By Lionel
[Professional title deleted]* James Tracy of [deleted]* University and Memory Hole Blog joined me for a conversation on the dread conspiracy theory, the label that shuts down and shuts up without fail. Behold the man who dared to question the official account of Sandy Hook, a man who simply and merely asked questions and then uncured the usual and predictable wrath of a feckless and impuissant mainstream media who don’t take kindly to those who question whether they’re doing their job.
There was a time when academic freedom provided the backdrop and stage for intellectual inquiry. The proscenium for ideation and issue inspection. Jim Tracy dared to question the official account of Sandy Hook and continues to.
The subject of this recordation. In this interview the good [professional title deleted]* and I discuss the retooling of the term conspiracy theory to connote that of lunacy and the baseless, the future of the classroom and campus as crucibles of truth, attempts to stifle and silence daring academics and what “woke him up,” a concept many are familiar with, i.e. the event or events that made him aware of organized and concerted media deception.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMHs8LrZozU#t=25
Veteran radio personality Lionel has been getting people to both laugh and think critically for over 25 years. Talkers Magazine, the talk radio industry journal, listed him in the HEAVIEST HUNDRED: The 100 most important radio talk show hosts of all time. He’s also included in Talkers Frontier Fifty as an outstanding talk media webcaster. Lionel is an attorney, media critic, part-time bluegrass musician, stand-up comedian, and the author of “Everyone’s Crazy Except You and Me . . . And I’m Not So Sure About You” (Hyperion). For more information visit LionelMedia.com.
Lionel will be a guest on the November 26th edition of Real Politik.
*This post has been edited in accordance with an agreement between [deleted] University and James Tracy.
Reblogged this on Today,s Thought.
Another brave soul getting truth out! Looking forward to the video, but there was an error…((
It’s “Tracy,” not “Stacy,” Lionel!
But I agree with you on everything else, including that the National Enquirer sometimes has real scoops.
Many of the “How Dare You” trolls are in fact State Actors promoting the official story for the criminal factions within the corrupt government. They are a deluded bunch as they think their opinion matters!!
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
Great program. I had the pleasure of listening to Lionel’s first NYC broadcast in the early nineties while living 60 miles away in Connecticut. NYC radio stations were worth listening to in those days. His transition to the big apple from Florida was amusing – the Lionel way. As often as I could I listened to Lionel and to Lynn Samuels on the same station – WABC. She too was a one of a kind radio personality and was the one who introduced Matt Drudge to the big city when he came there from Hollywood. Later she became his call screener.
Here is Lionel’s tribute to Lynn Samuels who died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve in 2011. Many, including myself, have questioned her way too early demise.
http://www.podjockey.com/lionelmedia/?s=samuels
“A Lynn Samuels eulogium. She died Christmas Eve. She was a talk radio titan because she did and said what she pleased. She listened to no one and had the guts, temerity, intrepidity and elephantine balls to be different from the usual cookie cutter, echo chamber mindless robots that inhabit the medium. John Mainelli, WABC PD par excellence, empowered her. And she pissed people off and royally. Her voice made Edith Bunker sound like Margaret Thatcher. But it didn’t matter. She was unique, cool, sui generis, nonpareil and a royal pain in the ass. Her kind is absent from an atrophied talk radio spectrum. Just listen to the bilge that passes for talk today. It’s horrific. But that’s emblematic of our country in many respects: few choices and lousy ones at that.”
I love this interview. The guy gets Tracy laughing (I hope I could do the same) as he sets up very weighty questions.
One complaint. Ward Churchill. He should have lost his career because his entire persona was a lie. Fake Indian. Absolutely shamelessly so.
I am no apologist for Wall Street, incidentally. I hate everything about it.
But it seems to me that the idea that he was not drummed out of respectable society because he built his entire reputation on a monstrous lie, which is impossible to deny, but because of a nasty quip characterizing the financial drones who died on 9/11 as architects of a Nazi-like regime, the academy got its undies in a twist, strikes me as emblematic of everything that is wrong with academia, if not the post-Western civilization we live in across the board. His shamelessness was protected for years because–even though he really isn’t one–Indians must be protected. Because of the terrible shame we are supposed to feel about what we did to them. So a fake Indian gets treated with kid gloves–until he pisses on the fake 9/11 meme. Odd, that.
This is ridiculous on so many levels. Normally, academia would protect, indeed trumpet the courage of a tenured professor who made nasty Third Reich imputations concerning the financial world. The ivory tower loves that sort of thing. Yet, somehow, the memo was distributed to the academy that 9/11 would be untouchable, and Ward the Fake Indian never got his copy. He’d been strutting about in his ridiculous regalia for years, and everyone knew what a fraud he was, so I guess he assumed his magic immunity was more magic than it was–kind of like those North Dakota tribes who thought their shirts would deflect Custer’s bullets when they did the “Ghost Dance.”
Now, as I have written here at length, on many occasions, I despise Lincoln and his monstrous war to destroy Southern culture, and I particularly despise what his despicable generals immediately set about doing to the Plains Indians. They slaughtered them with the same glee they burned down Southern cities. Savages. I’m on the side of those Ghost Dancers, and hold in the highest contempt the monsters who murdered them and put the survivors in concentration camps, where their descendants languish today–when if the Good had prevailed they would today have their own independent countries in those ancestral lands of theirs, with their own laws and customs and Washington just as influential over them as Peking or Delhi. We SHOULD feel guilt about that, just as we should feel guilt about what “we” did to the South, under Lincoln.
But what should be considered even more despicable is when lilly-white people like Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren make a handsome living pretending to be Indians, cashing in on white guilt.
That Churchill was cashiered because of the Eichmann comment and not because he was trading on other peoples’ tragedy for personal gain says everything we need to know about what’s wrong with the world as we find it today.
I neglected to mention Kevin Barrett, who was also witch-hunted out of the academy because of his 9/11 Truth activism. The scenarios differ, however, because Churchill had tenure and Barrett was a contracted instructor. Few tenured faculty speak out on many genuinely controversial issues, and those dependent on contract renewal wisely don’t. Further, only about one quarter of teaching faculty in the US are tenured/tenure track.
I have an interview with well-known attorney Dan Seigel in early December. Seigel has litigated some of the most noteworthy cases in recent history where academics have been harassed or otherwise wronged by their colleagues and/or administrations. We’ll surely discuss these concerns at greater length in that discussion.
“Further, only about one quarter of teaching faculty in the US are tenured/tenure track.”
So often we must add caveats. Here’s one: I admire a very great deal of Victor Davis Hanson’s thought, even though he’s a staunch neo-conservative, and even though I disagree with his interpretation of much of history–he might be a super-expert, and I an autodidact, but he can still be wrong, and in my opinion IS, about these things.
That out of the way, one of the things he has written extensively about, and entirely out of personal experience, is the now slave economy within the academy. He’s a retired classics professor (he taught at Fresno) who witnessed the inequity with disgust. Most of the teaching is done by people who have absolutely no chance of achieving the lofty full professorship and tenure. They get paid less than a barista at Starbucks, work horrible hours, and are treated as if they are invisible in the faculty lounge. If memory serves, they have a hard time gaining access to the printer, as they prepare coursework. There is the easy life of the few, and the grinding mass of the many. Tuition-paying parents have no idea what’s going on.
This section of his website is titled “education”; I perused the first page, and it looks like many of those articles can be found there: http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?cat=79
There was a time (not really that long ago) when great teachers taught at university, and young scholars had a real chance of joining them. Then, a summer job could produce enough money to finance the rest of the year at a first-rate college. There are lots of horrible reasons this is just a memory of things past, but that would be a task for another day.
Patrick, this issue is very much related (aren’t they all?) to the post on mind control in education. There was a time (you may be old enough to remember it), when “higher education” was assumed to inspire the students to explore ideas and arrive at their own conclusions.
The same phenomena are very much at work in the universities that are devouring the primary schools. The underlying belief that the students should never be exposed to controversial ideas is rife.
While I very much admire those involved in trying to educate the public, they are hopelessly trapped in an institution that does not generally succeed in that effort. There is an enormous difference between learning to recite the party line and catching fire with the desire to learn and having the tools to discern the relative value of information.
Besides the pressure from political segments, the universities survive on grants. They are by no measure “independent”. Those who control the purse strings most definitely have a say in who works there and under what circumstances.
It would be great if the university president were completely devoted to academic excellence. They aren’t. They are primarily salesmen. Those that aren’t get removed.
On the false credentials thing, as disgusting as it is, there are certainly more examples of this. Do you remember the Carlos Casteneda PhD? I read his books, I have it on good authority that they were not a “thesis”. Nonetheless he was “popular” (and a minority).
I recently stumbled upon a lengthy article about Carlos Casteneda, lophatt. It was about the cult he created, and the women he mesmerized, and the deaths surrounding it. Fascinating. He was as shameless as anyone alive; he made up absolutely everything. For instance, the Yaquis didn’t use the drugs Casteneda had Don Juan instructing Carlos about (if I remember correctly, you have to travel thousands of miles south to find such tribes). He made it all up, but insisted until his death that it was all true.
I read the first three books in 1978 or so, and thought them very instructive. Then, the fourth came out, which included impossible, preposterous twists, and I became skeptical. I believe I read the fifth, or only got through part of it and threw it aside in disgust. It had all become ridiculous. If a thoughtful teenager could see through him, why couldn’t everyone else? Yet he kept cranking out books, and he gave seminars (big $$$) that were well attended, in which he taught the philosophy of his made-up religion–which is where he found the women he lured into his creepy commune.
His reputation was never hurt, even as the evidence of massive fraud mounted, for years. His publisher, for one, certainly was raking in the money, and had no interest in finding out the truth.
I hate liars, but I hate the cravenness of college administrators even more. They have ruined higher education on an institutional level. The Glass Bead Game, it ain’t. I’m glad James brings up Barrett, because I admire courage–he knew what would happen to him for telling the truth: stating the obvious-but-forbidden was a danger he was happy to face. That he knew this beforehand is a damning indictment in itself. Everyone knows what a sick game life in the universities has become, and they have to choose to play it if they are to have such a life. It must be terribly demoralizing. Politically correct frauds and charlatans can survive just fine; genuine seekers after truth, whose findings might jeopardize the political and business connections that the modern American university depends upon, well, there’s no place to be found there for such as them.
Ha!, yeah, I too was fascinated for a while as a “youth”. Later, when I began to study theology in earnest I realized that he boosted most of his ideas from Juan de la Cruz.
I hadn’t thought of him for years until you made your comment on “fraud”. I suppose the point I was making was that saying that he didn’t deserve a doctorate for this doesn’t mean that the books weren’t entertaining. On the other hand, being a popular writer doesn’t necessarily qualify one for a PhD!
I could probably do an hour or so on the history of various degrees, their implications, their common use today, and the implications for the unwashed masses who tend to hang on everything they say, deserved or otherwise.
Just as a side note, I think his “theory” was that “Don Juan” was a sorcerer who learned his craft from the ancient Toltecs. He claimed that they weren’t really conquered by the Conquistadors, they simply become plants and rocks, etc., and continued to “rule” from nature.
While I still think the books were rather good, his ideas were not original, nor were they “anthropology”. He simply wedded several theories and practices together and narrated them through his creation.
Higher education is just like cable TV; as long as people, and the government keep paying for it, the product will remain the same.