What About Ukraine?

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed.

Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents

divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just as the US and Ukraine have begun to develop a more mutually trusting relationship over intelligence-sharing.

. . . Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a US request for ammunition.

The officials worried that supplying the ammunition, which the US would then send to Ukraine, would violate South Korea’s policy of not supplying lethal aid to countries at war. According to the document, one of the officials then suggested a way of getting around the policy without actually changing it – by selling the ammunition to Poland.

The problem of ammunition is troubling. This story goes into more detail on current Ukrainian weaknesses, agaain based on the Teixeira documents:

The planned Ukrainian late Spring offensive could be a death trap for the US, NATO and even America’s Asian allies.

A brigade is normally between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers. Using the higher number, Ukraine is planning to commit 60,000 troops in the counteroffensive, focused on an effort to break Russia’s control over Black Sea ports other than Sevastopol.

However, it is likely Ukraine will launch some sort of simultaneous attack on Crimea and Sevastopol, if it can.

. . . The planned counteroffensive, despite US and NATO support, faces some significant obstacles. The nine US-NATO-equipped brigades have less armor than promised by NATO.

. . . maintaining a gaggle of dissimilar equipment will not be easy and field repairs will be next to impossible. This will pose a significant challenge to the Ukrainians, who also will have no equipment reserves to replace what may be lost in battle.

. . . The lack of ammunition is also a major problem to support the promised offensive, even to continue the war itself.

Consider for example ammunition for artillery. The US has supplied 155mm howitzers, mostly with high explosive shells. The M-777 howitzer has a range of around 21 kilometers (13 miles). By now, Ukraine has fired off nearly 1 million 155mm shells, a huge amount.

According to the Pentagon report, there are none in the pipeline right now. While some additional thousands may be found, given the huge rate of expenditure by the Ukrainian army, it is hard to see how the 155mm will help very much in the planned offensive (assuming these artillery pieces survive Russian airstrikes, a big assumption).

The Federalist, aligned with opposition to the war from the right, draws similar conclusions from the Teixeira leaks:

What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe.

. . . One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.

. . . From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.

Let's recall that Zelensky's argument a year ago for Western support in a war against Russia was that it would be a bargain -- Ukraine would do all the fighting with maybe just leftover Warsaw Pact weapons, and the Russian empire would quickly collapse. Up to last fall, that was a sustainable argument, burt after partial success in the Donbas, the string of underdog battlefield victories stopped, the winter counteroffensive never happened, and the attritional battle in Bakhmut appears to have depleted Western weapons to the point that there may no longer be aa credible deterrent to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

And last year I noted that Zelensky himself looked like a wartime leader at the Lincoln or Churchill level -- but Lincoln and Churchill were able to make their cases over periods of years, until battlefield success supported their calls for resoluteness and sacrifice. Zelensky, again after last fall, has been much more quiet, while the prospect of quick Ukrainian success, for instance in recapturing Crimea, appears less and less likely.

And of course, Joe Biden seems more and more detached from his job, willing to let his various surrogates push for their own programs as long as he doesn't have to work very hard. There will need to be stronger leadership than this over the next year to avoid an endless and hugely expensive stalemate, which is what Zelensky in particular promised we wouldn't have.

Does Anyone Believe One Word Of This Jack Teixeira Story?

Starting with the original line that Jack Teixeira's online group was a bunch of right-wing racists. (Teixeira is a Hispanic surname, from any of the places in Portugal and Spain named Teixeira). The US Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as either someone with a surname that is carried on the Bureau's list of Hispanic surnames, or someone who lived in a household where he or she spoke Spanish as a child. Perhaps the New York Times, among others, could revive the term "white Hispanic".

But beyond that, subsequent accounts have quoted a member of his online group that described him as "Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” which would actually fit Christian antiwar protesters of past generations like the Berrigan brothers, Roman Catholic priests who led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War. Neither was a right-wing racist.

But that leaves aside the bigger question of just what the heck is going on here. When I worked in tech, it was sometimes in classified environments. Mr Teixera was a low-level enlisted member whose job was basically to push a cart around the office with spare keyboards and network cables on it. As the link above puts it,

As a cyber transport systems specialist — a military equivalent of an IT specialist — Teixeria was responsible for military communications networks and would have had a higher level of security clearance because he would have also been tasked with ensuring protection for the networks, a defense official told the Associated Press.

Well, ensuring protection of the networks insofar as it involved pushing a cart around the office. But let's say that one day he was pushing his cart around to replace some colonel's keyboard and saw a stack of TOP SECRET documents just left out for anyone to see, and he thought, "gee, my racist right-wing buddies in my online gaming group would love to get their hands on these!" Leaving aside that you're not supposed to leave TOP SECRET documents just lying around for some dude to see while he's pushing a cart, once Mr Teixeira left the building, any cart he pushed, anything he carried, would be inspected, and he'd be busted instantly for having that stuff.

I've been in that environment. You have to be constantly aware of what you're carrying and whether you should be taking it outside. And in fact, most of it is overclassified and utterly harmless if it gets out, but the rules are the rules, and to work in that environment, you have to follow the rules. So just as someone who sometimes worked in a classified environment along with the guys who pushed the carts around, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But don't just take my word for it:

Kash Patel, former chief of staff at the Pentagon and former deputy director of National Intelligence, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Friday, questioned the evolving narrative over the Pentagon leaks — specifically that a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard reservist acted alone to leak top secret military data.

Patel, a former federal prosecutor, said he does not believe “for a single second, this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran this operation alone.”

Patel said, first, the suspected leaker, Jack Teixeira, would not have had access to the information without someone within the Department of Defense (DOD) or the intelligence community giving it to him, providing it to him, or telling him it should be put out there. “It’s just not possible,” he said.

This generally fits with my experience. Classified information basically doesn't sit on someone's desk where a guy pushing a cart can find it, and the guy pushing a cart would have to know what it was worth even if he found it -- and that leaves aside how he could get hundreds of paper pages out of the secured facility without being searched and caught. Trust me, any time I left work at a classified facility, any briefcase, any manila envelope, any book or magazine I had, was thumbed through. Patel goes on,

“That the New York Times and Washington Post ‘broke’ this story, that also leads me to believe it’s the same tradecraft from Russiagate, that when deep state actors want stuff out there, they put it out to their sources,” he said. “Am I to believe that these two newspapers found this guy out first, before the FBI? That’s absurd. That’s the timeline we’re being told. So now, we have better investigators at the New York Times and the Washington Post than in the FBI?”

Patel's conclusion is at least credible:

He said the intelligence shows that the Pentagon and President Joe Biden have been lying to the American people about how well the Ukraine War was doing.

“I think the substance of the intel…it says basically, our effort in the Ukraine, our $100 billion effort, is failing,” he said.

A different source who's from a different political faction has a somewhat similar take:

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson, who did presidential daily briefings during the George H.W. Bush administration, told "Judging Freedom" host Andrew Napolitano that he thinks the latest leak of Ukraine War documents is an inside job.

This is the same Larry Johnson who, not long before the 9/11 attack, minimized the threat of Islamic terrorism and said, "The danger, I think that has happened is we've tended to make Osama bin Laden as sort of a superman in Muslim garb. I mean,he's 10 feet tall, he's everywhere, he knows everyhthing and bhe can't be challenged." So although he's well past his sell-by date, here's what he's had to say about the Teixeira case:

"The information was leaked for [a purpose], to prepare the U.S. public for the crash landing that's going to take place with respect to U.S. foreign policy," he said.

This is a coordinated media strategy, this is a disinformation campaign. The documents are real. I’m not saying the documents are fabrications, they are not. But this cover story that's been manufactured to explain how these documents came to be produced, it just falls apart. It simply falls apart based on one document, which is listed as "CIA Operations Center Report: Top Secret." I worked in the CIA operations center, and I helped prepare those reports, that's an internal CIA document. No one on a U.S. military base anywhere in the world will have access to that kind of document.

So just as a now-and-then visitor to the classified world, I'm seeing things that don't fit, but people who've been at or near the top of that environment are also seeing things that make them ask what's really going on. Unfortunately, the reporters are still getting over spring break, and the stories so far are days old. We'll just have to wait and see.

Everybody Has A Boss

So after two weeks of radio silence, Anheuser Busch sent out its US CEO to issue a bland non-apology for the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. I went looking for pictures of Brendan Whitworth, and what I found was what you'd expect -- he's a pretty boy, there to look good at employee town halls, but someone else is running the show. People have been parsing out just what he intended to say in his statement, but I think the real lesson in this episode is that everyone has a boss, including the US CEO of Anheuser.

Over a two-wwek period when Bud Light went radio silent on social media, yuou can bet there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter between New York and Brussels, where Mr Whitworth's bosses are, about the impact of the Dyhlan Mulvaney controversy, with Whitworth giving happy talk, the way pretty boy CEOs do, about how this is just a blip, it'll all blow over, and so forth.

Finally the bosses in Brussels lost patience and told him to say something, except by this point he was between a rock and a hard place, and his speechwriters were forced to write about the only thing they could -- after all, if he came out and said it was a big mistake and apologized, he'd have hundreds of screaming trans guys storming company headquarters, while if he said an elaborate bunch of nothing, things would work themselves out, and the bosses would be happy. More or less.

According to the UK Daily Mail,

According to sources cited by the Daily Wire, 'no one at a senior level' was aware of the Mulvaney brand partnership before it launched, and the campaign was undertaken by a 'low-level marketing staffer.'

Executives have 'paused' new marketing campaigns so they can implement a more robust vetting process for future projects, according to the report.

While media attention has focused on Bud Light VP Alissa Heinerscheid for her potential role overseeing the campaign, [marketing and PR expertr Gareth] Boyd argued that responsibility for overseeing protocols to approve new marketing campaigns ultimately falls with the company's CEO.

. . . Boyd questioned whether proper contingency planning was carried out at Anheuser-Busch before launching the partnership with Mulvaney, saying it appeared the company did not have a response plan in place.

'You would have thought they would have had something saying, "okay, in a worst case scenario of backlash, what do we fall back to?"' he said.

I think the answer there is simple: they didn't have a contingency plan because nobody ever thought they'd need one. There was just no inkling that this would be remotely controversial. My guess is that the "sources' who talked to the Daily Wire were in Brussels, not New York, and they're asking, or should be asking, who hired Alissa Heinerscheid and who thought it would be a good idea to let her think she had a free rein on Bud Light's branding. That's the one who should be fired.

But this brings us to the next question: has Alissa been fired? The fact checkers say

No, Bud Light’s VP for marketing hasn’t been fired. Her Linkedin profile still describes her as the vice president of the brand and the “first female to lead the largest beer brand in the industry.”

Moreover, there aren’t any official reports or press releases from Budweiser confirming that she has lost her job.

But this YouTuber has better insight:

First, corporations don't normally issue press releases saying anyone's been fired. At most, a CEO who's gotten into hot water with the board will make a statement that he's leaving to spend more time with his family. Farther down, all that happens is that the person's extension will just keep ringing. If you try to call the switchboard to ask about it, they'll just reply they're sorry, that person isn't an employee here. (It's happened to me.)

But I think the YouTuber above has it right: that Alissa has deleted her LinkedIn profile is as good a sign as any that she's out. I'd say there's a good chance she showed up at her office one day last week and found it had someone else's name on the door, and when she asked about it, she was told she was not an employee there, if she even needed to ask.

But if she did ask, or if she hired an attorney to pursue the matter, I think there would be two clear grounds for termination. The first would be, as the sources intimated to The Daily Wire, that she exceeded her authority in approving the partnership deal, notwithstanding her superiors in New York would likely have approved it even if she'd asked. The second would be that, in the videos she made in the week or so before the Dylan Mulvaney deal went public, she spoke to media without going through the corporate PR department. That'll get anyone escorted out the door.

This leaves aside the question of how many MBA types get away with this sort of thing every day of the week, but that's related to the question of why despots tolerate flagrant corruption among their vassals. They tolerate it until it's convenient to send them to a firing squad for flagrant corruption. An effective corporate system makes sure anyone can be fired for a good excuse that's already right there on the shelf.

Everybody has a boss, including Brendan Whitworth, who's basically just there to look pretty.

William Barr Is The Energizer Bunny

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place.

Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night:

“I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.”

. . . Barr has been openly critical of Trump since leaving his administration, even saying last week that Trump is the “most likely” GOP candidate to lose to President Biden in a hypothetical 2024 presidential election. Barr stepped down as attorney general, apparently at Trump’s request, in his final month as president and just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The problem for Barr is that other legal analysts have been saying that all the potential cases against Trump are varying levels of flimsy, including the Mar-a-Lago documents case that Barr mentions. On that matter:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who serves as a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said President Joe Biden’s document haul and those found during the FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August will “neutralize” each other.

This will make it difficult for the Justice Department to make anything stick, he said.

“The end result here, by the way, will be a tie. Each of these allegations neutralizes the other,” Dershowitz said Friday evening in an interview with The National Desk.

“It means that it’s impossible that Donald Trump will ever be prosecuted for his mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago, and obviously, the special prosecutor will not prosecute President Biden,” he added.

Now, it's certainly possible that even if Prof Dershowitz says these cases are weak, prosecutors will bring them anyhow, as indeed Alvin Bragg has done in the face of prior decisions not to go ahead with the New York indictment. The difficulty is the practical effect of bringing them. Up to now, Mr Barr has scoffed at Trump's rise in the Republican polls as an indication that they will simply nominate him as a loser in the general election. But this isn't such a sure thing now:

[N]ot once during the 2020 election did the average of [Real Clear Politics] national polls show Trump with a lead. Throughout the campaign, the closest Trump came to Biden was a four-point deficit.

Today, the RealClearPolitics poll of national polls shows Trump with an outright lead of 1.7 points. It bears repeating that this never happened once in 2020. Even left-wing pollsters show Trump doing well. The Marquette poll shows a tie. Quinnipiac only has Biden up two points. Rasmussen, one of the only pollsters that show Biden with a respectable approval rating, has Trump up by seven.

As I've been saying here, none of this is predictive so far in advance of the 2024 election. On the other hand, it does begin to refute any attempt by Mr Barr and others to discount Trump's potential candidacy on the basis that he's popular only with the Republican base and will surely lose in a general election -- at least, "if present trends continue", which is never a sound assumption.

But what this data does support is that the Bragg indictment is playing to Trump's strategy, which is to use the media itself to keep him in the media, and we might well begin to assume that the second wave of Republicans who are currently announcing or exploring 2024 candicacies, like Gov Haley and Sen Scott, are actually angling for the vice presidential spot. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, with no political experience, likely wants to raise his profile in anticipation of a cabinet appointment.

And what nobody's mentioned so far is that the Trump surge is also feeding off the Bud Light controversy, which industry observers say has gained surprising traction:

Backlash to Bud Light’s celebration of transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney’s "365 Days of Girlhood" doesn’t appear to be dwindling.

"This boycott seems to have more legs than most," Justin Kendall, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, told the New York Post.

"It started out as a conversation on social media and has breached into mainstream media," Kendall said. "Bud Light is the best-selling beer in the country."

If it's in mainstream media, it's there right next to The Donald. The stories play against each other. I simply don't know if prosecutors in Florida, Georgia, and Washington will ever recognize that additional indictments on flimsy cases will do precisely what they don't want -- keep Trump in the nightly news month after month, portraying him as the one figure the establishment can't tolerate in the political process. They'll make Trump's case for him -- and Prof Dershowitz even makes the point that not only can he run for office from a prison cell, he can serve as president from there, too.

If there's a monolithic establishment behind the scenes making the decision to indict Trump -- which Mr Barr seems to think, and he even seems to think he's part of it -- they've in fact got to be wondering if maybe it's going backfire on them if they keep it up.

So I Reread Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade"

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run.

I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic, she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said,

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

It looks like Wolfe wrote this essay right before Star Wars premiered, but the Force fits into this scheme as another 1970s manifestation. This is also consistent with accounts given by detransitioners in the Emma Jo Morris series. For instance,

"The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The objection many raise to Dylan Mulvaney's public persona isn't that it's "almost fake", it's that it's completely fake. Some use the term "womanface" instead of "blackface". But as with New Age cults and religions, transgenderism is sold as a therapeutic solution to life's problems. Morris quotes Pamela Garfield-Jaeger in another essay in her series on transgender:

"I don’t understand it, in terms of from the professional side, how they can believe in this,” Garfield-Jaeger told Breitbart. “I understand how a person can be tricked to believe in it if they’re told, ‘All of your pain and suffering will go away if you take this, almost, magic pill,’ which is become transgender, and then you get all this positive reinforcement.”

. . . She said that “naive” mental health providers, though, are acting out of codependence, as they do not “affirm” any number of other maladaptive behaviors, such as drug addiction or eating disorders.

. . . “If you look at other disorders — of course now they don’t want to call it a disorder, they compare it more to an immutable characteristic, but we know that’s not the case because people are choosing to do it — if you look at other mental health issues, like an eating disorder, or drug addiction, you don’t have institutions being, like, ‘Well you need to affirm their addiction,’ ‘We need to affirm their eating disorder.'”

Tom Wolfe has another important insight in "The Me Decade":

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me.

Wolfe attributes these aspirations to women, or at least women of the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, and the slogan was clearly meant to influence women of that time -- but the implication now is that it applies even more to transgender pseudo-women like Dylan Mulvaney. Wolfe is no longer around to draw new conclusions from this, but it seems convincing that the transgender movement is yet another outcome of the 1960s cultural changes.

Transsexualism In A Cultural Context

I spent my last two years of high school in Bethesda, which even in the 1960s was in the vanguard of secularism -- where I definitely lucked out was that even though my sister went to the exclusive National Cathedral School, some of my acquaintances there went to Sidwell Friends, and my college roommate went to St Albans, I went to one of the county public schools, although the culture there was equivalent (I dated the daughters of the DC Bar Association president and the US Ambassador to Mali). Somehow in that culture there was a sense in the atmosphere that the human race was evolving, and it was time to leave behind any childish or primitive reliance on religion.

It wasn't just Hugh Hefner who argued that religious proscriptions on this or that were of a piece with Old Testament dietary restrictions, which were perfectly fine for their day as a way to prevent food poisoning and such, but now we have refrigeration, so we have to rethink these things. By the same token, traditional natural-law ideas about chastity and marriage no longer apply, because now we have penicillin -- and when The Pill came on the scene, the arguments were so much the stronger.

It didn't help in my case that I was raised Presbyterian, which was weak tea indeed in the face of these arguments (my parents sent my sister to NCS for reasons of upward social mobility; the family continued to attend Bethesda Presbyterian until I left for college, but when I returned for Christmas, they'd moved on to All Saints Episcopal Chevy Chase). In college I was hearing about Darwin and Freud as established truth, and this effectively continued the argument that traditional natural-law moral theory was obsolete. What took place soon enough isn't really relevant to this account, but let's say for now that The Episcopal Church had nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, recent developments that I've noted here, the apparent effort of the FBI to infiltrate the Catholic Church, and the effort of the Walter Reed medical center to decertify Catholic clergy for providing pastoral services there, follows the implicit public health policy during the COVID pandemic that religious services were "inessential" to remind me that the argument that religious belief is equivalent to childhood belief in Santa Claus is very much current, and it's driving public policy more than ever.

So I'm intrigued to see what's represented as the first part of a series at Breitbart News by Emma Jo Morris, who is currently Politics Editor at Breitbart News and had previously reported on Hunter's laptop at the New York Post. I believe she is a lesbian who is ardently opposed to trans ideology, which isn't actually unusual for traditionally same-sex attracted people.

In the piece, she ventures into religious issues as they relate to transsexualism. She talks with Estella Suarez-Hamilton, a young woman who “transitioned” as a teenager and presented herself as a man:

Estella views the transgender movement as a pseudo-spiritual belief system she describes as “modern Gnosticism,” which includes initiation, rituals, and rules.

“If you are thinking about how to describe the sect, it is very much connected to, like, the modern Gnostic principles. This is a syncretic cyber sect of modern Gnosticism,” Estella said, “and I love how complicated it sounds, because the trans community loves language, and they love to complicate language to the nth degree. So, I think that this term is just very — from my experience — very accurate to explain what I went through, that’s what I think happened, and that’s how I can articulate it.”

“The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The term "gnosticism" is productive here, as it actually is in reference to a wide range of New Age beliefs not immediately associated with transsexualism. This essay at Word on Fire puts the traditional Catholic view of gnosticism in a contemporary context:

Gnosticism tends to set up the material and the spiritual – the body and soul in particular – in opposition, spurning the former as “the darkness” and clinging to the latter as “the light.” But this is far from some extinct or esoteric belief system. As Ross Douthat argues, “the Gnostic spirit is everywhere in contemporary religion” – from new age spirituality to the New Atheism.

For instance, we see the “utter pessimism” of Gnosticism in the hit series True Detective when Rust Cohle reflects on the tragic death of his daughter. His neo-Darwinian commitments notwithstanding, Cohle’s pessimism pushes him into Gnostic territory, where the soul is “yanked” out of non-being and “forced” into being, flesh is “meat,” life is a “thresher,” and parenthood is a “sin”. (Most Gnostics in the ancient world, not wanting to perpetuate the bondage of bodily life, were notoriously ascetical when it came to sex and reproduction.)

As a practical matter, that the current corporate-political establishment is endorsing transsexualism is not a Marxist-derived atheism, but in fact, it's a radical revision of gnosticism, the idea that your soul is so unattached to your body that you can simply adopt a whole new "gender identity". There's a lot to consider along this line -- I relize now that I need to reread Tom Wolfe's 1976 "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening".

It's Worse Than They Told Us

A couple of montha ago, on February 24, I used the photo of a Stasi informant above at the top of a post covering the February 2023 leak of a memo from the FBI Richmond field office talking about the danger of traditionalist Catholics, the sort who go to Latin mass, and how they might turn into domestic terrorsts. As of March 23, the FBI issued a statement saying

that the "Domain Perspective (report) did not meet the FBI's exacting standards and was withdrawn." He added, "Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters removed it from our internal system. The FBI also initiated a review — which is now ongoing."

In my February 24 post, I asked,

Given this is the FBI, I'm suddenly suspicious that they say they've removed a document, but, er, have they stopped paying any informants who've been spying on Catholics suspected of attending Latin masses? They said nothing about that in their annoucement, but given that by their own admission, they had some nice lady spying on defendant Rehl's family prayer meetings without result, how do we know one or more of our own dear family friends isn't an FBI informant?

In the February coverage of the Richmond report, it was revealed that the FBI did have at least one informant infiltrating Latin masses in Virginia. It turns out that I wasn't the only person curious about how far this whole idea had gone. Via the Washington Examiner link above,

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray over the agency's investigation into Catholic parishes in the United States.

Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Wray testify regarding a Jan. 23 document from the Richmond Field Office. It was titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

. . . Jordan described the [FBI's March 23] response as "substandard and partial" because it contained a significant number of redactions. He demanded full access to the documents relating to the effort, characterizing those given so far as preventing "the Committee from fully assessing the content and context of the documents and obtaining information requested from the Bureau."

Jordan quoted a passage from the Richmond document as particularly concerning. It encouraged agents to engage congregants in Catholic parishes "to enlist their assistance to serve as suspicious activity tripwires."

Although the Richmond field office document has apparently not been released and was heavily redacted in the first place, new accounts like this one at CatholicVote say

According to the limited documentation the FBI released to Congress, the FBI had sought to use Catholic churches as “new avenues for tripwire and source development,” including at “mainline Catholic parishes” and among “local diocesan leadership.”

The reference to "mainline Catholic parishes" and “local diocesan leadership” strongly suggests FBI efforts have gone beyond Latin mass traditionalists in attempting to penetrate Catholic institutions. 22% of the US population in 2017 was Catholic. On Feb 13, 2023, in the wake of the initial leak of the Richmond Field Office document, Bishop of Richmond Barry Knestout issued a statement that read in part,

The leaked document should be troubling and offensive to all communities of faith, as well as all Americans. I am grateful for the Virginia Attorney General and 19 attorneys general who have called upon the government to publicly release all materials related to the production of this memo. If evidence of extremism exists, it should be rooted out, but not at the expense of religious freedom. A preference for traditional forms of worship and holding closely to the Church’s teachings on marriage, family, human sexuality, and the dignity of the human person does not equate with extremism.

. . . “I call on all national representatives from the Commonwealth of Virginia in the House and Senate to exercise their role of oversight, to publicly condemn this threat to religious liberty, and to ensure that such offenses against the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion do not occur again. Racism, religious bigotry, violence, and discrimination have no place in our Church or teachings.

As of yesterday's statement from Chairman Jordan, the FBI had not responded to his requests to provide all the documents relating to the effort to recruit Catholic informants, something Bp Knestout would clearly like to see as well. How many informants nationally does the FBI have attending Catholic masses, Bible studies, or Knights of Columbus meetings? What are they finding? What are they reporting? And as we've been learning, the dividing line between "informant" and "provocateur" is thin indeed. Who's doing what here?

When I look at Abp Timothy Broglio's difficulties with the Walter Reed medical center canceling the ability of the military services archdiocese to supply Catholic chaplains there, it's hard to avoid thinking there's a more widespread sentiment at high levels of the deep state against the Catholic Church, but when I consider the National Catholic Reporter's alarm that the US bishops voted for the conservative Abp Broglio as USCCB president by 138 to 99, and the following day,

elections for other positions indicated a near sweep for conservative candidates. Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City defeated Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin for secretary. New committee chairs included Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois; and Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia,

I've also got to think the bishops are on to something. The Church is changing.

In a more or less unrelated episode in Boston two weeks ago,

The FBI and other federal agents burst into the wrong Boston hotel room Tuesday night during a training exercise, startling the guest inside who had no idea what was going on as he was handcuffed.

The incident occurred on the 15th floor of the Revere Hotel as agents were conducting a mock investigation. FBI agents were assisting the U.S. Department of Defense in a training exercise inside the hotel to simulate a situation that DOD personnel might encounter in a deployed environment.

"Based on inaccurate information, they were mistakenly sent to the wrong room and detained an individual, not the intended role player," the FBI said in a statement.

The agents targeted room 1505, where a Delta Air Lines pilot was sleeping inside and opened the door, WBZ-TV reported.

When agents went in, they handcuffed the man, who is in his 30s, before interrogating him and putting him in the shower, the news report said.

In a different news story on the raid, a retired FBI agent said,

I do question using a very public hotel and at night is just the very strange piece, because most interviews and interrogations are done in the day, and the law enforcement personnel generally work 9-5, so why are you choosing the nighttime which makes no sense. If this was in fact routine, I think they'll be changing their practices.

Well, maybe they're just trying to get us all acclimated to the midnight knock on the door, huh? It's becoming more clear that the FBI must become an issue in 2024 -- and where's Catholic Joe Biden on the issue of recruiting Catholic informers?