “The Week” hyping the idea that “we’re going to have a strong economy through 2020 and beyond with a bull market.”
But by Monday morning, Trump’s allies were going to the next level. Beyond offering dubious assurances of that everything is going well, Trump’s minions are now repeating his asinine claims that the media is trying to create a recession by clapping it into existence — and that its sole motive for doing so is to dump Trump.
“[T]he only thing that can happen in this country right now that can derail this economic juggernaut is if everyone believes it’s going to be derailed,” declared Charles Payne at Fox News.
“The bottom line is, is there seems to be a deliberate attempt by many people to make this economy go into recession,” he added.
The idea that journalists are secretly plotting to sabotage the economy in order to get Trump ought to be self-evident nonsense. It’s even sillier when one realizes that the media industry is already in an economic crisis, with journalists being laid off at rates equaling those of the last recession, even during supposedly good economic times. Another recession will be absolutely devastating to journalists.
Yet we’re meant to believe that journalists are not only equipped with magic powers that can will a recession into happening, but that they would use those powers to destroy their own lives and futures, all in the name of bringing down Trump. If journalists are that powerful, they should be able to finish off Trump without wrecking the economy along the way. It’s not exactly hard to portray Trump as the worst living American, after all. All you need to do is quote him directly on and random subject, and the effect is worse than anything anyone could say about him.
Just as the Fox News Cabinet is happy to tell Trump soothing lies, so is his real White House team.
“[S]everal aides agree with him that the news media is overplaying the economic fears, adding to his feeling of being justified, people close to the president said,” Haberman reports.
But this isn’t one of those situations, as with Trump’s inauguration crowd size or his fantasies about criminal gangs, where his followers can just play along with the lies, having no skin in the game. As with farmers already affected by the trade war, economic downturns are hard to ignore, since they tend to have real impacts on real people’s lives, even those living in the Fox News bubble.
The question is whether this will matter, or whether Trump voters are so bigoted that they will vote for their own economic ruin, so long as their man keeps sticking it to liberals, people of color and feminists?
Those farmers Trump is screwing over are an unfortunate harbinger. Reporters keep going out to farming communities that face economic devastation due to Trump’s impetuous and unnecessary trade war. They generally find that Trump-voting farmers are standing by their man, favoring their own meanest impulses over their own family’s economic fortunes. Many cling to the ridiculous hope that Trump is somehow secretly trying to save them from the effects of his own actions.
On the other hand, there is anecdotal evidence that at least a few farmers are angry enough about Trump betraying their trust that they no longer support him. Earlier this month, for instance, CNBC spoke with Ohio soybean farmer Christopher Gribbs, who is losing money due to Trump’s trade war shutting down exports of soybeans to China.
“I couldn’t vote for him. I have to protect my business,” said Gribbs, who voted for Trump in 2016.
It’s fair to note Gribbs is part of a small minority of American farmers, and that most of whom are still backing Trump even as he strips away their livelihood. But, considering Trump only won the election because of less than 80,000 votes spread across three farm-heavy states, losing even a few of his voters could do real damage to his re-election chances.
And that’s just among farmers, a relatively small group of voters even in the Midwest. Despite his claims to the contrary, Trump knows full well that he won the 2016 on a fluke, and by the thinnest of margins. Even if he hangs onto the vast majority of his supporters, if just a few are scared enough by the economic worries that they vote for a Democrat or simply stay home, he’ll lose. That’s why he’s in panic mode and cranking up the conspiracy-theory machine to top volume.
Let’s not delude ourselves: Most of Trump’s voters will stay on the Trump train until it crashes into a mountain. Will those who bail out in search of self-preservation be enough to save us all from a second term?
Trump and Putin: The Prospering of Treason
August 21, 2019
by Christian Jürs
‘Cui bono’ is a Latin phrase meaning ‘who benefits?’
In the matter of the accusations at a high level that President Trump has worked, does work, for the Russians, the application of this phrase is quite important.
- Who benefits from Trump’s economically restrictive tariffs?
- Who benefits from Trump’s undeclared war on Latin Americans?
- Who benefits from Trump’s harassment of China?
- Who benefits from Trump’s divisive attacks on sections of the American public such as the black community and the latino?
- Who benefits from Trump’s very ill-advised and illogical actions in the Middle East?
American interests, economic and social?
No, they not only do not benefit but they are seriously injured and impaired.
Who, then, benefits from these actions?
Simple logic and an application of Occam ’s Razor show with great clarity that only one entity benefits from Trumps belligerent actions and that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The recent allegations that Trump worked for the Russians; had been gotten at by them earlier on is the only clear and logical answer to the question ‘cui bono.’
And for the leader of a country to deliberately work against the interests of his country for another is an act of treason and should be treated accordingly.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
August 21, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”
Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.
Conversation No. 36
Date: Sunday, September 15, 1996
Commenced: 11:15 AM CST
Concluded: 11: 37 AM CST
RTC: Ah, good morning, Gregory. Been to church early today?
GD: No, haven’t been to church for some time. Yourself? I mean someone who lives on Cathedral Avenue ought to have some nearby inspiration.
RTC: No, I get out very seldom these days what with my hip problem and I do have a balance issue. Asthma makes me short of breath sometimes. Never mind that. Anyway, I was looking for some papers on the Vietnam business….for addition to my book on that sorry time…and I found an analysis of the flying saucer business we talked about. I pulled it out for you. On the Vietnam business, I’ve finished the manuscript long ago but I keep thinking that I ought to put more documentation with it. Stupid dreams because I can never publish it. Had to sign that paper, you know. Bill has looked at it and thinks it would become a best seller but I am not going to give it to him in spite of what he thinks. Trento would love to lay his hands on it. He wouldn’t publish it, of course, but would run to Langley for that pat on the head and another nice pen set. Joe does love to collect pen sets and get those loving pats on the head.
GD: Could I look at it, Robert?
RTC: Ah….I might consider it but you couldn’t use any of it while I am still kicking. But anyway, this Roswell business…and oh yes, one in Montana about three years later…now the Company had nothing to do with any of this but we did get a copy of an official and very secret report, not because we cared about a spaceship wreck or little green men but because of the methodology used in containing and negating the story. Too many people knew about this so the cover-up had to be through and intense. It was a sort of primer for us. We improved on it, of course, but it was an excellent foundation for other matters.
GD: Such as?
RTC: Now, now, Gregory, one thing at a time. Yes, an excellent primer.
GD: I used to live in Las Cruces which is close by that area and from talking with people down there, it is almost universally believed. I believe a space ship crashed there and the Air Force was involved. The locals are still afraid of the threats they got back in ’47-’48 so I feel that where there is smoke, there must once have been fire.
RTC: What is your understanding of the incident?
GD: There was a big thunderstorm then and much lightening and one of the farmers or ranchers found debris all over his landscape. The Air Force people descended on the place and in essence shut everyone up. I was told repeatedly that bodies of aliens were found. Is that in your paper? Make a wonderful story.
RTC: Yes, as I recall, about four dead ones and one living.
GD: Little green men?
RTC: As I read it, not green but a sort of grayish green or gray. About four feet in height with no body hair, fewer fingers than ours and large eyes. I mean no question because there are original photographs attached. And the dead ones started rotting right away and the stink was monumental. There were complete autopsies, of course, but not in situ. Flew them out, iced up, for work at Wright.
GD: And the live one?
RTC: Died a little later. They were not of this world, Gregory but it was, and is, amazing how they at least resembled humans.
GD: That alone would drive the religious freaks nuts. Human forms from outer space?
RTC: Yes and that’s why in the movies you see giant crabs or whatever. Can’t look like us.
GD: Such closed minds. Darwin was basically right and someday, they will discover the so-called missing link that proves him right. Would that get suppressed, do you think?
RTC: Depends who is in power in the White House at the time. But let me send the report off to you to evaluate. I personally don’t see this as tabloid news about green men but how the story was contained and essentially countered. The one in Montana was much safer because this one crashed into a mountain, way up, with no busybody farmers and local hicks around to pick up dangerous souvenirs
GD: What was the determination there?
RTC: Essentially the same as Roswell. Unworldly metals and other debris, crisped remains of small people…I guess four feet was general…and so on. Again, lightening storms in the area. These things can be detected by a certain form of radar but not by most so there was a fix and that’s how the wreckage was found. The metal in both sites was odd enough. Very light but impossible to bend or even cut into. Equipment containers that were impossible to open or even open. That drove them all crazy because if we could construct aircraft, or even tanks, from such a metal, the advantages would be obvious. No shell could penetrate and the light weight would be a huge advantage in combat. As I understand it, no one could ever figure the composition out.
But again, the methodology…the mixture of threats of death and the cover stories are what this report was mostly about. Of course the press does just as it’s told as do the local police and so on. And no one in the Air Force is going to talk or they’ll end up taking a long walk on a very short pier. Time goes by and everyone but a few forget and that’s the end of it.
GD: Did they have any idea where these things came from?
RTC: No, they never did and therein lies another factor. Truman ordered silence, or rather approved the order on it because no one wanted a panic. The Cold War was just starting and they were afraid of the Orson Wells business all over. No, there could be no mass panic. My God, every attention-starved nitwit in the country would chime in with fictional stories about landings in their yard and so on. That no one wanted so rather than stifle any talk about genuine sightings, they rigged thousands of fakes ones until the public thought it was all too funny for words and went back watching baseball games on the idiot box. We took this and refined it. I wrote some suggestions on this and I will attach them for you. Sometimes we can’t cover up some nasty action so the best way to hide it is to magnify it so much and pass it to so many gabbling idiots that the public is quickly bored. I recall the business of people vanishing and that is true so the story goes out about flying saucers landing in cow pastures and kidnapping cows or fake stories about this or that child vanishing, and then his turning up later in a local candy store. A few dozen like this every year gets the public accustomed to disbelieving abduction stories. Or we could throw in a child molester from time to time just to spice up the pot. Hell, we, and the Pentagon, among others, have full-time departments handling fake stories. We leak them to the supermaket press.
GD: Or one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid rags…
RTC: Yes, Rupert can be so accommodating. He keeps the trailer park crowd in a state of perpetual excitement. Bread and circuses. Always the same.
GD: Do you know how many actual incidents got investigated?
RTC: I know of the two specifically. The one in New Mexico in ’47 and then the Montana one about two years later. I am sure there are more. The Russians had their own problems but they have much better control over the media that we do. They had less running around and creative writing issues.
GD: Nothing hostile?
RTC: Not that I ever heard about. I think just recon trips. That’s the educated guessing. Roswell was near some of our more sensitive A-bomb areas but I can’t figure out Montana.
GD: Maybe they were looking to kidnap some mountain goats for sexual escapades.
RTC: As I recall, they had no sex organs. I think goats would be out.
GD: No organs? How could they reproduce the species?
RTC: I don’t think the Pentagon was interested in that question. Maybe they just came out of a big machine somewhere, did their routines and died. I understand that they rotten very quickly and the stink when they did made it really impossible to do effective autopsies.
GD: I had that problem with floaters. Or abdominal cancer. God, what stenches from both. I used to wear a mask soaked in bay rum but I have seen techs puke on the spot. You just have to blot it out. A little like waking up after a drunken party and finding yourself in the sack with a really ugly woman. Never happened to me but did to a friend. A quiet departure. And a quick one too. And the forlorn cries of ‘Oh Honey, where are you going?’ echoing behind him. ‘Why outside to puke, my lovely one” might be an appropriate answer. Later, send her flowers you filched out of a cemetery and a zucchini in remembrance of things past. I don’t think Marcel would like that. I think he liked sailors.
RTC: Who?
GD: Marcel Proust. Wrote a book called that. Well, at this point either the visitations have stopped or the little gray men with no dicks have all gone into Congress. Except those thieves stink before they are dead. Well, send it all on and I promise to read it with interest….
RTC: Yes, and keep quiet indeed.
GD: A given.
(Conclusion at 11:37:AM CST)
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Bob Sears
Bob Sears is a California-based celebrity pediatrician, initially famous for his promotion of attachment parenting but currently best known as one of the central figures in the antivaxx movement, notable for his unorthodox and potentially dangerous views on childhood vaccination. Though he vehemently rejects the “antivaccine” label, Sears is at the very least one of the most diehard antivaxx apologists out there, vocal vaccine delayer, promoter of the nonsense “too many too soon” gambit, and a master antivaccine dogwhistle performer; he is also a mainstay at antivaccine conferences and meetings. No, seriously: Bob Sears is antivaccine.
His book The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child (2007) proposes, against accepted medical recommendations, two alternative vaccination schedules, a proposal that has garnered almost as much celebrity endorsement as it has received criticism from people who actually understand how this works based on medical evidence. Sears’s advice (or systematic misinformation) has contributed to dangerous under-vaccination in the national child population. The book has been accurately described as “basically a guide to skipping vaccines,” and it “may as well be called The Anti-Vaccine Book.” Rhetorically, the book relies to a large extent on the balance fallacy “to compromise between mutually exclusive positions, like young-earth creationism and evolution” by handwaving and false and misleading claims. Of course, Sears knows very well what audience he is targeting, and is using well-established techniques for reaching them; it is thus little surprise that his book has been highly successful among certain knowledge-challenged groups. There is an excellent discussion of his techniques, as well as his dangerous misrepresentations of the facts and evidence, here. For instance, Sears predictably (and, one has to suspect, deliberately) misuses the VAERS database to argue, falsely, that the risk of serious adverse events over the course of the current vaccine schedule is 1 in 2600. Then he says that the “risk of a child having a severe case of a vaccine-preventable disease is about 1 in 600 each year for all childhood diseases grouped together,” leading him ask whether “vaccinating to protect against all these diseases worth the risk of side effects?” Even disregarding his nonsense calculation of the risk of adverse events, even minimally intelligent readers should be able to identify the sleight of hand: Yes, Sears weighs the risk of an adverse event against the risk of acquiring a vaccine preventable disease using current disease incidence rates, which, of course, are what they are because of current vaccination rates. It is accordingly safe to conclude that Sears isn’t only a loon, but actively malicious. (He has also, on several occasions, lied about the danger of the diseases in question, of course.) Similarly, with regard to HIB, Sears admits that HIB is bad, but also “so rare that I haven’t seen a single case in ten years … Since the disease is so rare, HIB isn’t the most critical vaccine.” That it wouldn’t take long for him to see plenty of cases if people followed his advice, is not addressed. He also employs the appeal to vaccine package insert fallacy.
The rhetorical strategy described in the above paragraph is a mainstay of Sears’s marketing toward the antivaccine community. Though he admits that vaccines kinda work and are responsible for eradicating dangerous childhood diseases, Sears also said, in 2014, that he thinks “the disease danger is low enough where I think you can safely raise an unvaccinated child in today’s society.” Notably, Sears encourages anti-vaccine parents not to tell others of their decision not to vaccinate, writing that “I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the diseases increase significantly,” clearly, and probably correctly, recognizing that his intended audiences don’t worry too much about the ethics of free-riding. After all, Sears doesn’t care about ethics either. It is not for nothing that Sears has been a house expert for the insane New Age pseudoscience website mothering.com, for instance.
In 2008, Sears told the NY Times that 20% of his patients do not vaccinate at all, and that another 20% vaccinated partially, commenting that “I don’t think [vaccination] is such a critical public health issue that we should force parents into it.” In 2008, Sears got in some trouble when one of his “intentionally undervaccinated” seven-year-old patients was identified as the index patient who started the largest measles outbreak in San Diego since 1991, resulting in 839 exposed persons, 11 additional cases (all in unvaccinated children), and the hospitalization of an infant too young to be vaccinated, with a net public-sector cost of $10,376 per case. It is both disheartening and interesting to see Sears react to suggestions that he is kinda responsible here, but the reaction is relatively representative for the contortions Sears often gets himself into when simultaneously respond to critics, trying to maintain a veneer of respectability, cultivating his status in the anti-vaccine movement and attempting to escape blame of his moral failings. (Sears has predictably been attacked by other antivaxxers, too, over his lack of ideological purity).
Sears has said that he created his alternative vaccine schedules to allow parents to vaccinate their children “in a more gradual manner” than by following the CDC-recommended schedule partially because vaccination risks causing “antigenic overload”; the idea is based on fundamental misconceptions and not on sound scientific evidence. Interestingly, Sears has admitted that there was no published, peer-reviewed evidence to support the notion of vaccine overload, and claimed that “my precautions about spreading out vaccines are theoretical, a theoretical benefit to kids …”. PIDOOMA, in other words.
Health freedom
Sears is staunchly opposed to California Senate Bill SB277, a bill that eliminated non-medical vaccine exemptions, and tried to fight it under the banner of “health freedom”, comparing non-vaccinating parents to Nazi-persecuted Jews during the Holocaust. Because that’s the kind of person he is. (It is a common gambit among antivaxxers.) When the bill passed, Sears responded by teaching antivaccine parents how to proceed to obtain exemptions without any medical justification, basically offering to sell medical exemptions for $180 apiece. No, seriously (details here; and Sears wasn’t the only one to do so). Sears and one Melissa Floyd, a self-proclaimed “data analyst”, subsequently launched a website and associated facebook group called the Immunity Education Group to spread misinformation about the law, the CDC, infectious diseases and vaccines (some examples here).
Sears was similarly opposed (i.e. unhinged) to bill AB 2109, a bill that would require pediatricians to counsel parents on the risks and benefits of vaccines, partially because of its ostensibly hidden agenda: “it isn’t difficult to see the REAL reason for the bill: to increase vaccination rates in our state by making it more difficult for parents to claim the exemption,” said Sears, identifying what for a hidden agenda must be counted as remarkably open and explicit. The point of the bill was otherwise to ensure that informed consent was actually informed, but Sears – who has otherwise been very concerned about “informed consent” – seems to have been mostly worried about liability issues that might arise from any legal duty to be honest with his patients being imposed on him.
In 2016, the Medical Board of California released a six-page opinion accusing Sears of “gross negligence”, “Repeated Negligent Acts”, and “Failure to Maintain Adequate and Accurate Records” (quacks and antivaxxers were quick to run to his defense). And in 2018, the Medical Board placed Sears on 35 months of probation after he settled a case in which the Medical Board accused him of writing a doctor’s note exempting a two-year-old child from vaccinations without obtaining basic information about the patient (detailed discussion of the charges here). Per the terms of his probation, Sears is required to take 40 hours of medical education courses annually, attend an ethics class, be monitored by a supervising doctor, and will have to notify hospitals and facilities of the order, with restrictions on supervising physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Sears denied any wrongdoing, of course.
Oh, and he also runs an online store selling untested supplements at steep prices for all people in all sorts of different situations, such as the $18.99 (per 2015) Children Liquid Immune Boost supplement, presumably aimed at the same group who buys into his misinformation about vaccines.
Bob’s brother Jim Sears, also a pediatrician, has been involved in the antivaccine movement as well, and appears for instance in the antivaccine propaganda movie Vaxxed, where he claims not to be antivaccine while simultaneously spreading antivaccine conspiracy theories and defending Andrew Wakefield
Diagnosis: One of the central figures in the antivaccine movement (regardless of how he tries to market himself), and thus one of the most significant threats to the health, life and well-being of children in the US today. Utterly despicable.
Steven Seagal
More celebrity loons, and we suppose it comes as no shock to many that Steven Frederic Seagal struggles with reason, fact and comprehension. Seagal has been a lot of things, from martial artist, musician and aspiring politician to apologist for dictators, but is perhaps best known for a ridiculously overblown ego and intense paranoia. He has also claimed to be CIA black ops, a psychic, a “healer” and the reincarnation of a Buddhist God or holy man (which is presumably a step on the only way to justify his earlier claim to have put “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours into my weapons training”).
A fierce critic of Obama’s supposedly authoritarian governing style (he should have been impeached, e.g. over Benghazi, as Seagal sees it), Seagal is instead a fan of Vladimir Putin because Putin as a statesman “simply gets shit done when necessary”. Apparently, Seagal considers Putin “one of the great world leaders” and a “brother”, and has taken it on himself to be some sort of PR agent for Russia, including defending Russia’s actions toward the Ukraine; Seagal has even played a concert at a Russian nationalist bike show in Crimea in celebration of the annexation; in 2017 he was also banned from Ukraine for five years for being a national security threat. Putin has reciprocated the bromance, and Seagal is currently a Putin-appointed special envoy to the US, ostensibly with the task of improving relations between the countries. It is impossible to imagine that this might have been Putin’s true intention.
A possible contender for “world record in bizarreness”, Seagal’s own reality show was, in 2008, invited to Phoenix by sheriff Joe Arpaio to film a season and partake in police work. The apex of the season was probably when Seagal arrived at the scene of an alleged cockfighting ring driving a tank through the suspect’s gate; 115 roosters and a pet puppy were apparently killed in the process; Seagal summed up the operation by claiming that animal cruelty was one of his pet peeves. (That said, America’s most pressing problem, which Seagal learned while working with Arapaio, is its open borders.) In 2014 Seagal also considered running for governor of Arizona. Here is an interesting take on the similarities between Steven Seagal and Donald Trump, in case you thought he would have been guaranteed to lose.
A staunch defender of gun rights, Seagal has argued that the mass shootings that have occurred in the US are false flag operations with the intent to create unbearable restrictions for gun owners. He has also proposed that the solution to mass shootings is to have armed guards at every single school.
Honorable mention also to Seagal’s woo-based energy drink, the Lightning Bolt energy drink, “the only all natural 100% juice energy drink on the market”, which allows the consumer to “partake of the true Asian Experience”.
Diagnosis: A silly celebrity loon. But remember: so was Donald Trump.
Patrick Scrivener
A.k.a. Noel Kilkenny
Patrick Scrivener is an ostensibly Irish-born, incoherent, fundamentalist conspiracy theorist (we use “ostensibly” since we are unsure whether we can trust a word of what he says). Scrivener’s main schtick seems to be the belief that Catholicism is some sort of Satanic conspiracy; in fact, according to Scrivener “the Papacy has been controlled by the British Secret Service from it’s [sic] creation” – yes, you read it correctly – not unlike most other ills that affect what Scrivener takes to be “our flat earth” (oh yes, that too). To explain the British Secret Service connection: “The British Empire WAS the Roman Empire after 313 AD when Druid Constantine became Emperor. The British Empire lost Britain in 410 but continued in Rome. The continuation continued [sic] after the Fall of Rome in 476 because the Papacy was under control of the British. The British Empire regained Britain after the Norman Conquest.”
To give you some flavor of Scrivener’s scholarship, it is worth quoting him at some length; the following is collected from his criticisms of the website Fundies say the darndest things, which have naturally picked up some of Scrivener’s observations:
“Fundies Say The Dardest Things is a M16 controlled website to discredit my exposing of the great conspiracy! M16 agents on Fundies Say The Dardest Things post my articles on The Reformation Online onto this site because the site’s title makes it seem like the people who’s posts end up here are crazy! Fundies Say The Dardest Things want me to seem crazy [Fstdt doesn’t really deserve the credit for that] to prevent people from taking my words about Joshua of Nazareth, the Flat Earth, the Jesuits, and the British seriously. When Joshua of Nazareth claimed to be the messiah, the Pharisees tried to discredit him by calling him crazy [Scrivener is just like Jesus].However he gained so many followers that they decided to crucify him. Joshua of Nazareth lived in the Roman Empire. The British Empire was established in 313 AD when Druid Jesus Constantine became Emperor. The British learned of the strategy of discrediting their opponents from the Romans. Jesus Constantine created the Latin Church. The Papacy has been controlled by the British Secret Service from it’s creation. The Pharisees originally mocked Joshua the Messiah but Joshua gained so many followers that they decided to crucify him.” And now that M16 is on to him, as demonstrated by the fact that Fstdt has picked up his quotes? “The British Empire will eventually send James Bond to assasinate me [!] for exposing their conspiracy. But I will not cower in fear to the British. I will continue to expose the diabolical conspiracy and preach the truth about the messiah to save the souls of those who read my site from Hades.”
No, the James Bond reference isn’t just a figure of speech. According to Scrivener “[t]here was a real James Bond that existed”, namely Jackie Kennedy: “Jackie Kennedy was the female James Bond. Licensed to kill James Bond was a fictional character created by Ian Fleming, but the real life career of the female James Bond far surpasses any of the plots in his spy novels.” Kennedy was for instance instrumental in bringing Fidel Castro to power – apparently Castro was a CIA agent: “what eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis was the close ties between CIA Castro and MI6 Nikita Khrushchev” (no further detail given, unfortunately) – and married JFK on orders from the M16, before assassinating him and later RFK. Evidence? According to Scrivener “it can be proven conclusively that she was completely OWNED by the Agency”; it is unfortunate that he doesn’t try to, you know, supply the proof. Anyways, “[t]here are more James Bonds. Daniel Craig’s James Bond is based on an MI6 agent that is after me. Proof of it is a meme an MI6 agent did on the internet. Luckily I have guns in my house to defend myself.” That last sentence should perhaps give rise to some concern.
Of course, it’s conspiracies all the way down. Did you know that “Queen Elizabeth I(Shakespeare) […] was secretly part of the Latin Church and was planning to surrender England to the Spanish Armada”? Bet you didn’t – and by the way, Mary Stuart’s rule “shows the consequences of letting women rule over men!”. As for Elizabeth Shakespeare: “Queen Elizabeth I went under the identity of Shakespeare because the name of the Virgin Goddess Athena means ‘Shakespearer’ so as the Virgin Queen she wanted to symbolize Athena and the Virgin Mary since she was a secret Latin Church member. However Shakespeare’s identity was kept a secret to prevent people from finding out.” That is not what “because” means. Nor did you probably know that James Earl Ray “was brainwashed by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron”at the Montreal and Expo67, which Scrivener coincidentally attended (“It’s a small non-rotating world after all!!”), and“then sent south to be the fall guy or ‘patsy’ for the upcoming MI6/CIA assassination of Martin Luther King.”
Moreover, according to Scrivener, “Christianity has been proven to be the one true religion. The evidence that Christianity is the true religion is the historical documents of Joshua of Nazareth, and the fact that bible prophecies have been fulfilled. The Bible fortold that the NATION of Tyre would never again be found. That prophecy was fulfilled because since it’s fall there has not been a nation called Tyre. The city of Tyre is currently in the nation of Lebanon.” As proofs go, this one exhibits some shortcomings.
Oh, and flat earth: According to Scrivener, “[t]he ‘space age’ was launched to undermine the foundation of the earth!! Even though children were exposed to the ball earth when they first entered kindergarten, it wasn’t until the dawn of the ‘space age’ that thinking people were forced to accept it as a ‘scientific’ fact.” This is not entirely correct. Scrivener’s main point, though, is that the idea of a spherical Earth is a conspiracy created by Satan: “The fact that the earth is stationary and flat is the very foundation of Christianity […] Satan knows that he must undermine the foundation in order to enthrone is mother goddess.” How did Satan get the conspiracy going? Well, the answer is worth another somewhat lengthy quote:
“Jesuit ‘Sir’ Isaac Newton invented GRAVITY to explain why the oceans, and all living things, stick to a rotating ball earth. Newton was a bitter foe of the Fifth Monarchy Men, and he spent most of his life studying the Book of Daniel and Revelation in order to refute them. Gravity did away with antipodes or men walking upside down in the Southern hemisphere. According to Jerome’s corrupt Latin Vulgate Version, the earth is suspended in space by NOTHING:He stretched out the north over the empty space (Lat. super vacuum) and hangeth the earth upon nothing (Lat . super nihili). (Job 26:7, Douay-Rheims Version). That is an apt description of the earth according to Newton: A ball hanging in SPACE suspended by NOTHING or GRAVITY. Newton’s ‘law of universal gravitation’ states that ‘a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.’ In other words, the further an object is from another, the less the gravitational attraction. To prove this bizarre theory, astronots aboard a fake ISS are shown in ‘zero gravity.’ Remove gravity from the fake Newtonian system [gravity-denialism is a common feature of flat earth conspiracy theories] and the foundation is as unstable as water. That has not prevented NASA from spending billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up their crumbling foundatiuon. To go to so much trouble to exalt a female pagan deity is beyond belief
Scrivener was no fan of Hillary Clinton either, seeing right through her campaign to the British-Satanic-Round-Earth-Zionist-Catholic plot beneath: “Hillary in the White House is a vital part of the ‘Virgin Mary’ Co-Redemptrix dogma!! Hillary in the White House is a vital cog in the Rockefeller/Vatican scheme to force acceptance of that dogma worldwide: For all nations (UN) have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication [sic], the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury (Revelation 18:3). On 9/11, the official Hillary double was introduced. Hillary can run the White House vicariously through her double like she ruled the nation during the Presidency of her husband. The official Hillary double was introduced on 9/11. That date was so appropriate because Jay and Hillary Rockefeller engineered the 9/11 false flag operation. If Hillary is placed in the White House, both Russia and the United States will have doppelganger Presidents. For the past 500 years, with very few exceptions, female rulers have been bitter persecutors of Christianity [followed by a list of pseudohistorical examples pulled straight from Scrivener’s deranged imagination.]”
If you dig into his oeuvre, you’ll find deep sea monsters and free energy stuff as well, and that’s just scratching the surface. Scrivener’s website is here, and is worth a visit – at least it will give you all the details about how smart Scrivener is (Irish Gaelic “was not that difficult to learn because it used the letters of the English alphabet!!”).
Diagnosis: Possibly the most delusional person with regular internet access in the US at the moment. Probably harmless, though his proclamation that “I have guns in my house to defend myself” is somewhat disconcerting.