I was opening boxes now that were not just from another place — as is usual when you move; not just from another time; but I was opening boxes that were from literally another world. I don’t know that such a thing has happened in quite this way in history before.

Some items memorialized normal losses and change. Others, though, revealed that long-revered institutions had lost all morality and authority.

Here was a grey sweater that had belonged to my father, who had been a writer. It still had the line of loose threads along the clavicle, the little gaps opening up in the sewn-together pieces, that were characteristic of his distinguished-but-absent-minded-professor look. Dr Leonard Wolf could wear a moth-eaten sweater such as that one, on a street in New York City, and still look like a Byronic poet preoccupied with his latest sonnet. He looked stylish even when he was bedridden — even when advancing Parkinson’s meant he could no longer communicate with words, his treasure. He was charismatic even when gestures failed him; when my husband, an Irish raconteur, sat by his bedside, telling stories to make him laugh. He managed to have elan even when Brian had to ask him to make a sound to let him know if he wanted the stories to continue, and my dad could only groan: yes, more stories.

The stories have ended now for my father; at least the earthly ones. But the sweater still carries that wintry, breezy scent that was his while he was on this earth, telling us stories, more stories.

I folded my father’s sweater for the mending pile.

A small brown dog toy surfaced, chewed so thoroughly in one section that the white lining of the toy remained. The little dog who had enjoyed the toy, of course, the much-mourned Mushroom, is no more. His dog tag is nailed to a tree that leans over the river in the woods, near where we now live.

I put the chewed-up toy on the discards pile.

There was the little white wooden armoire I had hand-painted — amateurishly but with love — for a child’s room. The armoire was not needed any more. Everyone had grown up.

There were boxes and boxes of what had once been exciting, culturally meaningful CDs and DVDs. I sighed — what to do with these now? The technology itself was obsolete.

Then there were the pillows. Floral pillows. Tufted pillows. Even I knew these were tasteless, and I’d known that even at the time I had bought them. When my loved ones were old enough to notice aesthetics, they would chorus, when I brought home a new find: “Mom! Please! No more florals!”

I saw that I had been obsessed then with accumulating not only florals, but warm colors — cranberry and scarlet, terra-cotta and apricot and peach.

With the eyes of the present, and now in a happy marriage, I realized what had been pushing me to acquire all of these redundant soft florals. I had longed for domesticity and warmth, but had been, as a single mother then, dating the wrong kind of man to get domesticity and warmth. So I had unconsciously kept choosing softness and coziness in decor, because I had missed it in my relationship.

The man, a gifted, mercurial charmer, had also, in the past few years, passed away; young; of a wasting cancer.

I sighed again, and put the floral pillows in the “donations” pile.

####

Other items in the opened boxes, however, did not speak of organic loss and change but rather of worlds of authority that had seemed sparkling and real in 2019, but that have revealed themselves since then to be seething with rot.

Here, for instance, was the brown, pleated, Grecian-style dress, with the bared arms and gathered waist, that I had worn to a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 2000s.

Brown is a color I almost never wear, and I had never worn that Grecian style of formal dress briefly fashionable in the Friends era; so I remembered, as I shook it out into the sunlight of two decades later, that I had felt quite daring that night.

The wedding had been in an event hall nestled in the dunes. Local seafood hors d’oeuvres had been passed on silver trays. The bride had been smoldering and lovely in a white lace Vera Wang (always Vera Wang) dress. All was as it should have been.

The wedding had brought together White House politicos, Washington Post op ed writers and reporters, brash young New York City political speechwriters and campaign managers, and trendy nonfiction writers who were already making names for themselves chronicling the scene. We were all in our mid- to late 30s — we were fomenting change, approving of ourselves, making a difference; we were kind of like The West Wing, we thought — (one of our friends consulted for it) — idealistic, unintentionally a bit chic, madly hopeful.

We were the scene.

I almost recoiled now with sorrow and anger. I folded up that dress, thinking about those institutions that had undergirded our optimism that warm night, when our confidence and certainty had rung out onto the warm, salty breezes, along with the sounds of the ultra-hip blues band.

The major newspapers? The once-young journalists? The last two and a half years showed them to be shills for what have been revealed to be genocidal imperial powers. They became media versions of sex workers, scheduling time to deliver blow jobs to whomever would write them the biggest checks.

The once-young, West-Wing-style politicos? The last two and a half years showed them willing to become policy wonks for a global march to tyranny that instrumentalized a murderous medical experiment on their fellow humans; on their very constituents.

Where now were those institutions that at that wedding in the early 2000s, filled us with pride and a sense of mission as we took part in building them?

Imploded morally; left without a shred of authority or credibility.

I put the brown dress on the Goodwill pile.

I turned to an old scheduling notebook — it recorded some visits to Oxford. We’d been at a dinner party in North Oxford, hosted by the Warden of Rhodes House, attended by the Vice Chancellor of the University, as I recall, and by many other luminaries. Indeed, the evolutionary biologist Dr Richard Dawkins had been a guest, pestered, as he no doubt often was, by a dinner attendee who had wanted to talk to him about his atheism.

It had been a sparkling evening, elegant and urbane. I’d felt privileged to be at a table where some of the greatest of minds of my time were gathered, and where the very leader of a great university was helping to convene us.

I loved Oxford with a pure love. The university had sustained a vibrant commitment to the principles of reason and to freedom of speech, for over nine hundred years. It had supported the asking of questions when it was dangerous to ask questions; from just after what used to be called the Dark Ages; through the High Middle Ages; through the Reformation; through the Enlightenment. It had tended faithfully, through the darkest of times, the bright, unquenchable flame of the wakeful mind of Europe.

That - the legacy of critical thinking of the West - was Oxford’s legacy.

But —in 2021— it had complied with a requirement that its students endure “online learning”— a demand that had no basis in reason or in the natural world (https://www.oxford.gov.uk/news/article/1686/most_students_set_to_study_online_under_new_national_lockdown.)

This damage done to its trusting young people was a travesty, in my mind, of the great innovation that the University of Oxford had given to the world - the tutorial system, in which being physically present with a couple of other students and with a Don (professor) in his or her study, opens up the dimension of rigorous scholarly discourse in a magical and irreplaceable way.

‘Online learning’? In Oxford? An institution that had survived plagues and epidemics that dwarfed the respiratory disease of 2020-2022, that had survived wars and revolutions, and that had taught students nobly in the face of crises of all kinds?

I did not know if I would ever go back to Oxford; and, if I did, what I would find there or how I would feel. I did not even know if today’s Oxford would welcome me back, being, as I was now in 2022, though I had not been in 2019, a “reputational refugee”, having been cancelled institutionally in most of what had been my traditional intellectual homes.

My heart hurt once more. I put the old notebook in the pile for “storage.”

I unfolded a tablecloth I had bought in India. I’d visited a literary conference in Tamil Nadu in about 2005, and had brought the lovely fabric home as a souvenir.

A flood of memories surged as I looked at the once-familiar pattern.

I’d hosted so many parties in my little West Village apartment, centering on that hand-blocked tablecloth. I’d set a big pot of turkey chili — my go-to option, the only dish I could not ruin — pile cut-up baguettes on platters, and assemble bottles of cheap red wine on that tablecloth. Thus I could, as a broke single mom, affordably entertain — and those parties, as I recall them, were fantastic. Crowded, lively, buzz-y, with a sexy, intellectually engaging vibe. Filmmakers, actors, journalists, artists, novelists, academics, poets; a handful of the less-boring venture capitalists; all crowded together, spilling out into the kitchen, the hallways. At a certain point in the evening the noise would crescendo — (my neighbors were tolerant) — into the happy roar of new ideas clashing or merging; new friendships, new contacts, new lovers connecting and engaging.

In 2019, I had been part of the New York City social scene. My life was full of events, panels, lectures, galas, the watching of rehearsals, theatrical opening nights, film premieres, gallery openings. I thought that my place in the society in which I traveled was unquestioned, and that I was in a world in which this calendar of events, these parties, this community, above all this ethos, would last forever.

Where was that society now? Artists, filmmakers, journalists — all of the people who are supposed to say No to discrimination, No to tyranny — they had scattered, had cowered, had complied. They had groveled.

The same people who had been the avant garde of a great city, had, as I have written elsewhere, gone right along with a society in which a person such as I am, cannot enter a building.

And I had fed those people. I topped up their drinks with my affordable red wines.

I had welcomed them into my home.

I had supported their careers. I had fostered connections on their behalf. I had blurbed their books, had promoted their gallery openings, because — because we were allies, right? We were intellectuals. We were artists. We were even activists.

And yet these people — these same people — had complied — eagerly! With zero resistance! Immediately! With a regime that is appearing day by day to be about as bad in some ways as that of Marshal Philippe Petain’s in Vichy France.

Unthinkable now that I had treated them once as colleagues, as friends.

I had been made into a nonperson, overnight. Now it turns out, as America First Legal found via a recent lawsuit, that the CDC had actively colluded with Twitter officials, in reaction to an accurate tweet of mine calling attention to menstrual problems post-mRNA vaccination, to erase me from the worlds of both legacy media and digital discourse. A smear campaign that was global in its dimensions had been orchestrated with Twitter by CDC’s Carol Crawford, as the internal emails revealed by America First Legal seemed to show. This past week, another lawsuit, by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, revealed that the White House itself colluded with Big Tech to censor American citizens. My truthful tweet was in that tranche as well.

As if we were characters in a Lewis Carroll book, the world of meritocracy had been inverted.

The highest level of government collusion was directed at me the minute I did just exactly what I have done for 35 years; that is to say, the minute I raised, in summer of 2021, a grave women’s health concern. Confusingly, my advocating in exactly this way for serious women’s health journalism and for proper medical responses to women’s emerging sexual and reproductive health issues, had made me a media darling for 35 years. Indeed, this practice had made me a media darling among those very people, who had eaten my food and drunk my wine, while sitting around this very tablecloth.

But now, when I did the exact same thing for which they had long applauded me, I was cast immediately into social outer darkness.

Why? Because the times had changed.

And because the scale of the revenue generated for them by supporting flat out lies, had changed.

Did any of those right-on people — many of them famous feminists, male and female - speak up for me? Did any of them publicly say, Wait a minute, whatever the truth may turn out to be (and I was right, right, right) - this is a serious women’s health issue? Let’s explore it?

Not. A. One.

The bold, brave, edgy New York City avant-garde, whom I had hosted for twenty years?

They were scared off by Twitter.

That world surely shunned me, and made me a nonperson, overnight. The power of the Federal government is pretty stunning, especially in collusion with the biggest content companies in the world, when you are on the receiving end of being erased by them.

That world rejected me.

But I rejected it right back.

#####

I live in the woods now. Instead of the glitter and din of galas, the chatter of the literati, Brian and I are surrounded by crowds of tall, solemn trees; the excitement of our days centers on sightings of cranes and hawks; the dramas we face involve living near coyotes and rattlesnakes, and evading while yet marveling at the resident adolescent bear. We are making friends with those who grow food, in anticipation of needing to be self-sufficient. We just picked up from farmer acquaintances, to store in a massive freezer, something that was described with a phrase I had never heard in my previous, Door-Dash life: our quarter of a cow.

I was gifted a .22 by Brian. He recently bought me a Ruger as well. The world is falling apart even as a new world is emerging. A peaceful person though I am, I realize that we may someday need to hunt for food or perhaps need, God forbid, to defend our home. I am learning to shoot.

The old world, the pre-2019 world, is a scene of wreckage and carnage to me.

The old world I left behind, and that left me behind, is not a post-COVID world.

It is a post-truth world, a post-institutional world.

The institutions that supported the world that existed when these 2019 boxes were packed, have all collapsed; in a welter of corruption, in an abandonment of public mission and public trust.I look at them now the way Persephone looked backward without regret at Hades.

I am living in a new world already — a world that most people can’t see yet as it is still being envisioned and built up - painfully, daringly, laboriously. Though it exists at this point in history more conceptually and even spiritually than it does materially and politically, this new world is my home.

Who else lives in the new world?

My husband, who was not afraid to fight for America, and who is not afraid to defend me.

A new constellation of friends and allies, that have emerged since these boxes were packed away, and since the worlds that are represented as if sealed inside them, collapsed with rot.

I work and party now with people who love their country and tell the truth. The people with whom I spend time now are this era’s versions of Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Phyllis Wheatley and Ben Franklin. I don’t know how these folks vote. I don’t know that they know how I vote. I don’t care. I know that they are sterling human beings, because they are willing to protect the cherished ideals of this beautiful experiment, our native land.

Life experiences don’t unite these people with whom I hang out now; social status does not unite them — they come from all walks of life, from every “class”, and they pay little or no attention to status or class markers. Politics don’t unite these people. What unites them in my view is the excellence of their characters, and their fierce commitment to liberty; to the ideals of this nation.

Oddly, living now in the purple-to-red rural America that my former “people,” the blue-state elites, are conditioned to view with suspicion and distrust, I also have more personal freedom than I did as a member of the most privileged class. The most privileged class does not have the greatest privilege of all, that of personal liberty: it is a class that is continually anxious and status-insecure, its members often scanning the room for a more important conversation, its collective mind continually exerting subtle control, both socially and professionally, over other members of the “tribe.”

My former elite network paid lip service to “diversity”; but there was a deadening sameness and conformity in our demographics, and that conformity also policed our world views, our voting patterns, even our kids’ schools and our travel destinations.

In contrast, people here in deep purple-red country, the ones whom we know anyway, give each other the assumed permission to differ, to have uncensored opinions, to be free.

Even my social media community is not the world I left behind in 2019; I can’t even get on those platforms any more, as I am extra super duper ultra cancelled.

But I don’t know if I’d even want to be in those conversations now; the discourse of the elite left these days, “my people”, seems fearful and in-lockstep, scolding and rigid, when I hear exchanges of it.

Now, in 2022, my online community is made up of a world of people whom I never knew existed — or rather a world of people I was conditioned ignorantly to stereotype, and to fear; I am in contact now with people who care about America, who believe in God or in a greater meaning in this world, people who put family first, and who turn out — who knew? — to be vastly open-minded, civilized and decent.

I spend time with people who love their communities, speak out for their actual brothers and sisters, meaning humanity; risk themselves to save the lives of strangers; and care about actual fact-based journalism, actual science-based medicine, actual science-based science.

These days I chat online with people who tell me, unfashionably but beautifully, they are praying for me.

In spite of fighting an apocalypse every day, how can I help but be so much happier now?

*****

I no longer want to sit at a table with people who call themselves journalists, but who deny or trivialize injuries to women at a scale that beggars belief; who give Pfizer and the FDA a pass, and ask them no real questions.

I no longer want to sit at a table with people who are okay with the murder of children, the poisoning of breast milk, the burdening of women with the twenty different names in the Pfizer documents that all amount to menstrual pain and agony and the ruination of women’s fertility. I don’t want to do anything but prosecute the people who took money to cover up the damaging of women by means of “reproductive disorders,” at scale.

These people, “my people”, who were once so erudite, so witty, so confident, so ethical, so privileged - the people of the elite world contained in the 2019-and-before boxes — pretty and well-spoken as they once were, turn out, with the twist of just a couple of years, and just a bucket load or two of bribe money, to be revealed as monsters and barbarians.

I left the rest of the boxes to open another day. There is no rush.

The institutions the boxes memorialize are dead; and maybe they never really existed, as we believed them to be, in the first place.

I put the red, purple and blue tablecloth on the “wash and store to use again” pile. Then I took it home with me.

People who still have their honor intact, will sit around our table.

The recent movie on Elvis Presley[1] is exceptional in its acting, script, and production. For those interested in such matters, it is also excellent as cultural history.

The movie deals to a significant extent with the African influences on Presley’s music. As a little boy growing up in a poor, integrated neighborhood, he was fascinated by the rhythms and gyrations of the blacks, including black gospel music. This boyhood fascination developed into an adolescent identification with the “blues” of Negro musicians, and his frequenting of black nightclubs and bars.

With Presley’s distinctly Negro musical style and his equally Negro-influenced gyrations, the movie depicts the impact that he had on crowds of white female adolescents, which later spread to their initially appalled boyfriends. What the music and the gyrations were evoking were the atavistic impulses of the most primal elements common to the collective unconscious, as Jung might put it: that layer of the unconscious that predates racial differentiation.

Mass Marketing Negro Rhythms

Presley’s style was quickly seen as the means by which Negro music could be marketed to white adolescents; creating a vast new consumer market through the mainstreaming of previously marginalized Negro rhythms. Christopher Farley, writing for Time, refers to Samuel Phillips of Sun Records, where Presley got his start, as seeing the profits to be made in mass-marketing black music to white consumers via a white musician:

One of Presley’s most significant contributions was this: he was able to make more of a commercial impact in rock than the black performers who pioneered the field. In fact, before he signed Presley, Phillips famously declared that “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”[2]

With the backing of RCA Victor in 1956, Presley was elevated to iconic status, displacing the popularity of white country musicians such as Hank Snow.

Indebted to Negro Rhythms and Dance

Presley acknowledged his debt to Negro music. In an interview in 1956, Presley explained:

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ‘til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to a place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.[3]

To Loui Robertson of the Negro magazine Jet, Presley ascribed his first influences as a child to black gospel:

A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along.  Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid — like Rev. Brewster’s church (Rev. W. Herbert Brewster of East Trigg Ave. Baptist Church in Memphis).[4]

Little Richard said of Presley that “[t]hey wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”[5]

Perhaps the most significant accolade comes from one of our epoch’s most eminent Culture-distorters, Leonard Bernstein, who said of Presley:

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything — music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution — the 60’s comes from it. Because of him a man like me barely knows his musical grammar anymore.[6]

Bernstein hosted the “radical chic” fundraising dinner parties lampooned by Tom Wolfe, where New York’s socialites mingled with Black Panthers.[7] Bernstein, the maestro with a unique ability to turn high art into a cacophony, apparently regarded Presley as having made Beethoven and Wagner, Mozart and Gluck, redundant.

Breaking Down the Color Bar

In 1956 Presley “crossed the color line” by attending events designated for blacks only. In June he attended the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park during what was designated as “colored night,” according to the newspaper Memphis World. On December 7 he attended the annual fundraiser held by black radio station WDIA at Memphis Stadium to raise funds for “needy Negro children.” Here he performed with B. B. King, Ray Charles, and Rufus Thomas. He returned to the same event the following year.

The movie Elvis and sundry television documentaries on him over the years have referred to the opposition Presley met from diehard Southern segregationists. This is intended to place Elvis in his role as an iconic “rebel with a cause” against the “Establishment” in an era where it was the South that was beleaguered by the “Establishment,” while black civil rioters received plaudits from the mass media and plentiful funding from Ford, Rockefeller, and other oligarchic wealth.  The villain in the movie in this regard is James O. Eastland, Senator from Elvis’ home state of Mississippi. A review of the movie states of the Eastland character:

James “Jim” Eastland was an antagonist in the 2022 movie Elvis. He was based on the real life Senator Eastland, and was portrayed by the English actor Nicholas Bell. A virulent racist, Eastland was stridently opposed to racial equality and integration of minorities. In the 1950s he was a United States Senator from Mississippi. When young people heard and saw a new young singer named Elvis Presley Eastland also started opposing Elvis on the grounds that he was “corrupting” the youth of America with his physical performance artistry and his beliefs. He began leading efforts to have Elvis banned from both the airwaves and in person concerts.[8]

The white resistance is, as one might expect, portrayed invariably as regressive and ignorant. Television documentaries on Presley often show clips of a spokesman from the segregationist Citizens Councils, declaiming against Presley’s “immorality.” 65 years later, sophisticated viewers are supposed to react with reflexive mirth and/or disgust at such bigotry.

While country-music singer Hank Snow is portrayed, albeit in passing, as a regressive Christian bigot, not all Negroes were enamored with Presley’s style, just as not all were zealous about desegregation.[9] Criticism came especially from the jazz genre, one jazz music critic stating that whereas such music previously had a limited appeal, this music — referring to Presley — was now “intentionally cheapened to appeal to mass taste.”[10] The music critic had discerned precisely the meaning of it all. The jazz genre was elitist, despite the use the CIA and State Department were making of it during the “cultural Cold War” to showcase the wonders of American democracy to the world (along with Abstract Expressionism). Dr. Michael Bertrand states of this:

Dizzy Gillespie put many of the jazz community’s condemnations into perspective when he groused that “jazz was once on its way to becoming the real folk music of America, but now that’s almost gone. The folk music of America is [now] a mongrel made up of strains of Presley, Liberace, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Sh’Boom.” Faced with media reports that “started churning up silly questions about whether rock ‘n roll had replaced bebop,” Gillespie’s response exemplified an elite viewpoint. “We never carried big crowds because jazz is strictly an art form,” he explained, “and so there was always a division between jazz and what other people were doing who were not really participating in a caritive art form. Those other things people were doing were not creative; they were like pretty, manufactured meaningless tinsel rolling off an assembly line.” As far as Dizzy Gillespie as was concerned, the fact that the country could fall for rock ‘n roll was proof that jazz was “too good for Americans.”[11]

Gillespie had discerned the destructive impact of democratization on the arts, while others had pointed to the manner by which this democratization is mass consumption and profit maximization. Here is the crux of the “inclusive economy,” as the global corporations now call the process, behind the façade of “equality,” whether in the United States or South Africa.

At the time, the Citizens Councils mobilized large numbers of Southerners to resist federally-imposed desegregation. The Citizens Councils had started in Memphis and soon reached 80,000 members throughout Tennessee, then proliferated throughout the South. Their leaders were well-educated and articulate. Their supporters included scientists such as biologist Wesley Critz George and the psychologist Henry E. Garrett, who questioned the wisdom of racial integration, particularly in the schools. At the time a Northern commentator, Frank Britton, editor of The American Nationalist, analyzed the issue in a manner fairly representative of the anti-integrationist outlook:

The aliens who control our radio and television networks, and our musical recording industry, have long recognized the Negro jazz musician as an ideal medium through which millions of impressionable school-age children could be introduced to the joys of racial “integration.” . . .

The stock in trade of the Afro-jungle musician (and their callow white imitators such as Elvis Presley) is sexually stimulating rhythm music which has its origin in the primitive sex orgies of central Africa, and which is an integral part of the obscene “Voodoo” rituals practiced by Negroes in the Caribbean area. Until the advent of modern technology this Negroidal contribution to U.S. musical culture was largely confined to the brothels of New Orleans and other Southern cities with large Negro populations. Gradually, however, jazz and dixieland music (and its recent derivations of “rhythm-in-blues” and “rock-and-roll”) emerged from the bawdy house and black belt district, and through radio, television and recordings has been brought right into the American living room.

It should be emphasized, however, that the recording industry is the principal vehicle for the African jazz musician, and he derives a substantial proportion of his income (and fame) from the sale of records, most of which are sold to teen-age school children. The Negroidal “rhythm-in-blues” and “rock-and-roll” musician and his promoters thus prey on, and in turn are sustained by, the adolescent — the so-called “juke-box” set.

The weird and often unintelligible “jive” talk and “hop-cat” antics of the modern juvenile provides visible and startling evidence of the impact the Negro jazz musician (and his imitators) has upon the adolescent mind. And lest any doubt remains that it is an unwholesome influence, the recent craze for “rhythm-in-blues” recordings should dispel it. Although the story has been largely suppressed by the radio and press, the burgeoning popularity of “rhythm-in-blues” records is a national scandal. The “rhythm-in-blues” singer makes a specialty of putting double meaning into his lyrics. Millions of these suggestive and obscene double-entendre “rhythm-in-blues” recordings have been openly sold in record shops catering to juveniles and played on juke boxes and even over the radio. Some radio stations, under pressure from outraged parents, have outlawed the playing of the more offensive recordings, but the fact that such a situation could exist at all illustrates the insidious influence now being exerted over our youth by our Africanized entertainment industry.

. . . The situation raises the very serious question as to whether our white Christian-American civilization can continue to survive or perpetuate itself under such conditions.[12]

If the alarm of those such as Frank Britton from the late 1950s now seems even to the most “conservative” to be quaintly puritanical and regressive, if not malicious, perhaps it is because we “moderns” have over decades gradually succumbed and psychologically integrated Culture-distortion to the extent that our instincts have atrophied and we are unable to realize the abysmal depths to which Western civilization has sunk? We are immersed in cultures that are alien, and it is difficult to have the detachment necessary to perceive what has happened.

Carl Jung had observed the same Africanization process three decades earlier, writing that

[a]nother thing that struck me was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood . . . the peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the American Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance.[13]

Professor Carroll Quigley on Africanization of White Youth

Although Britton’s manner, at a time of racial tumult, is strident, an esteemed academic with impeccable liberal-Establishment credentials said the same in more refrained but just as unequivocal a manner.

Dr. Carroll Quigley of the Foreign Service School, Georgetown University, and Harvard University, a lecturer at the Brookings Institution and the State Department, and so on, is widely familiar especially among the “American patriot movement,” if one might call it that. His magnum opus, Tragedy & Hope,[14] has long been widely cited in that milieu. Quigley’s book is primarily of interest to populist elements of the “Right” because several dozen of its 1,300 pages refer to a “network” of oligarchs who aim to establish a world system of financial control, and often use Leftists for the purpose. It is particularly attractive to the traditional anti-British sentiments of the American patriot because Quigley erroneously thought that this was an “Anglophile network,”[15] which has obscured the many other interesting points in Quigley’s work. One of these is his discussion of the psychological differences between Europeans and Negroes; another is his discussion of the Africanization of white American youth.

In discussing Africa and Africans, Quigley described the outlook of “the ordinary African” as generally having “a preference for the present”:

The African has a fair recognition of the immediate past, a dominant concern for the present, and little concern for the future. Accordingly, his conception of time is totally different from that of the average Western man. The latter sees the present only as a moving point of no dimension that separates the past from the future. The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present with a moderate dimensional past and almost no future. This outlook is reflected in the structure of the Bantu languages, which do not emphasize the tense distinctions of past, present, and future, as we do . . .

In addition to his present preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of living, which contains many noneconomic goals. A fairly typical list of such priorities might run: food, sex dalliance, joking with one’s friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing . . .[16]

The “Bantu list of priorities” discerned by Quigley became as a tendency the priorities of Western youth: the satisfaction of immediate urges, devoid of consequences; a fixation on entertaining trinkets; and the satiation of the senses at the most primordial levels. At some deep atavistic level of the unconscious the primitive could be evoked, with the addition of expanding consumer demands that required neither quality nor performance. The “noneconomic priorities” of the traditional African could be commodified and repackaged for a white adolescent consumer market.

Quigley writes of the breakdown of the traditional American middle-class family, and particularly the rejection by youth of their parents’ values. This is not the place to consider the extent to which this “youth rebellion” that characterized the 1960s was seeded, cultivated, and propagated by the “Establishment” against which they thought they were revolting. What concerns us here is what Quigley said on the extent to which this youth rejectionism was influenced by Africanization.

Quigley states that behind the middle-class American family, “a new teenage culture has growing up”:[17]

In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scant clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink “cokes,” talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semidarkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and constructions so strange that parents find them almost incomprehensible. This Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involved dress and “dating customs,” both major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.[18]

The “youth revolt,” including what Quigley described as the Africanization of the young, assisted in a paradigm shift in the United States, first culturally, as we have seen, and then politically. This “youth revolt,” which John D. Rockefeller III, for example, regarded as such a splendid example of “youthful idealism,”[19] helped to fracture the “middle class” which the “Establishment” oligarchy, described by Quigley, regarded with contempt. Quigley describes this “Eastern Establishment” as maintaining their strength in “their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.” These oligarchs were repelled by what Quigley dismisses as the “Radical Right” of the “petty bourgeoisie,” represented by senators Taft[20] and Goldwater, the latter being considered as representing the “extremist elements” of the Republican Congressional Party in 1964.[21]

At another level, in regard to the fracture of middle America via the use of the young, the New Left had been radicalized by the experiences of white students in the early black “civil rights” protests that were also down South.[22]

Metapolitics

The cause of the South and of opposition to racial integration was lost as soon as Negro music imbued white youth via rock ‘n roll. White youth were Africanized en masse; the slang, lyrics, phrases, rhythms, and dance changed the collective psyche of white youth at the deepest levels, leading to a change in outlook, manner, and attitude to what Quigley called the “Bantu list of priorities.” These have remained dominant over the collective conscious of white youth, appealing to the infantile and the primordial.

White youths would no longer resist the despoilation of their neighborhoods and schools when their new icons and heroes were Negro, and they regarded black rhythms, dance, attire, and phrases as their own. Constance White, a black “style critic” for eBay, The New York Times, and so on enthused in Time: “Fashion has embedded itself in our popular culture, and Black style, fertile and innovative, is continuously multiplying like a reproducing amoeba, spinning off into sub-genres.”[23] Constance White traces this Africanization not only in the US but also in Europe to what was the moral fracture of the post-First World War years, where Negro musicians entered the clubs of Berlin, London, and Paris:

Stateside and in parts of Europe in the early twentieth century, bandleaders like Cab Calloway popularized the dramatically baggy zoot suit. Jazzmen and blueswomen started trends, as Billie Holiday did when she appeared with a flower in her hair. The ’20s flapper style is said to have risen in part from the need to allow for vigorous movement after Black youth introduced an energetic new dance called the Charleston, which was then popularized on Broadway. With dresses shortened to scandalously bare ankles and calves, corsets were flung aside, and dresses became loose and free, all the better to shimmy and shake.

As they do today, early entertainers of all colors found their style within the Black community, and in a back-and-forth exchange, the Black community in turn fed off and expanded upon the looks entertainers wore on stage, on screen, and at their public appearances. . . .[24]

Modernist Voodoo

What was achieved in the southern US — that is, even among the most resistant element of the white population then extant, the Southerners — was undertaken by evoking the most infantile stratum of a society, at the lowest denominator, that exists on a subliminal level: a primitive part of the unconscious that can be evoked through a return to primal rhythms and dance, tantamount to sorcery, or more specifically, to a Voodoo rite. A trance-like state is induced and the unconscious is opened to suggestibility. Here the modern houngan and mambo are the executives, promoters, and producers of the entertainment industry. As Constance White approvingly states, this Africanization of culture is “continuously multiplying like a reproducing amoeba, spinning off into sub-genres.” That is to say, it enables music, dance, and fashion to be commoditized and mass produced for a fast turnover and “planned obsolescence,” like automobiles, refrigerators, or televisions.

By the time that a robust white resistance was needed in the South, necessitating the loyalty of white youth, rock ‘n roll had Africanized that youth. The Presley movie depicts the true-life scenario that is described by Dr. Bertrand:

On the evening of July 4, 1956, the hottest day of the year thus far, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a staunch segregationist, appeared in Memphis to make a speech on the evils of integration. Several, pro-segregation groups had invited the race-baiting Senator to a holiday rally. Thirty-five hundred people assembled at the Overton Park Shell to hear Eastland rail against the Supreme Court, school integration, and various similar topics. Toward the conclusion of his speech, he pledged that “proponents of desegregation rally are after racial amalgamation, and we in the South aren’t going to stand for it.”

Ironically, the loudest ovations in Memphis that night did not emanate from the Overton Park Shell. The truly thunderous noise was reserved for an event occurring roughly two miles further west towards the Mississippi River, at Russwood Park a baseball stadium. Although the diamond may have been devoid of ballplayers, “the roaring was so loud and long that extras rations for sleeping pills were passed out to the patients of four hospitals near the field.” At about the same time that Eastland was reaching his crescendo of hate politics, Elvis Presley, was performing before an audience of approximately fourteen thousand screaming teenagers, both black and white.[25]

Dr. Bertrand points out that the two sides symbolized by Eastland and by Presley would conflict until one was brought to extinction. But Ford, Rockefeller, Rosenwald, and other oligarchical fortunes had patronized Negro causes for decades, along with the support of the mass media and the federal government. Added to this was perhaps the most vital element in delivering a death-blow to white consciousness: the use of the entertainment industry to cause a shift in consciousness among an entire generation of white youth. It was the segregationists who were the underdogs fighting defensive action. While Bertrand waxes lyrical on the brave new world awaiting, he seems supremely satisfied that the process he is zealously describing focused on the programming and manipulation of youngsters, “oblivious” to the “clamor and disruption they were creating.” Apparently, this is something that should be celebrated. Bertrand writes:

Those steadfastly moored to the past would not go away quietly or without a fight; those who danced and cavorted to the new rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll seemed oblivious to the clamor and disruption they were creating. By applauding and honouring rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll heroes they dissented from a past that no longer held a conclusive meaning for them. A generational collision was looming, and at least one alert white southerner foresaw the inevitable. The problem with rock ‘n’ roll he discerned, was that its message of equality transcended jukeboxes, radios and dancehalls. Too many whites and too many Negroes are hearing music the band isn’t playing.” Another frustrated Dixiecrat conceded that there were many people who thought such fears were exaggerated and that “we [are] reading something into the music that isn’t there.” Yet as he contemplated the swift and dramatic changes engulfing his society, he wondered, “Are we?”[26]

One might ask, how can one be in dissent when one is, as Bertrand mentioned, doing no more than reacting in an oblivious manner to dance and rhythms — “dancing and cavorting” — as if in Voodoo ritual, induced into a zombified trance that destroys rather than maintaining or enhancing free will and discernment? Bertrand acknowledges that the Dixiecrats perceived the subversive character of the dance and rhythms correctly. If the “past” no longer had “conclusive meaning” for white youth, with a heritage that truly was one of dissent and one that needed reviving, then it was surely because the South had failed to pass the full meaning of its heritage and a sense of destiny on to further generations.

A Southern mythos of blood and soil needed to be maintained and replenished, but it had been neglected perhaps out of hubris, and the most that was being defended were legalistic issues of “state’s rights” and segregation. Such degeneration could not have proliferated unless the custodians of that heritage had failed to imbue its spirit and ethos in new generations. Now, as if the oligarchy fears the vaguest possibility of a resurgence, the few remnants of that heritage are being systematically dismantled. The Rockefeller Foundation took credit for having initiated the process in New Orleans in 2017, according to the Foundation’s Director, Dr. Rajiv J. Shah.[27]

Again, the zombified dance to the drum of oligarchs and it is called “dissent,” with an additional gesture of humiliation: the bended knee.

Today, it is the use of Hip Hop, called “hip hop diplomacy” by the State Department, that is used as a strategy in the expansion of globalist hegemony under American auspices, and it is still youth that are targeted as the means of change[28] with the use of what is, to paraphrase Dizzy Gillespie, “manufactured meaningless tinsel rolling off an assembly line.”

The nexus of politics and commerce also sets its sights lower, literally, in using a similar process of Africanizing toddlers as another large consumer market that can be conditioned from the first years of life. For that purpose, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has published a guide for manufacturers of toys, games, books, films, television, clothing, and accessories on how to promote “inclusivity” among children, including pre-schoolers, with the premise being the “power to influence” “through advertising and marketing.” The categories include gender, race/ethnicity/culture, disability, and family definitions.[29] Dolls have become the equivalent of African fetish figures and promote ghetto slang, dress, music, graffiti, and “attitude”[30] to the littlest consumers. Was the indoctrination by any totalitarian state ever as pervasive and perverse as that perpetrated under democracy?

Dixieland lost its cause the moment that its young started idolizing dance, rhythms, mannerisms, and idioms that were of African origin. The process started in the West with the ideologues of liberalism in the salons of the degenerated upper classes in eighteenth-century Europe where the mythical “Noble Savage” was theorized and fetishized. The moral and social fractures of the First World War accelerated the process of cultural bastardization. The aftermath of the Second World War made the very notion of European identity morally anathema to the point of an ongoing criminalization. The 1960s saw a “revolution from above” in morals and culture, where adolescents were targeted for cultural reconstruction. Now the process is proceeding among the ever younger to the point of being cultural-paedophilia. The foundation of all the rot was ultimately cultural and moral — that is to say, firstly, metapolitical.

Notes

[1] “Elvis,” Warner Bros., 2022.

[2] Christopher John Farley, “Elvis Rocks. But He’s Not the First,” Time, July 6, 2004.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Elvis Presley and the Black Community.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] “What they have said about Elvis.”

[7] Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic. That Party at Lenny’s,” New York, June 8, 1970.

[8] “Jim Eastland,” Villains Wiki.

[9] During the 1930s, 2,000,000 blacks had signed the petition of the Ethiopia Pacific Movement for repatriation to an African homeland, either Liberia or Ethiopia. The strongest support for the movement came from the much-maligned Senator Theodore Bilbo, from Presley’s home state, who introduced the petition and restoration bill to the floor of the House every year until his death in 1947. The black separatists and their white supporters approached senators Storm Thurmond of South Carolina, John C. Stennis of Mississippi, and Richard Russell of Georgia to reintroduce the bill. Notably, these champions of segregation did not want to offend the interests of the Southern oligarchy that relied on Black labor. Further, the bill went against the concept of “state’s rights,” as it required federal backing — that is to say, the repatriation bill was opposed by the professed champions of “white supremacy.” The bill was later championed by Senator William Langer of North Dakota. Colonel Ernest Sevier Cox, one of the white backers of the black repatriation movement, stated that repatriation was opposed by Northern politicians who were after black voters and Southern oligarchs relying on Black labor.

[10] Cited by Michael T. Bertrand, Rock, Race and Elvis (University of Illinois Press, 2004), 146. 

[11] Bertrand, 146, citing Dizzy Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 230.

[12] Frank L. Britton, “American Youth Corrupted by Negroidal Influence,” American Nationalist, Inglewood, California (leaflet, 1958).

[13] Carl Jung, “Mind and Earth” (1931).

[14] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966).

[15] Unfortunately, Quigley was off-beam in calling this an “Anglophile network,” and assuming that there has been an alliance between diehard British imperialists via the Royal Institute on International Affairs (RIIA) and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The latter was created in the aftermath of the First World War as a think tank for Wilsonian democratic-internationalism. It was, to the contrary, a lead player in dismantling the British and other European empires. The proffered alliance between the RIIA and the CFR was stillborn, as explained by CFR historian Peter Grose in Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996, 2006).

[16] Quigley, 1185.

[17] Ibid., 1263.

[18] Ibid., 1263-1264.

[19] John D. Rockefeller III, “The Youthful Revolution: A Positive Response,” 1969, entered into the Congressional Record (Vol. 15, Part 3) by Hon. William H. Ayres (R-Ohio), February 17, 1969, 3595-3596.

[20] Quigley, 1244-1245.

[21] Ibid., 1248.

[22] This is discussed by a primary New Left leader and ideologue, Tom Hayden, in his autobiography Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988). Hayden’s allusions to New Left origins in the CIA-sponsored US National Student Association are also of interest, as are the same associations of feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

[23] Constance C. R. White, “How African Americans Have Influenced Style and Culture,” Time, February 6, 2018.

[24] Constance White, ibid.

[25] Bertrand, 242.

[26] Bertrand, 244. Emphasis added.

[27] Remarks by Dr. Rajiv J. Shah at the University of Pennsylvania Perelmsan School of Medicine Commencement, May 16, 2021, Rockefeller Foundation.

[28] “Hip-Hop Diplomacy,” Council on Foreign Relations.

[29] Catherine Rutgers (ed.), Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Advertising: A UNICEF Playbook (UNICEF, 2021).

[30] K. R. Bolton, The Tyranny of Human Rights (Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2022), 247-269.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Association (IEA), U.S. storage of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is 12% below the five-year average (LINK).  Additionally, the IEA is expecting the U.S. to export 11.7 billion cubic feet of LNG per day during the fourth quarter of 2022 — up 17% from the third quarter. The destination of that export is Europe.

Consider that 43% of U.S. households use natural gas for home heating, and power suppliers use natural gas to create electricity.  With the massive 2022 exports of LNG to Europe (+17% in fourth quarter alone), that means lower domestic supplies and increased prices here in the United States for electricity and home heating.  We are seeing and feeling these massive price increases right now.

Barrons – […]  If you need more evidence of the impact of natural gas exports on prices, just compare supply and demand fundamentals for the year leading up to February 2020 (the last pre-pandemic month) versus the year leading up to this May (the most recent month with full federal data). Annualized production rose over the period, while domestic consumption remained roughly flat. Yet LNG exports almost doubled—a surge that tightened U.S. gas markets and doubled the price that U.S. consumers pay for the fuel. 

The growth of global demand for U.S. LNG can be tied to many market forces, including the shortfalls in Europe due to Russia’s manipulation of European Union gas markets. Sustained high demand in wealthy Asian nations has contributed to export growth as well. And so has the U.S. gas industry’s dogged determination to ship its wares to the highest bidder, foreign or domestic. 

Russia’s role has been particularly critical in the rise of global LNG demand. As Russia choked off gas shipments to Europe, EU buyers have turned to global LNG markets to make up the shortfall. Global LNG prices rose in response, and U.S. LNG companies ramped up output, shipping more cargoes to Europe. But Russia responded by further clamping down on gas supplies to the EU—a vicious circle that has hurt Europe’s economy even more severely than it has harmed America’s.

There’s little sign that U.S. gas prices will ease in the coming years. Freeport’s demand will be back online soon enough, and there are three other massive LNG export projects under construction, with more than a dozen of others waiting for financing.

[…] Curiously, federal regulators have consistently found that the gas export projects are in the public interest—meaning they were in the economic interest of LNG companies and gas drillers. But now, exports are creating sky-high costs for U.S. consumers, and drillers are reluctant to boost gas output lest prices fall back to earth. So, it’s high time to consider whether soaring U.S. LNG exports are actually in America’s interest—or if, instead, runaway LNG exports are fueling energy inflation and undermining the nation’s economic competitiveness. (read more)

Not only are U.S. taxpayers directly paying for the majority of costs in Ukraine, but we are also subsidizing the European Union by exporting LNG and driving up the price for energy here at home.

We the taxpayers are directly paying Ukraine, and indirectly paying Europe to maintain gas sanctions against Russia.  As a result, we the taxpayers are also paying higher prices here at home.  This is the reality of the current exfiltration of wealth as created by the Biden administration.

FUBAR

Flynn pointed to “crazy ideas” associated with the QAnon movement — usually labeled by the mainstream media as a “baseless conspiracy theory” — such as the notion that, during his presidency, Trump was “battling an entrenched bureaucracy and sex trafficking ring run by pedophiles” and currently, that Trump is still the acting, sitting President.

TWJ Deputy Managing Editor Josh Manning asked Flynn to elaborate on his theories on QAnon’s origins.

“This is me speculating, but it is also — when I speculate, I also have a level of expertise in these types of efforts,” said the former National Security Advisor, describing his extensive resume in the intelligence world.

“This is something that I can see our government — and they’re going to go crazy on this — but I can see our government, you know, somewhere, at some level, putting something like this together, but bifurcating it from the government and turning it over to another body.”

The movement’s origins stem from anonymous posts on an internet forum supposedly authored by a senior U.S government official with ‘Q’ top-secret security clearance.

Some proponents of the movement trust in the idea of a wide-ranging ‘plan’ in which their adversaries will be arrested in masse — an idea Flynn urged conservatives to reject.

“This idea that there’s some ‘plan,’ or something that’s going to happen…”

“You know, I keep telling people. The plan is ‘We the People.’ The plan is you and I,” said the retired general.

“The plan is me and guys like me and people like me getting out there to encourage people to get involved in the everyday life of this country.” (read more)

Mr. Richard’s complaint brings multiple charges, which include:

• The legislature created an unconstitutional statutory mechanism by enacting N.H. RSA 656:40, which authorized a new manner of counting votes on a trial basis, but not provided for by Part II, art. 32 of the NH Constitution.
• N.H. 656:40, authorizes an un-elected body, the “Ballot Law Commission”, oversight over the towns and cities, to authorize local use of programmable electronic voting machines exclusively, without counting the votes in an open meeting, and without the consent of the inhabitants, as required by Part II, art. 100.

Mr. Richard will argue:

• The legislature’s temporary authorization in 1979 to use voting machines is unconstitutional. In addition, the use of voting machines since 1979 can no longer be considered used on a “trial basis.”
• The Ballot Law Commission is an unconstitutional, un-elected, and unqualified body that decides if a town can ignore the hand count requirement of the Constitution of NH, and authorize the use of programmable, open source, electronic machines, and not the legislature.
• The Ballot Law Commission makes rules which are enforced as law. Neither the legislature, nor the Ballot Law Commission, have enacted any testing or certification standards to ensure the reliability, accuracy, or safety of voting machines.
• The state of New Hampshire has no federal testing or certification requirements for the repair and modification of its’ tabulation voting systems and electronic voting machines. New Hampshire’s statutes and/or regulations make no mention of any federal agency, certification program, laboratory, or standard.

As reported by the Gateway Pundit, a second lawsuit was filed by NH Resident Brenda Towne in federal court. Mrs. Towne’s complaint seeks the removal of voting machines in NH. It also names Harri Hursti and LHS Associates as plaintiffs, alleging that they were responsible for the destruction of election evidence that was to be maintained and kept under state and federal mandates.

Mrs. Towne’s lawsuit seeks the following relief:

• To preserve all remaining election records from the November 3, 2020 election,
• Declaration by the court to order a full physical and cyber forensic examination of machines, ballots and peripheral objects related to the conduct of the 2020 New Hampshire federal election by a qualified expert of plaintiff’s choice.
• The removal of all electronic voting machines and devices from all future New Hampshire elections.

You can read more here.

Konnech, which is based out of East Lansing, Michigan, builds software to manage the poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, and supplies necessary to run elections in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

In January 2021, Phillips said that the cyber analyst he had been working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” such as vote4la.com, vote4detroit.com, and vote4boston.com, which Konnech’s “PollChief” software application used to gather personally-identifying information about poll workers.

Using Binary Edge, a software product companies use to identify and assess the risk of cyber breaches, “We began to look at where do these URLs actually resolve to. We found that most of them resolve to one IP address and that IP address — the URL resolved in China,” Phillips said.

“What we also learned in our review, apps.konnech.com [.net], resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he continued.

“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”

This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he emphasized.

Engelbrecht and Phillips decided that “this was a major national security risk” and immediately took the information to the FBI.