So.  The “Patriot Prayer” guy — ever controversial ever abrasive — is running for the Senate.

I haven’t much clue if he sneaks in in Washington’s “Top 2 Primary” — everyone voting for everyone, two onto November.  But something strikes me as odd.  It’s two things he shares with similar “right wing to the Republicans” 4th Congressional candidate Clint Didier.

(1) Didier.  Football player — NFL.  Patriot Prayer guy — high school football coach.
And… (2) Monsanto.  Both run against Monsanto, like they’re listening to KBOO or something.  I kind of understand Didier — high ag district, it’s  a fair corporate boogey to put on mainstream Republicans — but this guy comes from what?

Skipping around the NY Times articles.  The least conspiratorial claim, or most atonal of points… made in the vast land of conspiracy to protect the NRA’s claim on the Second Amendment comes here…

In an on-air appearance, Jack Kingston, a former United States representative from Georgia and a regular CNN commentator, asked, “Do we really think — and I say this sincerely — do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” (He was quickly rebuked by the anchor Alyson Camerota.)

A point, if not much of one, of fact in the background — sure… the infrastructure that has the kids up and speaking comes from various political causes.  The point is spotted with the bit of hypocrisy over at a different article.

Shyanne Roberts was nine years old when she built her first AR-15-style rifle. Now 13 and a competitive shooter in South Carolina, she regularly uses AR-15s at shooting competitions, along with shotguns and pistols. Her rifle is black with purple marbling. Her name is engraved on the scope mount, so everyone knows it is hers.

“I like shooting them because it’s just another gun to master,” she said.

She has testified against stricter gun laws in New Jersey, and said that she did not support tightening laws on semiautomatic rifles in the wake of the Florida shooting.

I presume the gun is locked up pretty well, with bullets shuffled away to another place, before the outings.  Or — sure — the 13 year old kid is fine.  But the thing I don’t ever quite grasp in terms of the hunting and sporting angle of target shooting and hunting: it strikes me that the closer we get to a bow and arrow, the more it reflects on “sporting” — ie:  skills competition to get the thing focuses.  Moving up the technology to recent transfers from military assault weaponry, and it feels like it would be cheating.  Maybe there’s a grand effects at work, but then I suppose you could get your jollies better from… shoving watermelon off roof tops in lieu of fireworks?

Feeling the need to nod a bit to Black History Month, perhaps regrettably in the manner it’s mis-honored in some American high schools (my memory is of my Freshman history teacher thinking — quick!  It’s the 27th, and … er… how about this movie about Black soldiers in the Civil War?) …

… But more especially wanting to get off the beaten path a little bit, I read George Schuyler’s 1930s farce Black No More.
Schuyler, an interesting figure — a contrarian who started as a Socialist, didn’t much like any of his Socialist organizations, and at some point just ran to support of Nixon and the John Birch Society — though, reading two different introductions in two different editions of the book, with the one who is more sympathetic toward his contrarian politics figuring to the line that Nixon was to the left of Clinton.  This will tend to shuffle the book away from your book stores’ array of black America’s literature.

The satires on WEB Du Bois, Booker Washington, and Marcus Garvey are the opposite of subtle.  (So Booker Washington is the president of “ the Dusky River Agricultural Institute, Supreme General of the Knights and Daughters of Kingdom Come and president of the Uncle Tom Memorial Association“.  (And I suppose ultimately Garvey was a charlatan, if an interesting figure.)   It’s the HL Mencken school of mockery.

So.  Anyone read Matthew Sweet’s Operation Chaos?  Not necessarily going to fly off the shelf, but I hope it’s got its niche.

The book begins thusly.    (And some events and figures covered at Larouche Planet here.)

The Guardian pipes in.  The American Deserters Committee was of course infiltrated by the CIA, as well as by the Swedish security services and presumably the KGB as well. The survivors Sweet has tracked down all believe they know who the spies were, and all disagree. Most of the explanations are plausible. Certainly they are far more plausible than the undisputed reality, which is that the core of the group who went to Stockholm fell into the clutches of an American fantasist and convicted fraudster, who built a cult that endures to this day.

Kirkus Review:  Unfortunately, the presentation is somewhat disjointed, as Sweet jumps among a variety of perspectives. Readers looking for a neat conclusion to the deserters’ story will likely be disappointed; the tale is ongoing, and the participants have gone in different directions. The shift from the antiwar story to the rise of the LaRouche cult, while implicit in the material, reads like an unannounced detour.

Well, okay…  Announce it: the book lands on having a Part one and a Part two.  I note Michael Vale doesn’t particularly come out smelling like roses with the Part One, running his own ego-stripping sessions on his cadre before they next land in the Larouche movement.

Bo Burlingham, on life in the ADC:  There was an awful lot of playacting that was going on.  I was part of that.  We were all sort of play acting, trying to be relevant.  Aware that these big events were happening, and wanting to have some part in them.    And then on to…

(pages 170 – 172) In a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, Michael Vale met Lyn Marcus for the first time.  A lanky figure in his early fifties, with thinning hair and a bow tie as prim and proper as his New England accent.  A pipe smoker, whose tobacco habit also gave him a useful rhetorical prop.  He smiled beneath a pair of dark glasses and welcomed Michael into the Labor Committees.  Michael accepted.  It was the biggest mistake of his life.
“Often, I don’t catch the signals of danger, or if I do I don’t heed them,” said Michael.  “But I saw this one coming.  It’s a pretty eerie feeling to be in the presence of a psychopath.”
[…] I knew the next part of the story, and the shadow that it had cast upon Michael’s life.  I knew the man he called Lyn Marcus, and had once regarded as a political ally, was the villain of his biography.  I also realized, as we spoke, that Michael Vale believed his old enemy was dead.

Stop right there.  That’s a pretty funny take away.  A common belief among people whose associations with Larouche are far more fleeting than Vale’s.

Read the next paragraph here.

“The enemies have changed a little,” he said.  “It used to be the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger, and me.”

Instead of, apparently, Zeus.  And I don’t know if this is a revelation or old news, but a quick comment.:

Molly Kronberg spent a peculiar few minutes on the line trying to stir the interest of the tv journalist Geraldo Rivera.

Regarding the new news that the grand world plot against Larouche (and it continues, as we see here)– well, follow the logic if you may… I may point out… wait a decade and Geraldo Rivera may just have bit, for roughly the effect Morton Downey Jr. gave him.

Matthew Sweet was apparently surprised by Bill Jones’s appearance at a White House Press Conference: EIR has been perched there for the past however many decades.  (As too other odd  figures… you had the Jeff Gannon “controversy” in the Bush Years — himself notably wound up in Larouchian conspiracy land as conspiracy theorists speculated back to the White House sex ring).  The Trump Administration has added skyped bloggers to lob some soft balls.  And, looking over the acknowledgements — in any future printings the sentence that thanks all the former Larouche followers who helped than lists a bunch of names of former followers… as well as Dennis King — could be clarified.

II.  All right.  The historical allusion and marker lands on another wacky candidate in Illinois, and so discussion turns to that whole 1986 election debacle.

What’s Alex Jones’ take on Lyndon LaRouche?
Slightly aroused.

Oh man, there was (is?) a LaRouchie stationed on the sidewalk Broadway near Wall Street for years and years. He looks exactly as you would expect.
Conspiracy nuts try to join them, but then wander off when they can’t understand what in hell their new conspiracy is about.

At the risk of being beaten to the asphalt of a parking lot, I liked his ideas on a high speed coast-to-coast train.

I remember 1986 in Illinois very well. I once wrote a soc.historywhat-if post about it where I noted: “It is in any event pretty clear that Fairchild’s and Hart’s votes did not reflect approval of the LaRouchies’ views of the world. (And they did not reflect any huge LaRouchie campaign, either–the LaRouchies claimed their total campaign expenditures were only in the hundreds of dollars!) The LaRouchie candidate against gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III for example got well under 10 percent of the vote. Likewise, whenever there was a three-way contest between the Democratic regular, a “respectable” opponent and a LaRouchie, the LaRouchie came in a poor third–which suggests that the LaRouchie vote was partly a protest vote by people who may not have known who the LaRouchies were but *did* know they were opposed to the regular candidate (contrary to the conventional wisdom that they didn’t know who the regular candidate was)…”

A bit of a bias here?  honorable Adlai Stevenson III.

ITEM NUMBER THREE:  Conspiracy reverberates.

It occurred while I was traveling the country to talk about my new book on Edward Lansdale, the legendary covert operative who in the 1950s helped to defeat a communist insurgency in the Philippines and then to create the state of South Vietnam. While Lansdale was once known as a pioneer of counterinsurgency, in recent years he has acquired notoriety among conspiracymongers who think that he was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

This astonishing claim was first made by the now-deceased L. Fletcher Prouty, an Air Force officer who worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. In retirement, Prouty became a prolific conspiracy theorist who was associated with the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and Lyndon LaRouche. He said that “the Churchill Gang” murdered FDR and that David Rockefeller stage-managed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ITEM FOUR:  Wait for it… from the anals of political positioning.

In a surprising action yesterday, the never-Trump (and always never-LaRouche) Washington Post…

Some agree with the positioning, I see.

The Republican Party’s head-first dive into breathless conspiratorial fantasies in defense of Donald Trump is a brand-defining moment as the Party of Lincoln morphs into the Party of LaRouche.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE:  A bit of a blip to show that, whatever else you can say, PANIC was dipping into some popular support.   From Trina Robbins’s Last Girl Standing — on editing an AIDS benefit comic book.  See here on Neal Adams.  (183-184)

Neal Adams really didn’t get it.  The page he submitted consisted of a large male face with an A on the forehead.  The lettering around the face explained that in some future time, AIDS had been eradicated by isolating people with AIDs in special camps (and to judge by the drawing branding the letter A on the foreheads!)  He was not being ironic!  The whole thing was so homophobic that I decided Robert should write the rejection letter, which he did: an amazingly polite letter, considering.  Neal sent a letter of protest to our publisher!  I thought this was akin to sending a letter of protest to the principal if the teacher fails you on a test.  His letter was pretty incoherent, and made references to “Nazi’s”.  I couldn’t resist.  I sent him a letter asking what it was that belonged to the Nazi’s.

ITEM SIX:  Erm.

President Trump’s historic trip to Asia last November is one of the greatest diplomatic achievements by any U.S. president in recent memory.
All very cooperative with China and Russia.  Follows off the heals of this, right?
Therefore, I support LaRouche’s Four Laws: 1. Re-instate Glass-Steagall; 2: Establish a National Development Bank; 3. Issue $10 trillion federal credit directed to create modern infrastructure; and, 4: Replace the war machine with a commitment to peaceful space exploration and fusion power development.
Trump supports none of those.  So goes Kevin Morgus to the Albany (OR) Democrat.

Others noted.

Apparently, the Russian government swayed the American election by bombarding American facebook users with … er… this.

  Yes.  Paid Russian operatives were behind that whole “Satan loves Hillary” campaign.

The facebook page “Army of Jesus” is pure Russian disinformation.

As too a bunch of other facebook pages you weren’t aware of because you were in the wrong circles.  Which influenced the base vote in and around Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
(Maybe you caught some Bernie bro thing at some point.  I don’t know?).  The only thing I ever got was a barrage of “Vote for Kasich” ads, as the desperate Kasich campaign apparently filtered the ad sense analytics determined I was maybe some anti-Trump Republican.  Or it was worth a roll of the dice to decide that I was.

  You know the thing about the Hillary Clinton Satan boxing Jeus… “Like” if you want Jesus to win thingy…

You can easily “unlike” it.

In the meantime, it’s still legal for everyone to call politicians mean names, and round about there the campaign to figure out how to stop the menace… beggars the possibility of answers that are worse than the problem.

I suppose the deep into into Western psyche, if not for political purposes than for commercial purposes, from nefarious Russian sources goes back to the prefab group “t.A.T.u.”, whose managers saw the titillating appeal of teenage (faux) lesbian singing, manager gnabbing the appeal off of studies in psychology.  I guess the next KGB program will be to try to spot the trends of demonology to dump on … erm…

So.  Mitt Romney.  Running, and a shoo in at that, for a seat in Utah.  To provide a Utah conservatism for the Republican Party — supplementing, I suppose, Mike Lee’s.

There have been losing presidential candidates who took their spot in the Senate.  Goldwater.  Humphrey.  Of course, they were senators before running for president.  Romney’s seems a new course.

Skipping states to snag a seat is interesting.  Of course, to the detractors who go to him saying “Why don’t you stay out in (mass)?”, he can always say, “Two words.  Henry.  Clay.”  That should shut up all cries of carpet-bagging!

Lost on something here.

BuzzFeed News first reported a YouTube user called “nikolas cruz” wrote “Im going to be a professional school shooter” in a comment posted last September on a video uploaded by a Mississippi bail bondsman.
It was not immediately clear why the FBI would not have been able to identify the author of the post if that username was, in fact, his real name.

The man is butchering the English language.  There is no such thing as “professional” school shooter — professional means that you’re getting paid for it.  Unless the kid has plans for a tell all book, or other means of monetizing his crime (and I imagine if we get that far from precedent, all moneys earned as he wails away in prison would through lawsuit go to the family’s victims), this doesn’t work.

Or maybe we’ve redefined the word?

Interesting to see a graph of school shootings (and term not as defined by the “Anytown club” which apps the number to 18, for as many as they can spot) — over the last two decades — broken up by town population.  I’m not sure what the graph is set out to prove, but I suppose it’s good a statistic of mindless productions as anything.

In other bits and pieces of our damning national psyche… I note this.

As the grandma snooping in on this boy’s journal gets feted by most everyone, the perhaps plausible perhaps not “Defense” is (for good and bad) all but ignored in the AP article and write ups.  An after thought. 
Public Defender Rachel Forde noted the gun and the grenade shells were legal to possess. She said the “musings and ventings” in O’Connor’s journal weren’t enough evidence to support a charge of attempted murder.

The dog won’t hunt, in the court of public opinion, and there appear to be enough thingies beyond this to corroborate horrors anyways.  And yet I pause for a second on it.  I once met someone who was expelled from the Oregon Public school system under a then-recently passed law for, as he said, “i “rumor and innuendo and venting private journal entries”.  And though I do have the thought for him that — well, clearly the public school system wasn’t much working for him and whatever alternate system he had once thrown out of school hopefully proceeded well enough… but I’m still left at that thought where you throw the threat assessment in the “reading his journals” and it doesn’t receive anything of a “wait one second” pause.