Saturday News Goulash

Jack Teixeira, Mike Morell, Koko Da Doll, Miss Effie, & the Anglican Ex-Communion

Goulash (gulyás) and Dreher beer in Budapest (source)

Good morning. I know this counts as an extra post this week, but hey, there’s some interesting news, and besides, fish gotta swim, Rod gotta write.

We begin with the shocking report that Airman Jack Teixeira, the Pentagon leaker, was apparently leaking top secret stuff online from the beginning of the war. The new discovery, by NYT reporters, shows that he was posting information directly to a publicly listed YouTube channel — one that was much more widely accessible than the Discord server where he previously posted. From the Times:

Airman Teixeira also claimed that he was actively combing classified computer networks for material on the Ukraine war. When one of the Discord users urged him not to abuse his access to classified intelligence, Teixeira replied: “too late.”

At one point he offered to share information privately with members of the group living outside the United States. “DM me and I can tell you what I have,” he wrote.

On another occasion, he wrote that he was able to access a site run by the National Security Agency, the U.S. spy agency that focuses on communications intercepted from computer networks, to look for updates on the war.

It becomes clearer that there was no admirable (if misguided) motive here. This was just an insecure kid desperate to impress others. He is going to jail for a long time, and needs to go to jail for a long time. Whatever criticism I have of the role the US has played in the Russia-Ukraine war, no nation — not ours, not anybody’s — can allow this to happen. If Jack Teixeira didn’t think he could uphold his oath to keep the nation’s secrets, he shouldn’t have gone into the military. And look, I can understand, as a moral issue, breaking that oath under an extreme circumstance. But this? This was about a punk trying to look like a big man online. Shoulda just written to Charles Atlas.

The Mike Morell Lie

You will forgive me, though, if I feel a lot less sorry for the national security state than I otherwise would have, in light of the Mike Morell news this week.

A retired CIA leader coordinated a letter from former intelligence chiefs claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation because he wanted to help Joe Biden's presidential campaign.

Mike Morell told the House Judiciary Committee that he was asked by Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State - who at the time was a senior member of the Biden campaign - to help discredit the laptop reporting.

Morell was a former acting CIA director, serving for two months in 2011 and four months from 2012 to 2013. He retired from the CIA in September 2013. 

Morell wrote an “open letter” denouncing the laptop story as Russian disinformation, and ran it past intelligence elites. More:

The letter was ultimately signed by 51 former intelligence officials, including himself and four other former CIA directors, including John Brennan and Leon Panetta.

The letter was published by Politico five days after The New York Post first reported on the contents of the laptop.

The headline for Politico's story, on October 19, 2020, was: 'Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.'

The letter alleged that The New York Post story 'has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.' 

But the story was true, as we now all know! So, did you read about the Morell story, or see it on TV? Seems to me to be big news when a former acting head of the CIA did something like this — that is, put out a lie, and suborned the signatures of 51 top intel officials to use their authority to give the lie the air of truth, for the sake of influencing a presidential election, and at the bidding of a political campaign.

Matt Taibbi is en fuego about it all (the entire post is paywalled, I think):

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceed that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

The import of the actual laptop story, at least what’s been disclosed so far, is still not clear. I’ve long thought the suppression of it by Facebook and Twitter had clearer import, being a historic censorship first. However, if it can be proven that this “Russian Disinfo” whopper was laid on the public at the behest of the Biden campaign, with the aid of the intelligence community, that escalates things to a new level of scandal, far above the censorship issue.

But the media are almost entirely ignoring it:

Temporarily, however, that may be obscured by the absolute corruption of American media. Outside of conservative outlets, who naturally are eating it up, there were exactly two serious stories done about this on the national level in an appropriate response time. One was in CNN and was at least relatively down-the-middle, though humorously it did quote a Democratic Party spokesperson from the Weaponization Committee saying, “Jim Jordan has released cherry-picked excerpts of a transcribed interview.” The same Democrats from the same Committee also called my testimony “cherry-picked,” and also called the testimony of three FBI whistleblowers “cherry-picked.” The inevitable end-of-year Matt Orfalea “cherry-picked” video will be epic.

The other traditional press story was by the Washington Post. Written by Aaron Blake, the Post piece never says anything like, “The letter signed by the 50 intelligence officials turned out to be total horseshit, which every last one of us quivering invertebrates in the ex-news media pretended to believe.”

This really is something, isn’t it? We had a Biden campaign official asking the former top spy in the US to do something to discredit the laptop reporting. Morell testified that if Blinken hadn’t asked him, he wouldn’t have done this, and that he did it because he (Morell) wanted Biden to win.

Notice that this wasn’t a request to enlist a former CIA chief in a back channel effort to discredit a story that was a lie. It was a request to do so to discredit a story that was true.

Why are we not all talking about this? Because it was done to get Donald Trump, is why. Therefore, according to the news media, it’s a non-story. Democracy isn’t dying in darkness; it’s happening in plain view, by a press that has abdicated its responsibilities, and by a national security elite — I’m talking about the signatories of the letter — who are happy to be party to a massive, consequential lie, to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

It could be the case that some of those signatories put their names to the letter because they trusted Morell. Well, if those people exist, it’s plain they were used as patsies by the Bidens. Why don’t they raise their voice and rescue their reputations by denouncing what was done to them? Are any doing it? I haven’t seen any, but then, I don’t see everything. Please let me know in the comments if you have seen this anywhere. We have known for a long time that the Hunter Biden laptop was real; even The New York Times muttered its conclusion that yeah, it was. These Deep Staters have had lots of opportunity to apologize for the abuse of their reputations, and the weaponization of their signatures in a political contest. Have they? If not, why not? What does that tell you?

So I go back to Jack Teixeira. What he did is absolutely indefensible, in my view. He traded on his access to intelligence, and his supposed expertise at analyzing intelligence, to make himself look like a big man in front of his nerd friends. That’s bad. That’s really bad. It’s a crime. But it’s not the same thing as trading on your expertise at analyzing intelligence to stand up a Big Lie, and throw a presidential election, is it? Which, by the way, is not a crime. It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.

And we come now to a fretful column today by the WaPo’s Philip Bump, about how Donald Trump is destroying young men’s confidence in democracy. Bump is scandalized that Trump went on some lowlife popular YouTube show, and played into the conspiracy theories that many young white males have about democratic institutions. Bump quotes Trump from the show:

“With that being said, we want to help people out. We want to have freedom,” he continued. “But, you know, in many ways, we’re no longer a democracy. When you look at what’s happening … they’ve weaponized our justice system. They’ve done things that were unthinkable. I say we don’t have a free press. Look what happened to our show the last time we did a show. You had the biggest show. You had the biggest hits. You were setting records and they took you down.”

Well, look, I’m not a Trump fan, as is well known, and I devoutly wish he would go away. But we now have proof that the Biden campaign weaponized the (no longer active) senior intelligence community to intervene to help swing the election by deploying their collective authority in defense of a lie. And we see plainly that the media went along with the lie back in the fall of 2020, when it first surfaced, and are now uninterested in the Morell admission, which is MASSIVE for democracy. No, the real problem is Trump going on a podcast and — I’m trying to say this without snickering — undermining the faith of its listeners in democracy.

The podcasters, the Nelk Boys, had a previous interview with Trump removed by YouTube because Trump put forward his stolen election theory. Here’s Bump:

Remember: the reason the first interview was taken down was that Trump, with the Nelk Boys’ assistance, was undermining confidence in democracy. There’s no evidence at all that the 2020 election was affected by voter fraud to any significant degree, but because Trump lost, he’s insisting that his allies claim there was. The Nelk Boys were more than once happy to provide him an unchallenged platform to do so.

Does Philip Bump not see how ridiculous he looks? Just for the record, I don’t believe the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud, but come on: Bump believes it was right for YouTube to “defend democracy” by silencing Trump. Does he believe that the Morell letter and its 51 signatures amounted to defending democracy? Where is his outrage over the way the media behaved in suppressing the Biden laptop story during the campaign? Does he really not believe that the way the US Government and other major American institutions (e.g., the media, the Fourth Estate) behave have undermined confidence in democracy?

The brazenness of these people. Here in Budapest, we’ve suffered a recent visit by USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who was in town to announce $20 million in US taxpayer dollars to be spent to defend “democracy” in Hungary. Hungary is a NATO ally with a free press and free (and fair) elections. Its problem is that the voters of Hungary keep electing the party of Viktor Orban, which displeases Washington. Democratic results that displease Washington are by definition not democracy — haven’t you heard? Maybe Mike Morell can round up 50 more intelligence officials to denounce Hungary, and anybody else that Team Biden dislikes.

You want to know what undermines democracy? The George W. Bush administration lying its ass off about Iraq. The Bush and Obama White Houses, State Departments, and Pentagons doing the same about Afghanistan. Remember the Afghanistan Papers story from 2019? If you haven’t read it, you should; it’s exemplary journalism in service of democracy, by the Washington Post. After a three-year court battle, the Post gained access to government papers showing that the state repeatedly lied about the Afghanistan war. From the Post:

The Lessons Learned interviews contradict years of public statements by presidents, generals and diplomats. The interviews make clear that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.

These were the US Government’s own internal conclusions. You know what would have stood up democracy, have increased faith in it? For Congress to hold joint hearings on the Afghanistan Papers, and to have held people accountable for the lies.

Didn’t happen. President Trump didn’t call for these hearings. Neither did the Democrats, who controlled Congress when the Post published. President Biden hasn’t either. It’s all been swept under the rug. What does it take to fail in Washington today? Or is it the case that once you’re a part of the Inner Ring, you are a made man?

To recap: I don’t like Trump, and I think he’s bad for our country. I hope Ron DeSantis is the GOP nominee in 2024. But if it’s Trump, I will grit my teeth harder than I gritted them in voting for the corrupt Edwin W. Edwards over David Duke in 1991, and pull the lever for Trump. He is indeed a threat to democracy — but not nearly the threat the Regime (state + media + elite institutions) is. The fact that Mike Morell now admits what he did on behalf of Biden, and the media don’t give a damn, tells you a lot more about the rottenness of our democracy than Donald Trump appearing on a lowlife YouTube podcast. The fact that the Afghanistan Papers came out, and the story sunk like a stone, without any public outcry over the fact that so much American blood and American treasure was spent on a cause Washington knew was lost, and lied about it — if you worry about democracy, worry about that, not about Thug Life Trump on a podcast.

Koko Da Doll, RIP

It is my sad duty to inform you that Koko Da Doll, a MtF transgender street prostitute and star of a celebrated documentary, has met an untimely end. He was shot to death in Atlanta. From the NYT:

The Atlanta Police Department said that it was actively investigating three violent crimes against transgender women this year — the fatal shooting on Tuesday, another fatal shooting on April 11 and a shooting that critically injured a female victim in January.

“While these individual incidents are unrelated, we are very aware of the epidemic-level violence Black and Brown transgender women face in America,” the department said in a statement.

The department said it was exploring the possibility that the shootings were motivated by hate.

But it added: “In these cases, our investigators have not found any indication the victim was targeted for being transgender or a member of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, and these cases do not appear to be random acts of violence.”

“Epidemic-level violence black and brown transgender women face in America.” Even the police have bought into this lie. Koko was a street prostitute. Prostitution is a very dangerous line of work. A number of the killings of trans women are, in fact, murders of street prostitutes, and have nothing apparently to do with their trans status. People who sell sex for a living on the street are far, far more likely to have intercourse, social and otherwise, with the kinds of thugs who shoot people.

As I have written multiple times, the claims LGBT activists make about an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence are nonsense. For one thing, there are still few killings relative to the size of the trans population. For another, if you look into the details of the cases, as I have done, very few of them have anything to do with anti-trans sentiment. They are often prostitutes, or victims of domestic violence, or die some other way. The activists assume that any killing of a trans person is ipso facto evidence of “hate”. And the media, and the Atlanta PD, go along with it.

In Atlanta, the April 11 murder of a transgender named Ashley Burton is believed by police to have been a domestic violence incident. Even Burton’s relatives believe he knew the killer. I was unable to find many details of the trans person killed in Atlanta in January, not even the man’s name, or nom de trans. All I could find was this just-the-facts statement from police:

Preliminary Information: On 1/9/23, around 11:16pm, officers responded to a person shot at the location of 444 Highland Ave. Upon arrival, officers located an adult female with a gunshot wound. EMS responded to the scene and transported the female to the hospital in critical condition. Preliminary information indicates a dispute occurred prior to the shooting between the victim and a male suspect. Investigators are working to determine the circumstances surrounding the incident. The investigation continues.

The police now identify the “adult female” as trans. Sounds like domestic violence, not a hate crime, but we’ll see. The Human Rights Campaign, which is quick to claim all murdered trans people as hate crimes victims, doesn’t even list this unnamed person as one of them.

But yeah, “epidemic.” Thanks, Atlanta PD. I just watched a short clip online of the documentary centering Koko Da Doll, in which a trans street hooker described what they do for money. I’m not going to link it here, but let me just say: the sanitizing term “sex worker” does not convey the sordidness and danger of this line of work. I wonder if normies have the slightest idea what this way of life really involves. Nobody deserves to be killed, heaven knows, but the kind of people who get mixed up in the world of street prostitution put themselves in immense danger, every day. One study estimated that female prostitutes are between 60 and 100 times more likely to be murdered than non-prostitute females.

Global Anglicans To Canterbury: Drop Dead

Here’s another story not getting nearly the attention it deserves: this week, a gathering of Anglican Communion leaders in Rwanda separated their churches from the Church of England. The cause? The C of E’s progressive stance on homosexuality — specifically, its decision to bless same-sex partnerships. The overwhelming majority of Anglicans around the world vehemently reject this. More:

It is clear now that the future of Global Anglicanism has passed from Canterbury to GAFCON and the Global South. Most of the world's practicing Anglicans, some 85%, have cast a vote of no confidence in the Archbishop of Canterbury and declared themselves to be in broken communion with the Church of England. There is no question now that the Archbishop of Canterbury's role as Communion leader is over.

Today, a new future dawned for 1,300 Anglicans - laity, clergy and bishops - meeting in Rwanda. And they did so on behalf of 70 million fellow Anglicans from a multitude of tribes, languages, peoples, and nations.

"The Instruments of Communion have failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ"; the "leadership role" in the Anglican Communion of the Archbishop of Canterbury has been rendered "indefensible" by the failure of "successive" Archbishops of Canterbury "to guard the faith" by exercising appropriate discipline "compounded by" Justin Welby's "welcoming the provision of liturgical resources to bless practices contrary to Scripture," said the statement.

Do you get how big this is? Eighty-five percent of the world’s Anglicans are no longer in communion with the Church of England, and no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as their leader. All because the declining Church of England, which is on track to become extinct around 2060, betrayed the faith over homosexuality. Big history, y’all.

Miss Effie Lou

I won’t leave you this weekend on a downbeat note. What follows is part of an essay by Brandon Meeks, an Arkansas Christian who writes like a dream, on his Substack. Sit down for this one; it has the fragile beauty and sweetness of a clipped magnolia blossom:

She was old all my life; 76 when I was born, 87 when I first met her. When she spoke, it sounded like a swarm of bees hovering over a thick patch of clover. She was blind and feeble and had to be led around by the arm. But there was rarely a Sunday that went by for a hundred years that didn’t find Miss Effie Lou standing in the choir loft carrying the altos on her bony shoulders. She’d lost a husband, a daughter, and two sons, but she never lost her song.

I have always been fascinated with old people. All the things they’ve seen and heard and done. When I was a kid, I would go over to Ludbar, the small assisted living apartments where she lived, and sit for hours listening to her tell stories. 

“I was 5 years old when the Titanic sank,” she said. “Daddy was a preacher. We prayed for the families of those that sank frozen into eternity as he told us to make sure we were always ready to meet the Lord.” 

She told me about life before electricity and bathrooms and televisions. She called the names of the horses and mules that had been her companions as well as her transportation. And it sounded like quite an adventure to an 11 year old boy. But when she told me about having to check the outhouse for snakes whenever she had to powder her nose in the middle of the night, it dampened a great deal of my pioneering zeal.

“I was grown before I ever saw a car,” she said. “And it was several more years before I got up the nerve to ride in one of those noisy contraptions. At least with the horses you didn’t have to worry about being left on the side of the road with a flat tire, and I never recall ever hearing about two horsemen having a head-on collision.”

She talked about meeting Louis, her late husband, while picking cotton on the row opposite him during the Depression.

 “He was insufferable; cocky, flirtatious, and the most handsome thing I ever saw,” she said, smiling at the ghost of a memory that she could still manage to see despite her milky white eyes. “He told me that if he picked more cotton than me I should agree to go out with him. I told him that he’d have to pick more cotton than every man in that field before I’d give him a second thought.”

“What’d he say,” I asked.

“Nothin’. He just grinned and went to snatching and stuffing like his britches were on fire. He filled nearly two cotton sacks more than the highest picker, and twice as many as several others. I married him six weeks later.”

Then she went quiet for a few minutes. “We never spent a night apart for the next 55 years until April 24, 1980. The night the Good Lord called him home.”

Some days when I visited Miss Effie Lou she didn’t feel much like talking. She just sat by the light of the window feeling the sun on her face and listening to voices long quiet to everyone but her. On those occasions I would do most of the talking. She would nod and smile as I explained the finer points of the Batman legendarium, or how chiggers could be removed from one’s nether regions by smothering them with some of grandmother’s fingernail polish. Boys don’t have good sense at that age.

Then I would go sit down at her old piano and say, “Do you feel like singin’ one?” She always did. And soon she would be leaning on the end of the ancient upright Kimball showing the angels a thing or two about how it’s done.

Though raspy and thin, worn threadbare by the friction of so many passing years, her voice had a strength and beauty to it that was otherworldly. It was the sound of a century’s worth of Arkansas Delta breathed out all at once into the wind. The sound of revival meetings in clapboard churches; the sound of haltering lyrics strewn with the roses over a wooden box draped with a flag. It was the sound of feed store gossip around live-bait wells; the sound of pink tomatoes kissed by salt and summertime. When Miss Effie sang, she sang the mourner’s song, but tempered by hope and circumscribed with joy.

If you want to see how the story ends, click here. I hope you’ll subscribe — I just did. Such gorgeous, meaningful writing about the American South. I can imagine that some people not from the South might get the idea that this kind of writing is laying it on a little thick. Well, it’s not. I didn’t grow up around rural Southern people who had the same kind of piety as Miss Effie, but the physical, sensual details Meeks offers in his recollection of the old lady are all intensely familiar — so intense that when I finished the essay, I had to stop to think about the old folks I was lucky enough to know in my Seventies childhood. They’re all gone now.

I remember as a very small boy, maybe five years old, going with Daddy up to the country store in Plettenberg, a settlement deep in the woods of West Feliciana Parish. It was remote then, and just as remote now. The words on this map are about as big as the hamlet itself.

My father was the parish health officer. He ran a program every summer to vaccinate dogs against rabies. On that day, I went with him in his pickup truck, the cab of which smelled like Marlboros and dirt, to the Plettenberg store, to inoculate country people’s dogs. All the way up there, we’d listen to country music on WYNK. I remember the slightly sweet smell of dust inside the old wooden store, and the Jack’s cookies stacked inside a big clear jar on the counter. Black folks, white folks, they were all there to get their hounds jabbed. Daddy didn’t have to do that as part of his job. He did it because he figured it would help the community.

A decade ago, after I moved back to Louisiana, I took a drive down the backroads. I lost a cell signal for a while, up in the area around Plettenberg. I remember passing a ruin of a wooden building, with no indication of what it had been. I wondered: is that the old Plettenberg country store? It probably was, but I can’t say for sure. I was too young to remember many details, just the heavy, wet air inside, the faint aroma of the dust, the Jack’s cookies on the counter, and Daddy out front, vaccinating dogs for men in overalls and worn-out caps. What a lucky boy I was to have had that. When I think of the America I love, it has nothing to do with Washington, or politics, or Washington’s endless wars, or the stuff that shows up in my Twitter feed. It has to do with memories of the Plettenberg store. With a place, not a politics.

I grew up as an alien there. Didn’t fit in, but not for Daddy’s lack of trying. That’s just how it is with some kids. I’m sitting here writing this in a sunny apartment in the middle of Europe, overlooking the Danube. In lots of ways, I feel more at home in a place like this. That’s just how it is with some folks. You regular readers know the traumatic events of the past eleven years or so that landed me here. If I spend the rest of my life over here in Europe, that’d be okay. Most everything I went home for back in 2011 has been destroyed (read the long “Goodbye Louisiana, I Tried” post for more). Yet I trust in God and in His will more than I ever have. If I never return to Louisiana, or to America, fine. Budapest might be my Ravenna. I’m not mad about it, just beyond broken-hearted.

And yet, why is it that this morning, in this strange and wonderful city, reading Brandon Meeks’s writing about Miss Effie, I feel deep in my heart a homing beacon signaling to me that come what may, I will one day move back to West Feliciana Parish to die? Why am I rifling through my memories to find any trace of recollection of an old country store that I only saw once as a boy in the early 1970s, but the faint memory of which seems like a piece of driftwood that will keep me from going under?

Why do I have the feeling that the place where I never could find a home will finally accept me when my children release me to its earth?

So that’s what the final image of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia means, then. I get it now. Thanks Brandon Meeks. The rest of y’all, subscribe to his Substack. A writer who can bring that response out of the depths is worth following, and supporting.