S01E141: I'm Coming For You, Barbara
I'm Coming For You
Tonight’s Tarot:
Freaks of Hazard:
Captain Oblivious and Tjunta both had their monthly donations of $5.55 and $3.33 come in! Thank you for the continued support!
We also had a new monthly set of donors come in! It’s none other than Spaz and Mommabury! They set up a monthly donation for $9.99 (like the telephone number!). Thank you both so much!
Special shout out to Midnight Mike of http://obdmpod.com/ for taking some time out of his schedule to help me tune the system! It sounds so smoooooooooth!!
Thanks to PrivateBrowsing for sending in a pic of this tagged up desk. Good to know the kids are trying to one-up these schƎmƎs!
FRUITY BEATNIKS
EVERYONE’S A CRITIC
A Different History of Modernism – Episode 1: Art and the CIA
American Art of the 20th Century - 1955 Press Release
UPENN Article Concerning Congressman Dondero Gold Medal
🍸 Tom Braden, retired lead spook at the CIA and former host of CNN’s Crossfire, discusses how he and his team attempted to combat “communist and fascist elements” by covertly funding and promoting a select group of artists, including the pioneers of what we now call Abstract Expressionist art… from the shadows!
To get to know the man a little better, here’s an article written by Braden in 1967 for The Saturday Evening Post titled “I’m Glad The CIA is Immoral” (Archive)
Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and many more were promoted by the Agency
Other speakers in these clips include author Richard Elman, Sociologist Christopher Simpson, retired CIA Officer (and Le Cercle member) Donald Jameson, and more spooks. Tom Braden speaks quite a bit…
HH 1 - The CIA and Post-War Art
Rarely do the rich, affluent, and political patronize fine art anonymously. However, the CIA have done such a thing
To fight communism, the Agency has engaged in a Cultural Cold War, buying out musicians, actors, journalists, and even painters… especially painters
HH 2 - The CIA and the MOMA 1955
In Paris 1955, the MOMA hosted the largest American collection of modern art to travel abroad at that point in history
This endeavor was directly funded and organized by the CIA and their officers including Tom Braden and William Colby
Jack Pollock, or “Jack the Dripper”, is showcased particularly heavily, despite being a Communist sympathizer
Young Pollock in Mexico - A Hammer Smashing Into Wall Street HH 3 - Critics Be Damned
Many critics, French and American, lambast the exhibition and ridicule it
The CIA, the most well-funded and connected patron of all, disagrees with them
HH 4 - Peace Initiatives
Would these artists, and indeed the abstract movement, have been as culturally relevant without the direct influence of the American Intelligence Community?
What do we do with all these veterans home from war?
How do we address the military threat of the Communists without a large military?
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hosts Peace Initiatives, some on America’s doorstep, in an act of global diplomatic strong-arming
Gorky
HH 5 - Tom Braden
What about the avant garde attracted the Ivy League stiffs from Yale?
Early CIA are veterans of the OSS, which replaced it in 1947
In 1950, they establish the International Organizations Division, where the CIA’s cultural policy was centered and implemented
Tom Braden himself insists that their subterfuge was necessary to enforce the freedom of expression they so desperately were wishing to attain in the 50’s
Tom Braden
HH 6 - Individualism Through Subversion
CIA Agents used to be respected members of the community!!!
You used to walk around…. BACK IN MY DAY you used to be able to tell folks on the street you were with the CIA, and by golly, they’d shake yer hand and thank you for your service!
Anyway the CIA totally didn’t manipulate their own countrymen in a vicious phony culture war meaning to address a foreign boogeyman who’s worst crimes were to enact in the very clandestine activities in which they were participating
Rothko
HH 7 - Cultural Commissars
While the CIA promotes Abstract Expressionism as Operation American Freedom abroad, various factions at home condemn the very same movement as the vile Communist enemy which it is intended to combat
One such individual is Congressman George Dondero
HH 8 - Congressman George Dondero’s Speech
Michigan US Representative gives speech denouncing modern art as a Communist plot
For this speech, the International Fine Arts Council (IFAC) gave Congressman Dondero on 10/8/56 a Gold Medal of Honor for "dedicated service to American Art”.
HH 9 - Shocked I Say
McCarthyism rips through the US political scene, and all matter of artists are brought before an official committee to answer for potential crimes and subversion. There is a conspiracy that many Communist artists have infiltrated America and are sneaking Commie mind control into everyday life through films, art, music
The CIA meanwhile is convinced they have the education, culture, and wherewithal to engage in this operation to promote specific artists through secret pass-by companies and thoroughly corrupt the individualistic free market environment they keep claiming to wish for
Baziotes
HH 10 - FBI vs CIA
Also fighting this art movement is the CIA’s arch-rival - The FBI!
J. Edgar Hoover, known cross-dressing black man and effective founder of the FBI, displays characteristic paranoia and spite towards anything looking any shade of pink, unless it’s a nice skirt
HH 11 - The Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a typical spook front
However, the CIA realized they could make their own “foundations” on paper and therefore have unilateral control over it
HH 12 - Good To Be An American
Even though the CIA bolstered his reputation and funded him, Jackson Pollock would certainly find a foot in the general cultural swing regardless, right?
If promoting art is wrong, the CIA doesn’t want to be right!
George Dondero’s Speech [Excerpt]
Mr. Speaker, quite a few individuals in art, who are sincere in purpose, honest in intent, but with only a superficial knowledge of the complicated influences that surge in the art world of today, have written me–or otherwise expressed their opinions–that so-called modern or contemporary art cannot be Communist because art in Russia today is realistic and objective.
The left-wing art magazines advance the same unsound premises of reasoning, asserting in editorial spasms that modern art is real American art. They plead for tolerance, but in turn tolerate nothing except their own subversive “isms.”
The human art, termites, disciples of multiple “isms” that compose so-called modern art, boring industriously to destroy the high standards and priceless traditions of academic art, find comfort and satisfaction in the wide dissemination of this spurious reasoning and wickedly false declaration, and its casual acceptance by the unwary.
This glib disavowal of any relationship between communism and so-called modern art is so pat and so spontaneous a reply by advocates of the “isms” in art, from deep, Red Stalinist to pale pink publicist, as to identify it readily to the observant as the same old party-line practice. It is the party line of the left-wingers, who are now in the big money, and who want above all to remain in the big money, voiced to confuse the legitimate artist, to disarm the arousing academician, and to fool the public.
As I have previously stated, art is considered a weapon of communism, and the Communist doctrinaire names the artist as a soldier of the revolution. It is a weapon in the hands of a soldier in the revolution against our form of government, and against any government or system other than communism.
From 1914 to 1920, art was used as a weapon of the Russian Revolution to destroy the Czarist Government, but when this destruction was accomplished, art ceased to be a weapon and became a medium of propaganda, picturing and extolling the imaginary wonders, benefits, and happiness of existence under the socialized state.
Let me trace for you a main artery from the black heart of the isms of the Russian Revolution to the very heart of art in America.
In 1914, Kandinsky, a Russian-born Expressionist and nonobjective painter, who found it safer to liv in Germany, returned to Russia, and 3 years later came the revolution. He is the man who preached that art must abandon the logical and adopt the illogical. He dominated a group of black knights of the isms, who murdered the art of the Russian academies. They were Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Constructionists, Suprematists, Abstractionists, and the rest of the same ilk. Kandinsky was a friend of Trotsky, and after the revolution founded the Moscow Institute of Art Culture. He was Communist leader in Red art–the commissar of the isms.
Kandinsky remained in Russia until 1921, when the art of the isms began to feel the iron grip of the new art control, the art for the sake of propaganda, the art of social realism. Kandinsky went back to Germany.
The Communist art that has infiltrated our cultural front is not the Communist art in Russia today–one is the weapon of destruction, and the other is the medium of controlled propaganda. Communist art outside Russia is to destroy the enemy, and we are the enemy of communism. Communist art in Russia is to delude the Russian workers.
The art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, is the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, having infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens to overawe, override and overpower the fine art of our tradition and inheritance. So-called modern or contemporary art in our own beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, decadence, and destruction.
What are these isms that are the very foundation of so-called modern art? They are the same old lot of the Russian Revolution, some with transparent disguises, and others added from time to time as new convulsions find a new designation. I call the role of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: daw daw ism, futurism, constructionism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all are media of social or political pro test, all are instruments and weapons of destruction. To trace the origin, development and history of all these isms is a task too lengthy for the time available to me here, and also beyond the scope of my intention. But I do tag them specifically, as well as generally, as instruments of destruction.
Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.
Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.
Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.
Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane.
Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.
Surrealism aims to destroy by denial of reason.
NO. 5 DIRT
⭐ The UnXplained: Hunting Lost Civil War Gold (Season 4)
According To Legend - Hear the backstory of a mysterious load of Union gold that went missing.
Legend of the Lost Gold of Dents Run Visit PA Great Outdoors - “At that time (circa the late 1800s-early 1900s), the Pinkerton Detective Agency came to the area and lore has it that 3.5 gold bars were found. After some of the detectives left the agency, they were said to have spent the rest of their lives in the area looking for the rest of the gold.”
The Public Spotlight - The Gubment was able to keep this missing shipment secret until the 1970s.
The Lost Gold Shipment – Mt Zion Historical Society (The Original 1974 Article) - Perhaps the most detailed in the notes tonight of what happened back in the 1860’s.
Gold ingots - Another retelling of the story.
The Descent - Dennis Parada is on the case!
Was the FBI Searching for Lost Civil War Gold in Pennsylvania - “In 2004 he found a trove of artifacts from the Civil War period at the Dents Run site, including knives, tin cans, animal traps, human and animal bones, and traces of a fire pit. Subsequent investigations with “high powered metal detectors” indicated the presence of “a large metal object 8 feet to 10 feet under the fire pit,” Parada writes. He claims that the lost shipment contained 52 bars of gold, each weighing 50 pounds.”
Enter The FBI - …until the FBI and DNCR completely fuck him over.
⭐ Judge: FBI to hand over Elk County Civil War gold hunt records
A rundown of the most recent happenings in this case. I tell you huwhat you wanna lose something? Give it to the FBI.
Treasure Hunters Believed They’d Found $500 Million in Civil War Gold — Then the FBI Swooped In - On some of the anomolies found in the turned over records:
The FBI initially turned over hundreds of photos, but rendered them in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white, making it impossible to tell the time of day they were taken or even, in some cases, what they show. The treasure hunters went back and requested several dozen of the photos in color, which the FBI provided.
The agency did not provide any video of the second and final day of the dig. Nor did it produce any photos or video showing what the FBI’s own hand-drawn map described as a 30-foot-long, 12-foot-deep trench — which the treasure hunters claim could have only been dug overnight. Government lawyers acknowledged these gaps in the photo and video record but did not elaborate in a court filing last week.
The consulting firm hired by the FBI to assess the possibility of gold produced a report on its findings, but the version given to the treasure hunters seems to be missing key pages.
The FBI did not provide any of its agents’ travel and expense invoices, which could shed further light on the dig timeline.
⭐ FBI records deepen mystery of dig for Civil War-era gold
From The Mouth Of The Fed - Fed Fed Fed Fed Fed Fed!
⭐ 397: The Lost Gold Of Dents Run | The Confessionals
False Bottomed Wagons - A longer slightly more in depth background on how the gold was lost.
Under The Bridge - Cont.
Enter The Psychic - Turns out Dennis got a nudge from a totally surprising source…
How a psychic started Pennsylvania’s strangest treasure hunt - This article cites Dennis has spent over $20,000 in his pursuits. Not sure if this includes legal fees. Dennis eventually give up his first initial search but returned in 2004. After finally discovering the cave the psychic spoke of, they we’re able to locate evidence of pig iron. Pig iron was used as for cases during the Civil War. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DNCR) is also a bunch of dick bags in this story. Dennis at first was working thru them to secure the site, but the DNCR basically strong armed him out off the location. Stole his gear etc etc. The FBI claimed Dennis was guilty of “magical thinking” and insists there was nothing there. Later in this article there are claims of armored cars being seen in the area. It wraps with a quote from Dennis’s song Kem, “I couldn’t understand why a government agency would lie to us. For a minute after the dig I thought if there was nothing there then maybe the science was wrong. But the more time goes by, I still say something was there. Something had to have been there.”
Speed Reading - Watch the psychic in action!
The Dirt Samples - You’re there baby.
Did the FBI Steal Nine Tons of Civil War Gold?
Treasure Hunters Believed They’d Found $500 Million in Civil War Gold — Then the FBI Swooped In
OPENER
INTERMISSION
My Goodness - C'mon Doll (Live @ KEXP)
John J. Kimmel - Medley of Straight Jigs
Михаил Лоов - Фрагменты Наблюдений, Михаил Лоов - Над моим городом Луна сегодня светит...
CLOSER
Royalty Free Metal - 3º buena 3º mala (by Chubby Mosh) - Download link in description
TAKE THESE, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE!
