Category Archives: History

UPDATED: Diana West Fact-Checks Whitney Webb’s Scandalous, ‘Deep Fake Journalism,’ Part 1: WHAT FACTS?

Conservatism, Critique, Glenn Beck, Government, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Journalism, Old Right, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, The State

Diana West deconstructs Webb’s teenybopper linguistic dissembling to reveal the real scandal—that Webb’s counter-factual, x-rated history was published

Thanks to the likes of Webb and some self-styled conservative enablers, it is not ‘an overstatement to say that our understanding of American anti-communism hangs in the balance…’

What we are looking at is journalism at its lowest, where a lack of decency toward the dead doesn’t even have the cover of truth-seeking in the public interest. Or maybe it’s not really journalism at all. It’s the ritual sexual humiliation of reputation, the perversion of memory, the defilement of places in history that can never again be anything but sordid ~ Diana West

In January, Diana West, author of the superb American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, had promised to provide us with her forensic examination of Whitney Webb’s end-notes. Not that I doubted them—but my instincts have been confirmed. (My objection was to Webb’s poor, phantasmagorical grand thesis.)

Low-watt Whitney Webb is the toast of The Town because The Town, quite a few self-styled conservatives included, is filled with village idiots. Diana deconstructs Webb’s teenybopper linguistic dissembling to reveal the real scandal—that the Webb book was published in the first place, given its shoddy, circular sourcing. It most certainly should not be promoted in conservative quarters, as that further imperils our tenuous understanding of American anti-communism.

As to Diana: She’s been called “McCarthy on steroids,” high praise in my book, given my own admiration for “tail gunner Joe.” And given that, in 1954, when the nation was still patriotic, Joe McCarthy was the fourth most admired man in America. J. Edgar Hoover was fittingly much admired, too.

Read about Diana on her website. Suffice it to say, however, that Diana, who calls herself a “journalist,” is a “citizen historian,” a scholar and a sharp analytical thinker. She regularly pierces the (mostly) mirthless monotone of conservative commentary with prose as strong as paint stripper.

FACT-CHECKING WHITNEY WEBB, PART 1: ON THE EXISTENCE OF BLACKMAIL MATERIAL ON J. EDGAR HOOVER
Jan 18
BY DIANA WEST

My object today is to check the veracity of some key sources of the thesis of Whitney Webb’s two-volume-work, One Nation Under Blackmail.

Why am I doing this? Because Whitney Webb asked me to. She’s asked all of us to “engage more” with the source material in her endnotes, to “fact-check” her research. Indeed, like Gary Hart before that “Monkey Business” business, Webb often issues this challenge while promoting her briskly selling book in online interviews.

OK. I’ve accepted the challenge. For the past several weeks, I have been discussing what I have found out about Webb’s research at my Patreon channel, which I am making available here (J. Edgar Hoover), here (late 1950s cultural context), and here (Susan Rosenstiel). Whitney Webb has recorded a video in reply to my first video here.

Since the neo-oral video tradition only goes so far, I am resurrecting the Written Word to establish at least some of what I’ve learned about Webb’s sources.

Before I begin I must inject a question: Are these sources in fact “Webb’s” sources? When interviewer Natalie Brunell, in the most friendly way, asked Webb to discuss how she had found all of these “amazing” sources, Webb said a truly amazing thing. (I should note Webb had just been discussing my initial critique of her Hoover material.) The thirty-three-year-old author addressed the question about her research this way:

Right, so a good part of Volume One, I had a research assistant named Edmund Berger, who is amazing and a total genius. So he did some of the pri — you know, some of the, uh, research for aspects of that book, so I can’t speak to how he conducted the research but it’s brilliant.

Wow. Webb can’t speak to how someone else conducted the research for her book. It’s not every day that a rising “investigative journalist” disavows responsibility for 500 pages of research published under her name. That said, I will continue to address Webb in my comments below.

—

Webb’s thesis is set forth in her books’ subtitle: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein. (I am concerned with Volume One, which I will refer to as Webb’s book, singular.)

That sordid union, she maintains in the book, and, with more bluntness, in those online interviews, began roughly 80 years ago with the blackmail (alleged) of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover over compromising homosexual pictures of the man (alleged) that fell into the hands of “Intelligence” and “Organized Crime” (alleged). Cross-dressing, leather-clad orgies at the Plaza Hotel in New York City nearly 70 years ago ensued (alleged). As a result (alleged), Hoover’s FBI (1924-1972) failed to investigate Organized Crime (alleged), thus (alleged) creating the corrupt conditions “that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein.”

J. Edgar Hoover’s reputation is hardly without tarnish in the 21st century. Whose reputation is? However, is the legendary founding director of the FBI really the proto-trans-non-binary-mob-patsy who founded the New Perv Order? Do Webb’s sources for her X-rated biography/history check out? Before we pull down the Stars and Stripes and hoist in its place a new banner of soiled underwear, let’s find out.

First, to acquaint readers with how this messaging is coming across, I am including a few written excerpts of Webb’s recent book interviews. The first one is from an appearance with comedian Jimmy Dore on “The Jimmy Dore Show,” which has a Youtube following of 1.13 million subscribers.

Whitney Webb: First off, yes, this [sexual blackmail] is something that has been going on a very long time. In fact, the longtime director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who was in charge of that agency for decades and decades and decades, the top law enforcement official in the US, he was sexually blackmailed by the mob in the thirties, and he did not even go after organized crime at all because of that.

Jimmy Dore: AHHHHOHHHH

WW: That’s a matter of record, he denied it ever happened [organized crime]. And the sexual blackmail operation that entrapped him, also intimately involved a man named Roy Cohn —

WW: Ahhhh

JD: — who is best known as Donald Trump’s mentor, and the two of them along with a mob-linked businessman named Lewis Rosenstiel, were seen engaging in sexual blackmail operations themselves; but again, Hoover and Cohn only joined that after they themselves had been entrapped, yeah? And this involved minors.

JD: Oh, no kidding!

WW: Yeah, this is something that has been going on a very long time —

JD: So, you’re saying J. Edgar Hoover was entrapped sexually with a minor by the mob, by the mafia?

WW: Well, so, at first, the — he was involved in the sexual blackmail operation after he was blackmailed by the mob. That involved children.

But he was initially blackmailed because a photo of him was taken, having — giving oral sex to his longtime deputy Clyde Tolson, and that was taken by affiliates of Meyer Lansky of the Jewish mob; and later those [photos] fell into the hands of James Jesus Angleton, the first counterinteligence chief of the CIA. So that’s another example of how the mob and the CIA like to share “intelligence,” right? …

That’s “intelligence,” finger-quotation marks provided — a cute fillup to pornographic allegations. However, she didn’t get the story “right” as written in her book.

For example, Webb’s charge that the mob blackmailed Hoover over sex with children (references in bold above) does not appear in Webb’s book.

Here’s another version of events that’s more faithful (if that can possibly be the right word) to Webb’s book. This interviewer is “lawyer-turned-Youtuber” with Viva Frei, whose Youtube channel has over half a million subscribers.

Whitney Webb: One of the first people, prominent people, that was blackmailed by people like Meyer Lansky, was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. And it’s for that reason that Hoover never went after organized crime as FBI Director. He falsely claimed it was a local problem, and not going on in an organized way at the state or national level — and it provably was … but you see how this is developing. And eventually when Organized Crime and Intelligence come together, sex blackmail becomes one of their tools.

Viva Frei: Let me ask you this with Hoover. The blackmail material they had on him, was it engaging in activities with underage people –?

WW: Not underage people, but his deputy Clyde Tolson. Because it’s very well known now that J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual, but in that period of time, that would have destroyed his career, right? And so they caught him, they took pictures of him in compromising positions with Clyde Tolson, and these were shared with early intelligence people like James Jesus Angleton, who was one of the most prominent counter-intelligence people in the CIA from its founding onward.

A reader might wonder — even if Webb’s many interviewers do not — is there credible evidence for the existence of these “pictures”? The short answer is no; the long answer is below. Constantly describing them, referencing them, using them to bolster her thesis, as Webb is wont to do, has the effect of creating what we might think of as “deep fakes” in the minds of Webb’s listeners.

Excuse me, is that journalism or brain-washing?

She continues:

So, basically — in that example alone you can see then how Organized Crime and Intelligence are sharing “intelligence,” i.e., blackmail, which, you know, counts as “intelligence” to these people and then they can use that as leverage.

Again, that’s “intelligence” (read: dirty pictures of Hoover) with quotation marks.

Webb continues talking about “it — the alleged Hoover “pictures”:

So the mob can use it as leverage, and now Intelligence can use it as leverage over FBI Director J, Edgar Hoover, which is the highest law enforcement body in the United States. So, there’s lots of stories — this is just an early example, but there are lots of examples of this happening, the corruption of our core institutions in this type of way, throughout American history. So it’s very important to understand how we get here right now.

I’d like to pause to note that the “corruption of our core institutions” is something everyone (practically everyone) reading these words recognizes, mourns, rages at, all of us trying in our own way to survive what has happened, to our families, to our nation; and to resist it all and fight back. Indeed, it is in this shared tragedy where we might find the mechanism of Webb’s crossover appeal to us “outcasts” — we who already know the government is lying to us, even trying to kill us, and we who have long turned our backs on that government’s indispensable ally, the MSM. Some of us have been counter-culture for a long time; some of us woke up in this camp more recently — due to the rolling coup d’etat by a sordid union of Intelligence and Organized Government against Donald Trump from 2016 onward (Webb doesn’t want to talk about that one); or the covid hoax, covid tyranny and covid die-off (2019 onward); or the vicious persecutions of the January 6 patriots (2021 onward); or one of so many other convulsions shaking loose the facts to show that We, the People are not sovereign over the State; rather, we are victims in its crosshairs.

In other words, we can agree with what Whitney Webb is saying: Yes, our core institutions have been corrupted. But — and this is The Big Question — did it happen “in the type of way” the 33-year-old author is telling us? Namely, by a “sordid union” in the 20th century of Intelligence and Organized Crime originally forged by J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia? And isn’t there something missing from Webb’s 20th century — like, um, uh, the sordid union of the KGB, cultural Marxists, things like that?

One last interview of note. Webb sat for a long session in November on The Glenn Beck Podcast, which has one million subscribers. Beck was in reverential-host-mode; Webb, dressed demurely for the occasion, offered a more G-rated version of the Hoover-blackmail story, one that skipped the alleged “pictures” entirely. Was that calculated so as not to rile Beck’s reliably conservative, intuitively anti-communist audience? In any case, this interview was a big success, racking up 3.7 million views.

Glenn Beck: Are we ever going to find out who’s in the black book?

Whitney Webb: I don’t think so. I think the FBI has been compromised from the very beginning. Uh, in the book I talk a lot about J. Edgar Hoover. He was blackmailed by the mob. He realized the power blackmail had; started using blackmail himself; and, you know, increasingly the FBI — and I think it’s very obvious to a lot of conservatives now — comes in to cover things up, and to, you know, go after, uh, you know, figures that they, you know, don’t want to advance in their careers, or, you know, any sort of thing. It’s, it’s very, um, it’s very complicated.

I first noticed Webb due to her popularity with some of those speaking out against the rise of the biosecurity state/covid tyranny, such as Catherine Austin Fitts, Children’s Health Defense, James Corbett, Dr. Mercola. It is something of a curiosity to see someone who started her journalism career at Mintpress News — an advocacy website I find bedecked with anti-Israel, anti-“American Empire” headlines (but not, for example, anti-“Chinese Empire headlines”) — making inroads into less doctrinaire, more libertarian and even right-leaning pockets of the Internet. A Beck interview here. An Epoch Times op-ed there. Maybe it’s my imagination, but even Amazon seems to be getting its algorythms behind a tack toward the wider, wilder Right:

Today it appears that Webb has even been invited to appear on Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” Is it an overstatement to say that our understanding of American anti-communism hangs in the balance? Yes. But maybe not by much.

—

Now for the mainstay of Webb’s Hoover/mob-blackmail claims, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Irish author Anthony Summers. It is from this 1993 book that the nightmarish shape of J. Edgar Hoover in drag first slithered into the American consciousness. It is high time to put a stake in it — put a stake in it again, I should say, because it’s been debunked before. I don’t need to prove a negative to do so; I will simply demonstrate that the “evidence” marshaled long ago by Summers in lurid detail, today in brief by Webb — but just enough to perpetuate Homo Hoover as “Mary” in a dress — comes from a single, bitterly biased witness, whose mendacity has been proven not once, but multiple times in court.

Her name is Susan Rosenstiel. She is the eye-witness who claims to have seen J. Edgar Hoover (1) dressed in drag (“fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces…”) as (2) he participated in homosexual orgies at the Plaza Hotel, one in 1958 and another in 1959. At the time, the FBI Director, in his sixties, was at a pinnacle, if not the pinnacle of his popularity; his book on the dangers of communism, Masters of Deceit, was a national best-seller; he was also under renewed assault by left-wing media of the day. The New York Post, for example, then a liberal paper, had an investigative team scrutinizing Hoover in 1959. Somehow, though, they all missed out on Hoover’s group sex assignations at the midtown Manhattan landmark.

According to Susan Rosenstiel, that’s where “Mary Hoover,” pronouns unthought of, took himself to have at it with two 18- or 19-year-old “blond boys” in a homosexual orgy alongside liquor magnate Lewis Rosenstiel, Susan’s later-to-be divorced husband, and Roy M. Cohn, Lewis’s later-to-be divorce lawyer. (For the record, all three were anti-communists, Hoover and Cohn, of course, on the national stage.)

Bias, much? It’s not just Susan’s bias against her ex, his lawyer, and, in J. Edgar Hoover, we might argue, his hero (Lewis donated copies of Masters of Deceit to libraries across America, and, in the mid-1960s, would donate $1 million to a foundation set up in Hoover’s honor) that makes her claims unbelieveable. It is not only the outlandishness of her claims. Susan Rosenstiel has a significant court record against her veracity. What follows are highlights.

In 1975, Susan Rosenstiel pleaded guilty to perjury, as UPI reported, “for testifying that $17,000 in borrowed jewelry had been stolen from her when she actually had pawned it.” That’s over $98,000 in 2022 dollars, by the way.

In 1971, she pleaded guilty to attempted perjury (another jewelry-related case); she had been charged with perjury, but the judge allowed her to plead guilty to the lesser charge.

In 1970, State Supreme Court in New York ordered Susan Rosenstiel to pay a jeweler for over $150,000 in diamond and sapphire baubles (2022 dollars), which had been sent to her “on approval” back in 1965 but never returned to the store or paid for. Over and above the cost of the jewelry, Susan was ordered to pay the jeweler roughly a quarter million dollars more in damages (2022 dollars). The New York Daily News reported: “During the trial, Susan denied ever taking the jewelry and denied being in the jewelry shop on the June 6, 1965 date, but Faraone [the jewelry store] produced witnesses to testify that she had so been there.”

Think about all of this for a moment. We are supposed to let decades of American history be changed forever because a convicted liar claimed she saw J. Edgar Hoover in a gay orgy at the Plaza Hotel .

Are you willing to go along with that? I’m not. Is journalism based on such “evidence” your idea of fact-seeking and truth-telling? It’s not mine. Three courts judged Susan Rosenstiel’s word untrustworthy. That tells me there exists no credible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover ever appeared in drag at homosexual orgies at The Plaza Hotel. None. Zero.

This isn’t all Susan’s fault, of course. Without writers from Summers to Webb and everyone in between, all of whom do not cite new corroboration, but old Summers, such a creature is left to cry her spiteful pain to the wilderness. What we are looking at is journalism at its lowest, where a lack of decency toward the dead doesn’t even have the cover of truth-seeking in the public interest. Or maybe it’s not really journalism at all. It’s the ritual sexual humiliation of reputation, the perversion of memory, the defilement of places in history that can never again be anything but sordid.

To what end?

Ten years after the publication of Official and Confidential, Ron Kessler published his book, The Bureau, in which he examined many of Summers’ Hoover claims. Kessler also interviewed Summers, and asked him about the Susan Rosenstiel story. What Summers told him is jaw-dropping.

Despite the clear implication in the book that her story was true and the declaration on the book’s jacket that the Mafia knew that Hoover was a “closet homosexual and transvestite” and held that over his head, Summers told me that he merely reported what Rosenstiel said, along with what others claimed. He told me he holds “no firm view one way or the other” as to whether she told the truth.

The self-absolution of amoralism.

—

Many writers have weighed Summers’ sources and found them wanting, including mafia-expert Peter Maas (The Valachi Papers) in 1993, Marquette University FBI expert Athan Theoharis (J. Edgar Hoover, Sex and Crime: An Historical Antidote) in 1995, journalist Ron Kessler (The Bureau: The Secret Files of the FBI) in 2003, Joseph McCarthy biographer M. Stanton Evans (Blacklisted by HIstory) in 2011, and Yale professor and Hoover biographer Beverly Gage (The Day Wall Street Exploded, G-Man) in 2022. Others, too. Of extra interest, both Peter Maas and, as noted, Ron Kessler, interviewed some of Summers’ sources. Most of these analyses and rebuttals may be instantly found online.

I don’t know if Whitney Webb read any of them. As mentioned above, she did watch my initial foray into video-critique. In her video-reply, she seems to be walking away from Hoover-transvestite story.

Webb put it this way:

There’s also the claim here that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser so I do want to make very, make it very clear that there is a difference between the claim that J. Edgar Hoover was involved with sexual blackmail and that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser. Those are different claims.

“Two different claims” or not, in Susan Rosenstiel’s case, they come from the exact same source. Until Webb walks away from the entire Rosenstiel story of the Hoover-Rosenstiel-Cohn orgies at the Plaza as a non-credible smear, her newfound diffidence is no way out of the predicament.

Without Rosenstiel’s testimony, what’s left?

To find out, let’s look more closely at Webb’s source material in the Summers’ book. Naturally, gossip and mobster chatter abound in a book claiming that Hoover was sexually blackmailed by the mob — although “at what hand, first, second, or third, is hard to say,” as Peter Maas commented in his Esquire essay (May 1993) on Summer’s Hoover/mob-blackmail story, “Setting the Record Straight.”

Mass spoke to journalist Pete Hamill, who is quoted in the Summers book in support of the Hoover/mob-blackmail charge. Hamill maintained he had not even spoken to Summers, and that his quotation “must have come from a column”; Summers, in reply, insisted he interviewed Hamill “five times” (Esquire, August 1993). Either way, though, Hamill told Maas that his Hoover/mob-blackmail story was “strictly anecdotal stuff…You know how mob guys gossip like old women. It was the sheerest hearsay. The fact is, I don’t even know if Hoover was gay.”

Wait, what??

From an all-around hard-boiled journalist like Pete Hamill, that’s one blockbuster comment: “I don’t even know if Hoover was gay.” For the past thirty years, we have all been programmed to believe EVERYONE KNEW HOOVER WAS GAY.

Well, aren’t there some gay photos out there, John Q. Public vagely asks?

Good question. That story, too, is from the Summers book. Before we look at Summers’ evidence, note that Webb, among many others, writes about “the photos” as if their existence is established fact. And yes, this is how Big Lies become ingrained as truth. I’m starting to think of this process as “deep fake journalism.”

She writes:

The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity, specifically oral sex, with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson.60

Webb’s Endnote 60 leads us to a 1993 UPI story about the launch of the Summers book.

Headline: “New Book Pictures J. Edgar Hoover as Drag Queen.”

Ever wonder how to get a whole non-credible smear into just one lede? Behold:

NEW YORK — J. Edgar Hoover protected organized crime for years because top mobsters had evidence of his homosexual activities, including his dressing in flouncy miniskirted drag and taking part in hotel orgies, according to excerpts from a new book about the late FBI director.

The story goes on to announce a media pile-on — the Summers book, a Vanity Fair piece (see below) excerpting the Summers book, and a national PBS broadcast of a “Frontline” show dependent on Summers input as well.

Imagine for a moment that you are not a cross-dressing exhibitionist homosexual orgy participant under the thumb of killer-mobsters. How to compete with a multimedia attack? Especially after you have reached that ultimate state of defenseless in death. The KGB at its zenith couldn’t have done — and didn’t do — a better number on Hoover.

Or did they? All of this happens to be the fulfillment of long-term Kremlin “active measures” to undermine Hoover, who was for many decades not only the top lawman in America but also the top Red-hunter in the Executive Branch. In The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokihin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin explain that not only was the FBI “a major target of KGB active measures,” but until his death in 1972, “many of these measures were personally directed against the long-serving FBI Director.” One of the lines of disinformation advanced by the Service A of the KGB “was to accuse him of being a homosexual.”

Beverly Gage, author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, elaborates on the Kremlin disinformation operation.

Recent evidence suggests that the Soviets were also targeting Hoover in these years. In 1992, a retired, high-ranking KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin fled the collapsing Soviet Union with thousands of pages of hand-written notes documenting the agency’s foreign intelligence operations. Contained in these notes was a passage showing how the KGB used “active measures” — forgeries, anonymous letters, paid informants, leaks to newspapers — to spread gossip about Hoover’s sexual orientation. “To compromise E. Hoover as a homosexual, letters were sent to the main newspapers on behalf of an anonymous organization,” Mitrokhin recorded. According to Mitrokhin’s notes, those letters attacked him for acting like a “moralist and pillar of American society” even as he “turned the FBI into a faggots’ den.”

Funny, with all of that, how the KGB never seemed to have unearthed these “photo(s)” of Hoover, which Summers/Webb claim were floating around “Organized Crime” and “Intelligence” going back to the 1940s. It’s especially funny given the “astounding” level of penetration by Soviet agents of US “Intelligence” going back to the OSS in the 1940s, which, I find reading Ralph de Toledano’s terrific 2006 book, Cry Havoc, got its strategic (ideological) focus from German Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Such currents, such actors, of course, don’t exist in Webb’s sanitized but sordified version of the 20th century.

But, of course, the alleged “photos” do. Webb continues:

At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials, including John Weitz and Gordon Novel.62

Aha! Eyewitness, we are to believe, and two of them. Webb’s Endnote 62 sources another news story about the Summers book, in this case by the Los Angeles Times.

I’m going to let pass the “several other” CIA officials who fail to materialize in either the news story or the Summers book, and simply note that Summers himself does not identity either Wietz or Novel as “CIA officials.”

That’s because John Weitz was not a CIA official. He was a fashion designer, author of two biographies of Nazi notables and veteran of the OSS. (The OSS was disbanded at the end of World War II. The CIA opened shop in 1947. Truman publicly regretted what the CIA had become after JFK was killed in 1963.) Gordon Novel’s identity is less straight-forward. Summers rather tenuously describes him as both “controversial” and “someone who has had links to the CIA.” In FBI chronicler Athan Theoharis’s view, that should be amended to “self-proclaimed intelligence operative.”

Now for an extremely serious misstatement by Webb on p.60. She writes:

Both Weitz and Novel later stated that the pictures they had seen showed Hoover engaged in oral sex on a man who [sic] Angleton identified as Tolson; however, only Hoover’s face was recognizable in the photographs.63

No. That’s not true. Weitz made no such statement; Summers had only Novel making the Hoover i.d.. Weitz, as Summers reported, could not identify either of the men in the (single) photograph he was shown — and even the LA Times got that right.

Webb’s Endnote 63 takes us directly to Summers, p. 280, where we may review exactly what Weitz said about the 1950s incident.

“After a conversation about Hoover, our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson.” (Emphasis added.)

Peter Maas spoke with Weitz again for his Esquire piece, “Setting the Record Straight,” and Weitz underscored for Maas what he had told Summers: “The photograph, as I recall, was very, very blurry. It seemed to show two men humping on a beach. Perhaps it was Hoover, perhaps it was not. I didn’t give it much import.”

So much for Joh Weitz’s short-lived, I hope, career as an erronesouly reported eye-witness of the alleged Hoover “photo.”

As for Gordon Novel, like Susan Rosenstiel, there’s a lot to say about this man, who was in and out of court and scrapes and deals. Highlights I found perusing old newspapers online include a tangled relationship with prosecutor Jim Garrison’s JFK investigation; a $1.5 billion (yes, billion) lawsuit Novel filed against organizers of the 1984 World’s Fair claiming, according to one press report, they “stole his idea with the help of the CIA” (I have no idea what that means, either, but the case was dismissed); and, a 2007 interview, in which he actually tried to steal Susan Rosenstiel’s mendacious thunder by bragging that he was the guy who put Hoover in the dress.

Actually, he’s the guy who put Hoover in the photo.

Ron Kessler found something particularly relevant to Novel’s credibility when it comes to politically explosive photos. In 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board released a set of FBI documents (after intercession by President Clinton, Newsday reported). One of the documents, highlighted by Kessler, was a real doozy.

Kessler writes:

[The document] revealed that while working as an investigator for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, Novel tried to doctor a photo to make it appear that Lee Harvey Oswald had appeared with Castro. When Novel had trouble making Oswald fit into the original photo, he tried to place Jack Ruby in the photo.

And when Hoover didn’t fit into the original photo — what then?

I’m not at all trying to suggest Novel created the alleged Hoover “photo”; but it seems clear that here was an operator who did not see photographs of actors on the world stage as sacrosanct artifacts of one defined time and place, but rather as politically malleable stink-bombs.

Ask yourself: Is Novel’s “recollection” sufficient cause for American history to shift and declare we have proof of a Hoover-Tolson homosexual liaison? Of course not. Not by a long shot.

To recap: There is no credible evidence for Hoover’s cross-dressing Plaza orgies; and there is no credible evidence of the Hoover-Tolson photo(s).

Bye-bye, mob blackmail material.

Even from the perspective of the faculty lounge, there’s just no there there, as professor Athan Theoharis sums up:

It might be satisfying to conclude that Hoover richly deserves Anthony Summers as his biographer. But Summers’s sources, if undeniably imaginative, provide no credible documentation for what amounts to no more than gossipy character assassination.-

—

There is one Whitney Webb’s non-Summers source to deal with — perhaps the worst smear yet because in this instance we don’t even have a Rosenstiel or a Novel to kick around.

On p. 61, Webb insinuates that there existed a relationship between the former FBI director and a convicted sex extortionist.

Webb writes

that Hoover had also been tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who helped run a sexual blackmail operation in New York that involved male prostitutes.67

“Tied to Sherman Kaminsky”? The FBI Director was “tied” to an extortionist … male prostitute …?

Evidence, please.

Webb’s Endnote 67 is p. 88 of Bobby and Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and Hoover That Transformed America by Burton Hersch.

What follows is everything on the page allegedly connecting the lawman and the sex-blackmailer:

Organized by Sherman Kaminsky and Edward Murphy, the gang entrapped a wide range of educators and entertainers, a lot of military brass — one admiral, William Church, killed himself rather than risk disclosure — and the prominent Congressman Peter Frelingheysen. A photo turned up of Hoover himself “posing amiably” with Kaminsky, while Clyde Tolson had reportedly “fallen victim to the extortion ring.”

At some point, the FBI jumped into the investigation. Hoover’s photo disappeared from the files and Kaminsky went underground, subsisting for eleven years in Denver raising rabbits and distributing wigs. One of Hoover’s gifts was for retrofitting reality,

“Retro-fitting reality…”? Note to self: Hersch is not my problem; except insofar as he is Webb’s source.

Folks, it’s a very bumpy ride from hereon in. Fact is, I can find no reference whatsoever to vet these two incendiary items — not for Hoover “posing amiably” in a Kaminsky photo, not for Tolson falling “victim of the extortion ring.”

The quotation marks are nice and everything, but I can’t find a source for them in Hersch’s endnotes.

If somehow I have missed them, I’d appreciate having that pointed out so I continue my analysis. However, I don’t believe that I’ve misinterpreted the nothing-ness in Hersch, and Whitney Webb is fine with it.

She writes:

That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos showing Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.70

Webb’s Endnote 70 takes us back to Hersch, p 88. Everything Hersch wrote about Hoover is already reproduced above.

Notice how the single photo (unsourced) of Hoover “posing amiably” with Kaminsky in Hersch has morphed into plural photos “showing Hoover and Kaminsky together” in Webb.

Notice also how Hersch’s “at some point, the FBI jumped into the investigation” has turned into Webb’s “the FBI quickly took over the investigation.”

According to a detailed Slate article by William McGowan on the case, which Webb also cites (helpfully, for once), there is no sinister implication in the involvement (not a “takeover”) of the FBI in investigation alongside the NYPD. (McGowan writes: “In the year following the Western Union arrest, the NYPD and the FBI, working in parallel and sometimes at odds, would uncover and break a massive gay extortion ring whose viciousness and criminal flair was without precedent….”) McGowan’s account, by the way, does not mention Hoover, Tolson, or photo(s).

Reading Hersch and Webb, however, you might even get the idea that the FBI “took over” in order to make the (sourceless) Hoover photo(s) disappear — and Kaminisky, too.

Webb now pulls into overdrive:

Why would Hoover have been involved with the activities of Kaminsky?

“Involved with”?

First, Webb has Hoover “tied to” Kaminsky with no evidence, and now she’s got him “involved with” Kaminsky’s “activities” with no evidence. Not even Hersch said Hoover was “tied to,” let alone “involved with,” this extortion ring.

But Webb is on a roll, and spiraling.

There are only a few possibilities. One possibility is that Hoover had been blackmailed by Kaminsky, though it’s more likely that Kaminsky instead had ties to figures in organized crime that had already blackmailed Hoover long before. Another possibility is that Hoover was cozy [sic] to a second sexual blackmail operation targeting closeted homosexual men because he sought to pad his own library of blackmail for personal and professional gain.

Whitney Webb even cracks Hoover’s thoughtwaves!

What does seem clear is that Hoover was well aware of the power that amassing blackmail afforded and was willing to indulge in taboo behavior at the “blue suite” [the Plaza Hotel] because he was no longer concerned about being extorted or manipulated with sexual blackmail in ways that would end his career or destroy his public image. He had fallen in with the very crowd that had reportedly blackmailed him, later developing a symbiotic relationship with that same network.

All I can say is, Service A [i. e., KGB], eat your heart out.

Location: Blogs

Diana West

UPDATED: One of Diana’s videos detailing her initial foray into the Webb “Deep Fake Journalism.” Via Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/784864080/9e3c12f84e

MLK, Russell Kirk, And The Ignominy of Modern Conservatism

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Colonialism, Communism, Conservatism, Democrats, Education, Egalitarianism, History, Intellectualism, Race, Republicans

5 Replies

Outrage is too mild a term to describe the inane barbarity visited by the Russell Kirk Center on the memory of its namesake, Dr. Kirk, founder of American conservatism. It is built on lies and blatant falsehood

By Boyd Cathey

For the past forty years (officially since 1986) the third Monday in January has been celebrated as a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Federal and state offices and many businesses either close or go on limited schedules. We are awash with public observances, parades, prayer breakfasts, stepped-up school projects for our unwary and intellectually-abused children, and gobs and gobs of over-the-top television “specials” and movies, all geared to tell us—to shout it in our faces, if we don’t pay strict attention—that King was some sort of superhuman, semi-divine civil-rights leader who brought the promise of equality to millions of Americans, a kind of modern St. John the Baptist ushering in the Millennium. And that he stands just below Jesus Christ in the pantheon of revered and adored historical personages…and in some ways, perhaps above Jesus Christ in the minds of many of his present-day devotees and epigones.

It seems to do no good to issue a demurrer to this veritable religious “cult of Dr. King.” There are, indeed, numerous “Christian” churches that now “celebrate” this day just as if it were a major feast in the Christian calendar. In short, Martin Luther King has received de facto canonization religiously and in the public mind as no other person in American history.

And the King cult has taken hold in the “conservative movement” with an especial tsunami-like effect.

The latest outrage of this revolutionary “cleansing” of traditional conservatism has been what has been inflicted on Russell Kirk, the “Sage of Mecosta,” the generally acknowledged founder of the American conservative movement back in the early 1950s. And it comes at the behest and invitation of the very institution bearing his name, The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, which plans to host a joint conference with the Acton Center, on Monday, January 16, with black activist John Woods, Jr., doing the honours. Under the looming visage of Abe Lincoln, Woods’ Web site, Braver Angels, defines his own organization as dedicated “to depolarization…bridging the partisan divide….” (A photo of a gaggle of brainless, lovey-dovey, googly-eyed Clinton and Trump supporters decorate the site.)

Here is part of the blurb from the Kirk Center:

Without King and Kirk, modern American Social Justice liberalism and modern American conservatism as we know them would not exist. And yet, for all of their differences, our modern politics suffer because contemporary liberalism and conservatism often lack the grounding in virtues, communitarian values and faith in an ordered universe to which both Kingian Nonviolence and Kirkian Conservatism held fast. Is it possible that by reacquainting ourselves with these lost traditions we could summon the better angels of left and right and restore a politics of virtue for the modern age?

Outrage is too mild a term to use to describe this inane barbarity. It is built on lies and blatant falsehood.

At one time figures such as Kirk were considered too unwieldly, too untouchable to be incorporated into the swirling vortex of crazed conservative political correctness. Very simply, although the standard encomia were regularly paid to his earlier accomplishments and role, his essential (negative) views on King, his opposition to the civil rights movement (and legislation), his staunch arguments against egalitarianism, his opposition to the frenzied anti-colonialism of the 1950s and 1960s (cf., his adventure novel, A Creature of the Twilight, set in late colonialist Africa), and his virulent disgust directed at George H. W. Bush (which led him to become chairman of Pat Buchanan’s campaign in Michigan in 1992, just as I chaired the North Carolina Buchanan effort) are significant mileposts which Kirk biographer, Bradley Birzer, must acknowledge (see generally, Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative; University of Kentucky Press, 2015).

From 1967, when I was a college freshman, until shortly before his death in 1994, I corresponded frequently with Russell. As chairman of the Pfeiffer University Visiting Lecture Program—that would never happen today!—I brought him to my school. And, then, after a year as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia (where I finished my MA in 1971), Kirk asked me to come to Mecosta to serve as his assistant for 1971-1972. There I was privileged to learn from the Master. Not only did I delve deeply into roots of traditional Anglo-American conservatism (I assisted RK on Eliot and His Age and The Roots of American Order), but one responsibility I had was to edit Kirk’s little educational quarterly, The University Bookman. There he demonstrated his willingness, among other difficult topics, to debate cognitive disparities between the races (publishing reviews of politically-incorrect volumes).

And then, I recall sitting in his library with him as the results of the Michigan Democratic presidential primary filtered in, in the spring of 1972. Although television sets and radios were not permitted in the old house, “Piety Hill,” up the street, I had a radio, and at Russell’s urging I brought it down from my room (the second floor of the library building). Kirk delighted in George Wallace’s upset victory, although I don’t think he wished his wife Annette to find out!

Such examples of his thinking and actions are now all swept under the carpet, carefully ignored, or simply rewritten, and the “Sage of Mecosta” emerges with new raiment, diminished and stuffed in a Procrustean bed, fully “trans-ed” and purified of his earlier inequities and sins of racism and against “human rights.”

Let us recall a little history, and this I essentially repeat from my earlier essays on this subject to which I refer the reader.

Mention the fact that King may have plagiarized as much as 40 % of his Boston University Ph.D. dissertation [cf. Theodore Pappas, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans, 1998, and Martin Luther King Jr Plagiarism Story, 1994, if they are have not been scrubbed from circulation], or that he worked closely with known Communists throughout his life, or that he advocated American defeat in Vietnam while praising Ho Chi Minh, or that he implicitly countenanced violence and Marxism, especially later in his life [cf., Congressional Record, 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461]—mention any of these accusations confirmed begrudgingly by his establishment biographers David Garrow and Taylor Branch, or mention his even-by-current-standards violent “rough sex” escapades (which apparently involved even under-agers) [cf., Cooper Sterling, January 13, 2018, VDare] and you immediately get labeled a “racist” and condemned by not just the zealous King flame-keepers on the Left, but by such “racially acceptable” conservatives like Rich Lowry and Dinesh D’Souza who supposedly are on the Right.

Indeed, in some ways Establishment “conservatives” such as Lowry (National Review), D’Souza, Glenn Beck, the talking heads on Fox and the furious scribblers at nearly all major “conservative” journals, and many others, not only eagerly buy into this narrative, they now have converted King into a full-fledged, card-carrying member of “conservatism inc.”—a “plaster saint” iconized as literally no one else in our history. Thus, this latest attempt to “scrub” clean Russell Kirk so that he, too, can join the new holy pantheon…finally, it simply had to happen.

Celebrating King becomes a means for the modern “conservative” movement to demonstrate its “civil rights” and “egalitarian” bona fides. When the Neoconservatives made their pilgrimage from the Trotskyite Left into the ranks of conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, they brought with them a fervent belief in a globalist New World Order egalitarianism that characterized their Trotskyite ideology, and the determination to redefine and re-orient the traditional American Rightwing, and to re-write, as well, American history.

Thus, the purges of the old conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s—there was no room for Southern conservatives like Mel Bradford, no room for traditionalist Catholics like Frederick Wilhelmsen or Brent Bozell Sr., no room for paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard, no room for Old Right anti-egalitarians like Paul Gottfried, and no room for “America Firsters” like Pat Buchanan…. These figures did not believe in King’s (and Lincoln’s) “promise of equality,” and thus were no doubt scarred by latent or real racism.

King Day becomes, then, for the modern Conservative Movement an opportunity for it to beat its chest, brag about its commitment to civil rights and “the American dream, the unrealized idea of equality” (that is, to distort and re-write the history of the American Founding), and to protect its left flank against the ever increasing charges that it could be, just might be, maybe is —“racist.”

The heavily-documented literature detailing the real Martin Luther King is abundant and remains uncontroverted. During the debates over establishing a national “King Day” in the mid-1980s, Senators Jesse Helms and John East (both North Carolinians) led the opposition, supplying the Congress and the nation, and anyone with eyes to read, full accounts of the “King legacy,” from his close association and collaboration with the Communist Party USA to his advocacy of violence and support for the Communists in Vietnam, to implicit support for Marxist revolution domestically. Ironically, it was Robert Woodson, a noted black Republican, who highlighted in a lecture given to honor the “conservative virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King” at the Heritage Foundation on November 5, 1993, the difficulties in getting black advocates of the older generation to respect King’s role as a Civil Rights leader. According to Woodson, as quoted in an excellent essay by Paul Gottfried,

…when Dr. King tried to bring the Civil Rights movement together with the [Marxist] peace movement, it was Carl Rowan who characterized King as a Communist, not Ronald Reagan. I remember being on the dais of the NAACP banquet in Darby, Pennsylvania when Roy Wilkins soundly castigated King for this position. [Paul Gottfried, “The Cult of St. Martin Luther King – A Loyalty Test for Careerist Conservatives?” January 16, 2012].

But not only that, behind the scenes there were voluminous secretly-made FBI recordings and accounts of King’s violent sexual escapades, often times with more than two or three others involved in such “rough sex” trysts; and of his near total hypocrisy when discussing civil rights and other prominent civil rights leaders. It is, to put it mildly, a sorry record, scandalous even by today’s standards…Indeed, King makes Harvey Weinstein look like a meek choirboy in comparison.

But you won’t hear any of that mentioned by the falling-all-over-itself media mavens at “Conservatism Inc.” or on Fox. In fact, such comments will get you exiled to the far reaches of the Gobi Desert and labeled a “racist,” quicker that my cocker spaniel gobbles down his kibble.

Almost all the material is now available and accessible online, including material from the Congressional Record. And I have listed it in previous forays into this topic. Much of what we really have come to know is thanks to the excellent work and dedicated research of the late Dr. Sam Francis, who served on the staff of Senator East. Francis’s work is critical, and originally was written to preface the publication of voluminous testimony and documentation placed in the Congressional Record by Senator Helms.

Francis’s essay and the Helms’ dossier were eventually published in book form (I have a published copy, but I’m unsure if you can still find it on Amazon). A few years back Dr. Francis’s introduction [“The King Holiday and Its Meaning,” February 26, 2015] and the lengthy Congressional Record material, which he prepared for Helms [“Remarks of Senator Jesse Helms. Congressional Quarterly,” February 26, 2005] were put online. For a very complete understanding of King’s association and cooperation with American Communists and his endorsement of Vietnamese Communism, as well as his putative endorsement of Marxism here in the United States while condemning the free enterprise system, these two items are essential reading.

But, say the scribblers at the “establishment conservative media,” wasn’t King really a conservative at heart, an old-fashioned black Baptist who believed in the tenets of traditional Christianity? Shouldn’t we simply overlook these all-too-human failings? And, like John Woods, Jr., shouldn’t we search diligently for those points of “consensus” and “shared communitarian values”?

The answer is a resounding NO.

I can think of no better summation of the real meaning of King Day and its bare-knuckled ideological use to deconstruct, dissolve and obliterate American traditions and heritage than to cite, again, Sam Francis:

“[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.

“By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.”

I will not be celebrating this day; rather, it is for me a mournful reminder of what has happened and is happening to this country…and what has happened to the once-fearless and vibrant “conservative movement” and now to the revered Dr. Russell Kirk.

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview.

England’s Augustan Age: On Satirists Alexander Pope And Jonathan Swift

Britain, Christianity, History, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Pseudo-intellectualism, Pseudoscience, The West

4 Replies

The counterculture of England’s Augustan Age was one of the most remarkable in history. It should be a model for the Dissident Right of today

By Juvenal Early

Think of a nominally Christian country in which a beleaguered majority is everywhere beset by the corruption of its leaders and the criminality of rebarbative minorities. Corruption reigns in high places, barbarism and crime reign in the street, and the culture is pervaded by mediocrities, who are celebrated as rebel geniuses, when they’re really just dullards, courtiers, and the usual Establishment lackeys. Can you guess?

That’s right. England in the Augustan Age, 300 years ago.

This was a time after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic James II was usurped by his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. When the Duke of Marlborough proved that it was possible for a General to become richer than a King. This is also the age when the English Language evolved into what we know today.

But although people in the Augustan age were certainly better-read than the savage illiterates of our own times, still, as always, the lowest common denominator prevailed. And so, people eschewed their rich legacy of Dryden and Chaucer and Shakespeare, in favor of the smut purveyed by the odious bookseller Edmund Curll or the profuse dullness (Dulness) on offer from the hacks who infested Grub Street.

In 1721, Robert Walpole became England’s first prime minister, a year after the “South Sea Bubble,” the Wall Street Crash of its day. Scam and corruption were everywhere prevalent. Walpole was a man of his time, enriching his courtiers and punishing his enemies. He stayed in power for 20 years, during which time highwaymen, thieves, and thief-takers—like the infamous Jonathan Wild—held sway, and the average person was under siege.

But a culture always generates a counterculture, and the counterculture of the Augustan Age was one of the most remarkable in history. It should be a model for the Dissident Right of today. The key figures of that counterculture are two of the immortals of literature: Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. I’ve been hearing about Swift and Pope all my life but hadn’t known that they lived at the same time and were friends—although Swift was an Anglican clergyman and Pope a Catholic (not a big door-opener in post-Tudor England).

Swift and Pope joined with Dr John Arbuthnot and playwright John Gay to form the Scriblerus Club. Arbuthnot, a little too fond of eating, created the great English persona John Bull, the honest citizen who’s a tad slow on the uptake. Gay wrote what may be the first musical, “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728), a rollicking send-up of Walpole’s corrupt England. “The Beggar’s Opera” would be modernized by the German communist Bertolt Brecht into “The Three-penny Opera,” Gay’s protagonist Captain MacHeath transformed into Mack the Knife.

The Scriblerians inspired one another. More than anyone since the great Juvenal, they elevated satire to high art. Their targets were numerous, and they tended to consign them to the charnel house of Dulness (sic). The enemy list included Classics scholar Robert Bentley, depraved bookseller Edmund Curll, laughable Poet Laureate Colley Cibber, and critic Lewis Theobald. Above all, there was Walpole, as criminal-friendly as a Soros DA, who would’ve strung up the Scriblerians, if possible. As it was, he saw to Swift’s Irish exile and banned theatre in London after Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” proved such a smashing success. Poor Gay died long before his sequel Polly was staged (in the age of Johnson!).

The best work of the Scriblerians still resonates three centuries later, especially in the case of Swift and Pope. They’ll be discussed for as long as great literature still matters.

Born into a Catholic Family, the same year Papist James II was ousted in favor of William and Mary, Pope’s (1688-1744) prospects were never bright. Fortunately, his family had money and could take shelter from the worst of the anti-Catholic persecution in lovely Windsor Forest. Many career paths were never an option for Pope. Plus, he was born with tuberculosis of the spine. Handicapped in body (he never grew above 4’6”), handicapped by religion (Swift tried to bribe him into the Church of England), denied all but the most rudimentary education, Pope could not have been expected to amount to much. Yet, he made more off the printed word than any writer since Shakespeare.

Inclined toward the Ancients, Pope imitated Horace and wrote first-rate translations of Homer. Classics scholars swear by his Iliad. He edited new editions of Shakespeare that were an invaluable link in the English theatre.

A poet, Pope wrote his brilliant satires in verse, mostly iambic pentameter. What does poetry have to do with satire? Oscar Wilde, anyone? Going back to Dryden, verse was a preferred vehicle for satire. Even Jonathan Swift used it occasionally. In Post-Revolutionary America, nothing stung like a good poem, and newspapers used it often. Take Jefferson’s friend Philip Freneau, editor of the National Gazette. Here he is in early 1800, jabbing fellow countrymen for going overboard in mourning the recently deceased George Washington:

He was no god, ye flattering knaves,
He own’d no world, he ruled no waves;
But—and exalt it, if you can,
He was the upright, Honest Man.

Pope’s eloquent venom was meted out to many agents of dullness, for instance:

Walpole and the courtier John Hervey (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot):

Whether in florid impotence he speaks,
And, as the prompter (Walpole) breathes, the puppet (Hervey) squeaks.
Or at the ear of Eve (Queen Caroline), familiar toad,
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,
Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies,
His wit all seesaw, between that and this,
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss [referring to Hervey’s bisexuality].

George Bubb Dodington, a Walpole ally, very susceptible to toadying hacks:

But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate,
To Bufo (toad) left the whole Castalian (spring of the Muses) state.
Proud as Apollo, on his forked hill,
Sate full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill,…

Sometimes there was tribute, here to his friend John Gay:

Or simple pride for flattery makes demands,
May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands!
Blessed be the great! For those they take away,
And those they left me; for they left me Gay;
Left me to see neglected genius bloom,
Neglected die, and tell it on his tomb….

Pope reserved special scorn for bookseller Edmund Curll; Lewis Theobald, a critic who attacked Pope’s edition of Shakespeare at length; and actor-cum-Poet Laureate Colley Cibber. The latter two would find themselves skewered in Pope’s Magnum Opus, The Dunciad, as respective kings of the Dunces.

The scurrilous Curll, a literary thief and plagiarizer, published purloined texts, hack-writer pulp, bios of newly dead celebrities, and even some smut. An opportunist, he’d got the best of Pope early on, but Pope turned the tables later, manipulating Curll into publishing his letters, i.e., presenting Pope’s side of his own story.

Of Curll and his ilk (Grub Street hacks), Pope writes in the Dunciad:

Hence miscellanies spring, the weekly boast,
Of Curll’s chaste press, and Lintot’s rubric post:
Hence hymning Tyburn’s elegiac lines,
Hence Journals Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines;
Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace
And New Year odes, and all the Grub Street race.
In clouded majesty here Dulness shone;
Four guardian virtues round support her throne…

Cibber and Theobald had offended Pope in other ways, including the dullness of their work. Cibber, a comic actor, was elevated to Poet Laureate in 1730, though he was without poetic accomplishment. The critic Theobald nitpicked Pope’s Shakespearian Editions at great length, advertising himself as England’s supreme Bard expert. Both men were deemed suitable candidates for king of the dunces:

I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Called to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate;
You by whose care, in vain decried and cursed,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first.

After his death, Pope’s reputation only grew. He was esteemed by Dr Johnson in the 18th Century; Byron, Lamb, Arnold, and Ruskin in the 19th; and W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell in the 20th. Only The Bible and Shakespeare have been quoted more. His tormentors outlived him; his reputation buried theirs. They exist only in the footnotes of many Pope biographies.

And what of Swift (1667-1745)? Born in Dublin to a carpetbagging English family, forced by circumstance and Walpole to spend most of his life in Dublin, he felt cheated out his English birthright. An Anglican, he didn’t particularly care for the Catholic Irish. Yet, he excelled in Dublin as a clergyman, and rose to become Dean of St Patrick’s, a post he held from 1713 until his death. An Englishman by temperament, he’s as much a part of the Irish canon as James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. When the English pushed Ireland around a little too much, Swift rose to its defense, and was inspired to write his sublimely satiric “Modest Proposal.”

From 1689 until 1699, Swift worked as the secretary to the writer/diplomat Sir William Temple, in Moor’s Park, Surrey. Temple, whose work hasn’t aged well, was nonetheless a first-rate prose stylist, as Samuel Johnson said of him, “the first writer who gave cadence to English prose.”

During this period, Temple became embroiled in the literary Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Temple took the Ancient position in opposition to proponents of modern books, like Richard Bentley. Swift, always loyal to Temple, produced his first great satire in Temple’s defense, The Tale of the Tub. There would also be the long essay, The Battle of the Books. Swift’s reputation as a writer was established.

Why did he write? Entertainment be damned. He told Pope he wanted to vex the world, not divert it. Swift’s oeuvre is vast and rich, from The Tale of the Tub to The Bickerstaff Letters, The Drapier Letters, and many essays and poems. But, of course, with Swift, it always comes down to Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

Gulliver’s Travels, is Swift’s masterpiece, the acme of satire in the English letters. It is Swift’s disquisition on Walpole’s England and the rottenness of Human Nature. Americans know Gulliver’s Travel as a bowdlerized children’s book, an entertaining little Disney cartoon, and most people think it begins and ends with the Lilliputians. In fact, it’s a darkly humourous parody of Robinson Crusoe (Swift didn’t care for the Whig hack Daniel Defoe)—filled with puns, bodily functions, and scatology—that’s an exhaustive survey of what’s wrong with the world. It’s also prescient and speaks to our present condition as much as anything written 300 years—heck, 3 days—ago. Far from being a children’s book, most people can’t appreciate Gulliver’s Travels until they’re over 30.

Ship’s doctor, Lemuel Gulliver, takes four journeys. First to Lilliput, where the tininess of its citizens is meant to represent the smallness of mind and vision Swift observed in Great Britain. There’s a Walpole stand-in Lilliput, the rope-dancing Treasurer Flimnap. Gulliver, soon in trouble for urinating on a fire in the queen’s chamber (thereby saving her!), will eventually need to escape Lilliput and find his way home.

On his second voyage, Gulliver reaches Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants, as large in proportion to Gulliver as he was to the Lilliputians. The Brobdingnagians are large of mind, large in generosity, peaceful, and open-minded. When Gulliver—let’s be clear; Gulliver is not Swift, not yet—proudly tells the Brobdingnag king about England, the king is aghast. He sees through Gulliver’s arguments and rationalizations. Through the king, Swift sends up his native land, including the national bank and national debt; the warmongering of its leaders; the war profiteers, like Winston Churchill’s revered ancestor the Duke of Marlborough:

He asked me, who were our Creditors? and, where we found Money to pay them. He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and extensive Wars; that, certainly we must be a quarrelsome People, or live among very bad Neighbors; and that our Generals must needs be richer than our Kings.

On learning about England’s legal system and its legislators, the king tells Gulliver:

You have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country. You have proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice are the proper Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator. That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.

The Brobdingnag King might almost be a paleolibertarian—200 years before the birth of Murray Rothbard. He sums up England as follows:

I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.

The Brobdingnagians also provide Gulliver with the opportunity to see human bodily decay at close-range, man through a microscope. As enormous as the Brobdingnagians are, Gulliver can easily see the imperfections of human flesh, the pores, the moles, the blemishes. The sight of a human mouth eating is a horror beyond words. Illusions are shattered.

On his third trip, Gulliver journeys to the floating island of Laputa, ruled by people who anticipate 21st Century elites who mandate electric cars and pandemic lockdowns, who demonize their opponents as anti-science. Laputa reveres science too. At their grand Academy of Lagado, the so-called Projectors rule the roost. They are eerie precursors to the rabble who run America’s woke universities. With funding available for the most esoteric of projects, the Projectors seek to extract sunbeams from cucumbers or reconstitute food from piles of human excrement. Wiser by now, Gulliver observes that

The only Inconvenience is, that none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the meantime, the whole Country lies miserably in waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths.

Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhms (say “HUE-nums), horse-like creatures of pure reason. When he arrives, Gulliver is greeted by a revolting horde of human offal, known as the Yahoos (in case you wondered where that term came from). Gulliver runs away from them, in fear for his life, but recognizes in the Yahoos his own English race.

When discovered by the Houyhnhms, they at first take Gulliver for a Yahoo, but he convinces them otherwise. He takes up residence with their leader, and soon feels comfortable among such rational beings whose worldview is so sympathetic to his own. The king’s conversation enlightens Gulliver. Gulliver has found his perfect home.

But the Houyhnhms are unnerved by his presence, so much does he resemble a Yahoo. So, reluctantly, Gulliver leaves and makes his way back to England, where he is now appalled by human contact, even with his family. They’re all Yahoos to him, and for a long time he avoids interaction. He eventually comes to a sort of détente with his fellow human beings, and lives out his days, spending as much time with horses as possible.

What can we say in conclusion about Pope and Swift? To state the obvious, human nature is immutable and projects devoted to perfecting humans are destined to fail. Also, satire is a very effective weapon. Truth, matched with wit, is a powerful combination.

If you’re a Christian, it’s okay to be a misanthrope like Swift. Let’s be honest, all this love thy neighbor/love your enemy stuff gets carried out way too far. Tough love is much better. If you love your neighbor to the point that you’re tolerating open borders, foreign wars, and drag queen story hour, you’ve got a problem.

In conclusion, we need to emulate men like Pope and Swift. They were the coolest guys in town in their own time, and their work has lived on until ours. If you match truth and wit with intelligence and real learning, you just might leave a legacy that people will be talking about 100 years from now.

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“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite a buzz.

* Screen picture credit here

UPDATED (9/23/022): The Genius Of Erik Larson

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