The Soap Opera and the Welbornian Corrective

So the best television is the social media platform Telegram. Man, the Wild West of election integrity is the soap opera to end all soap operas. 

So the characters are “characters”: eccentric, wild, undisciplined, unpredictable, truthful, deceitful.

Some of the reputable fighters are kind of boring, truth to tell, but perhaps that’s what makes them reputable. People like Matt DePerno, who fought in Antrim case against Dominion and Matt Braynard, who did great work around showing fraud unrelated to the machines and who is now defending the Jan 6th political prisoners. 

Other reputable fighters are NOT boring but haven’t done anything suspect. Like Joe Oltmann and Eric Metaxas. 

But then you have lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, the latter is the guy who saved Richard Jewell’s reputation after being unfairly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Wood was also the lawyer representing the Covington Catholic kid. 

And you have Patrick Byrne, author of the “Deep Rig” book and movie. 

Finally you have Gen. Michael Flynn. 

So a recent dust-up started when Rittenhouse accused Wood of letting him rot in jail for 87 days and not raising the $2m bail fast enough. (Wood’s response is that it’s tough to raise that much in that time frame and if not for him Rittenhouse would’ve served over a year in jail due to trial not starting for 14 months after the shooting.) 

Byrne put out a video saying Wood was a kook. Wood said that Byrne had called him, three days ago.  

Wood then proceeds to post the entire hour and a half “private” telephone call on social media!  The otherwise savvy Byrne got played big time. Along the way, Byrne threw Sidney Powell under the bus, saying she wanted to have sex with Byrne during a couple drunken episodes and now she’s turned all “woman scorned”. Additionally she’s a major grifter, taking in millions for election fraud that is being used only for her personal expenses and defense lawsuits. 

Wood is upset that Flynn charges $25k+ for speeches, and that didn’t come more strongly to Wood’s defense over things in the past despite promising to do so, and he was also troubled by a prayer that Flynn said recently at a public event. 

Flynn invoked an odd phrase:  

“We are your instrument of those sevenfold rays and all your archangels, all of them...We will be the instrument of your will, whatever it is. In your name, and in the name of your legions, we are freeborn, and we shall remain freeborn, and we shall not be enslaved by any foe.”

It’s said that: 

Flynn’s prayer bears a striking resemblance to a prayer by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the now-deceased leader of an anticommunist doomsday cult obsessed with nuclear war. Prophet’s group, the Church Universal and Triumphant, reached its peak in 1990, the year she predicted much of the world would be destroyed in a fiery nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Prophet’s followers flocked to her Montana ranch, building fallout shelters for an apocalypse that never arrived.

...Both prayers mention “legions” and “seven-fold rays,” and are nearly identical in their phrasing.

Weirder and weirder. 

Meanwhile the ol’ possum Wood does a victory lap:

I love to see the enemy engage in deflection. Check out Mike Flynn’s Telegram channel. He has turned off his replies. He is trying to talk about issues confronting our nation while totally avoiding an honest discussion of the issues facing him - the occult prayer, the money he charges for speeches, Vernon Jones, Pegasus, and several other troubling issues raised by facts about him.

I admit Mike and Sidney played me for a few months. I had no experience in military psychological operations.

But I am a quick study and I got up to speed as quickly as Jesus intended for me to do so.

I was deceived. Now I am not.

**

And the impossibility of telling white hats from black hats from gray hats leads ... ideally.. to Advent peace! 

Amy Welborn, as if in response to my thoughts, posted the necessary corrective: 

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent, holy spheres,

While minds, as meek as beasts,

Stay close at home in the sweet hay;

And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

–“Advent” by Thomas Merton

Amid the general dis-ease, uneasiness, division and frustration that seems to mark so many of our lives now, it seems to me there’s a singular constant: the suspicion, if not outright conviction, that we’re enveloped by narratives, most of them false and many maliciously so, by tales we’re being told from all sides, and that it’s all coming so relentlessly, we don’t have the time or the expertise to tease out fact from fiction, to fight through the narratives to figure out, and most importantly, live in what’s just…real.

Can Advent help?

Thomas Merton wrote a lot of poetry. A stanza from his poem “Advent” is at the top of this post. You can read the entire poem here. Perhaps sit with it for a minute – even just the verse up at the top there. What the necessary stance for an Advent that’s more than just “preparation?”

…minds, as meek as beasts…

….close at home….

…intellects…quieter than the flocks…

Instead of pride, meekness. Instead of endless activity of the spirit, staying still, at home. Instead of noisy striving, quiet.

And perhaps in that quiet, away from the narratives, we can hear the truth. Not a truth of later, or someday or the end of time, but the truth of now.

Counterfactual’ing the Coming Civil War

What one actor - or half-dozen people at most - whose behavior over the past decade might’ve altered our current course towards civil war? 

It wouldn’t be the Democrats on the Judiciary panel during the Kavanaugh hearing, bad as they were, or anything Fauci did, or Hillary’s Benghazi, or media elites. 

Some would say Trump himself, which is fair enough except he wasn’t given the time to take that honorific. 

The answer is if Comey and McCabe had acted with self-restraint and honor, and to have accepted Trump as the president. That could’ve been THE game-changer. 

The politicization of the FBI and DOJ is incredibly destructive because it undermined the semi-illusion that voters have the final say.  It didn’t feel like voters had the final say with Trump, at least not in 2016.  Perhaps that’s the way it’s always been, at least going back to the bad ol’ days of J. Edgar Hoover.

Certainly plenty of bad stuff that happened subsequently can’t be blamed on the FBI's war on Trump. But the bad blood it engendered was so fierce that it could only fuel skepticism around the election results, which led to Jan 6th, which led to the overreaction, which has led to further radicalization - in the typical endless cycle. 

But imagine the counterfactual if Trump was not made a martyr in ’16 and ’17. Imagine if the biggest issue he had to complain about was the media lying about his inaugural crowd size or them saying he was a racist, and that the Democrat’s lack of willingness to negotiate on infrastructure was horrible. 

Instead, the FBI “made” Trump. They made him seem much bigger by their willingness to throw out their training and virtue. Trump needed to be the guardrails on the FBI rather than the other way around. Who could’ve predicted? 

St Gallen Mafia & Politics

I was listening to the “Holy Smoke” podcast/interview with author of book on the St. Gallen Mafia. It was interesting to learn that the “arch-conservative” (bad label but the public perception) Ratzinger had a close enough relationship with his number one “arch-liberal", Cardinal Martini, who was supposedly the mastermind behind the St. Gallen mafia meetings, organized around the goal of stopping Ratzinger. 

And yet these two foes, Martini and Ratzinger, esteemed each other and wrote prefaces or blurbs for each others’ books and in general seemed to be able to be very fraternal while being at opposite ends of the spectrum theologically.  There are even reports that Martini influenced Benedict’s resignation. 

What can one say of this both in regard to the Church and in American politics? Did Benedict, wittingly or unwittingly, play into the hands of the liberal faction? Was Benedict naive or simply faithful to his own view of the Church - which might have been one more “trusting in the process”, both of Martini in particular and the conclave after his resignation in general and in God to look after His church ultimately?

Jesus, after all, trusted the process and chose Judas to be his friend. Is it the role of the “good guy” (understanding we’re all flawed save Christ) to always be on defensive and reactive to evil and thus at the natural disadvantage? Like how the Allies almost fell to Hitler due to being slow on the uptake? 

I see faint parallels in how the GOP generally seems too trusting of the good will and standards of the elite Democrats, especially with regard to integrity of voting and mail-in ballots. Similarly, Trump was hit by the Deep State immediately and hardly left a dent in them.  

Some of this naivety and soft glove usage has ebbed over the past decade or so in part due to the things like the Zuckerberg drop boxes, Kavanaugh hearing, and the politicization of the intel agencies. 

The Church, regardless, is on firmer ground given the gates of Hell could easily prevail against the U.S.. But it’s hard to believe the next conclave won’t be a bit different and involve a bit more due diligence.

How a Smear Becomes a Law: Non-Schoolhouse Rock Version

The recent news about John Durham’s indictment led me back to reading about the plot against the president. 

The Deep State can work fast: the Steele dossier was planted in the media two weeks before Trump sworn in, FBI tries to entrap Flynn four days after inauguration and he’s tossed two weeks later, Sessions recuses himself two weeks after that, FBI investigation opened eight weeks after that, and then special counsel Mueller is appointed a week later. 

So the deep state was able to take out Flynn and effectively Sessions in just a month, and helped clip Trump’s approval rating from 45% on 1/20 to 39% on 3/20. 

It took Trump almost four months to take out Comey.  Trump was playing defense and the offense has the advantage of the element of surprise. (We saw it in the 2020 election where Trump was very late to the game of concern over voter fraud.)

**

The spy agencies worked fast but the ground was prepared back in 2015. The first glimmers of rogue actions begin in October of 2015 when a CIA contractor is hired by Fusion GPS to find dirt on alleged Trump ties to Russian organized crime figures. 


The backdrop is that on September 10th, CNN reported that Trump’s support had “surged to 32%” in a poll and that “most Republican voters (51%) think Trump is most likely to emerge as the GOP winner.” 

In January of ’16, Christopher Steele begins talking to Obama’s DOJ about Trump and Russia. 

In February, Trump wins most of the delegates of the early primaries. 

In March, a smear campaign begins in press about Trump team’s ties to Russia. Only three candidates are left in GOP race. 

In May, Trump becomes the presumptive GOP nominee. 

In July, the FBI opens an umbrella investigation into pretty much everyone associated with Trump. 

In mid-August FBI’s Peter Strzok sends the “insurance policy” text to FBI lawyer Lisa Page.