When the Mind Is Not Free

 From Sensus Fidelium:

These questions are not foreign to me. I knew someone who took an SSRI, developed suicidal thoughts that frightened him, and flushed the pills down the toilet. Years ago, while driving for Uber, I met a veteran who told me that he took a pill, blacked out, and awoke in handcuffs. He later learned that he had wrecked his car and fought with police, but he remembered none of it. Those stories cannot establish what caused the reactions; I do not know the complete medical histories, diagnoses, dosages, or other substances involved. They are anecdotes, not clinical trials. Yet they explain why I cannot dismiss reports of sudden, frightening behavioral change as imaginary simply because they are unusual.

To explore these issues, I recently interviewed Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a board-certified psychiatrist and former medical officer in the FDA’s Division of Psychiatry who now works extensively with psychiatric-drug adverse effects and withdrawal. His perspective deserves a hearing, but it also needs to be placed within proper limits. He did not examine Lindsay Clancy, he was not her treating physician, and an interview cannot decide a criminal case. His value here is that he helps identify medical possibilities that toxicology numbers and outward appearances do not necessarily settle.

The prosecution in the Clancy case emphasized apparently organized behavior: she arranged for her husband to leave the house, acted while he was away, and took steps that can be described as planned. For many observers, planning seems to end the insanity question. A person capable of organizing means, they reason, must also understand the end toward which those means are directed.

Dr. Witt-Doerring challenged that assumption. A person experiencing psychosis may still speak coherently, perform household tasks, conceal disturbing thoughts, and appear outwardly composed. As he put it during our interview, a person can look “really put together” while being driven by “bizarre, delusional thoughts in the background.” The crucial distinction is between the ability to reason instrumentally and the ability to judge reality correctly. Someone may connect steps A, B, and C with terrible efficiency while beginning from a premise that is entirely false. (Read more.)

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Charlie Manson and MKUltra

 From Chronicles:

Long-dead Charlie Manson is back in the news, thanks to a congressional investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra program. One of those testifying before Congress was Tom O’Neill, who spent 20 years of his life trying to follow an occasionally obvious and sometimes obscure trail of documents describing the CIA’s mind-control experiments, which often involved the use of the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In his book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, O’Neill suggests Manson and his cult of followers were possibly a CIA experiment gone bad. Another testifying to the evil of MKUltra was Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

That O’Neill, Kinzer, and others were able to piece together a history of MKUltra is a testament to their skills as researchers, because in 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms had all MKUltra files destroyed. However, thanks to typical bureaucratic ineptitude, it was later discovered through FOIA requests that thousands of MKUltra documents had been improperly stored elsewhere and were not destroyed. O’Neill and Kinzer made other discoveries in personal records and correspondence of those involved in MKUltra.

MKUltra was formally launched in April 1953 in response to North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet attempts to “brainwash” captured Americans during the Korean War. Sidney Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, led this CIA project. Gottlieb received an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1940 and a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1943. 

By the summer of 1951, Gottlieb was working for the CIA as chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. He thought that through experimentation with various drugs he could find ways to alter brain chemistry and achieve mind control. He tried using the active agent of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cocaine, heroin, and mescaline, before settling on LSD as the most promising drug to alter the thinking and perceptions of the experiment’s subjects. (Read more.)

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The De-Christianization of France

 From The War on Beauty:

France has been in a process of de-Christianization since the Revolution in 1789 when Catholicism was outlawed and replaced with a new atheistic cult called ‘The Cult of Reason.’ A lot of people were surprised by the recent mockery of the Last Supper at the Olympic Games, but this isn’t the first time there has been an outright assault on the Catholic Church in France, nor is this the worst instance (shockingly).

After the Catholic monarchs and Ancien Régime were violently couped in 1789, a new anti-religious, and clearly satanic totalitarian government came to power and immediately severed all ties with the Church. Along with the persecution of the aristocracy, normal French people/ peasants, including thousands of clergy were martyred for not renouncing their Catholic beliefs.

This was the first big move in shifting France away from a faith-based society to one that worships reason, science, and man’s own ‘intelligence’ as the new God. The new regime went so far as to remove all crosses and religious symbols in the country including from graveyards, ceased all Catholic schooling, and not only closed all churches but forcibly confiscated them from the diocese to fund the new government. (Read more.)

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The Cost of John Dee’s Sorcery

 While Catholic practices were banned in England as being superstitious, Queen Elizabeth I consulted a wizard. From Sebastian Morello:

There is at present an entire revisionist historiography being developed which explains Henry VIII’s break from Rome not by reference to his desire for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but to his failure to secure for himself the Imperial throne of the Holy Roman Empire at the election in 1519. Instead, Charles Habsburg was elected, becoming Emperor Charles V, and Henry was intensely bitter about it. He thought he should be Emperor of Christendom, especially as he had demonstrated that he was a most loyal son of the Church amid the rise of Protestantism, even receiving from the pope the title ‘Defender of the Faith’. When he broke with Rome fifteen years later, he was already talking about his kingdom not as a region of a wider civilisation called Christendom, but as its own island empire over which he was both supreme temporal and spiritual lord.

It took the courtier, spy, and wizard John Dee to explain to Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, that having broken with that great empire of Christendom, the Kingdom of England (which also included Wales and Ireland) had before it two possible futures: it could fizzle out into obscurity, or it could expand across the seas and make for itself its own empire, a counter-empire if you will. This counter-empire would expand across the whole world. It would be based not on the baptism of nations in fulfilment of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), but rather on the demands of Mammon. Dee came up with a name which would be lasting: he coined the term ‘the British Empire’.

Dee and the warlock, scryer, and speaker of the secret Enochian language Edward Kelly travelled through Europe. Together they stayed for considerable lengths of time at the Imperial court and other royal courts, uncovering the spiritual and temporal sources of the empire with which Dee’s future creation would compete.

Kelly claimed—and I have no reason to disbelieve him—to have been led by what he described as a ‘spiritual creature’ to a container of red powder hidden in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. From this powder, he made a tincture which gave him power to alchemically transmutate base metal into gold without any need of the Philosopher’s Stone. Kelly demonstrated the potency of this tincture on numerous occasions, and by it he deeply impressed Dee. (Read more.)

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Justice Without Vengeance

 From Sensus Fidelium:

A Catholic reflection on mental illness, psychiatric medication, moral responsibility, and the online appetite for condemnation

There are crimes so terrible that words seem almost indecent beside them. Children are dead. A husband or wife is left with a home emptied of the people who made it a home. Grandparents bury grandchildren. Families who expected ordinary joys instead spend the rest of their lives asking a question that may never be answered: How could this have happened?

That is where any discussion of the Lindsay Clancy case must begin, not with politics, pharmaceutical companies, courtroom personalities, or social-media arguments, but with Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. They were innocent children whose lives were taken. Nothing said about their mother’s mental condition can restore them or make what happened less objectively horrific.

But beginning with the victims does not require us to end with vengeance.

The recent mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s case came after jurors were unable to agree on whether she was criminally responsible when she killed her three children in January 2023. Her defense maintained that postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder had deprived her of the ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Prosecutors argued that she remained capable of planning, choosing, and understanding what she was doing. The disagreement was not about whether the children died by her hand. It was about the condition of the mind and will behind that hand. Associated Press

That distinction is uncomfortable. It is also profoundly Catholic. (Read more.)

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Inverted Morality

 I always disliked the changes Disney made to the delightful fairy-tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. From Classical Ideals:

The story of The Snow Queen (1844) by Hans Christian Andersen begins with an evil mirror, crafted by the devil himself. Its deviousness lies in the fact that it shows things the opposite of what they are. Good looks evil, beauty looks ugly and conversely, evil looks virtuous and ugliness looks good.

At the beginning of the story, while the devils carry this mirror up and up to heaven in order to laugh at God Himself by inverting His reflection, they drop it and it breaks into a trillions of pieces. Some of these pieces land on earth and pierce the eyes of people to invert their vision, and into their hearts to invert their sense of morality. Though this story was written nearly two hundred years ago, well before the internet and its devices captured society so profoundly, its message feels urgently relevant. So many of society’s ideas about morality, heroism and virtue seem not merely wrong, but completely inverted. 

One of the most egregious examples of this, ironically, is in Disney’s retelling of the Snow Queen, Frozen (2013). The villain of the Snow Queen becomes the heroine in Frozen as Elsa, a misunderstood princess with superpowers she “just hasn’t learned to control yet”. Frozen shows selfishness as freedom, permissiveness as love.

(Read more.)

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Hamas Counts Its Dead Children as Wins, and American Students Are Celebrating Their Victories

 From The Enterprise:

In 2023, with roughly 1.4 million Gazans displaced and some 641,000 of them crowded into 150 UN shelters running at nearly 3 times their intended capacity, Ismail Haniyeh appeared on Al-Mayadeen television and said it plainly. Speaking of the women, children, and elderly of Gaza, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau declared, “We are the ones who need this blood.” That blood, he said, awakens the revolutionary spirit. It is worth noting that Haniyeh’s net worth was between $3 and $4 billion.

Two years of American argument have treated those deaths as if they arrived by accident, or as if the only live question were whether Israel has been careful enough. Haniyeh told his audience the deaths were useful to him.

Urban guerrillas have always fought in cities. That fact, by itself, proves almost nothing. Human shielding is the deliberate placement of fighters and weapons among civilians so that the enemy must either hold fire or kill innocents. The laws of war forbid it because it exploits the protections those laws give civilians. Hamas has gone further. Its leaders have treated the resulting deaths as a political harvest: mobilization at home, pressure on governments that watch the footage. Photographs of rubble cannot prove that intent. Hamas’s own recorded words can.

The words are not new. In February 2008, years before this war, Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad boasted on Al-Aqsa TV that “death has become an industry” and praised human shields assembled from women, children, and the elderly. On October 24, 2023, Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Hamas was proud to sacrifice martyrs and promised to repeat the October 7 attack again and again. The next raid was already priced in. (Read more.)

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Prescription Psych Meds

Updated from a few days ago. I disagree that the Clancy murders can be compared to someone killing someone when high or when drinking and driving. Lindsay was taking medication not for recreation but so she could function. From Tierney's Real News:

Addiction to prescription psych meds is the biggest issue we have in America right now and nobody talks about it. They start giving them to toddlers at 2 years old. Ativan is booze in a pill, Adderall is Meth in a pill, Oxy is heroin in a pill, anti-depressants are cocaine in a pill, seroquel is a chemical lobotomy in a pill. A whole generation will be like Lindsay if we don't wake up soon. Not kidding. I've been in recovery for 30 years and the rooms are filled with pill heads like Lindsay who have been medicated into insanity and violence. They are taught to not use street drugs or alcohol but taking boat loads of prescription psych meds is just fine. At treatment centers they hook addicts and alcoholics on 5 different pills. Walk in with one addiction and leave with 5! Creating a lifetime addiction to psych meds! I swear they use psych meds to create all the MKULTRA psychotic "trans" killers for false flags. Prove me wrong…(Read more.)

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Murder of the Princesse de Lamballe

Among the thousands murdered during the French Revolution, one of the most notorious cases was that of the death of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette. The fury of the new order of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity vented itself upon her frail form in a manner of extreme violence. This was as strange as it was hideous, because other than being a confidante of the queen's, Madame de Lamballe could be counted among the more liberal, "enlightened" aristocrats, devoted to works of charity and civil improvements.

Contrary to the standard depiction of Lamballe as a lovely but simpering idiot, the princess was intelligent as well as cultured. She was the Grande Maitresse of all the French masonic ladies' lodges, for she saw freemasonry as a tool for creating a better world, as did many of her contemporaries. Her liberal politics were one of the reasons, according to scholar Bernard Fay, that King Louis XVI encouraged his wife towards the Polignacs, and away from Lamballe and her Orleanist salon. Madame de Lamballe discovered before the end that utopian politics that seek to create an earthly paradise inevitably lead to social chaos.

Marie-Therese-Louise de Savoie-Carignan was born in Turin on September 8, 1749. In 1767 she was married to the Prince de Lamballe, son of the Duc de Penthievre, relatives of the French royal family. Her husband died soon afterwards, and the young Marie-Antoinette pitied her and took her sleigh-riding. According to Madame Campan, the queen's chambermaid:

It was at the time of the sleighing-parties that the Queen became intimately acquainted with the Princesse de Lamballe, who made her appearance in them wrapped in fur, with all the brilliancy and freshness of the age of twenty,–the emblem of spring, peeping from under sable and ermine. Her situation, moreover, rendered her peculiarly interesting; married, when she was scarcely past childhood, to a young prince, who ruined himself by the contagious example of the Duc d’Orleans, she had had nothing to do from the time of her arrival in France but to weep. A widow at eighteen, and childless, she lived with the Duc de Penthievre as an adopted daughter. She had the tenderest respect and attachment for that venerable Prince; but the Queen, though doing justice to his virtues, saw that the Duc de Penthievre’s way of life, whether at Paris or at his country-seat, could neither afford his young daughter-in-law the amusements suited to her time of life, nor ensure her in the future an establishment such as she was deprived of by her widowhood.

Marie-Antoinette made Madame de Lamballe, known for her virtue and kindness, the Superintendent of her household, which was controversial at the time since there were other courtiers who felt the position was due to them. The two women became good friends. The queen was always trying to recapture the home she had left in Austria, where she had been inseparable from her older sister Maria Carolina, who had mothered her a great deal. Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Polignac were both roughly the same age as Carolina. However, Lamballe was a bit too intellectual for Antoinette and so the queen, with Louis' approval, eventually became closer to the Polignacs. She always remained friends with Lamballe, however.

When the Revolution erupted in 1789, Madame de Lamballe returned to France from the safety of England in order to be share the troubles of the royal family. She became closer than ever to the king's devout sister, Madame Elisabeth of France, and was horrified at how the masonic principles she had thought to be so constructive had led to such a violent revolution. When the royal family was arrested and sent to the Temple prison in August 1792, Lamballe was separated from them and sent to the prison of La Force. When the September Massacres broke out, in which thousands were killed and the streets ran with blood, Madame de Lamballe was asked to renounce her loyalty to the king and the queen. She refused, and was delivered over to the mob. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death, and by some accounts raped and mutilated. She was definitely decapitated, and the valet of Louis XVI, Hanet Clery, gave an account of how the mob brought her head on a pike to the Temple prison for the queen to kiss.

We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison's wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen's voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim's head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike.

Such excesses became typical of the French Revolution, stirred up by propaganda which played upon the fears of many. The Princesse de Lamballe was a bit misguided but ultimately heroic and loyal, and the grisly death to which she was subjected exemplified not only the misogyny of the new order but a hatred of all that was beautiful and good.

 

 

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Knife Wielding Woman In NYC

Another weird case. From The Truth Barrier:

 The official story:

A 49 year old woman named Pamela Cisneros with a documented history of “Bi-polar” disorder stabbed the 32 year old Vice President of Bank Of America to death in Times Square, N.Y.C., and shortly thereafter stabbed another man, a tourist from Rhode Island, who survived. She is seen on a video waving two small knives at a circle of cops. She lunges at them, is shot, and killed.

Video here.

[Warning: Video depicts shooting of the woman.]

I watched the video and wondered why they didn’t demand she drop the knives, or taser her. I also wondered why there as no blood on her, on the knives, or on the ground. The bullet is seen falling out of her stomach as they turn her over and handcuff her. Also, why is that photographer there with a professional camera, shooting photos?

Many in media are posting this video of the same person, same clothes, dancing creepily with knives (much larger knives) in the exact manner that Britney Spears always does. It is apparently AI. (Read more.)

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Clancy History

 From Tierney's Real News:

Lindsay was prescribed a changing mix of medications over several months, including:

• Antidepressants: Zoloft (sertraline), Prozac (fluoxetine), trazodone, amitriptyline, Remeron (mirtazapine)

• Benzodiazepines / anxiety / sleep agents: Ativan (lorazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), Buspar (buspirone)

• Antipsychotic / mood stabilizer: Seroquel (quetiapine), Lamictal (lamotrigine)

• Over-the-counter: Benadryl (diphenhydramine)

These drugs (especially in combination or when rapidly started, stopped, or dose-adjusted) can produce profound effects on brain chemistry. Benzodiazepines, Seroquel, Ambien, Trazodone, and high doses of certain antidepressants can cause heavy sedation, emotional blunting, dissociation, and a flattened affect often described by patients and clinicians as a “zombie-like” state—reduced emotional responsiveness, slowed thinking, and a sense of detachment from one’s own actions or surroundings. (Read more.)

 

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Why Hasan Piker Mocks a Murdered Man

 From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Hasan Piker is deeply envious of Charlie Kirk.

The hard-left influencer debated Kirk in 2017 and was set to do so again before Kirk was murdered last year. Yet now Piker is going around mocking Kirk’s assassination, leading a crowd last weekend, during his live podcast tour, in a sarcastic singalong of an AI-generated song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.”

“We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name,” Piker sang off-key, the crowd howling along, while the celebrity socialist’s co-hosts guffawed and waved their arms in the air.

This wasn’t satirizing a political opponent—Kirk has been dead nearly a year. Why make him the subject of this derision?

It’s because Piker knows his audience, and they’re not looking for thoughtful politics. They want a hatefest. Readers of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four might remember the totalitarian leftist party that runs the dystopian state in that novel regularly held events called a “Two Minutes Hate” to whip up hostility against the regime’s enemies.

Piker has improved on that—his podcast and live events like this offer more than an hour’s hate.

And nobody stirs the Piker crowd into a frenzy like Charlie Kirk.

The slain Turning Point USA founder represents everything they’re against, and not just because he was a widely successful conservative organizer who won young Americans away from socialism on the unfriendly campuses where he spoke—and where he ultimately died for his beliefs.

Kirk’s faith in God, his devotion to his family, his happiness all infuriated his enemies.
His self-sacrifice did, too, and more than anything else: Kirk knew the risks he took by going where he wasn’t welcome and speaking truths the left didn’t want to hear—and was determined to prevent anyone else from hearing. (Read more.)

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The Banality of an Evil Pro-Abortion Art Exhibit

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Still, the effect of seeing Andrea Bowers’ art was mostly enervation. This kind of angry political art is by now very old hat. Take the first room one enters at the exhibit. In Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, Bowers has simply reproduced dozens of letters of women seeking abortions, as well as guides on how to perform abortions, blown them up to poster size, and wallpapered a huge white room with them. This performative exercise might have shocked people a few decades ago, but by now the public has already absorbed and passed its judgment on the nonsense of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. We have moved on. A hectoring and didactic display meant to incite insurrection in defense of abortion is old news. I mean, I was around to see Karen Finley smear herself with chocolate!

Bowers does better in the other rooms at Glenstone, which feature her pieces The Body is Not a Thing, It’s a Situation and Women and the Earth Have to Tolerate a Lot. Bowers has reproduced book illustrations, both from 1896, on square panels of cardboard. The illustrations themselves are quite beautiful, lovely representations of women in flowing Victorian dresses bodies intertwined. The original drawings were meant to illuminate women as deeply powerful and fertile beings with a seamless and metaphysical connection to nature. Then there are the works Ecofeminist Sycamore Branches: Women Have Always Thought Like Mountains, which feature tree branches illuminated with neon. The irony, of course, is that Bowers is using imagery evocative of the sensual and generative power of women to argue for killing babies. (Read more.)

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Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.) 

    While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”

 The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book ­villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.” (Read more.)

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The Affair of the Necklace

On August 15, 1785, the "Affair of the Necklace" broke upon France, just as Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were about to assist at the Mass of the Assumption, the patronal solemnity of the realm. Cardinal Louis de Rohan, who was supposed to offer the Mass, was publicly arrested in his pontifical robes for his part in the debacle. The Diamond Necklace scandal was one of the events which precipitated the French Revolution of 1789 and the fall of the monarchy. After perusing the internet I think it becomes necessary to affirm once again that Marie-Antoinette, according to several major biographers, was an innocent victim in one of the most sordid intrigues in history. She never sought to possess the necklace. For one thing, the necklace was not to her liking; she preferred light, aerial creations. A few scholars even doubt that Madame du Barry, whom the jewelers had in mind when they originally designed the huge, garish necklace, would have cared for it, her taste being not quite so grotesque as is generally assumed. Also, by 1785 Marie-Antoinette had cultivated simpler tastes; she was very much under the influence of Madame de Polignac, who never wore diamonds. It is known that when Boehmer tried to sell her the necklace, she remarked that France needed ships, not diamonds.

The fault of the King and Queen was in attempting to be too above board in the handling of the proceedings. Instead of trying to settle the disaster quietly, there was a public trial of the Cardinal, for whom Marie-Antoinette harbored resentments. Not only had Cardinal de Rohan rudely infiltrated one of her garden parties, but he had told ribald jokes about Marie-Antoinette's mother. He had many mistresses (including Bonnie Prince Charlie's daughter). He symbolized the worst decadence of the French nobility and the corrupt higher clergy. He was grand almoner of Versailles due to his ancestral prerogatives, but neither the king nor the queen had any use for him. The scandal rid them of him, but at a very high price. They could never have known at the onset the cast of bizarre characters with whom the Cardinal was involved, who were brought into the light of day. The Queen's name was dragged through the mud by being associated with such people in the gazettes, people who were complete strangers to her. Biographer Maxime de la Rocheterie believed that even if the king and queen had tried to suppress the scandal, the results would have been disastrous nevertheless.

How did it all come about? Through a woman who lied. Each lie told by Madame de la Motte was more outrageous than the last, yet individuals motivated by lust or ambition or greed believed her tales. She told people that she was an intimate friend of the Queen, who had never even heard of her. The swindle was tragic for all involved, especially for the innocent Marie-Antoinette, for it confirmed in the popular imagination all the salacious gossip which portrayed her as a loose, extravagant woman.

For details of the Diamond Necklace Scandal, read my book Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars.

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Welfare Fraud Racket

 From Tierney's Real News:

The 64-page report titled Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of Gender Medicine reveals that more than 225 hospitals and health systems made more than $50 MILLION in profit by building pediatric gender programs nationwide and exploiting insurance billing codes. They used diagnoses like “endocrine disorder, unspecified” and “precocious puberty” to get coverage to perform these disgusting procedures in minors. In other words, they mutilated children for profit.

JD VANCE: “It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child. For years now, some hospitals and healthcare providers have been subjecting children to horrific, experimental treatments in service of radical gender ideologies.

Today, thanks to the Wolves in White Coats report released by the HHS, we know why: profit. It turns out that convincing vulnerable children to reject their gender can create patients for life, earning hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue per child.

The report contains deeply disturbing allegations, and I encourage every American and every parent, to read it. More than just pushing these procedures on kids, hospitals and providers may have been defrauding Medicaid and private insurers by using misleading or fraudulent billing codes to get insurance to cover the costs.

People were getting wealthy by DOING these procedures on kids, LYING about medical implications, and collecting REWARDS!”

More than 225 hospitals and health systems built pediatric gender programs. Then they HID what they were doing to kids behind FALSE billing codes.

• $50 MILLION in puberty blockers were billed under E34.9 — “Endocrine Disorder, Unspecified”

• More than $11 MILLION found billed as “precocious puberty” for kids aged 13-17.

That’s not a paperwork error. That’s how you hide the abuse you inflicted on children.

These providers created lifelong patients (hormones, surgeries, follow-up care) - with average costs for such treatments far exceeding routine pediatric care (tens of thousands to over $100,000 per patient in some estimates cited). (Read more.)

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Arrest of Cardinal de Rohan

It is tragic and ironic that the scandal that led to the fall of the French monarchy would explode on the patronal feast day of the kingdom, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was also the feast-day for the Queens of France, who in the days of the Bourbons were all named "Marie." It is an additional irony that a Cardinal of the Roman Church was instrumental in the culmination of the scandal through his own unworthy and imprudent conduct. Here is Madame Campan's account of the Cardinal's arrest:

On the following Sunday, the 15th of August, being the Assumption, at twelve o’clock, at the very moment when the Cardinal, dressed in his pontifical garments, was about to proceed to the chapel, he was sent for into the King’s closet, where the Queen then was.

The King said to him, “You have purchased diamonds of Boehmer?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“What have you done with them?”

“I thought they had been delivered to the Queen.”

“Who commissioned you?”

“A lady, called the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois, who handed me a letter from the Queen; and I thought I was gratifying her Majesty by taking this business on myself.”

The Queen here interrupted him and said, “How, monsieur, could you believe that I should select you, to whom I have not spoken for eight years, to negotiate anything for me, and especially through the mediation of a woman whom I do not even know?”

“I see plainly,” said the Cardinal, “that I have been duped. I will pay for the necklace; my desire to please your Majesty blinded me; I suspected no trick in the affair, and I am sorry for it.”

He then took out of his pocket-book a letter from the Queen to Madame de Lamotte, giving him this commission. The King took it, and, holding it towards the Cardinal, said:

“This is neither written nor signed by the Queen. How could a Prince of the House of Rohan, and a Grand Almoner of France, ever think that the Queen would sign Marie Antoinette de France? Everybody knows that queens sign only by their baptismal names. But, monsieur,” pursued the King, handing him a copy of his letter to Baehmer, “have you ever written such a letter as this?”

Having glanced over it, the Cardinal said, “I do not remember having written it.”

“But what if the original, signed by yourself, were shown to you?”

“If the letter be signed by myself it is genuine.”

He was extremely confused, and repeated several times, “I have been deceived, Sire; I will pay for the necklace. I ask pardon of your Majesties.”

“Then explain to me,” resumed the King, “the whole of this enigma. I do not wish to find you guilty; I had rather you would justify yourself. Account for all the manoeuvres with Baehmer, these assurances and these letters.”

The Cardinal then, turning pale, and leaning against the table, said, “Sire, I am too much confused to answer your Majesty in a way–”

“Compose yourself, Cardinal, and go into my cabinet; you will there find paper, pens, and ink,–write what you have to say to me.”

The Cardinal went into the King’s cabinet, and returned a quarter of an hour afterwards with a document as confused as his verbal answers had been. The King then said, “Withdraw, monsieur.” The Cardinal left the King’s chamber, with the Baron de Breteuil, who gave him in custody to a lieutenant of the Body Guard, with orders to take him to his apartment. M. d’Agoult, aide-major of the Body Guard, afterwards took him into custody, and conducted him to his hotel, and thence to the Bastille....

The moment the Cardinal’s arrest was known a universal clamour arose. Every memorial that appeared during the trial increased the outcry. On this occasion the clergy took that course which a little wisdom and the least knowledge of the spirit of such a body ought to have foreseen. The Rohans and the House of Conde, as well as the clergy, made their complaints heard everywhere. The King consented to having a legal judgment, and early in September he addressed letters-patent to the Parliament, in which he said that he was “filled with the most just indignation on seeing the means which, by the confession of his Eminence the Cardinal, had been employed in order to inculpate his most dear spouse and companion.”

Fatal moment! in which the Queen found herself, in consequence of this highly impolitic step, on trial with a subject, who ought to have been dealt with by the power of the King alone. The Princes and Princesses of the House of Conde, and of the Houses of Rohan, Soubise, and Guemenee, put on mourning, and were seen ranged in the way of the members of the Grand Chamber to salute them as they proceeded to the palace, on the days of the Cardinal’s trial; and Princes of the blood openly canvassed against the Queen of France.

Here is additional information about the Cardinal, who was tried but acquitted, and a line which I found interesting:

Rohan’s acquittal did not stop the king from banishing him to Chaise-Dieu. During the French Revolution, Rohan left France for Germany. His character improved and he spent the remains of his wealth providing for the poor clergy around him. The Rohan family spent decades paying off the debt of the diamond necklace–they were honor-bound to pay the 1.6 million francs owed for the necklace since Cardinal Rohan had been guarantor.

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Another Trans Murder

 From The Post-Millennial:

The cause of death in the killing of William Evans-Ellis, the mentally handicapped 7-year-old allegedly murdered by his mother and two trans-identified males, has now been confirmed by the Hamilton County Coroner's Office. The 7-year-old from Oakley, Ohio was discovered dead last week after suffering extensive abuse.

William's mother, Kaitlin Evans, 39, has been charged with murder and child endangerment, as have trans-identified males Kirby Rankin, 33, and Nessa Keaney, 23. The transgender male lovers of Evans shared a home with her and the boy. Rankin was previously known as Nathan Rankin, while Keaney was previously known as Adamhnán Keaney.

Speaking to reporters on August 11, Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco explained that a blunt force injury to William's head was what killed him. The mother and trans lovers allegedly caused "bruises too numerous to count" on the boy's body, and Sammarco estimated he had been dead roughly a day by the time officers found him, per Cincinnati.com. Sammarco reflected on the difficulty of the case: "This is a hard case for everybody... We always say that we expect the worst, but sometimes we get it." (Read more.)

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Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

 From Man of Steele:

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation. (Read more.)

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Spells, Magic and Ancient Paganism

 Pagans lived lives of superstition. From The Collector:

In ancient Mesopotamia, magic was considered commonplace and was inseparable from religion, politics, and daily customs. Unlike today, magic was not seen as “other,” but essential for the functioning of society. This was true for all the various city-states and empires that flourished in Mesopotamia across its 3,000 years of history. This article explores the types of spells and rituals that characterized magic in ancient Mesopotamia.

In ancient Mesopotamia, magic and spells were considered a normal part of religion and were integrated into daily customs. Polytheists, people could call on a variety of gods through spells and rituals, though the patron deity of an individual city was chiefly honored.

Unlike ancient Egyptian religion, which was built around the predictability of the life-giving Nile flood, Mesopotamian cosmology was shaped by the instability of life in the ancient Near East. Whether conditions were harsh, harvests irregular, wild animals threatening, and there was often armed conflict between people. There, it is not surprising that their pantheon was occupied by both gods and demons, connected with nature and the other unpredictable elements of life in the region. While the gods were often anthropomorphic, they could also appear as mythical beasts that embodied aspects of the animals in the region, including lions, snakes, and birds of prey. (Read more.)

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