"The Man I Warned You About": What William F. Buckley Would Make of Trump and His MaGA Republican Party

I was a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. decades ago. And of Gore Vidal. The opposites of the Right and Left political thinking in their day, respectively. I still watch Buckley's Firing Line, now in the competent hands of Margaret Hoover. I came across the documentary Best of Enemies - Buckley vs Vidal (2015) on Netflix, that I highly recommend, and it got me thinking. It was about their 10-night ABC network airing during the Republican Convention in 1968 in Miami, Florida which I would love to get a chance to view...all 10 episodes. Even though each segment was only 15 minutes druing each night's 90-minute news show.

What would Buckley make of Pres. #47 Donald J Trump today? Not much I thought. So who is Buckley?

William F. Buckley Jr. was the most influential intellectual architect of modern American conservatism. He founded National Review in 1955 as the movement's flagship journal, hosted Firing Line for 33 years as the longest-running public affairs show in television history, and was widely regarded as the most skilled conservative debater of his generation. Erudite, witty, and relentlessly disciplined, he believed conservatism had to be intellectually serious to be politically durable. He was not a populist. He was the man who defined what the American right was supposed to be.

One of his most consequential acts was purging the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, on the grounds that conspiratorial, anti-intellectual populism would destroy conservatism's credibility and marginalize it from mainstream American life. That decision shaped the Republican Party's intellectual identity for decades.

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What He Actually Said About Trump

Around 2000, when Trump briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination, William F. Buckley wrote critically about him, in National Review, characterizing him as a demagogue whose essential appeal was flattering crowds while offering no substantive ideology beyond self-promotion. He identified Trump's narcissism as the core of his political identity. This was not a passing dismissal. Buckley chose his words with precision, and he used them deliberately.

It was in part reprinted in 2016, again in the National Review.

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On MaGA and Populism

The Birch Society purge is the key lens here. MaGA, with its election denialism, conspiracy adjacency, contempt for institutional expertise, and grievance-driven mass politics, would look to Buckley like the Birchers' revenge. He spent decades trying to prevent exactly this kind of movement from capturing the Republican Party. Watching it succeed would have been, for him, a historic failure of conservative nerve.

On Institutions

Buckley was a deeply institutional man. Yale, the CIA, the Church, the Senate, the press. He believed civilization was built on inherited structures that required active defense against both left-wing leveling and right-wing wrecking. Trump's sustained assault on the Justice Department, the electoral system, NATO, and the independent press would not read to Buckley as disruption or strength. It would read as vandalism.

On Trade and Foreign Policy

Buckley was a free trader and a Cold War internationalist who saw the liberal international order as a necessary defense against totalitarianism. Tariff nationalism, America First isolationism, and hostility to alliances would be nearly incomprehensible to him as conservative positions. He would see them as strategic recklessness dressed up as patriotism.

On Style

This matters more than people credit. Buckley believed conservatism should project civilizational confidence, wit, and seriousness. He cared about what the movement looked like to educated people. Trump's rally aesthetic, the vulgarity, the grievance saturation, the contempt for precision and argument, would strike Buckley as not just politically wrong but as an embarrassment to everything he built.

Where It Gets Complicated

Buckley had his own contradictions. His civil rights record was late and troubled. He had an aristocratic streak that could shade into romanticizing hierarchy. And his loathing of the left was bone-deep, which might have made a clean break from the Republican Party psychologically difficult even as he watched it transform into something he didn't recognize.

His most likely posture would have been to call for a conservative reformation from within, probably to diminishing audiences, probably futilely.

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The Bottom Line

Buckley would almost certainly argue that MaGA is not conservatism at all. It is a personality cult that has occupied conservatism's institutional infrastructure while gutting its intellectual content. He would place himself, however uncomfortably, alongside people like George Will and David Frum who chose principle over party. And he would reserve his sharpest contempt not for Trump, whom he had already diagnosed clearly in 2000, but for the conservative intellectuals and Republican officials who knew better and said nothing.

The movement he built was taken over by the kind of man he spent his career warning about.

He saw it coming a quarter century ago.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Birthday, Vancouver, BC - Summer 1981...and Cheech and Chong

OK so, with my birthday coming up (this was 1981), my girlfriend, let's call her, "M" and I, decided to go to Vancouver.

I was driving, so my car, but which one? The '75 Camaro RS? The one after that? I'm thinking it must have been the Camaro? Anyway...irrelevant, really.

Shanghai Junk Cabaret in Vancouver’s Chinatown History. Nude psychedelic dancer ‘Sandi’ at the Shanghai Junk cabaret in Chinatown, 442 Main Street, on Feb. 18, 1967. Club owner Stan Chong is at left, looking up, and Tommy Chong smiles on the right. Photo : Ray Allan.

so before graduating college in 1984, had to be before Bellingham as we'd have been broke, so that means likely 1980 or so she went to Wazzu (WSU, Washington State University) for year 1980-81, we then moved in together for 1981-82, 82-84 in Bellingham. We drove up to Vancouver as I'd been going there all my life. Well, Victoria anyway, but then from high school on ...fully Vancouver. 

We got to Vancouver and must have had a reservation as we must have had a destination. We got our room key and headed to our room. Part of the idea was to luxuriate, take it easy, play in our room, order room service. For whatever reason, I pulled back the cover on the bed a bit, sat down, picked up the phone to order food and....dead phone. 

We wanted food. so we had to go downstairs to the front desk. I told the clerk the situation and asked for another room as we had planned on using room service, as part of the reason for the weekend, but the phone was dead. It seemed a simple request. What hotel would refuse you a working phone to spend more money?

She started to say something, then stopped, thought and asked, "Did you pull the covers down on the bed?"

What an odd question. I gave her a weird look and said, "Yeah, I pulled the covers back a little but I can put them back." She said, "Well then, I can't give you another room. I'm sorry." Then the killer phrase all middle management loves to use as a weapon: "It's policy." She smiled. It was a petty, satiating smile. The kind used by those who know they have power over you and there was nothing you could do about it.

I was stunned. I could feel the heat rising. I was not happy and becoming less so with every moment. So the customer is never right, here? 

Thinking of my mother, as annoying as she could be with her "squeaky wheel always gets the grease" and, "I learned that from my dad," nonsense. Yeah sure, but she often took that too far and too often. She often sent back food at a restaurant to the humiliation of my older sister and I who once said, when we were talking about this, that she had dined around the world with actual rich people, and while mom seemed to think that's how rich people act, the ones she knew would be humiliated to make such a fuss. 

So I said, "I would like to talk to your manager."

That surprised the woman. But then smiled: "I am the manager." She enjoyed the look on my face as the blood drained. I could see this was hopeless. My birthday was not starting off well. I'd been through a lot over the past year, separated from the Service, out of the USAF, divorced, trouble getting a decent job (had a few miserable ones), and I needed this celebration of...anything. 

I just needed a break. And this wasn't going to be it.

So, surrendering, I asked where we could get a drink. Adding salt into the wound, she said, "Well, it's Sunday, so you can't." I was stunned, I mean, what? It's my birthday and I can't even get a drink?

She said, "Well you can, but you'd have to order food first. I said fine we're hungry anyway and asked where the nearest restaurant was. 

Finally she was useful and told us there was one a couple of blocks down the street. It was nice out being August 30th, so we headed out. I have no doubt I was complaining as we walked down the street, trying to process it all and being assuaged by the thought of dinner and drinks.

After about a half a block we noticed two attractive, nicely dressed... apparently sex workers on our right, waiting for something. Someone like me apparently.

One of them saw us, focusing directly on me, and walked over. She was quite attractive, So much so, I don't even remember the other one's looks. She was pleasant, happy as she propositioned me. My girlfriend wrapped her arms around my right arm, hugging it. 

We didn't stop and kept on walking, but now the woman was walking with us. I said, "Thanks, but as you can see, I have a girlfriend." She took that as an invite, or a challenge and slipped her hands around my left arm, smiling, and being very friendly. 

So I'm now walking down the street with two good looking women, one on each arm. My birthday was getting better, but also, worse. While this was fun, it was either fear invoking, or relationship concerning. 

I never considered paying for the woman, but it was a moment I realized I could have fun with. I had an urge to tease my girlfriend a bit. So, when the woman said, "I don't mind a party." Meaning she'd be happy to join my girlfriend with me (what kind of customers was she used to?)...I smiled and looked at my girlfriend and said, "Well, it IS my birthday."

The woman picked up on that immediately. M said, "Yeah, in your dreams," and we just kept walking. I was polite and thanked the woman but turned her down. she realized it was a losing battle by this point, but she had given it a valiant try. So she detached and said, "Well, if you change your minds, I'll be around." She wasn't, when we made our return trip back to the hotel after dinner, I couldn't help but notice she wasn't around.

We continued on and had our dinner and some things to drink (I think two were allowed on a Sunday, "what a strange law" we thought), then headed back to our hotel room, and our stupid broken telephone (is that even legal?). We had our own private party and satiated our attraction for each other, eventually falling asleep in one another's arms. This was the best part of that weekend. Although possibly not the most interesting part.

The next day we hung out around town, walking through Gastown, headed over to Stanley Park where I showed her and told her the story about the time I was there when I was18 with a friend. I'm in my mid 20s at this point, and my girlfriend was about 19. We'd met at Tacoma Community College as lab partners in Physics/Chemistry, where we both had taken a single summer quarter.

OK. So this now heads into another story entirely and the point of telling all this. We'll skip that story about when I was 18 for another time. It involves Gastown, the Gastown Pub, the Gastown Inn, and a mass amount of High School students swarming over a hill from the parking lot, down to the beach at 3rd Beach, Stanley Park.

At the end of day we decided a bit late, to head out of town and home to Tacoma. Not realizing it was rush hour until we were in the middle of it trying to get across the Lions Gate Bridge (Hwy 99).

When I came across Chinatown I said I had to drive through there. That was a bust as there wasn't much to see and I quickly got lost. I finally found my way out of it and just wanted to get out of town and on the freeway home.

We drove around avoiding traffic until we realized, there was one bridge out of town and it was jammed. Realizing we we're stuck for a while, I said maybe we should just stop someplace, anyplace, to get out of the traffic and maybe get something to eat. We could head out once traffic died down.

So we stopped at the first place that looked promising. There wasn't much which confused us. But we found what looked like a bar...maybe. I parked and we weren't even sure it was open. But we opened the front door and stepped inside. No one was around. On the left it seemed like a restaurant or something, but was dark. There were stairs straight ahead that seemed to just go on, but we heard music filtering down from there.

So, we started climbing. 

We get to the top and look around, my gf frowned at the two old men, the only patrons. But the attractive, completely naked, tiny Asian woman dancing on the small stage, seemed somewhat reassuring to her. Or not.

We went straight on in, found a table on the left, near the back along the wall, where the walkway continued further back, to restrooms and the kitchen, which I think was on right, with rest rooms on the left.

We ordered a sandwich and a beer each. We sat there waiting, watching the dancer. Then she said, "She's good." The dancer. I agreed. Then she said, "I have to go to the rest room." She headed into the back

I sat there watching the dancer, observing the old businessmen being served. The dancer finished as another was passing by her onto the stage. They shared a few words. The new dancer was not quite as cute, but she got on stage, and dancing starts again. The other woman walked through the room, watched closely by the men at tables and she disappeared into the back.

Eventually the food arrived. I'm watching the new dancer, sipping a beer. There wasn't much else to do. I realized that it's been more that 15 minutes since my girlfriend left. She never took that long. I started wondering if I should be worried. Once that occurred to me I started a run down of reasons I should or shouldn't worry. The reasons to worry outpaced the reasons not to.

I knew about organized crime in Vancouver. We were after all, in another country, even if it was typically (as I knew it) Canada. I got up and walked to the back. I saw the rest rooms, but I wasn't going to go into the women's rest room. 

Or should I? Am I being a bad boyfriend in not going in? Am I a perv if I do? What the hell, why was I in the situation? What an odd weekend. I had to admit to myself, I always had fun, or odd, or entertaining times in Vancouver. But this was a first.

At what point should I tear the place apart? Or start yelling? I noticed there was a back door. Could she have gone out back? Why? Had she been kidnapped and taken out that door? At this point, I'm trying not to freak out. Everything seemed normal, nothing "felt weird." I'm pretty good at feeling something like that. I didn't here. It all felt normal, but was I being delusional? I mean, I didn't know that place, what's normal there?

I went back and sat down, confused. I watched everything like a hawk. Trying to decide. Should I go into the women's rest room? I decided I needed to. But when? This was all happening in a short span of time. My mind was racing a bit. Should I have gone in already? I was pretty sure, yes. But if I went in there and she's there, she's going to give me a hard time like, forever. Maybe. Or would it cause a ruckus with the staff, some guy going into the women's restroom. Was I overthinking things? Sigh... Why was this happening?

While I'm sitting there trying to make myself go into the women's rest room, M walks up and sits down like nothing was out of the ordinary. 

"Oh good, food's here. I'm hungry." I look at her like she's nuts. She takes a sip of beer and notices the odd look on my face. "WHAT?"

"What? Do you know how long you've been gone? I've been freaking out wondering what happened to you. I don't know this place, or if someone kidnapped you. Or what. What took so long? Is everything OK?" An odd grin crossed her face, one of...embarrassment? What happened?

"I'm so sorry, really, I just lost track of time." I'm observing her now. Something's off. She has a familiar look on her face. Like she's...

"Are you stoned?"

She smiled. "Uh, yeah." She started to explain. "I went to the restroom. When I was done I came out of the stall and that dancer was in there by the sinks. Still completely naked. I washed my hands and we started talking. She was nice. Funny. Then this guy just, walks in."

Here. I'm not pleased. 

"She knew him. He had a joint and asked if we wanted to smoke it. I mean, I said...yes."

Now I'm trying not to be pissed, mostly because I'm freaking out about IF I should go into the women's rest room and apparently, it's normal for a guy to do that? Not to mention, I missed out on getting stoned, hanging with a cute (naked) dancer. With my girlfriend, in a situation where it was all apparently normal and OK? 

"Good grief. I can't believe I was out here trying to not lose it, worried something horrible may have happened to you...all while you're just getting stoned? Not to mention, I mean, I didn't get to get stoned either."

"Well, I'm sorry, but it just happened and it would have been weird to say, 'can I go get my boyfriend so he can get stoned too'?" Really, I did get her point. It was all just an odd situation, and I got caught up in it on the wrong end of things. It sucked for me, but I didn't want to deny her doing what I would have done too.

As we'd been talking, I could see she was realizing the situation as our conversation was evolving, and  she hadn't considered the other side of how this might all have appeared to me, waiting for her in a strange place. As it turned out, the place didn't seem that strange at all but rather a nice venue. At least in that situation.

She had found a cute, naked woman in the bathroom, a guy walks in, offers them a joint to get high on, and they're just talking ... having fun. Well, more power to her. But my end in the situation, sucked.

"Look, it's not like you did anything wrong, but, damn, I was worried and trying to decide if I needed to start yelling your name and go into the women's restroom which, come on, could easily go wrong. I mean, we don't know this place, they don't know me, what if they said they never saw any woman? You're just, gone? Kind of a horror show." Yes, I have a good imagination. She knows that.

I can see this is all dawning on her and she's flustered. And feeling bad. What can I say, why blow her calm and her high. So, I brushed it off. I was glad she had some fun, at one of us had. This was a very odd birthday overall. We drank the beers down, paid, took the sandwiches with us and headed out. Rush hour was over. The rest of the ride home south was uneventful.

But it was not a birthday I ever could forget. Overall, it wasn't horrible. Just...it wasn't even in the ballpark of a weekend that either of us had anticipated.

Still, it was a story I told for years. And that made it all worth, something. Weird hotel. Propositioned by a very good-looking sex worker on my 24th birthday. Lost in Chinatown, accidental visit to a nude dance club, M getting stoned in the bathroom with a naked dancer and some guy, while I sat outside quietly losing my mind over sandwiches.

It was enough of a story. It didn’t need anything else. Certainly no embellishments.

Then recently I went down a rabbit hole about Tommy Chong’s and Cheech Marin's early years when they met, in Vancouver, and I found out something that reframed this entire story.

Before he was half of Cheech and Chong, before Up in Smoke, before any of it, Tommy Chong was running clubs in Vancouver. One of them was the Shanghai Junk -- a topless club in Chinatown, at Pender and Main, operated with his brother Stan.

When Tommy took over, he didn’t have the heart to fire the dancers. So instead, he built an improv comedy troupe around them, called City Works, and created what he described as the first topless improvisational theatre in Canada. This was about 1969.

Where were we? Upstairs. Small tables. Chinatown. A stage with a naked dancer. 

Here’s a 2014 article about it: Chinatown: Topless joint sparked stoner comedy genre.

What is it with my connection to topless joints? (See, The Teenage Bodyguard screenplay). I’ve only been to two, neither of which were my idea, one in Tacoma (topless only) to find a friend whose birthday it was with a group of our friends, and that time in Portland (fully nude venues) with coworkers. 

OK three, including the one in this story. But hey, I was with my girlfriend and when we walked in, we had NO idea it was anything but a bar.

A young guy named Cheech Marin, who had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, walked into that room and joined City Works. The two of them came out one night to warm up the crowd, got laughs, never gave the stage back, and eventually drove to Los Angeles to become one of the most successful comedy acts of their generation.

If you don’t know Cheech and Chong, here’s the short version. Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong became one of the most successful comedy acts in North American history through the 1970s and into the ‘80s -- albums, tours, and a string of films starting with the 1978 cult classic Up in Smoke that defined a generation’s sense of humor and became shorthand for a whole cultural moment.

They were enormous. 

If you were alive and paying any attention in that era you knew who they were. What most people didn’t know was where they started -- which was a topless improv club in Vancouver’s Chinatown, in a room above a street corner, at a small stage, with a naked dancer and a handful of tables.

The geography of where we parked that night -- right side of the street, facing toward bridge out of town, on the edge of Chinatown -- all lines up with Pender and Main.

I stopped there to kill time on my birthday weekend on the way out of town. I had a beer and a sandwich and worried about my girlfriend and watched a naked woman dance on a small stage. there was just over ten years between these things when Cheech and Chong were there. 

I had no idea until now, decades later, after watching their latest film, Cheech and Chong's Last Movie, a compendium of their history, that we may have been sitting in the room where Cheech and Chong history happened.

I was a big fan of theirs from day one. If you ever were, great movie to watch about them.

I stopped there to kill time on my birthday weekend on the way out of town. I had a beer and a sandwich and worried about my girlfriend and watched a naked woman dance on a small stage. 

Look, does it really matter if it was that venue or not? Because whether we were there, or a mere block or so from it, either way? This was a pretty pleasant exercise in memory and nostalgia.

I had no idea back in that bar that we might have been sitting in the room where Cheech and Chong history happened. Or down the block from it. But regardless?

The Canadian beers were good. The sandwiches were fine. The naked dancers were, well?

Let's just say...what a weekend.

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Trump's Project 2025 - As Seen If From Another Country

 Intelligence Assessment — Internal Use Only

Origin: Domestic Policy Intelligence Unit Classification: For Discussion Purposes Subject: Heritage Foundation — "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" (2023)

Assessment frame: If an allied democratic government produced an analogous 900-page transition document, how would U.S. intelligence evaluate it?

Executive summary

The document constitutes a comprehensive pre-transition governance blueprint authored by a well-resourced private foundation with longstanding ties to the relevant political movement. Comparable products from allied democracies are not unusual; the scope, specificity, and institutional placement strategies contained here are, however, exceptional and warrant close analysis.

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Key findings

High concern Subordination of the civil service. The document calls for replacing career professionals across agencies with political loyalists, explicitly framing the independent bureaucracy as an obstacle. No allied democracy has proposed a comparable wholesale political conversion of its professional civil service. Assessed risk: significant erosion of institutional memory, independent oversight, and policy continuity.

High concern Concentration of executive authority. Structural proposals centralize power within the Executive Office of the President at the expense of independent agencies, inspectors general, and congressional oversight mechanisms. This pattern, if enacted by an ally, would prompt reassessment of that government's democratic governance indicators.

Moderate concern DOJ and law enforcement posture. The document proposes subordinating federal law enforcement to direct White House control, reducing the institutional separation that protects prosecutorial independence. Comparable arrangements in allied nations are treated as governance vulnerabilities in our own country assessments.

Moderate concern Intelligence and national security realignment. Proposals affecting the intelligence community's chain of command and the NSC structure suggest a preference for politically accountable leadership over professional judgment. If observed in an ally, this would be flagged as a potential single-point-of-failure in crisis decision-making.

Moderate concern Media and information environment. Sections on federal communications agencies and public broadcasting suggest an interest in reshaping the domestic information environment. Not unprecedented in democracies under stress, but correlates with democratic backsliding patterns in our regional analysis models.

Within norms Policy content. The ideological policy positions — on regulation, taxation, social programs, foreign policy posture — fall within the range of legitimate conservative governance observed in allied democratic states. Disagreement with these positions does not constitute a governance risk in itself.

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Overall assessmentWere this document produced by an allied democratic government, the intelligence community would flag it as a significant governance-stress indicator — not primarily due to its policy content, but due to its institutional architecture proposals. The combination of civil service conversion, executive consolidation, and reduction of independent oversight bodies maps closely onto patterns observed in the early-stage democratic erosion of Hungary (2010–12), Turkey (2013–15), and Israel (2023). The document is notable for its candor — it names the mechanisms explicitly rather than implementing them incrementally, which is atypical of comparable transition-planning documents from stable democracies. The degree to which these proposals are enacted versus used as negotiating positions will be the operative variable for ongoing assessment.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Addiction of Ignorance, and the Revolution We Should Have Seen Coming

I have definitely written about this before. Many times. 

America has a drug problem nobody wants to talk about honestly. Not fentanyl. Not alcohol. Ignorance. Specifically, the cultivated, deliberate, chosen variety. Selective ignorance. And like any addiction, the longer it goes untreated, the more it takes from you, and the more dangerous the addict becomes to everyone around them. 

What makes it an addiction rather than a simple deficit is the active, continuous work required to maintain it. Psychologists call it motivated reasoning: the cognitive process by which people do not reason toward truth but toward conclusions they have already decided they want. This is not passive. 

People running motivated reasoning are working hard, filtering incoming information, discarding what contradicts the preferred conclusion, amplifying what confirms it. The ignorance in America's current crisis is not a shortage of available information. 

We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. This is a shortage of willingness to receive information that costs something. That is a crucial distinction, and it changes everything about how we diagnose what is happening to us.

We did not stumble into this. We chose it, repeatedly, at every turn where knowing something inconvenient would have cost us comfort, privilege, or the warm bath of tribal belonging. We chose it in churches, in school board meetings, in voting booths, and on social media feeds algorithmically tuned to feed us exactly what we already believed. The addiction metastasized in plain sight.

And it is worth understanding why the social cost of knowing is so high. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established decades ago that human identity is inseparable from group membership. We do not just belong to groups. We are our groups. 

When the group's shared worldview requires the rejection of expertise, accepting expertise becomes an act of betrayal. You do not just change your mind. You lose your people. In communities where the group is the whole of a person's identity and social world, that cost is existential. Ignorance becomes the price of admission, and people pay it willingly, even gratefully, because what they are buying is belonging.

There is a phenomenological dimension here that goes deeper still. Willful unknowing is not a passive state. It is an active, lived experience requiring continuous maintenance. On some level, the person who chooses not to know is aware of the choice. Reality keeps pressing in, and the relief of not engaging it has to be re-administered, reinforced, re-confirmed by the group. That is the addiction structure exactly. The substance is not a chemical. It is the relief of a world simplified to the point where you and your tribe are right, and everyone with credentials and data and uncomfortable questions is the enemy.

I was in high school in the early 1970s when my teacher (I've previously written about my high school Civics and World Problems teacher, the amazing Mrs. Wotton) walked us through what Mao Zedong had done to China with his Cultural Revolution. We sat there, American teenagers, shaking our heads at how stupid those people must be. 

How could an entire society follow a megalomaniac into the deliberate destruction of its own intellectual class? How do you purge universities, persecute doctors, imprison professors, and silence scientists, and have a population that either cheers or says nothing?

We were very smug about that. Very confident it could never happen here.

What we did not understand then, and what the psychology makes clear now, is that Mao's Red Guards were not simply destroying expertise. They were building community through that destruction. The shared rejection of the intellectual class was a bonding ritual. 

The public humiliations, the struggle sessions, the denunciations: all of it created solidarity among participants. You proved your belonging by performing your contempt for knowledge. The crowd that cheers when a professor is fired, when a doctor is silenced, when a library is purged, is not just expressing hatred. It is renewing its membership in the tribe.

Here we are.

Donald Trump did not invent American ignorance. He weaponized it. He handed it a flag, a cross, and a grievance, and told it that everything it didn't understand was the enemy. White Christian nationalism became the operating ideology of a federal government. Not a fringe. Not a protest movement. The government.

The psychological engine underneath that movement has a clinical name: Terror Management Theory, developed from Ernest Becker's foundational work and extended by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. When people feel their mortality, their significance, or their cosmological worldview under threat, they do not open up. They contract. They cling harder to the group identity that gives them meaning and to the enemies that justify their fear. 

White Christian nationalism offers exactly the right package for that psychological state: a cosmology, a tribe, a hierarchy, a villain, and a promise of eternal significance to people who feel they have been made small. Trump did not build that. He found tens of millions of people already running that psychological program and gave them permission to act on it.

Agencies gutted. Scientists fired or sidelined. Educators targeted. Health agencies hollowed out in the middle of a century that has already demonstrated what happens when you let preventable diseases find an opening.

And it is worth knowing that much of this ignorance is not organic. It is manufactured. 

Historian Robert Proctor developed the field of agnotology, the formal study of culturally induced ignorance and doubt, after studying how the tobacco industry spent decades deliberately producing uncertainty about the link between smoking and cancer. 

They did not need people to believe cigarettes were safe. They only needed people to believe the science was unsettled. The same machinery runs today on climate research, vaccine safety, election integrity, and pandemic response. Engineered doubt is not a side effect of the information age. It is a product, developed, funded, and distributed with precision.

We are watching infectious disease rates climb back toward numbers we were told we'd never see again, because a meaningful portion of the population has decided that the people who study disease are the enemy, and the people who spread misinformation about it are the heroes.

We are watching professors lose positions. Researchers lose funding. Federal employees purged for the content of their emails and their perceived politics. Libraries challenged. Curricula sanitized.

And we haven't even gotten to the imprisonments and murders...yet.

I say yet with full awareness of what I'm saying. Because if you had described the current state of American governance to me in 1973 in that high school classroom, I would have told you it sounded exactly like what we were being warned about. 

Except we were being warned about them.

The Soviets. 

The Chinese. Cautionary tales on the other side of the world.

The cautionary tale was always us, waiting to happen.

Ignorance is comfortable. Too comfortable. Selective ignorance is ecstatic. 

You get to keep your prejudices, discard inconvenient facts, belong to a community of the like-minded, and feel righteous about all of it. 

The MaGA movement did not recruit stupid people. It recruited comfortable ones. 

It recruited people who found the drug of chosen ignorance, of selective ignorance, more appealing than the cost of knowing things that challenged their worldview.

Fascism does not need jackboots on day one. 

It needs an addicted population that has practiced, for decades, the discipline of not knowing what it does not want to know. That population is ready-made for whoever arrives with the right story.

It would seem we learned nothing from what we studied. Or we have simply...purposefully...forgotten it.

Worse, we were too arrogant to think we needed to remember it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Purpleism opposes all human irritants. Trump has consumed that space so completely everything now runs through him.
That distortion of daily life is itself a Purpleism issue.
Exhausting.
Malignant Narcissism does that

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The Militias We Stopped Talking About

Wishing you and yours a very pleasant Memorial Day!

I hope we're approaching a time when we can celebrate it without the disdain, frustration, embarrassment, and outright abuse our own government has been inflicting on its citizens. We've earned more than this. We've also let our greatness lull us into a false sense of safety, and some are more than happy to fill that void.

It will get better. We will come out of this stronger. And wiser.

A few years ago, illegal paramilitary militias were widely described by federal law enforcement as one of the most serious domestic security threats in the United States. The FBI repeatedly warned about anti-government extremist groups, armed militias, and politically motivated violence. News stories were common. Congressional hearings were held. Arrests made headlines.

Then something curious happened.

We stopped hearing about them.

That silence does not mean the militias disappeared. It means the story changed.

Today I saw a news piece: "War widens as Israeli and US planes pound Iran and Tehran and its proxies hit back"

Iran is attacked by a foreign enemy. Militias respond in defense of their homeland. That is how militias are supposed to function historically.

In the United States, too many private militias have turned inward, seeing their own government as the enemy. Instead of national defense, they reflect a toxic subculture of anti-government extremism.

A militia that prepares to fight its own country is not a defense force. It is something else entirely.

The Quiet Threat

By 2024 and 2025, federal assessments still categorized militia-style extremists under the broader heading of domestic violent extremism, a category that includes anti-government groups and individuals who believe violence against the state is justified.

Security experts continued to warn that domestic extremism posed a greater day-to-day risk than foreign terrorism.

But public attention faded.

Large groups stopped marching as openly. Fewer armed demonstrations made national headlines. The big militia names that dominated the news after January 6 became less visible.

It looked like the problem had gone away.

It hadn't.

From Organizations to Individuals

One major change is structural.

Earlier militia movements often organized in visible groups with leadership hierarchies, training events, and public messaging. Today, the movement is more fragmented.

Instead of large organizations, analysts increasingly describe:

• Small independent cells

• Loosely affiliated networks

• Individuals radicalized online

• Informal local groups

This makes the threat harder to track and easier to overlook.

When there is no central organization, there is nothing obvious for the public to notice.

But decentralized movements can be more unpredictable than organized ones.

Less Attention Does Not Mean Less Risk

Another reason militias faded from the headlines is that government priorities appear to have shifted.

Some federal programs that monitored domestic extremism have been reduced or reorganized. Staffing and resources directed at domestic terrorism investigations have reportedly declined.

This does not necessarily mean the threat is gone.

It means fewer public briefings, fewer press releases, and fewer visible investigations.

In other words, less noise does not equal less danger.

Anti-Government Extremism Remains

The core ideology that drives militia movements has not disappeared.

Militia movements historically form around a belief that the federal government is illegitimate or tyrannical. That worldview still exists and in some cases has spread more widely than before.

Ironically, the less visible militias become, the more their ideas may blend into broader political culture.

Formal organizations may shrink while the mindset survives.

History suggests this pattern is common. Extremist movements often become less visible before they reappear in new forms.

Private militias made sense in the 18th century, when the United States had no real standing army.

They became obsolete once America developed a professional military and especially after the National Guard was created as the official organized militia.

Today the United States already has what the Constitution envisioned: a trained militia under civilian control.

Private militias are not a necessity. They are a leftover idea from a country that no longer exists.

To make it painfully clear to these groups and to Americans at large:

Once the National Guard became the constitutional militia, private militias became unconstitutional. Illegal.

The Constitution authorizes militias under government authority, not private armies acting on their own. This is reflected in the Second Amendment itself:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

For most of American history, the Second Amendment was understood as supporting a well regulated militia under public authority, not independent armed groups. Courts, historians, and legal scholars generally treated it as a civic responsibility tied to national defense.

That interpretation began to change in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, political movements and gun-rights organizations promoted a new interpretation that emphasized an individual right to bear arms independent of militia service. This shift was partly a reaction to social unrest, distrust of government after Vietnam and Watergate, and fears of federal overreach.

Advocacy groups funded research, legal arguments, and public campaigns to promote this view. Over time, the new interpretation moved from political activism into legal theory and eventually into court decisions.

The result was a major historical shift: the Second Amendment increasingly came to be understood as an individual right rather than primarily a framework for a regulated militia.

But the Constitution still provides for militias under government authority. It does not authorize private armies acting on their own initiative.

Then the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind. What happened to him and the NRA? 

When people say “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre lost its damned mind,” they’re usually talking about two different things that happened at the same time:

1. A political and ideological shift

2. A leadership and corruption collapse

Both are real — and together they explain what happened.

A New York jury found LaPierre liable for financial mismanagement and misuse of millions of dollars, ordering him to repay large sums. For wealth and power, he weaponized the NRA using and abusing the 2nd Amendment. 

He resigned in 2024 shortly before the trial began.

A court later banned him from NRA leadership for ten years.

This is going on in our government today with toxic conservatism running amuck. 

It is the same pattern that can be seen again today under POTUS 47, Donald Trump...a convicted felon, long associated with criminal investigations, and an increasingly autocratic political figure. He has also been found liable in court for sexual abuse, and further revelations may yet emerge regarding his associations and the Epstein investigations.

We are seeing the presidency used in ways that test constitutional limits, while a Republican-controlled Congress largely falls in line with his agenda rather than acting as an independent check on executive power.

The result is a level of corruption and concentration of power unprecedented in modern American history.

The Real Question

The real question is not whether militias exist.

They do.

The real question is whether we are paying attention.

Only a few years ago, illegal paramilitary groups were described as one of the leading domestic threats facing the United States.

Today, they receive far less attention.

But quiet movements do not necessarily mean peaceful ones.

Sometimes it just means they are preparing.

Something Worth Watching

Illegal militias occupy a strange space in American law and culture. Many states prohibit private paramilitary activity, yet armed groups continue to organize in gray areas of legality.

They do not disappear simply because the news cycle moves on.

If anything, history suggests that movements ignored too long tend to return in unexpected ways.

The militias we stopped talking about may still be there.

And that may be exactly the point.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

New Worlds, Unknown Histories -- What Is Anchor Field's Expanding Vision?

I want to share something that has quietly been one of the most ambitious creative projects I've had the privilege of watching take shape.

It's called Anchor Field -- and it's a museum to the imagination of someone close to my heart, who has decided it's time to stop keeping his work to himself.

AnchorField.org is a living creative archive unlike anything I've come across.

At its heart, it's the work of one person with a genuinely rare combination of gifts:

• WorldBuilder
• Philosopher
• Storyteller
• Visual Artist
• Musician
• Lyricist

-- all rolled into one.

The site spans original science fiction and fantasy universes with fully developed alien species, histories, cultures, and timelines. Philosophical and theological essays explored through AI-powered podcast discussions featuring multiple distinct voices. Original artwork expanded through AI tools. RPG campaign journals written as literary prose.

And even an original theoretical physics framework.

What makes Anchor Field stand out in an era saturated with AI-generated content is the intentionality and transparency behind how AI is used here. Every idea, every world, every argument originates from the creator.

AI serves as the brush, never the painter.

That distinction is spelled out plainly on the site -- and you can feel it in every corner of the work.

This is a human imagination that simply refuses to stay small.

There are even recordings of his own piano and guitar on the site -- a reminder that the artist was always there, long before the brushes.

The site is still growing, which is part of what makes it exciting. If you love speculative fiction, deep ideas, music, art, or creative experimentation at the edge of what's possible right now -- Anchor Field is worth your time.

Go. Explore:

https://anchorfield.org

Shooting in a Ghost: Lincoln High's Rifle Team and the Old Aquarium at Point Defiance

I had been in that building before.

As a kid, I'd gone to the old Point Defiance Aquarium on the waterfront more than once, the one down near the water, below the bluffs. I remember the fish, the glass, the particular quiet of that kind of place. Puget Sound creatures behind thick panes, and kids pressing their faces in to get closer. There was a small amusement park next to it. I remember that fondly, too.

1970-71 Lincoln High School Rifle Team Yearbook page - Tacoma, WA. Some members missing.

In the fall of 1970, as a Lincoln High sophomore, I was driven to Point Defiance for my first rifle team practice. We pulled up above the boat house and I knew this building. It was the aquarium. But no, someone said, it's not. 

We walked into what was by then just one long bare room with targets at the far end. Nothing on the walls. No tanks, no glass, no trace of what it had been. Just wood and distance and the smell of a place that had been repurposed and forgotten. No trace of what it had been. I stood there a little stunned. Things change.

Photo at least a few years before I was visiting in 1960 or shooting there in the early 1970s.

Point Defiance Park was established in 1888 when President Grover Cleveland authorized the federal military reserve to be used as a public park. As early as 1895, the Park Board leased space for a boat stand, restaurant and float at Point Defiance Park to J. Olson for $5 a month. The first permanent boathouse was built in 1903 by Edwin Ferris. Ferris agreed to pay for the construction of the boathouse if he could run it for ten years, at which time he would turn the building over to the Park Board for their use. Ferris’s beautiful octagonal boathouse/pavilion was an immediate success. - Parks Tacoma

The aquarium existed only in my memory now, not in the room itself, now turned into a firing range. We were going to be shooting in a ghost held only in my mind. I seemed to be the only one on the team who knew what it had once been. A journey into the deep of Puget Sound. Apparently, the aquarium burned down in 1974 and the boathouse ten years later in 1984.

I'd be curious who owned the building as Tacoma had a series of criminal arsons back in those days. I wrote about some of it in my award-winning screenplay, The Teenage Bodyguard, set in 1974. It details an attempted arson at the Top of the Ocean restaurant along the waterfront on Ruston Way, a few miles southeast of there. A local crime family had burned down or tried to burn down more than a few buildings in those days for fun and profit.

---

Lincoln's rifle team was not a glamour operation. We shot .22 caliber rifles donated by the Army — heavy, worn, some broken. The 1972 yearbook records them diplomatically as "worn out or broken." I struggled with the bulk and weight of those old surplus rifles from the start, and never quite made peace with the aperture sights either. I was not, I'll tell you honestly, a natural range shooter. Equipment that fits you matters, and nothing about those rifles fit me particularly well.

Our coach was Mr. Williams, ex-Army turned teacher, a genuinely humane man with great stories and a clear understanding of what his kids were working with and working against. When I complained about the rifles he didn't apologize for them. He just said: it's what you have, be proud and make the best of it. That was Mr. Williams. He knew something about making do.

Forty rounds counted toward your score, ten points each, four hundred possible. Hit three hundred sixty or better and you earned a varsity letter. Any member could earn one regardless of sex, which in 1971 wasn't nothing — we had girls on the team and they belonged there.

Every Monday afternoon the old aquarium became a gathering point for Tacoma's high school rifle league. Stadium, Curtis, Wilson, Mount Tahoma, and Lincoln all competed there, five city schools converging on one repurposed waterfront building with their rifles and whatever else they could get their hands on. One team, a school who was financially better off, had match competition pieces and won quite a bit more often. It was hard not to notice that fact.

We were the only school though with Army surplus rifles and our coach told me, "It's what we have, don't worry about those other schools, be proud of them, and shoot well." It was a real league, with real competition, and virtually none of it exists in any archive anywhere. The yearbooks are almost the only evidence it happened at all.

It is worth noting that today the idea of a Tacoma public high school rifle league — five city schools competing weekly, kids bused to a park facility with Army surplus weapons, earning varsity letters for marksmanship — would be unthinkable.

Not because the kids were dangerous, they weren't, we weren't, or because the sport wasn't legitimate, it was. Simply because the world changed. Hunter's safety courses still exist, and competitive shooting still exists, but the casual integration of rifle sport into public high school athletics, the same way you'd letter in swimming or track, belongs to a specific window of American life that closed quietly sometime after we did.

I've mentioned that from time to time in recent years when in a group and the topic came up and I have gotten horrified looks or comments like, 'Well, that wasn't a good idea." But WWII wasn't that far away back then. Certainly not for those who taught us.

I had a 20 gauge single shot shotgun and a British .303 bolt action WWII surplus rifle on a rifle rack in my bedroom in junior high. My older brother's as he traveled America on his motorcycle in the late 1960s. Yes, I had ammo. 

The .303 British bolt action on that rack had been my older brother's, given to him at fifteen. Later, when I was fifteen, he passed it to me — he didn't have a son and didn't know yet that he would. It was a serious weapon. The British used that caliber to hunt elephants in Africa. It was not a toy, and we never treated it as one. 

I eventually gave it to my own son when he turned fifteen. I did keep the bolt however, until he moved out and was legally old enough to own it. My brother died this year. I think about that rifle and what it carried with it — not just the weight of the thing, but the line of it, three generations each receiving it at the same age, each understanding what it meant to be trusted with something that demanded respect.

Mr. Williams was ex-Army. Mr. Eakes ran hunter's safety courses. For them, teaching young people to handle weapons carefully and compete honorably was simply good citizenship. None of us considered harming anyone, and none of us did. The newspapers from that era are proof enough of that. Compare those to the newspapers today and draw your own conclusions.

---

The best shooters on our team were the Hondle brother twins and the Eakes brothers. I already knew all of them from a private junior high rifle team coached by the Eakes boys' father, Mr. Eakes. They were older than me and they were crack shots, the lot of them — but the Hondles carried it differently than the Eakes did. The Eakes brothers were good but weren't on the high school team. They'd had enough of it with their dad, growing up, helping him as I had, teach hunter's safety courses a year or two previous.

The Hondles knew they were good. When you're a younger kid wearing a T badge around guys like that, you feel it without anyone having to say a word.

The T badge was my first year. Gold shield, black border, a T for Tyro — meaning beginner, meaning novice, meaning you're not there yet. In competitive shooting it's a legitimate classification for a first-year competitor. In that company it felt like wearing my inexperience as an announcement. Nobody said anything about it. That was almost worse.

---

My senior year I was working nights at the Auto-View Drive-In, where my stepfather was assistant manager for his night job. I missed matches. I showed up when I could, which was not always, and I watched my entire high school social life happen on the other side of the snack bar counter — friends and classmates coming in on weekend nights while I was working, every holiday, every Friday. I knew I was missing things that don't come back.

Mr. Williams saw the whole picture. At the end of my senior year he gave me a full varsity letter — a gold L, the real thing. I always figured it was for being on the team three years and holding down a night job through high school, both of which he understood and respected. He was that kind of man.

I never got the letterman's jacket. My parents couldn't afford it and neither could I on snack bar wages. So the letter sat. I still have the T badge somewhere. I'm not sure I was ever as dismissive of it as I felt at the time.

---

One of the faces in the 1973 team photo is my best friend Dave Henderson. Dave wanted to be on the team. So, I told him to get over for that day. He never fired a round that season. But he is in the Lincoln yearbook as a rifleman, which still makes me smile fifty plus years later.

---

The whole waterfront Pavilion complex at Point Defiance burned in 1984. The old aquarium building went with it — the shooting range, the ghost, all of it. Three lives for one building: aquarium, rifle range, ash. Almost none of it is documented anywhere. The yearbook pages are about the only hard evidence the league and that range existed at all.

I earned a letter in that building, for a jacket I never owned, shooting rifles I never fit, in a room I'd first entered as a child looking at fish.

I think about that sometimes.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.