1. [Bobby] needs some solid legal experience and this job should provide it. --President John F. Kennedy joking to Department of Justice official Ronald Goldfarb about why he appointed his brother US Attorney General.


    Imagine President Joseph Biden aggressively acting to save the career and reputation of a small-town Republican politician mired in scandal.

    Sounds crazy, right? It probably is, nowadays. That’s probably why President Joe never did such a thing. But John Kennedy did, with the help of his brother Robert.

    Cincinnati native George Ratterman (left) played football for Notre Dame during the 1940s. After school he turned pro, ultimately quarterbacking the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants, where in 1950 he led the NFL in passing. During this time he also picked up a law degree. A bonafide sports hero, he retired from the game in 1956 and returned to the Queen City area, settling in the suburb of Newport, directly across the river from the downtown Cincinnati skyline. He served as general counsel for the players union for the rest of the 1950s, while occasionally performing piano concerts.

    Like many of his neighbors, Ratterman became increasingly irritated about the crime and corruption that had become entrenched in Newport, and he decided to do something about it. In 1961 he ran for Campbell County sheriff on a law and order platform, vowing to get rid of the gangsters infesting his city.

     In other words, he ran on a promise to drive the Mafia out of Northern Kentucky.

    By 1961, Newport had become a real free-for-all, hence its nickname, Sin City. Local historians will tell you that the city’s walk on the wild side began during the Civil War, when soldiers under the command of General Joseph Hooker frequently crossed the Ohio to receive favors from professional camp followers colloquially known as Hooker’s Brigade, or Hooker’s Division.* During Prohibition, Newport sported a growing number of speakeasies, many of which operated back-room slots and other games of chance. These establishments initially specialized in the homemade brews made famous by local citizens (i.e., moonshine, mountain dew, white lightening). But they eventually began importing booze from Canada through mob-connected bootleggers: some from the Capone operation out of Chicago, some from a branch of the Genovese family operating out of Cleveland.


    The success of the sex, gaming and alcohol industries got the attention of the Genovese family. Starting in 1927 they began taking over the entire operation. They’d either buy you out in a deal you literally couldn’t refuse, or they’d force you to pay them exorbitant fees for protection.** Sure, some locals tried to resist giving up a piece of their action to what they might have considered Yankee outsiders. And for those foot-draggers, the mob had a special harassment technique they called “Ding-Donging.” If you didn’t sell or pay the extortion, a bunch of goons would come over to your place of business, whip out their richards, and piss on anything or anybody they could reach.

    Class act, huh? Well it did the trick.

    The mob influence extended into local politics. As I’ve said before on this blog, organized crime simply cannot exist without help from officials, whether its on the state, local or national level. This became especially handy after Prohibition, when vice lords, whether Mafia or not, expanded the gaming operations with full knowledge and assistance of local police and politicians. Indeed, they remodeled the gaming experience to resemble what most of us now would recognize as modern casinos, complete with colorful decor and plush carpeting.*** Two of them, the Lookout House and the Beverly Hills Supper Club drew such a-list performers as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Don Rickles, Marilyn Monroe, and (believe it or not) Ozzie and Harriet Nelson to entertain gamblers from all over the country, despite the fact that gambling was quite illegal in Kentucky during this time.****

    Yup. This was a town where you could openly booze it up, gamble away your children’s college fund and get laid with impunity. Of course, these vices might actually put you in danger of the sporadic but deadly violence that accompanies mob operations. Newport had truly earned the sobriquet Sin City. Hence the irritation of one former NFL star named George Ratterman.

    Of course, the mobsters didn’t take kindly to Ratterman’s crusade, and wouldn't take it lying down. They acted. On the evening of 8 May 1961, persons connected to the Cleveland syndicate drugged him, transported him to Suite 314 of the Glenn-Tropicana hotel, and put him into bed with local stripper Juanita Hodges (right), better known to local history by her stage name, April Flowers. They posed her and George's nude bodies to make it look as though they were having a rendezvous. A photographer, hired specifically for the occasion, took pictures.

    Ratterman came to with no memory of what had taken place. But it didn’t take long for him to figure it out after his arrest by Newport police during the wee hours of 9 May. Fortunately for him, blood tests taken quickly after his arrest showed high concentrations of chloral hydrate, the drug most often used in a Mickey Finn.

    It’s no secret that upon his assumption of the Oval Office President Kennedy and his brother Robert aggressively attacked the Mafia. While many are aware of their involvement in such things as the Hoffa trial and the Valachi hearings, many say that their war on the Mob actually began in 1961 with their defense of George Ratterman.

    Before Ratterman’s abduction, Robert Kennedy had already assigned Justice Department official Ronald Goldfarb to investigate corruption and Mafia-backed crime in Newport. Fortunately for Ratterman, he and RFK had a mutual friend, Cincinnati-based attorney William Geoghegan. Geoghegan brought Bobby's attention to the case and suggested he look into it..  Bobby and Jack agreed to do so. The positive chloral hydrate tested helped considerably, for it was strong evidence affirming Ratterman’s claims. It also didn’t hurt that both JFK and RFK were ardent football fans who liked Ratterman as a player.*****

    The Kennedys enlisted Democratic Kentucky Governor Bertram Combs to assist twenty-five FBI Special Agents during their investigation of the Ratterman case -- over the objections of Director J. Edgar Hoover. Not only did the G-Men prove Ratterman’s innocence, but they gathered enough evidence to convict Glenn-Tropicana owners Charles Lester and Edward Buccieri on federal charges of conspiring with Thomas Paisley, Tito Carnci and Newport Police Detectives Patrick Ciafardini, Upshire White and Joseph Quitter to deny Ratterman of his civil rights.******

    Once cleared, Ratterman easily won election, but quit politics altogether after his term expired four years later. He passed away in 2007.

    Over the course of the investigation, grand juries handed down indictments to City Commissioner Paul Baker, Chief of Police Donald Faulkner, and 131 other Newport officials, nearly the entirety of city government. Succeeding administrations would hammer away at the mob’s hold over the next two decades.

    The Mafia, tired of putting up with increasing local resentment and stricter laws with stricter enforcement, simply moved their operations to Las Vegas, where gambling and other enterprises were legal. The last vestige of mob influence disappeared in the early-1980s.

    Meanwhile, the Lookout House and the Beverly Hills Supper Club both burned to the ground, in 1973 and 1977 respectively. The latter resulted in the deaths of 165 patrons and staff. Many locals see both fires as suspicious and most likely connected to lingering mob activity.

    We, of course, know how Jack and Bobby fared in all of this. Many believe their commitment to rid the nation of organized crime motivated such Mafia players as Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante to assist in their assassinations.

    As for April Flowers, I’m not sure about her fate. I’m guessing that she turned into May Showers.

    _________________

    *According to popular legend this is the origin of the term “hooker,” meaning a sex worker. But many sources point out that the word had been in usage decades before the general’s campaigns in the Cincinnati area.

    **According to most local historians the Cleveland branch of the Genovse family operated the casinos and speakeasy, while the New York faction administered the strip clubs and prostitution interests.

    ***Hence they were locally known as “carpet joints,” denoting their elegance and opulence, as opposed to the hole-in-the-wall accouterments of so-called “bust out joints.”

    ****Side note: Before he became famous, Dean Martin actually worked at the Beverly Hills Supper Club as a blackjack dealer.

    *****In fact, Bobby and Jack fantasized about owning an NFL franchise after their political careers had ended.

    ******Paisley, a friend of Ratterman, introduced George to Carinci on the pretense of a business proposition, specifically opening up a restaurant in New York. The two took Ratterman to the Glenn-Tropicana, where the ex-football star consumed the beverage that knocked him out. Both were acquitted. Also acquitted were Detectives Ciafardini, White and Quitter. The court found that even though they had violently assaulted Ratterman during the arrest, they simply responded to the call, and did not participate in any facet of the plot. Lester and Bucieri, who were connected to the Cleveland Genoveses, called Hodges to Suite 314, called the photographer and then the police in an effort to create what they hoped would be a career-ending scandal.

    A 1966 appellate court decision upheld Lester and Buccieri’s conviction, also noting “ample evidence” connected Carinci and Paisley to the plot.

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  2. By now, it's become a bit of cliche:  everyone seems to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when learning of the JFK assassination.

    Everyone includes a guy named Michael Aday, a Dallas native, who says that he went on a wild ride with a Secret Service agent who commandeered his automobile.  

    Below is a clip of Aday, using the nickname most people know him by, recounting the incident with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

     

     

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  3. Below is the recollection of JFK assassination witness Linda Willis, interviewed in 1991 and posted by Encyclopedia Britannica. 


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  4.  I'm a bit delayed in posting the next real item here due to meatspace circumstances.  We're dealing with the illness of a close family member, and it's something that has literally kept me up all night for the past two weeks. Along with other family members, I've kept watch during the night.  While their vigilance has afforded me the only sleep I could get, I still had to wake up multiple times due to the fact that I'm the only one who can physically lift him.  

    We got a slow start in researching the next post.  Don't know when I'll put it up.  But I'm putting in this place holder so that everyone will know that at least I am okay.

     

     


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  5. In July 2006, I posted a seven-part series chronicling an incident in my weird past. It was about a friend, referred to as Miss Texas, who mysteriously vanished amid a haze of intrigue involving the CIA, federal AIDS research, sex-trafficking, false identities and one highly encrypted 3.5 inch floppy disc. Police in New York, Lubbock and Denton Texas investigated her disappearance, but never found her.

    Throughout the series I stressed the fact that I never came close to believing the bizarre story she had spun for me. I mean, she constantly stressed to me her fear that she would be “disappeared” by some government agent, and that she relied upon my help not to disappear. I’d play along, but never took her seriously until that fateful day she stepped into oblivion. So naturally, I began to wonder if what she told me had been true in part. Worse, I fretted that my actions, or more accurately my inaction, might have played some role in her fate, whatever that was. I sometimes berated myself thinking, if only I had believed her.

    I’d go through a similar scenario when, two years later, someone else briefly entered the periphery of my life. She was an acquaintance of someone who would become a good friend of mine, a young woman whom I’d met only weeks earlier in meatspace after a month of conversing with her in an AOL writers chatroom. A., my friend, introduced us, saying, “X., this is Susan. She’s a writer too.”

    “Cool,” I said, during the customary handshake. “What are you working on?”

    Instead of answering right away, the steely-eyed blonde gave me the once over, her mouth pursed in a straight line. In retrospect, I believe she was sizing me up to see whether or not she should respond. About three seconds after my query she replied, “I’m working with James Ridgeway on a series of articles about the infiltration of New York and New Jersey strip clubs by the Russian mafia.”

    “Sounds interesting,” I said. Out loud. But inside my head, I thought the woman was full of shit. By then, I was quite familiar with James Ridgeway’s work, as a faithful reader of the Village Voice, Mother Jones and other progressive-leaning periodicals. I’d seen a number of his documentaries, starting with Blood in the Face, a movie about white supremacist movements in the US. I even had the honor of speaking with him one-on-one for about an hour. Since his beat consisted of leftist political concerns, strip clubs and post-Soviet gangsters didn’t seem to me a subject that would interest him. What’s more, the world inhabited by A. and Susan seemed a universe apart from his. Where the hell would he have made contact with someone like Susan, I wondered.* The thought seemed a bit grandiose too, something indulging in a James-Bond type of fantasy that involved illicit sex.

    I last spoke to A. in 2002.  After that, we lost touch. So I couldn’t find her when I learned, thanks to a 2003 story airing on National Public Radio, that Susan had mysteriously vanished about six months after this introduction. Truth be told, I didn’t even notice at the time because she was such a minor figure in my life. Even so, I felt bad that neither A. nor I realized something had gone wrong with her at the time. And even when you’re talking about a distant acquaintance, someone whom you would have spoken to on five occasions at most, learning about their catastrophe from the national media is somewhat jarring. What’s worse: I realized from the press coverage that I had misjudged her. She was on the level when she told me about her relationship to Ridgeway, and the work that they had done together.

    Ridgeway published the book in June of 1996. Titled Redlight, it is replete with photos by Sylvia Plachy.  Ridgeway credited Susan as its researcher. At the release party that month, Susan, visibly out of sorts according to many sources, expressed her fears of being disappeared by either the Russian mafia, Russian intelligence, or the CIA.

    And, a month later she vanished, just as she had feared.** Like my friend Miss Texas, she did so amid a web of intrigue just as intense as that spun by the self-proclaimed Lone Star beauty queen. Miss Texas only feared the CIA. Susan not only feared the CIA, mobsters and the SVR, but also a stalker and a bunch of Gen Xers fancying themselves vampires.*** Miss Texas garnered no national headlines, even though the authorities officially investigated her disappearance as well. I guess that’s what happens when your fate has nothing to do with the sex industry or the undead. But they had other things in common. Both left children behind. Both women had a roughly similar physical appearance. Both feared that some shadowy organization wanted to get them. They were roughly the same age, born only three years apart.  Most critical to the point I want to make here, they also shared my personal opinion of them as liars.

    Of course, when I found out the truth about Susan, I felt terrible for disbelieving her when it turns out that the story she gave me was accurate to the letter. But while saddened by her plight, I didn’t feel guilt over it. I barely knew the woman. I had no part in her disappearance. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent this particular series of events from happening.

    But Miss Texas was another story. I had been wracked by guilt for not extending myself further -- a small price to pay for the protection of a friend. Maybe I could have reacted more strongly instead of just playing along.  And I would have had I believed her from the start.

    That was the primary purpose for posting about Miss Texas fifteen years ago. I wanted to share the story, as it actually happened, taking great pains not to embellish, speculate or sensationalize it to see if what she told me was, in fact, credible to most people. Many  commenters regarded the story with a jaundiced eye in the least, with some vacillating on whether it was true, and others seeing the series as a piece of fiction from beginning to end. I found their skepticism quite reassuring. If they didn’t believe the story she told, then why should I? And if I had no basis for belief, then I could at least reason with myself that my inaction was justified. I mean, who can act upon a story that spurious? And Miss Texas was unlike Susan in a key aspect. As limited as our conversations were, Susan never told me anything that didn’t turn out to be the gospel truth. Miss Texas, on the other hand, provably and repeatedly lied to me.

    Two years after I posted the series on Miss Texas, a strange e-mail came to my inbox. The subject header read, “Delete after reading.” The missive itself contained only one thing: a link to a YouTube video. I copy-pasted the link to another browser, and lo and behold I saw the face of Miss Texas staring back at me. She didn’t look all that different than when I last saw her, so I wondered when she shot the video. Some time into it, she made an off-hand allusion to the events of 11 September 2001, so she had to have been alive for at least six years since I saw her last.

    My first reaction was that of elation. She was alive and well, and I was now off the hook.

    I don’t know who sent me this e-mail. My best guess is that Miss Texas somehow came across the series I had written about her. Because of details in it that no one else should know, such as conversations between the two of us, she might have realized who I was. Maybe she wanted to let me know that she was okay, and that I could finally drop the albatross I had around my neck for almost fifteen years by that point.

    You’ll note that I refer to Susan Young Walsh by her actual name, but not Miss Texas. On the one hand that's because Susan is most likely deceased and thus free of consequence.  She also deserves props for some impressive accomplishments and abilities.  On the other hand, my elation over finding Miss Texas quickly turned to sadness and a twinge of shame when I learned of her activities after our last meeting. Since she’s still among the living, and, believe it or not, I still consider her a friend, I won’t post her real name here (although I’ve probably given enough information in this post to identify her, if someone wants to spend a day sleuthing the Internet).

    During the late-1990s and for all of the Twenty-First Century, Miss Texas, and her husband, have propagated an unfathomable amount of misinformation about parapolitics in general, and about one conspiracy story specifically.

    You see, the charges made by QAnon folks and their sympathizers -- that there’s a band of liberal insiders who are sex-trafficking minors, killing them after they’re no longer useful and drinking their blood -- originated in a mythology that Miss Texas helped to create in substantial part.**** She even gave this tale the name most commonly associated with it, Project Monarch. The reckless and unsubstantiated accusations made against such notables as Lecil Martin (better known to history as Boxcar Willie) undermined the credibility of the subject matter it claimed to champion: specifically, the accusation that CIA indoctrinated children into clandestine services through drugs, radiation, and coercive behavioral modification. Moreover, most of this training had to do with compromising US officials through sexual blackmail, or in other words catching them in the act and then blackmailing them.

    The original story upon which the Monarch mythos latched onto actually had evidence which included sworn statements, sworn testimony, and medical records. In a 1995 Presidential Radiation Commission hearing two witnesses, Claudia Mullen and Christine deNicola testified that CIA-backed doctors had used radiation as part of their psychological training to become child sex spies.***** I cannot say for certain whether the story is true or not. But I can tell you that it found credibility in the international press, especially in Canada. In the United States, the commission took it seriously at the time. In their report, The Human Radiation Experiments, in a chapter titled “Government Standards for HumanExperimentation: The 1960s and 1970s [pg. 106’],” they concluded:


    Central Intelligence Agency documents suggest that radiation was part of the MKULTRA program and that the agency considered and explored uses of radiation for these purposes [i.e. psychological coercion]. However, the documents that remain from MKULTRA, at least as currently brought to light, do not show that the CIA itself carried out any of these proposals on human subjects.


    Starting in January 1996, a number of reports had hit the mainstream press. I call them the “whackadoodle” stories, parodies of the 1995 testimony that destroyed all belief in its subject matter. Miss Texas was among those spreading this new tale. Problem was, there could have been children affected by a real program along these lines. Discrediting this story effectively meant discrediting them, forcing them to either face hostile incredulity, or keep the trauma to themselves.

    Of course, maybe that was the point. In conspiracy lore we often hear accusations and counter-accusations that such-and-such is a “disinformation specialist,” a person who deliberately clouds the waters of parapolitical inquiry in order to deflect public interest away from an accurate story, and steer it towards an inaccurate one. 

    Did Miss Texas actively and witting act in this capacity? Hell if I know. Hopefully not. Her husband has certainly claimed to be a part of the United States Intelligence Community (USIC), although I have no idea if that’s true.

    Whatever the case, her propagation of this story would have consequences other than silencing putative victims of an alleged program. As it has now become incorporated in the QAnon narrative, it now has a ton of parapolitical and political ramifications that threaten the nation as a whole.

    The public often demands unambiguous, bottom-line answers to complex questions. Either everything is a conspiracy, or nothing is a conspiracy. People bringing forth these stories are either whistleblowers or hoaxers, or perhaps delusional. We typically have neither time nor patience to assess the particulars of each strange account, and form an opinion based on pre-judgment.  As you can see from this post, I’ve been guilty of this tendency myself. In both cases, I decided both Susan and Miss Texas had given me a tall tale. Likewise, most people today regard any conspiracy story as patently false.

    Unfortunately, someone has to pay the consequences for accepting a false story simply because it fits with their experiential, ideological or moral perspective. In this case that might possibly include actual victims, if the Radiation Commission testimony is accurate. It definitely includes those who died in the Capitol siege occurring 6 January 2021.

    Likewise, someone has to pay the consequences for not accepting a true story because it sounds too out-there to believe. In this case, those who live with the stress of intrigue, a stress that might induce them to self-medicate or consider self-harm, or permanently estrange themselves from their loved ones, or whose private lives become fodder for the national press, or who very well might have been murdered because of their shadow existence, also bear a heavy burden.******

    As it goes with life, one moves on. On the minuscule possibility she’s alive, and can read this post, I’m hoping that Susan will regard it as my apology to her. As for Miss Texas, I’ve pitched everything that she left in my apartment, including that nice beige winter coat. I had to: (1) because I have no doubt that she has since replaced it; and (2) the moths had gotten to it.

    _____________________

    *Because of outside sources, I can now answer that question. Susan had penned some articles for Screw magazine during the early-1990s. Ridgeway contacted Screw’s publisher, Al Goldstein, when researching his own story on strip clubs, asking if he had a reporter who knew anything about the subject. Goldstein personally recommended Susan, and arranged their introduction.

    **The disappearance of Susan Walsh has become fodder for the true crime genre, with podcasts, television segments, a documentary and a Wikipedia article devoted to her case.

    Also, there happens to be another blonde woman named Susan Walsh who also disappeared. Unlike the one referred to here, she came out of hiding and has since talked to the press.

    ***Something unknown to me at the time, but recounted in most of the media about her was that Susan had fallen victim to substance abuse around the time I met her. Doctors had also diagnosed her as bipolar.  Consequently, some believe that she might have committed suicide. Some online amateur detectives apparently believe that she was disappeared by her husband, Mark. But Nutley, NJ police have emphatically ruled him out as a suspect, and there is honestly no evidence that I’ve seen that he’s in the least bit culpable. Rumors also abound that she was kidnapped and forced into the sex industry of Russia, or that her drug dealers killed her because she owed them too much money. And people have reported sightings of her after 1996, indicating that she simply ran away to start a new life. All of the above is purely speculative, with no real evidence to back it up.

    ****At the end of the original series, I speculated that someone who looked a little like Miss Texas might be her, although I doubted it at the time because of differences in physical features. Turns out that it wasn’t her, although she bears some resemblance to Miss Texas. Not only that, but they have worked together in the creation of Monarch mythology. They, and another woman who also bears a resemblance to her contributed as well.

    *****Because of their purported neurological effects, radiated materials were said by some to be a means for mind control, or as the late Dr. Margaret Singer would call it, thought reform.

    ******In a review of cold case files conducted in 2006, Nutley police announced that there was “clear” evidence of homicide in Susan’s disappearance. But to date, nothing has developed since on the case, and that evidence has yet to reach the public.

     

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  6. On 28 November 2017, an anonymous user posted an item on the /pol/ board of 4chan claiming to have top-level Q-clearance. In a thread titled “The Calm before the Storm,” he, she or they claimed that high -ranking military officials were secretly meeting to coordinate a simultaneous sting resulting in the arrests of 100 or more prominent persons for conspiracy. Specifically, they accused President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of trafficking young children for the sexual and culinary delights of an elite secret cabal funded by that perennial bugbear of right-wing conspiracism George Soros.* It would seem that after getting their rocks off on the kiddies, these stars and their high-powered comrades would supposedly kill and eat them.  Afterward they would drink their blood in praise of Satan. Most important, the only one who could conquer these forces, stop the madness and restore order was the current occupant of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump, with help from former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

    Okay. That’s a lot to unpack, especially with respect to irony. To start with, 4chan itself has had a history of posting child pornography on its site.** Second, there is such a thing as Q-clearance. Problem is, it only exists within the Department of Energy for purposes of monitoring issues pertaining to nuclear power.*** The source also said that military brass had something to do with the planning of these stings.  Their actions would fall within the purview of the Department of Defense. Yet, the source here is talking about mass arrests, which would be a matter for the Department of Justice, specifically the FBI and the US Marshals. In other words, whoever posted this showed betrayed a serious lack of knowledge about how the United States government actually works. It’s also curious when you consider that more credible stories along these lines (i.e., cases of alleged child sex-trafficking with actual evidence, such as in the Franklin Credit Union Scandal) all implicated right-wing political figures, whereas the targets of these allegations are almost exclusively in the political center and moderately liberal.

    And to top it off, an alliance between Trump and Mueller? A man who gave evidentiary credence to the notion that the former’s Presidency was in substantial part aided by an enemy nation?

    Irony aside, this initial post brought to mind Pizzagate, an unfounded allegation that Clinton had run a child sex-trafficking ring at a restaurant popular with Democratic politicos. During the first year of the Trump administration, a some social media influencers attempted to resurrect the story long after one of the believers of this story, Edgar Welch, ironically proved it untrue by actively going to the restaurant in question and looking for the missing kids, in the process firing three shots from his rifle. One of these influencers, a YouTuber by the name of Tracy Diaz, found support from a like-minded party using the account handle CrusadersPost. CP wished her a happy birthday that April. Four days after Q-clearance (Q for short) posted about an upcoming political storm, Diaz posted the first of what we would now come to know as the QAnon videos on YouTube. Naturally, the video blew up, as the kids say, and spawned other videos. Diaz subsequently increased her involvement on Twitter and Reddit.

    The kicker: a Reuters investigation by Joseph Menn found that CrusadersPost and other social media users encouraging Diaz had accounts originating in Russia.  She posted the video on 2 November 2017. By months end, these accounts would post the character string ‘QAnon’ in excess of 17,000 times, thus severely amplifying the story and spreading it out to a wider circle of internet users.

    The strategy was consistent with Russian disinformation strategies. As Nina Jankowicz explained to NBC News:

    One of the Kremlin’s favorite tactics is to inspire confusion and doubt to sow distrust in government. Qanon certainly does that....

    Amplifying the conspiracy theory also makes it look like it has more supporters, distracting from more substantive issues in the online discourse.

    One of the more fascinating aspects of QAnon is the technical savvy of its propagators. They demonstrated an intense awareness of the algorithms that govern such social media platforms as YouTube. As explained during the first two episodes of the New York Times podcast Rabbit Hole, YouTube’s initial algorithms attempted to find what a user tends to watch through his or her previous searches, and then provide links for suggested content that is somehow linked through theme or keyword. Consequently, the links you click on could lead to other material that is similar, but not identical to, the content you were originally watching.

    Eventually, you could very well find yourself watching QAnon material when you started out interested in something else. People curious about the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations could very well funnel down to the level of Q. Usually, however, it’s the more unsubstantiated conspiracy hypotheses that can get you there faster. This would include flat-earth followers, anti-vaxers and Covid-deniers. But parapolitics are hardly the only chutes leading down to Q-Land. QAnon adherents have wandered in because of an interest in medicine/holistic health, video games and other vestiges of popular culture.****

    You would be correct in assuming that the bulk of Q-activity and interest occurs online, with very little happening in meatspace. However, the small part that oozes out of cyberspace packs quite a wallop in the real world. Two QAnon proponents, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, won elections to the US House of Representatives.***** In a bizarre turn of events, QAnon supporter Anthony Comello blew away Gambino family crime boss Francesco Cali on 13 March believing the Mafioso to be part of this Satanic baby-eating cult.

    True, we usually don’t mourn the death of mobsters. Yet Comello had no evidence of a conspiracy, let alone Cali’s guilt or complicity in it. One therefore has to realize that a person rationalizing the murder of a Mafia man can also rationalize the murder of anyone else he mistakes for an organized criminal, for example an innocent person whose last name sounds Italian. And why stop there? He might shoot anyone he thinks looks Italian American, whether they are or not.

    By now, you’re probably thinking, “C’mon, that's kinda extreme.  Who’d be that fanatic and that daffy?” I dunno. Who’d be fanatic and daffy enough to storm the Capitol to lynch the sitting Vice President of the United States?

    Comello’s actions highlight a larger issue, one that many political pundits and the majority of the public have given voice to: namely the irrationality of QAnon. Indeed some have begun to view the movement as a cult. To be honest and fair, I must reserve judgment on that, for I have difficulty seeing their actions and beliefs, strictly speaking, as such although I concede the fact that there are many cult-like aspects to them. First of all, there’s the charismatic leader figure, namely Trump. But unlike other cults, the leader does not issue specific orders for his minions to obey. Rather, it’s more the case that senior members of the movement attempt to divine the will and intent of the leader and his messenger, Q. Unlike cults where mandatory verbatim of the catechisms lead to a machine-like precision of message, QAnon people learn a number of data, much of which have no empirical basis and more likely represent someone improvising random statistics off the tops of their heads. Members repeat them, of course but in their own language, resulting not in a machine-like precision but rather a near machine-like imprecision. While you might think that’s a small distinction, this would be more analogous to someone hearing talking points on Fox (or for that matter MSNBC) and propagating them through conversation and social media.

    Arguably the most cult-like element, the tendency of QAnonners to distance or isolate themselves from friends and family, might give us the best understanding of what’s going on. As Kelly Weill wrote in a 23 December 2018 Daily Beast article:

    Kimberly’s boyfriend was tired of hearing the QAnon videos she watched around their small apartment. To keep the peace, she started keeping the videos to herself. ‘I live in headphones now…. My boyfriend is...I don’t know how to describe it. We have very different views. He does not think this QAnon thing is anything except nonsense. I drastically disagree…..’

    Travis View is a researcher monitoring the QAnon conspiracy. Over the course of the movement, he’s seen believers discuss a growing estrangement from loved ones.

    ‘People in the QAnon community often talk about alienation from family and friends…[though] they typically talk about how Q frayed their relationships on private Facebook groups. But they think these issues are temporary and primarily the fault of others. They often comfort themselves by imagining that there will be a moment of vindication sometime in the near future which will prove their beliefs right. They imagine that after this happens, not only will their relationships be restored, but people will turn them as leaders who understand what's going on better than the rest of us.’

     

    Here, Weill is referring to an issue I’ve brought up before on The X-Spot when talking about the Children of God cult. Antinomianism denotes the belief in a secret knowledge that the rest of the world either ignores, or cannot understand. Sociologist Dr. Stephen Kent (University of Alberta), an expert on new religious movements, says that one typically finds this in coercive cults. It’s a means by which a cult can convince itself that they alone know the truth, and that they alone can take the necessary action to save humanity from itself, even if that action is illegal, immoral or fatal to the adherent.

    While QAnon has leadership, it does not seem to reflect not so much a top-down authoritarian structure with those at the bottom constantly supplicating their superiors for attention, credit, favor, or in many cases food, shelter and water, as would occur in most cults. Rather, leadership tends to serve more of a facilitating function, showing incoming members the ropes, divining the cryptic statements of Trump and Q, and so on. As you can see in the Daily Beast article, no one ordered Kimberly to stay away from her non-believing boyfriend (which is standard procedure in virtually all coercive cults). The rift developed because of her commitment to a belief rooted in status-anxiety, and a commitment to her peers, people she considers not below or above her, but rather equals who are newer to the cause or older. As View states in the above quote, these people see themselves as leaders of a new vanguard that saves America. The equality of the movement, which I see as one its most seductive features, indicates a belief that no one is indispensable. At the same time, no one is expendable, hence their oft-repeated mantra, “Where we go one, we go all.”

    If I wanted to slap the hell out of Trigger (or in other words beat a dead horse), I could also point out that the most senior QAnon member, Ron Watkins, son of 8chan proprietor Jim Watkins, suggested that other members “...go back to our lives as best we are able” after the inauguration of President Biden quashed all hope that Trump would miraculously serve a second term.****** As you’ve no doubt surmised, QAnon still exists, although reports disagree as to whether its growing or shrinking. So much for following the suggestion of leadership. Membership clearly acts on its own initiative, both collectively and individually.

    As Lt. Columbo would say, one more thing. Although its history and effects have spilled over into meatspace, as noted earlier in this post, QAnon has so far been a cyberspace phenomenon. It has relied on a closed loop of information sources and adherents who offer each other mutual support, what we used to call “strokes” in my graduate psychology classes. As with cults, people undergoing a nadir in their lives often reach out for support, especially to others who, at least initially during the lovebombing stage, accept them wholeheartedly and without question, in the process projecting the cult as the only entity that accepts them as special.

    Let’s see. Can you think of some recent event that has resulted in widespread crisis, financial hardship and isolation from social contacts? Something like a global pandemic?

    Fig. 1. Chart detailing the growth of QAnon

     

    As you can see in the above chart the growth of QAnon spiked in late-March of 2020, almost the exact time when most states required shutdown of all non-essential business and imposed curfews. In effect, these actions prohibited people from interacting face-to-face with their colleagues. If they worked for non-essential businesses, they were now out of a job. They couldn’t even commiserate with those in the same boat because the social hubs of bars and restaurants closed for indefinite periods. Many states even forbade gatherings of six or more people inside private homes. Those inflicted spent weeks in quarantine whether symptomatic or not.

    In short, we can see from this graphic that the spike of QAnon membership coincides with heightened anxiety on the international, national, local, community and personal level. And in perhaps the most devastating irony of all, the Q-people have, from the start, denied the existence of Coronavirus or downplayed its effects and prevalence. Along with other Trump acolytes most consistently resisted social-distancing measures, masks, the monitoring of symptoms, and ultimately vaccinations. It will probably be a long time before we can correlate their advocacy to the deaths of those in agreement with them, or the deaths of those following their advice. But the sad fact remains that the bigger they are, the bigger their body count.

    Oh, yeah. They can always blame that on Obama and Clinton, right?

    ___________________________

    *QAnon would cite actor Tom Hanks, model Chrissy Tiegen, songstress Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey comedian John Oliver and other notables as participants in this Satanic baby-eating cult. Some have noted that celebrities of color are over-represented in these lists, This jibes quite neatly with the study done by Dr. Diana Mutz (University of Pennsylvania, Political Science & Communications), who found that the election of Donald Trump represented a backlash against the first African American US President.

    **Ali Saad, Collin Campbell, Ronald Ohlson, Thaddeus Mitchell and an unidentified fifteen year-old were all arrested for downloading child pornography from 4chan. Also, when QAnon switched it’s main hosting venue to the message board 8chan, Mother Jones reporters AJ Vicens and Ali Breland discovered that the site’s owner, Jim Watkins, owned a number of domains expressly related to pedophilia.

    ***In 1997, Peter Benchley (of Jaws fame) penned a novel titled Q-Clearance. It’s easy to speculate that someone aware of the book applied this concept in this post because it was obscure and sounded cool.

    ****YouTube has since tweaked this algorithm in order to make this kind of linkage and rabbit hole effect less likely, especially with respect to controversial issues. It’s not that the videos have been removed from the site, necessarily. It’s just that they’re no longer as easy to find, because Google has limited their linkability.

    *****Greene posted a series of Tweets in defense of QAnon. Twitter has since deleted them. As reported in 2 August 2019 edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she added statements “...encouraging her followers to message her with questions so she can ‘walk you through the whole thing.’” Boebert endorsed Q-Anon on two web shows hosted by supporters. Both Greene and Boebert appear to have backed off from their support of QAnon since the inauguration of President Joseph Biden.

    ******A six-part 2021 HBO documentary titled Q: Into the Storm asserts that Ron Watkins was the person who posed as Q in the 28 November 2017 4chan post.

     

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  7. You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings…You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.

    --Populist politician Tom Watson, to an interracial audience in an 1892 speech made in Georgia.

     

    As I stated earlier, I had earlier planned to do a series on the Wilmington Massacre for years, but didn’t. I thought it important to show (1) a definite conspiracy that (2) received official recognition as such (albeit a century too late), that (3) deftly illustrates some of the mechanics and motivation of a true plot, one that could not be hidden because of its size and brazenness. I wanted to go more into detail about it. I wanted to do a better job with it.

    Still, I felt compelled to post the last three items because of their relevance to current events, an issue acutely noticed by those of you have commented. Indeed, the Wile E. Coyote coup attempt of 6 January 2021 bore some resemblance to the events occurring in Wilmington during the second week of November 1898, even though there were some key differences. The Wilmington coup successfully replaced a duly elected government. The January insurrection ended in over 400 arrests, numerous injuries to Capitol Police, and the death of one of the assailants. Wilmington was an attack on the local government. January 6 constituted an assault against the nation. Although the Wilmington coup rallied lower-class Red Shirts with nakedly racists attacks, those storming the Capitol on January 6 merely dog-whistled, downplayed, or denied the charge of racism.

    Although right-wing pundits on Fox and other conservative sources have tried to deflect blame on racists by asserting that the real attackers were secret “Antifa” operatives executing a false-flag operation, cameras captured images of noted white supremacists representing a host of different organizations, from the Proud Boys to neo-Nazi groups, participating in the violence. This should come as little surprise seeing that during one of the presidential debates, Donald Trump told one of these groups to “Stand back and stand by,” strongly suggesting they ready themselves for brown-shirt tactics. It should come as even less surprise that, after egging them on to approach the Capitol, with his recently unlicensed attorney Rudolph Giuliani calling for “...trial by combat,” they would engage in violent action.*

    The connection between racism and the 1898 Wilmington Coup should be obvious, even to Klansmen, the cognitively impaired and quadrupeds. But the same racist themes played out not only in the January 6 coup, but in the entirety of the Trump presidency, although in coded terms, circumlocution that skirted overt references to white supremacy. So it’s easier to deny the racists undertones of the insurrection earlier this year, despite the waving of the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol itself. Yet, both of these events had a common root.

    They boil down to what Dr. Richard Hofstadter termed “status anxiety.”

    We’ve perhaps heard, and maybe even bought into the mantra that the main issues driving Trump voters were recent or threatened job loss and the perceived growing weakness of the United States as a global power because of a litany of treaties that they interpreted as making the US more reliant upon foreign powers.** More sophisticated explanations would say that the American electorate has the same set of issues from one national election to the next, but that various issues change the priority, or the importance of these issues.

    In the end, however, none of this seems to explain Trump’s ascendancy or the desperate attempt to maintain it. A 2018 University Pennsylvania study done by Dr. Diana Mutz (Political Science/ Communication,University of Pennsylvania) for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that the cited issues for Trump’s electoral victory were simply not in evidence. In “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Mutz notes that economics could not explain voter disenchantment with the incumbent party:

     

    A second reason for skepticism regarding the left behind thesis involves timing. Trump’s victory took place in the context of an economic recovery. Throughout the year preceding the election, unemployment was falling, and economic indicators were on the upswing. Likewise, the dramatic drop in US manufacturing jobs took place during the first decade of the 21st century; since 2010, manufacturing employment in the United States has actually increased somewhat.... Research on economic voting suggests that recent economic events are most influential for voting….Given all of the positive economic indicators, why would 2016 be ripe for an economic backlash?”***

     

    Cutting to the chase, when you examine the possible causes for Trump’s presidency, and hold them to scrutiny, the only one left standing is status anxiety. As Dr. Mutz writes:

     

    How plausible is status threat—whether from a sense of declining racial or global status—as an explanation for changes in voting behavior in 2016? With respect to global status threat, the received wisdom from decades of research has long been that “voting ends at water’s edge.” In other words, outside of foreign wars, international affairs are assumed to have little if any electoral importance …. Racial status threat makes perfect sense occurring immediately after [eight years] of leadership by America’s first African American president. It is not racism of the kind suggesting that whites view minorities as morally or intellectually inferior, but rather, one that regards minorities as sufficiently powerful to be a threat to the status quo. When members of a dominant group experience a sense of threat to their group’s position, whether it is the status of Americans in the world at large or the status of whites in a multiethnic America, change in people’s sense of their group’s relative position produces insecurity.”****

     

    This fear of losing power or status has, at its core, a central belief in the zero-sum game. This is the contention that for one party to gain power, another must lose it. An example of this happened during the Charlottesville Protest of 2017, when white supremacists armed with Tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us.” If, at the time, you wandered what that meant, as I did, then you have to look at the statement in the broad context of a belief that Christian moral authority, and natural intellectual superiority entitled one group to hold the reins of power for the benefit of society as a whole. They assumed that leadership positions were limited in number. Thus, if a perceived out group, such as Jews, were to gain equal access to power, they could not take these rarefied positions without displacing the Christians already there.

    The flaws of zero-sum game theory lie in a faulty premise, namely that those who see themselves as the “in-group” are really insiders. As the Tom Watson quote at the top of this post implies, there are those who maintain considerable amount of political and economic power through inheritance and connections. Getting the rest of us, that is the bulk of us, to believe that there are limited opportunities for leadership, and therefore personal autonomy, benefits what Dr. C. Wright Mills (Sociology, Columbia) called the ruling class by getting everyone else to squabble, sometimes violently, for a little slice of the remaining pie.

    Everyone knows that the propagation of white supremacy has carried within it a tremendous impetus to suppress the advancement of people of color (especially women), non-Christians, immigrants, and, nowadays, LGBTQ citizens. The irony, however, is that white supremacy has also been a tool to suppress the social mobility of most white people.

    If you’re thinking the previous sentence has to be a typo, then I’ll paraphrase it: in the US, white supremacy has historically been a tool to inhibit the social advancement and the economic freedom of most white people. In the podcast Be Antiracist, Dr. Ibram x Kendi (Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard) spoke to attorney, economic policy advisor and political commentator Heather C. McGhee about the ways in which white supremacy and bigotry economically disadvantaged the bulk of Euro American society:


    Kendi: When some Americans imagine the transformation of this country, they imagine that they’re going to lose if we actually create an equitable and just anti-racist America. And it seems, as you’ve written, that that’s based on a zero-sum myth.

    McGhee: Um-hmm. So I left a career in economic policy to go out on this quixotic journey, in some ways, to find the answer to the question of why can’t we seem to have nice things, and what are the roots of our dysfunction. And it’s there that I came upon this paradigm of the zero-sum. It’s a term that means there’s no such thing as mutual progress. When you have people who are in a competition with one another, if team A scores one more point, team B scores one less point. The points will always add up to zero: positive on one side, negative on the other. Progress for team A has to come at the expense of team B. There’s a limited, or fixed, pie.

    And that idea resonated so deeply with me, it sorta gave me a name and a description to something I’d sensed my whole life: this fear that when white supremacy falls, that the world will become one that white people should fear. Therefore, racism is really great for white people, really terrible for people of color. And so, their self-interest is preserving racism at all costs.

    And it’s the at-all-cost piece that really felt so important for me to lay out. What are the costs of racism to our entire society? What exactly is the price white people are willing to pay to keep the system as it has been. And once I started looking, the list just kept growing. And that made it clear to me that we have these self-interested elites packaging, marketing, selling this zero-sum lie to most white Americans, and they’re doing it for their own profit. But our side, when we only talk about racism as something that’s good for white people, are kinda, like, helping out a little bit….We haven’t told the full story of what it has cost this entire country

    Kendi: ...This is what I’ve been sort of saying, and I want to know whether I’m just wrong: that white Americans typically compare their lot to people of color. And so, in other words, if their school has more resources, in a way their child’s school is almost like a first class school. They’re like, ‘Whoa! If we create equity, then I’m gonna be back in coach. I don’t want that. I’m gonna lose. My kid’s gonna lose.’ But it seems to me that white Americans should be assessing themselves from other white people in the Western world. And when they make that comparison, that’s when they can see actually what they don’t have, how they’re in coach.

    McGhee: And in fact maybe in other societies in the Western world everybody’s just in first class…. This really comes from, and is a feature of how brutally hierarchical our society is. In the first chapter of The Sum of Us, I go back in our history to the beginning, to find out where this zero-sum worldview and this lie came from, whose interest it served, and why it’s sorta reanimated generation after generation. And as it turns out, it was created as a way to sorta discipline white Europeans, in the colonial era, to be satisfied with their lot in a society where wealth was still quite concentrated, and where, because of chattel slavery and the plantation economy, there actually wasn’t a lot of room. A white person who was not a plantation owner, their labor wasn’t needed in the Southern economy, right, ‘Like what do we need you for, right?’ This myth of white supremacy was sold to white masses so that they could have, of course as W.E.B. Dubois said, the psychological wages of whiteness rather than material wages. And those psychological wages were knowing always that in a deeply unequal economy they could nonetheless count on being more than, and better than, black people.


    In the above, Dr. Kendi and McGhee make the point of contrasting American life to life in the rest of the Western world. American "conservatives" decry many of the things that are the norm in Europe as unrealistic, almost fanatically socialist, among them free universal health care, solid infrastructure due to decreased wealth disparity, and considerably more leisure time – in some cases more than double that of the typical American worker. European incarceration rates are much lower than those found in the US.**** Europeans tend to have more robust labor laws that are actually enforced. Compare this to current right-wing initiatives to push so-called “Right to Work” laws on a state-by-state basis, giving employers increased means to thwart labor initiatives for higher pay, better safety and so forth by decreasing union revenue, and inhibiting union political activity -- restrictions that don’t apply to employers.*****

    McGhee and Dr. Kendi also examined how far the propagation of zero-sum mythology goes back in the United States. You’d have thought that some whites would have put two and two together to figure out that racist dogma has actually robbed them of true power and authority.

    Actually, there were Euro Americans who figured this out. Watson did in 1892. The Fusionist/GOP Party of North Carolina did as well, and at about the same time. And the trend would continue into the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. During the 1940s, a coalition of white and black Alabama coal miners came together to improve pay and working conditions, in the process galvanizing worker resistance in the steel and textile industries too. In 1948, members of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) successfully bargained for higher wages and better working conditions by maintaining a united front of black and white workers in a strike against a large lumber company. William Fesperan and his Young Patriots Organization, replete with their Confederate battle flag regalia, figured it out when joining Young Lords leader José Jiménez and Black Panther Fred Hampton Sr. to form the Rainbow Coalition in 1969.****** In 2020, Euro-Americans from across the nation joined with their African-, Asian- and Latino-American countrymen to protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.*******

    As Dolly Parton would say later that year, “Of course black lives matter.” So she’s figured it out too.

    "How does this tie into the notion of the Deep State, or imperium in imperio?" some might ask, right about now. 

    I'm pretty sure most of you can already predict where I'm heading with this.

    _______________________

    *The buildup to the coup perfectly illustrates an earlier post in this blog on Dr. Mark Granovetter’s (Sociology, Stanford) Threshold Model of Collective Action. In his statistical analyses, Granovetter found that riskier actions, including aggressive ones, can coax the involvement of more reluctant participants if those at lower thresholds hold special status. What more special status could there be than a once-popular big-city mayor, and the current President of the United States?


    **This included not only treaties pertaining to security, such as NATO, but to the Paris Agreement on planet-wide climate change and trade deals, with their perceived imposition of regulatory requirements: concerns that led to the UK defection from the European Union (Brexit).


    ***There are numerous other reasons why the traditional models of loss don’t apply in this particular election, but space limitations don’t allow for a discussion of them all. Click here [https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/19/E4330.full.pdf] to read Dr. Mutz’s study in full.


    ****Turkey currently has the highest rate of incarceration in Europe with 357 per 100,000 compared to 639 per 100,000 in the US. For Australia the rate is 160 per 100,000, in Japan it’s 38 per 100,000.


    *****A 2011 Economic Policy Institute study found 3.2% lower wages, 2.6% less health insurance and 4.8% fewer pension programs in Right-to-Work states than in the rest of the nation.


    ******Many of the YPO came from southern states and relocated to the Chicago area in hopes of better job prospects and opportunities. On a curious side note, the Confederate symbology was not a deal-breaker for Hampton in forming this political coalition. But in discussing the symbology with the Panthers, and what it meant to them, the YPO decided to ditch the CSA-inspired items.


    *******Members of the same groups are speaking out currently against the violence and bigotry directed to their countrymen/countrywomen whose ancestors came from the Far East.

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  8. The not-so-secret cabal of Wilmington, NC city fathers had put much work into guaranteeing the results of election held Tuesday, 8 November 1898. Their Red Shirt minions had already threatened violence to all African Americans attempting to vote. Employers sympathetic to the plot had warned black employees that trying to exercise their franchise would result in termination. They also threatened to fire white employees who didn't vote the Democratic Party. The Red Shirts kept up their end of the bargain by setting up road blocks leading to the polls, and firing at all blacks who approached them.* In precincts that were overwhelmingly African American, the “ruffians” surrounded the polling stations, before entering and causing mayhem.** In majority white precincts, poll workers took orders to separate ballots by party, whereupon Democratic operatives switched out GOP ballots, and replaced them with their own.

    If you’re assuming that the rigging of this led to a sweeping Democratic victory in Wilmington, then you’d be right. Really no contest.

    The Secret Nine regarded the Democratic “electoral victory” as a mere start. One Fusionist alderman, and Republican mayor Silas Wright still held their seats, because neither had been up for re-election that year. Moreover, the remaining Fusionists would remain in power until their terms ended a couple months later.

    The S9 wanted power, and they wanted it immediately.

    On Wednesday, 9 November 1898, Secret Nine conspirator Hugh MacRae penned what he characterized as “The White Declaration of Independence.” It’s preamble began pretty much how you would expect any supremacist manifesto would:

    Believing that the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people; believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin, and believing that those men of the state of North Carolina, who joined in framing the union did not contemplate for their descendants subjection to an inferior race.

     The bulk of the document consisted of eight demands that are equally unsurprising. The last two dealt specifically to Wilmington Daily Record publisher Alex Manly; one calling for his permanent removal from Wilmington (and you can take that any number of ways), the other calling for this action within twenty-four hours.

    MacRae gave the Declaration to Alfred Waddell, an orator who had helped promote the pro-lynching propaganda adopted by the Democrats the previous two years. Along with twenty-three others (which included S9 member E.S. Lathrop), they formed the Committee of Twenty-Five, an organization created to execute the coup. Waddell, a skilled speaker, enthralled the crowd of 600+ spectators, 457 of whom instantly signed up to participate in the plot.*** Later that night, the Committee of Twenty-Five summoned prominent African American professionals and officials in order to coerce their acceptance of the eight demands by 7:00am the following day.

    Which they did. Armond Scott, a local attorney bent over backwards to assure the Committee that they would do everything they could to find Manly, and turn him over for lynching justice.

    We, the colored citizens, to whom was referred the matter of expulsion from the community of the person and press of A. L. Manly, beg most respectfully to say that we are in no way responsible for, nor in any way condone, the obnoxious article that called forth your actions. Neither are we authorized to act for him in this manner; but in the interest of peace we will most willingly use our influence to have your wishes carried out.****

    Per arrangement, over 500 Democratic troops gathered at the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory on Market street, where they were armed with rifles, and a Gatling gun, a forerunner of today’s automatic weapons. From there, they proceeded to the Daily Record office. They didn’t find Manly. They subsequently contented themselves with burning down the entire newspaper. This got the attention of black factory workers and white sympathizers, who raced to the building to put out the flames. But the arsonists physically restrained them from doing anything but watching the paper go up in smoke.

    By 9:00am, the rumor mill was in full swing. Blacks and Republicans heard reports of a slain comrade. Whites heard rumors that black churches had been stockpiling weapons, and that the members were planning an attack. By 11:00am, the fuse ignited when white groups on the corner of Fourth and Harnett Streets argued with black groups assembled on the opposite corner. Two shots rang out, each side claiming the other fired it. The ensuing fight flamed out “in all directions,”escalating along the way. When William Mayo, one of the whites taking part in the interracial war of words on the corner, took a non-fatal hit, the white Democrats in town took it as license to kill indiscriminately.

    The massacre had begun.

    And in the middle of it, at 3:00pm, Waddell led some of the insurrectionists to storm City Hall, where they forced Mayor Wright and the entire Board of Aldermen to resign at gunpoint. Waddell then declared himself mayor, and then installed handpicked S9 appointees to city government.

    The coup d’etat had ended by 4:00. But the massacre continue.

    When Waddell and fellow conspirators exited City Hall, their troop strength had increased to 2,000 men, with hardly any opposition coming from Republicans black or white. The result: between 30-600 black men were brutally murdered.***** Over 2,100 African Americans fled in terror.  No telling how many were wounded.

    Not included in the above statistics was one Alex Manly. With the help of white allies, who gave him transportation, money, a disguise, and most importantly a whites-only password, Manly escaped under cover of pitch darkness. Along the way, he encountered violent white supremacists who let him through their lines when he gave the correct code.

    Manly relocated to Philadelphia, where he continued his career as activist and journalist. He lived quietly, and died in 1944.

    A little over sixty years later, the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission (WRRC) would do an investigation of the above events, which you’ll find in more detail in their official report. Their purpose was to counter inaccuracies put forth in the media in 1898. Northern reporters covering the event relied heavily on information given by the newly minted local government, its allies, and its henchmen, all of whom characterized it as a riot. In truth, it was a massacre based on misrepresentation and treason.

    After exhaustive archival research, the WRRC found:

    ...that the violence of 1898 was a conspiracy of a white elite that used intimidation and force to replace a duly elected local government; that people lost their lives, livelihoods, and were banished from their homes without due process of the law; and that governments at all levels failed to protect its citizens.

    Also, in November 2006 the Raleigh News and Observer, one of the papers egging on the lynch-mob, race-baiting onslaught of poorly armed people, issued an op-ed piece apologizing for the paper’s complicity in the conspiracy, writing:

    We apologize to the black citizens and their descendants whose rights and interests we disregarded and to all North Carolinians, whose trust we betrayed by our failure to fairly report the news and stand firm against injustice.

     The North Carolina legislature and WRRC’s dedication to setting the record straight official finding of brutal conspiracy, coupled with an apology by the PSYOP arm of that conspiracy were nice gestures, I guess, although they seem a bit late to me.

    And, to my knowledge, this is the first, at least the most successful coup d-etat within American government on American soil. It is a conspiracy. And it’s official.

    _________________

    *The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report, issued by the Wilmington Race Riot Commission in 2006, did not mention any casualties at this point. The commission went on to say that S9 and allies were trying to minimize casualties while the polls were open because they thought that an outburst might invalidate the election results. Most likely, the shots fired by the Red Brigade here were designed to intimidate, not kill.

    **As the WRRC puts it:

    Soon after the crowd arrived, the lamps were knocked off the tables by ‘someone pushing another against the table where the lamps were’ and the room went dark. Fulton tried to make his way to the back of the store to find a way out. and, as soon as the lights were re-lit, [Election Judge Albert] Lamb left the precinct before the ballots were fully counted….

    Other precinct workers, white grocer Joe Benton and white dairyman George Bates, were on hand at Lamb’s precinct during the ballot counting and supported the testimony of Fulton and Lamb…. Benton, as judge of the election, testified that scattered among the crowd were ‘between nine and twelve policemen’ who did not attempt to ‘prevent the disturbance.’

    ***The crowd had gathered because all Democratic papers announced the meeting for 10:00am.

    ****Scott attempted to deliver the letter in person but Red Shirts and a growing number of other vigilantes had begun to spread out across the city. So he mailed it instead.

    *****The number is inexact, mostly because of disputes over the scope of the massacre, the nature of the body count, and unknown fate of some of the victims. In all, the 2006 Commission only attributed twenty-two slayings to the conspiracy.

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  9. The incubus, in Christian mythology of yore, was a demon that raped chaste or virtuous women as they slept. Sometimes this resulted in pregnancy, with the little devils (so to speak) produced by this union harbingers of sin and degradation. Sometimes, they would produce individuals of checkered character, but immense power (e.g., Merlin, wizard of King Arthur lore). More often, the viciousness of the assault would result in the death of the victim. Almost always, the victim, should she survive in the physical realm, would be destined for an eternity of hellfire and damnation unless she submitted to a torturous exorcism.*

    Such sex monsters also exist in non-Christian cultures. Zulus refer to a similar entity as Tokoloshe, In northeastern India, locals talk about a kindred spirit as a Pori, whose rapes lead the victim to madness and suicide.

    Seems like these kind of legends would have little to do with nineteenth-century North Carolina. The sad fact is that they shouldn’t in an industrial age of mechanical innovation and growing electrical technology.

    Yet, they did.

    Late in 1897, nine Democratic city fathers made secret plans to expel the legally elected, mostly white Fusionist/Republican party by any means necessary.** Despite the fact that their real beefs had to do with Fusionist policies, such as of regulating interest rates,*** regulating railroads (which would prevent another bond scandal) and proportional taxation, political moves that would benefit not only African Americans but the majority of whites who lived in Wilmington, these Democrats knew that they had to find an issue that would forcefully compel the Euro Americans benefiting from these new progressive laws to, in essence, rally against their own interests. What they needed was the populist to revolt against the Populist party.

    State Democratic Party Chairman Furnifold Simmons knew how to do it. He cited an op-ed piece written earlier by The Caucasian in which Marion Butler asserted:

    There is but one chance and but one hope for the railroads to capture the net [sic] legislature, and that is for the [negro] to be made the issue.***


    Despite the fact that Africans held a minority of offices in a predominately black city, the “Secret Nine” enlisted the help of sympathetic newspapers and visiting orators to condemn the multicultural government as “Black Rule,” subject to the stereotypical proclivities attributed to black men since the end of the US Civil War.

    Nowadays, we use this term, “status anxiety,” to denote the existential threat to an individual's or community’s position in the social hierarchy. Although it’s really more of current usage, the concept behind it is as old as hierarchy itself, and this became the case here. Although under no threat from the current government, which might have actually represented their interests, some whites nevertheless noted that people who once deemed slaves, legally and culturally considered little more than livestock less than forty-five years ago, were now, because of hard word, dedication and opportunity, possibly more affluent than they. These people whom they still considered biologically and intellectually inferior were making policies that affected their lives.  And black magistrates not only had the official authority to judge but to impose penalties on them.

    Not surprisingly, status anxiety became an issue that resonated with some white voters, even though they realized over all that they were better off with the new government than they were with the puppets of city bosses. But the S9, their press and their strategists honed on a more primal fear based on stereotype: the wanton sexual lust of the black male, which, if empowered, would ultimately violate, rape white womanhood all over the state.

     

    Fig. 1. Political cartoon appearing in the 27 September 1898 edition of the News and Observer.

     


    It wasn’t enough here to equate black masculinity with criminality. The conspirators actively sought to resurrect the legend of the incubus, a preternatural sex monster recklessly killing, looting, and raping at will. If status anxiety didn’t hit close to home, this did. I mean who doesn’t have sisters, wives, sweethearts, mothers et cetera? The purveyors of this sentiment gave a very clear-cut message to white voters: either you are against us, or your in support of rape. If we don’t get your support, don’t complain to us when, not if, your loved ones are brutalized and murdered.

    As the election drew closer, the sex-monster meme grew increasingly more potent as press articles amplified the looming rapist threat. A high point came when a prominent feminist, Rebecca Felton, weighed in on the matter during an 11 August 1898 speech made before the Georgia Agricultural society:****

    I must make a strong effort to stop lynching, by keeping closer watch over the poor white girls on the secluded farms; and if these poor maidens are destroyed in a land that their fathers died to save from the invader’s foot, I say the shame lies with the survivors, who fail to be the protectors for the children of their dead comrades…

    When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue – if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch; a thousand times a week if necessary.

    Okay, I’m certain that everyone reading this is against the crime of rape.  While the above quote doesn’t necessarily identify a specific person or persons as habitual attackers, she made clear who she thought were the true villains:

    I say it’s a disgrace in a free country when such things are a public reproach and the best part of God’s creation are trembling and crying for protection in their own homes. And I say, with due respect to all who listen to me, that so long as your politics takes the colored into your embraces on election day to control the vote; and so long as politicians use liquor to befuddle his understanding and make him think he is a man and a brother when the purpose is to defeat the opposition by honey-snuggling him at the polls, and so long as he is made familiar with their dirty tricks in politics so long will lynching prevail, because the causes of it grow and increase.

    The Weekly Star and other white Wilmington press outlets carried transcriptions of Felton’s speech. Alexander Manly, publisher of town’s most influential black newspaper, The Wilmington Daily Record, felt compelled to respond, perhaps in no small part to his own mixed heritage.***** In an op-ed piece published a week after the speech, he asserted that white female/black male couplings, if they existed at all, would most likely be consensual, at least on the level of white male/black female couplings:

    ….our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness, bring attention to them and the man is lynched for rape. Every negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is well known to all….

    Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.

    You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites; in fact you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.

    The Weekly Star and other papers published Manly’s op-ed with introductory remarks crafted to fan white animosity. It’s perhaps tempting to speculate on why these remarks stirred so much social antipathy. Maybe, as Dr. Calvin Hernton (Sociology, Oberlin) suggests in his 1965 book Sex and Racism in America, the thought of white women as sexually autonomous beings flew counter to the prevailing dogma that they were, more or less, asexual. On the other hand it could have constituted good-old-fashioned externalization, the discomfort of white men of knowing that (1) they or those of their kind had for centuries often engaged in sex with enslaved black women, sex which (2) the women themselves were in no position to decline or resist and (3) produced offspring. It’s easy to think that freedom and enfranchisement of the negro male might have provided fertile grounds for comeuppance.

    Whatever the case, lynch mob passions, already inflamed, became explosive, with some whites expressing their desire to march down to the Daily Record offices and lynch Manly on the spot. And maybe they would have had the S9 not urged them to wait until after the election.

    That’s because they had a plan, one they’d been working on all year. 

    After producing the propaganda necessary to minimize challenge, they succeeded in squashing the black vote by getting employers to threaten termination or violence should their African American employees so much as show up at the polls. They subsequently siphoned off white support for the Fusionists through the White Government Union, a racial supremacy club to which many of their employers belonged. The WGU likewise strong-armed apolitical and anti-racist whites into supporting this plan by coercing them into signing contracts declaring their allegiance to the Democratic Party and the city fathers. It was, for some, a no-brainer when told to sign a loyalty oath to white supremacy when faced with the alternative of losing their jobs and entering the wonderful world of penury. Yet other whites took a bit more convincing. As then-Alderman Benjamin Franklin Keith rued at the time:

    Many good people were marched from their homes...taken to headquarters, and told to sign. Those that did not were notified that they must leave the city...as there was plenty of rope in the city.

    The S9 plan also included an army. The Red Shirt Brigades, so-named because of their distinctive uniform, grew out of the ranks of former Klansmen, who carried on the tradition of mounted, masked racial violence against black Republicans after federal intervention neutralized the first incarnation of the KKK in 1871. Founded 1875 in Mississippi, chapters sprung up across the former Confederate states, including North Carolina. For a couple of decades, they served as anything from bodyguards of prominent southern Democrats to shock troops who could enforce white rule and intimate politicians seeking political change. 

    Many of the Democrats relying on their Red Shirts and their minions saw them as vulgar men, lowlifes, or as they themselves would say in the parlance of the day “ruffians.” Not that it mattered. The Red Shirts loyalty to racial hegemony, their severe status-anxiety and their fear of racial inclusiveness and equality, led them to pledge their allegiance to, fight, kill and die for a political and economic class that not-so-secretly despised them.

    The S9 and their allies patiently waited for all the pieces to fall into place before they launched this plan: specifically a coup d'etat. They wanted to wait until the elections had concluded. If they won the elections – which by now should have been a cakewalk since a substantial percentage of the opposition’s base was under threat – they would simply take City Hall by force the following day, not even waiting for the incumbents’ terms to expire. If they somehow managed to lose the election, they would simply take City Hall by force the following day, the official tally be damned.

    ________________________

    *There’s also a female version called succubus. According to legend, the initial succubus was Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was banished from Eden for sexually emasculating the first man – she insisted that she be on top when they did the dirty. Over the centuries, she’s said to prey upon adolescent boys as they sleep, thus resulting in nocturnal emissions.

    **The “Secret Nine” as they came to be known consisted of Hardy Fennell, William Gilchrist, W.A. Johnson, E.S. Lathrop, Hugh MacRae, P.B. Manning, J. Allen Taylor, L.B. Sasser and Walter Parsley.

    *** While white banks often charged the more well-heeled to an interest rate of 5% or less, poorer whites typically payed 7.5%, while African Americans could only take loans at a staggering 15%. This threatened to force local black businesses into insolvency, whereupon they could be purchased cheaply by new owners.

    ****No the original piece did not use the word “negro.”

    *****Felton, like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull, was a prominent suffragette around the turn of the century. She also was a lifetime member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. While both organizations had some roots in nineteenth-century progressive politics, the latter has increasingly exhibited far-right tendencies since the turn of the Twentieth Century. Past officials endorsed lynching, and coordinated with the second incarnation of the Ku-Klux-Klan during Prohibition They still champion sobriety, but have in recent years turned their advocacy toward anti-LBGQT measures in public broadcasting and anti-abortion measures.  They also oppose sexual activity before or outside of marriage.

    ******Manly was the biological grandson of former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly.

     

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  10.  I'm ending this blog effective this date.



    Happy AFD.

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