I launched my American Pravda series just over a decade ago and during the last five years it has grown enormously, now including many dozens of individual articles and encompassing more than a half-million words of text. I’d still stand behind at least 99% of its contents, and the series probably constitutes one of the most comprehensive historical counter-narratives of the modern era found anywhere on the Internet.
Yet its roots actually go back a few years earlier than that and the entire series might never have come into existence if a link on a fringe website hadn’t caught my eye. I told that story in a short piece I published in 2010:
In the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign, I clicked an ambiguous link on an obscure website and stumbled into a parallel universe.During the previous two years of that long election cycle, the media narrative surrounding Sen. John McCain had been one of unblemished heroism and selfless devotion to his fellow servicemen. Thousands of stories on television and in print had told of his brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, his steely refusal to crack, and his later political career aimed at serving the needs of fellow Vietnam veterans. This storyline had first reached the national stage during his 2000 campaign, then returned with even greater force as he successfully sought the 2008 Republican nomination. Seemingly accepted by all, this history became a centerpiece of his campaign. McCain’s supporters touted his heroism as proof that he possessed the character to be entrusted with America’s highest office, while his detractors merely sought to change the subject.
Once I clicked that link, I encountered a very different John McCain.
I read copious, detailed evidence that hundreds of American POWs had been condemned to death at enemy hands by top American leaders, apparently because their safe return home would have constituted a major political embarrassment. I found documentation that the cover-up of this betrayal had gone on for decades, eventually drawing in a certain Arizona senator. According to this remarkable reconstruction of events, the average teenage moviegoer of the 1980s watching mindless action films such as “Rambo,” “Missing in Action,” and “Uncommon Valor” was seeing reality portrayed on screen, while the policy expert reading sober articles in the pages of The New Republic and The Atlantic was absorbing lies and propaganda. Since I had been believing those very articles, this was a stunning revelation.
But was this alternate description of reality correct? Could this one article be true and all the countless contrary pieces I had read in America’s most prestigious publications be false, merely the presentation of official propaganda endlessly repeated? I cannot say. I am not an expert on the history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
Yet consider the source. The author of that remarkable 8,000-word exposé—“McCain and the POW Cover-Up,” published on The Nation Institute’s website—was Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War journalists. His reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize, and his subsequent book on Cambodia was made into “The Killing Fields,” an Oscar-winning movie. Schanberg later served as one of the highest-ranking editors at the New York Times, with a third of the reporters at our national newspaper of record working under him. A case can be made that no living American journalist can write with greater credibility on Vietnam War matters. And he had labored for years researching and exhaustively documenting the story of American POWs abandoned in Indochina—a story that if true might easily represent the single greatest act of national dishonor ever committed by our political leaders.
He presented a mass of evidence with names, dates, and documentary detail. Many of the individuals mentioned are still alive and could be interviewed or called to testify. Sealed government records could be ordered unsealed. If America wishes to determine the truth, it can do so.
In the years following the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War WMDs, I’d grown increasingly suspicious of the mainstream media, beginning to suspect that it was far less reliable than I’d always assumed. The growth of the Internet had unleashed a vast torrent of additional material, much of it from alternative or fringe sources that sometimes made wild, conspiratorial claims about all sorts of things. My own views on such matters had always been quite mainstream and conventional, so I was very reluctant to abandon a lifetime of media habits and begin navigating an information jungle of implausible or often contradictory claims. Could I really take that sort of material seriously compared to the professionally-printed pages of my regular newspapers and magazines?
However, I explained that Sydney Schanberg’s astonishing John McCain revelations had finally tipped the balance and forced me to recognize that I had long been living in a world of comforting illusions based upon media lies:
Yet what I found most remarkable about Schanberg’s essay were not its explosive historical claims but the absolute silence with which they were received in the mainstream media. In 2008, John McCain’s heroic war record and personal patriotism were central to his quest for supreme power—a goal he came very close to achieving. But when one of America’s most eminent journalists published an exhaustive report that the candidate had instead served as one of the leading figures in a monumental act of national treachery, our media took no notice. McCain’s public critics and the operatives of his Democratic opponent might eagerly seize upon every rumor that the senator had had a private lunch with a disreputable corporate lobbyist, but they ignored documented claims that he had covered up the killing of hundreds of American POWs. These allegations were serious enough and sufficiently documented to warrant national attention—yet they received none.
A couple of years ago, in one of my last exchanges with my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom, who ran the National Security Agency for President Ronald Reagan, we agreed a case could be made that today’s major American media had become just as dishonest and unreliable as the old Soviet propaganda outlets of the late 1970s. At the time, we were discussing the coverage of our road to the Iraq War, but subsequent events have demonstrated that this national illness is far more advanced than either of us had suspected. Whether or not Schanberg is proven correct, the shameful cowardice of our mainstream media is already proven by the wall of silence surrounding his work.
- American Pravda: Was Rambo Right?
Hundreds of POWs may have been left to die in Vietnam, abandoned by their government—and our media
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words
Once a single large hole has breached a dam of disbelief, the forces of hydraulic pressure will steadily widen it, and I gradually became convinced that many of the astonishing claims I’d seen mentioned on alternative websites over the years were probably correct. Three years later, I published my original American Pravda article, summarizing much of that surprising material.
A couple of years after that I delved much deeper into the John McCain story and concluded that it was far more shocking than I had realized. I found very strong evidence that the senator had spent most of his Vietnam War years serving as a leading Communist propagandist and collaborator, then afterward returned home to be proclaimed one of our greatest war heroes and soon launched his very successful political career based upon that foundation. A story like that was so twisted and implausible it surely would never have passed muster even as a satirical Hollywood film, but it seemed to be true. I summarized this apparent history and the broader implications in a 2015 article that represented something of a sequel to Schanberg’s seminal McCain/POW blockbuster.
A year or two after we had republished Schanberg’s remarkable McCain expose as part of our cover-symposium, someone had released a video on Youtube that collected together portions of interviews by those accusing McCain of concealing his true Vietnam War record. Although I only very recently came across it, the claims made seem generally correct.
McCain’s eventual death in 2019 unleashed a flood of adulation and sorrow that swept across nearly every prominent organ of the mainstream media, with most of these pieces scarcely containing a single skeptical paragraph. This complete airbrushing of McCain’s very questionable record had troubling implications that I explored in a long article, arguing that blackmail probably served as an important political lubricant within the higher reaches of the American government:
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history.
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had repeatedly been admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of an inquisitive journalist who died while investigating mobsters?
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
Once I properly understood the implications of the terrible secrets that had probably been used to control a powerful senator such as John McCain, other such examples became obvious, as I noted in one of those same articles:
John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year, though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.
As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once-friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York City, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one else in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media also completely ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.
We must always draw an important distinction between the actions of individual journalists and the behavior of the American media taken as a whole. I believe that the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors are honest and sincere, and although their coverage may sometimes be slanted or mistaken, they do seek to inform rather than to mislead. Consider how many of the explosive facts discussed above or in Schanberg’s massive expose were drawn directly from the New York Times and other leading media outlets. But after those crucial stories run, the facts they have established often seem to vanish from subsequent coverage, causing them to be forgotten by most casual readers. Thus, the detailed account of Kerrey’s apparent massacre of civilians received the greatest possible initial coverage—a huge cover story in The New York Times Magazine and a top-rated CBS News television segment—but within a year or so the history had seemingly been flushed down the memory hole by almost all political reporters. The facts are still available for interested readers to uncover, but the latter must do the work themselves rather than simply relying upon the summary narratives produced by mainstream publications.
The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.
Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such painful personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.
That last example of the likely sexual secrets held over Hoover seemed to represent the most typical form of political blackmail. Indeed, as I noted, such methods had apparently been widely used to exert control over powerful political figures, both earlier in the twentieth century and in more recent years:
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the reasons for political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
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In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his 1950s Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have been influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
The decades-long career of the late Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been almost entirely focused upon accumulating a large portfolio of such sexual blackmail evidence against powerful figures in business, finance, and politics.
Once we recognize the likely role of blackmail, we can easily understand many puzzling aspects of the near-total immunity from serious media scrutiny that Sen. John McCain had enjoyed throughout his long political career. One or more powerful hidden factions or puppet-masters probably owned and controlled him, and as a leading Senator, he was an immensely valuable political asset, one that needed to be protected from exposure at all costs. Indeed, I had closed that same article by noting that this protection even extended past the end of his life:
The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
Despite all these revelations, one puzzling question still always remained in my mind. Under normal political circumstances, McCain’s hidden masters might have easily warded off any coverage of his true wartime record, but why would his Democratic opponents have given him a pass on that same issue during the heated 2008 Presidential campaign?
Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered the financial mortgage meltdown just a few weeks before the November vote, ensuring an easy Democratic victory. But prior to that, McCain had seemed the odds-on favorite to triumph over his opponent, a little-known freshman senator, whose full name—Barack Hussein Obama—almost seemed a mash-up of America’s two recent foreign enemies, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden. The Democrats had already gone eight long years without holding the White House, and their hungry political partisans would have been desperately eager for a turn of their own at the patronage trough, especially after George W. Bush’s unexpected reelection victory in 2004. Perhaps the mainstream media might have been reluctant to reopen the Vietnam POW controversy nearly two decades after it had been firmly closed, but if influential Democratic Party operatives had heavily pushed the issue, the press probably would have gone along. As a result, Schanberg would have ended his long career once again ranked as one of the world’s most famous journalists.
Obama’s chief campaign strategist was David Axelrod, someone with notoriously sharp political elbows. During 2004, Obama’s path to the U.S. Senate had been blocked by Blair Hull and Jack Ryan, very wealthy and formidable Democratic and Republican opponents, but both their campaigns had been demolished by devastating personal scandals orchestrated by that ruthless consultant. Axelrod himself was a former journalist so how could he have possibly ignored the heaven-sent opportunity to use Schanberg’s meticulous research to similarly sink McCain?
Obama’s own background was hardly pristine, given his financial involvement with Tony Rezko, a crooked Chicago developer, and his long association with fiery Afrocentric preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But McCain’s vulnerabilities were clearly of an entirely different magnitude.
As was inevitable in all modern Presidential campaigns, Obama-hating fringe activists had filled the Internet with all sorts of outlandish and mutually-contradictory accusations against the object of their venom, claiming that Obama was secretly an Islamicist or a Communist or a longtime CIA asset or a drug-addicted homosexual, or even a foreigner, constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency. But these were totally unsubstantiated accusations, nothing at all like the overwhelming evidence that John McCain had spent long years in service to our Communist wartime enemies. In strategic terms, the Democrats possessed complete “escalation dominance,” allowing them to deploy lethal political weapons while the Republicans would be unable to reply in kind. Four years earlier, Bush supporters had unleashed the brutal “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” advertising campaign against supposed war-hero Sen. John F. Kerry, costing him an expected victory in that close election. Yet now, neither the official Obama campaign nor any of its allies attempted to exploit McCain’s devastating vulnerability on his Vietnam War record, instead keeping entirely silent.
For almost fifteen years, I’d remained puzzled by this mystery, but I think it has now finally been resolved. Tucker Carlson had spent his entire career in elite DC media circles, and over the last few years he had become the biggest star on television, partly because he was willing to voice many of the controversial truths that others would not. These recent years of media stardom had left him independently wealthy, so when FoxNews finally purged him a few months ago in the aftermath of a disastrous lawsuit over claims of election fraud, Carlson became a free agent, soon producing his own political discussion show and broadcasting it by video on Twitter, now providing himself a platform to speak even more candidly than he had before.
About a month ago, Carlson’s personal interview with Donald Trump had attracted considerably more viewers than the official Republican Presidential Debate that aired around the same time. Soon afterward, Carlson demonstrated his newfound freedom of speech by boldly suggesting that Trump’s bitter political enemies might conclude that assassination was their best remaining chance of preventing him from regaining the White House in 2024. But in that same show, he also mentioned some shocking facts about the 2008 Presidential race that had previously been unknown to me.
👀 Tucker Carlson on How the Media Covered for Obama’s Personal Pleasures in 2008
“In 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack and a guy came forward, Larry Sinclair, and said ‘I’ll sign an affidavit and I’ll take a lie… pic.twitter.com/hMc7Th7jRG
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) August 30, 2023
According to Carlson, a man named Larry Sinclair had suddenly come forward during that campaign, claiming to have been sexually involved with Obama several years earlier, encounters during which the future Presidential candidate had also smoked crack. The man’s story was very detailed and seemingly credible, he’d filed a legal affidavit attesting to his claim, and he had even submitted to a polygraph exam. In June of that year, Sinclair held a press conference at DC’s National Press Club, answering numerous questions from the hundred-odd journalists attending, and emphasizing that Obama’s personal phone records could easily be used to establish the truth of his remarkable claims.
Not only had Carlson found Sinclair quite credible at the time, but so had a large majority of the entire Washington press corps. As Carlson put it, everyone in DC media circles was fully convinced that Obama was secretly having sex with “dudes” while smoking crack, but due to harsh threats of Democratic Party retaliation, none of those journalists and editors were willing to report those important facts to the American people whom they supposedly served.
In support of Sinclair’s 2008 claims, Carlson noted that last month a Daily Mail story had revealed that recently unredacted portions of private letters from Obama to one of his college girlfriends showed that the future President was heavily preoccupied by gay sex fantasies.
Fifteen years have now passed, but Sinclair was still alive and remained just as firmly committed to the same story he had originally told in 2008, so Carlson arranged an hour-long interview with him earlier this month, a show that has racked up 36 million impressions on Twitter.
Ep. 22 Larry Sinclair says he had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama, and that Obama came back for more the next day. Assess for yourself. Here’s our interview. pic.twitter.com/R6CXwKv6gs
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 6, 2023
Sinclair had never tried to conceal his troubled personal life nor his past criminal record, and he came across as quite credible when I watched him tell his story a couple of days ago, though others should decide for themselves. Although a lengthy article in the Daily Mail had summarized Carlson’s bombshell interview, all my regular news outlets had totally ignored it, so I didn’t learn of it until much later.
- ‘Today it’s Grindr, then it was the limo driver’
Convicted fraudster who claims he had cocaine-fueled sex with Obama says they met through a cabbie and hooked up in the back of his limo – before Barack returned for MORE at his hotel the next day
Harriet Alexander • The Daily Mail • September 6, 2023 • 2,200 Words
Sinclair’s original June 18, 2008 presentation at the National Press Club is also available on Youtube and his remarks seem reasonably convincing and entirely consistent with his current statements. At that event, he had also distributed a 2,100 word Press Statement while pointing people to his personal website that conveniently provided his background information and some of his other evidence. Although that website has long since disappeared, it is still easily available on Archive.org.
According to Sinclair, his two sexual encounters with Obama had occurred back in 1999 when the latter was merely an obscure Illinois State Senator, so Sinclair was shocked a few years later to see Obama on television giving the keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Party Convention. By 2007 Obama had become a leading Presidential contender, publicly boasting that he had never used drugs after high school, and such total dishonesty from the crack-smoking candidate outraged Sinclair, who complained to the campaign.
Events then took a much more ominous turn. Although he had never mentioned his sexual involvement with Obama, Sinclair was soon contacted by a certain Donald Young, who falsely claimed to be associated with the Obama campaign. During their phone conversations over the next four months, Young seemed fully aware of the sexual relationship and indicated that he himself was another one of Obama’s male lovers, while repeatedly pressing Sinclair to disclose the names of any other individuals to whom he had confided his story. Sinclair declined to provide that information and the phone calls eventually ceased.
But soon afterward, Sinclair learned that Young, the gay longtime choir director of Obama’s own Trinity United church, had been found shot to death execution-style in his own home, with no signs of forced entry nor property stolen. This naturally raised severe concerns, so Sinclair fully cooperated with the Chicago detectives investigating the case and filed a legal affidavit describing all his conversations with Young. He also spoke to Young’s mother, a former employee of the Chicago police department, and he claims she and Young’s other relatives were absolutely convinced that her son had been killed to protect Obama from public embarrassment. Just the previous month, another homosexual in Obama’s black congregation had been found shot to death under similar circumstances, while a third died three days after Young. The local Chicago media began carrying stories about this strange wave of sudden deaths among gay blacks affiliated with Trinity United, but the rest of the American press showed no interest.
Given such alarming developments, Sinclair’s subsequent eagerness to get his account on the record and in front of national journalists becomes quite understandable, since it might provide him a life-insurance policy. Once the media knew his story, his sudden death would be much more damaging to the Obama campaign than if he were allowed to continue telling his uncorroborated tales of sex and drugs. Whether or not such concerns were warranted, Sinclair is still alive fifteen years later, while none of the killings of homosexuals in Obama’s local church congregation have ever been solved.
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Given my total ignorance of these important events and my fading memories of the better known elements of Obama’s rise to political prominence and his victorious 2008 campaign, I decided to read Webster Tarpley’s book Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography published that same year, which provide all of this information at great length. Long associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement, Tarpley is very conspiratorial in his focus and also intensely hostile to Obama, whom he considered a puppet of the nefarious Trilateral Commission, so I’d hardly consider much of his analysis very convincing, but he does provide a reasonable summary of numerous important facts that have been carefully excluded from Obama’s massive 30,000 word Wikipedia entry. I’m sure there are far better sources of accurate information about Obama, but Tarpley’s work was the one that happened to come to my attention.
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Sinclair himself had released his own short, self-published book at the beginning of 2009. Although the cheapest used copies are now priced at nearly $500, there is also a much more reasonable Kindle edition, which I read. The work provided a very useful description of the ultimately successful efforts of the Obama campaign and its Internet allies to dissuade any national media outlets such as the New York Post or the Chicago Tribune from covering the author’s own story. Despite Sinclair’s very sordid background and his numerous personal flaws, I think most of his material came across as reasonably credible.
Based upon all this testimony, there seems a very real possibility that our 2008 Presidential campaign was punctuated by one or more political murders. But since our national media failed to report any of this information, neither I nor most other Americans were any the wiser, and we never learned of the devastating personal scandals that might have precipitated those lethal decisions.
Perhaps this sort of dramatic scenario might seem highly implausible to those who remain firmly committed to a strictly non-conspiratorial view of American politics, but I think there is actually ample historical precedent. In one of my earliest American Pravda articles, I had noted that soon after the end of World War II, quite a number of our leading political figures had suffered untimely deaths, usually under strange and suspicious circumstances. I had opened that article by drawing an indirect historical analogy:
Although my main academic focus was theoretical physics, I always had a very strong interest in history as well, especially that of the Classical Era. Trying to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory was a challenging intellectual exercise, testing my analytical ability. I believe I even contributed meaningfully to the field, including a short 1985 article in The Journal of Hellenic Studies that sifted the ancient sources to conclude that Alexander the Great had younger brothers whom he murdered when he came to the throne.However, I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.
Also, the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.
In hindsight perhaps I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the governance of their own society.
The contours of the 2008 Presidential race now become much more apparent. Both the McCain and the Obama campaigns possessed a stockpile of extremely lethal political weapons that could be used to completely destroy the reputation of the rival candidate. For exactly that reason, the resulting balance of terror based upon the prospect of mutually-assured political destruction meant that neither arsenal was ever used, while the oblivious American voting public remained completely unaware.
In trying to recollect the details of the 2008 campaign, I dimly recall having possibly seen discussion of some of these strange accusations at the time, perhaps in the comment-threads of fringe websites, but since they were never reported in the media, I merely dismissed them as nonsense and paid no attention.
And I was hardly alone in this. When I recently brought the shocking Sinclair story to the attention of an academic whom I know, someone situated in the elite establishment and well-connected to left-liberal Democratic Party circles but also personally very much open to “conspiratorial” theories, he said he’d never heard a peep about it. But as an aside, he told me that he knew for a fact that during the earlier 1992 race between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the two rival campaigns had quietly agreed to avoid any focus on “bimbo eruptions” since both candidates had such major personal vulnerabilities in that regard.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing mortgage meltdown ultimately swept Obama into the White House, along with greatly strengthened Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But although Obama’s enthusiastic partisans assumed that the result would be a vast political revolution overturning eight years of Republican rule, the actual consequences were very different, and the powerful personal secrets held over Obama’s head may have contributed to this outcome, secrets that might have recently been capped by a political murder or two. As I wrote in 2012:
Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. The sweeping victory of his successor, Barack Obama, represented more a repudiation of Bush and his policies than anything else, and leading political activists, left and right alike, characterized Obama as Bush’s absolute antithesis, both in background and in ideology. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity.Yet almost none of these reversals took place. Instead, the continuity of administration policy has been so complete and so obvious that many critics now routinely speak of the Bush/Obama administration.
The harsh violations of constitutional principles and civil liberties which Bush pioneered following the 9/11 attacks have only further intensified under Obama, the heralded Harvard constitutional scholar and ardent civil libertarian, and this has occurred without the excuse of any major new terrorist attacks. During his Democratic primary campaign, Obama promised that he would move to end Bush’s futile Iraq War immediately upon taking office, but instead large American forces remained in place for years until heavy pressure from the Iraqi government finally forced their removal; meanwhile, America’s occupation army in Afghanistan actually tripled in size. The government bailout of the hated financial manipulators of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued apace under Obama, with no serious attempts at either government prosecution or drastic reform. Americans are still mostly suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but Wall Street profits and multimillion-dollar bonuses soon returned to record levels.
In particular, the continuity of top officials has been remarkable. As Bush’s second defense secretary, Robert Gates had been responsible for the ongoing management of America’s foreign wars and military occupations since 2006; Obama kept him on, and he continued to play the same role in the new administration. Similarly, Timothy Geithner had been one of Bush’s most senior financial appointments, playing a crucial role in the widely unpopular financial bailout of Wall Street; Obama promoted him to Treasury secretary and authorized continuation of those same policies. Ben Bernanke had been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Bush and was reappointed by Obama. Bush wars and bailouts became Obama wars and bailouts. The American public voted for an anti-Bush, but got Bush’s third term instead.
During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists routinely characterized our democracy as a sham, with the American public merely selecting which of the two intertwined branches of their single political party should alternate in office, while the actual underlying policies remained essentially unchanged, being decided and implemented by the same corrupt ruling class. This accusation may have been mostly false at the time it was made but seems disturbingly accurate today.
The following year I returned to the same theme in the closing paragraphs of my original American Pravda article:
Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.
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