Reports from Trumplandia: The "Trump vs. Charlie Kirk" Edition

From Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's 6-10-26 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files":

The Justice Department had struggled with just how to dispose of the Epstein matter since the beginning of Trump’s second term. The issue was all-consuming for the president’s political base, but also potentially compromising for the president himself in ways that officials in the new administration didn’t fully understand. Any path forward would be fraught.

Some of that complexity was self-inflicted. In the engine room of the MAGA movement, the Epstein files were potent fuel. Elon Musk had used his social media platform to repeatedly question why a client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance had invoked the Epstein files as a broader campaign message to argue that “powerful people” were hiding the truth from Americans. Tucker Carlson and the young conservative leader Charlie Kirk had each insisted that the government should release the documents and each floated the idea that there was an expansive cover-up in progress.

Trump himself had been cagey. On the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in September 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, “I’d certainly take a look at it,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.” The list “probably will be” made public, he said, but he sounded less than enthusiastic. In private, Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was “fake news” designed to harm him politically.

But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters. Throughout 2024, Greene had made it her mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Presler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of a “deep state” capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.

Patel — a National Security Council director for counterterrorism and Defense Department chief of staff in the first Trump administration — had repeatedly claimed in podcast interviews that the government was hiding Epstein’s “black book” or client list, and he frequently asserted that the F.B.I. was deliberately withholding names to protect the powerful. Patel promised that a second Trump administration would release “everything” to restore public trust.

On “The Dan Bongino Show,” Bongino’s background as a Secret Service agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover-up. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he’d asked his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would “rock the political world,” he predicted. The “Washington swamp” was “not telling you the truth.”

And so as they took office in 2025, Trump’s advisers were subject to intense pressures of their own making. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly made things much worse [...].

The relationships at the top of the Justice Department were by now beyond dysfunctional. At another July meeting, in [Susie] Wiles’s office, Bongino and Patel told the chief of staff they suspected that Bondi had leaked negative stories about them.

“Blondie fucked this whole thing up,” Bongino later told a confidant, echoing Loomer’s derisive nickname for the attorney general. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything.” Bongino complained that he had given up his high-rated show and millions of dollars, “and now it’s all disappeared, because people think we screwed something up with Epstein.”

Bongino paused.

“This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-contra.”

On July 12, the president took to Truth Social to defend Bondi against criticism and to urge his “boys” and “gals” to stop wasting “Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” Trump told aides he was very unhappy with some of his most influential supporters, including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom were publicly urging the administration to come clean. Kirk had held a Turning Point USA event the previous day that turned into an Epstein grievance fest, with one speaker after another bashing Bondi over her handling of the situation. Trump had called Kirk and scolded him.

Nobody in Trump’s orbit had a better feel for the younger part of the MAGA base than Kirk, who saw that the Epstein cover-up, as it was now viewed, was capturing attention to an alarming extent. 

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

Nick Gray's CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

"In 1993, a film crew from Yorkshire Television in the U.K. led by producer Nick Gray and director Tim Tate went to Omaha, Nebraska in the U.S.A. to make a documentary about an alleged paedophile ring.

"Funded by the Discovery Channel in the U.S.A., their proposed film would first be broadcast in the U.K. and Ireland as part of Yorkshire Television documentary series: 'First Tuesday'. A U.S. broadcast would follow.

"In Omaha the film crew discovered the machinations of a vast operation functioning throughout the country providing children to the wealthy and the political establishment for molestation, drug trafficking and blackmail.

"A year later in 1994 the documentary 'Conspiracy of Silence' was to air in the U.K. but--during final editing with first broadcast approaching--the Discovery Channel inexplicably withdrew support and reimbursed Yorkshire Television the half million dollars it cost to make.

"To this day the documentary remains 'unaired.'"

--from the preface to Nick Gray's CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

If you want to watch this banned documentary, which is largely based on the research of John W. DeCamp (author of THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP), then click HERE. 

You can hear filmmaker Tim Tate, who produced CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE, discussing the strange saga of this censored documentary on the 11-18-22 episode of THE NICK BRYANT PODCAST. To listen to the entire interview, click HERE.

As a bonus, here are two related excerpts from my 2022 book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP:

“ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep” is a nearly fifteen-minute video that contains almost no facts whatsoever. It’s as if someone read and reread John W. DeCamp’s 1992 True Crime book The Franklin Cover-Up, which revolves around reportage about an alleged pedophile ring operated by prominent Republicans like Nebraska businessman Lawrence E. King Jr. (a crime ring that reportedly overlapped with Iran-Contra money-laundering schemes operating out of the Reagan-Bush White House), and decided to toss these scandalous rumors into a giant blender mixed with 100% pure gonzo jabberwocky — but this time around, Democrats are now the evil, moustache-twirling villains at the center of the soap opera. As with so many of Q’s claims, elements of past conspiracy theories have been distorted and flipped, always in favor of Republicans. Any allegations that reflect badly on Republicans are conveniently left out of the retelling [...].

One of the most controversial aspects of The Glass House Tapes was [Louis] Tackwood’s claim that the Los Angeles Police Department, in concert with various U.S. intelligence agencies, were using satanic cults in California for the purposes of blackmailing and brainwashing high-profile initiates. I find it ironic that this scenario has now been embraced by the right wing, when back in the early 1970s the only people talking about this were far-left radicals like the members of the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee, with whom Tackwood collaborated on The Glass House Tapes. Subsequent nonfiction books like Walter Bowart’s 1978 Operation Mind Control, Maury Terry’s 1987 The Ultimate Evil and John W. DeCamp’s aforementioned 1992 The Franklin Cover-Up explore similar themes in far greater depth...

 

Alternative 3 in THE GUARDIAN

From Phil Tinline's 6-16-26 GUARDIAN article entitled ‘Wow, It Really Worked!’: the 70s TV Show That’s Causing Worldwide Panic – 50 Years Later":

Over the past few months, a strange story has been seeping into the mainstream media from the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube. Its claim: scientists whose work related to aerospace and nuclear research are either dying or going missing. According to an influential report in the Daily Mail in March, the disappearances form a “chilling pattern”: two, for instance, had worked together at an air force laboratory. The implications, in some accounts, are Hollywood sinister, with scientists working on top-secret breakthroughs running into dark forces who wanted to get hold of what they knew – or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.

On examination, these claims collapse. The “scientists” actually worked in disparate fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Several were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; another in a shooting spree. In any case, as the debunker Mick West pointed out, the “US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce” is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned – about 4,000. Nonetheless, Congresspeople have been warning darkly of threats to “national security”. The Trump administration has launched an investigation into a phenomenon that is often said to go hand-in-hand with something called “Alternative 3” – whose origins might end up surprising Trump and co.

On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the “brain drain” of British scientists to the US. But it emerged that some of these scientists had vanished completely, while others had died in strange circumstances. The journalists had stumbled on something huge. As the host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton, solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect would soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and this had forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to work together in secret to implement “Alternative 3”: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a “human survival colony” for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists had been co-opted to play their part; the dead ones had threatened to leak the plan.

As you probably guessed, the “documentary” was a drama – as signalled by end credits listing the actors who played the horrified reporters and terrified scientists. Science Report did not exist; the whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose. He had been trying to write about people going missing, when he hit on the idea of a mock-documentary about people disappearing to Mars, driven to flee Earth by a novel concern: pollution-induced global warming. From there, he tells me, the script “wrote itself”, drawing on the breathless tropes of onscreen investigative journalism in the age of Watergate: secretly recorded street interviews, hidden truths on poorly-recorded tapes, the terrified witness who knows too much.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

A Missing Scientist, an Unactivated Burner Phone, and a Giant Rock

From Norio Hayakawa's 5-28-26 CIVILIAN INTELLIGENCE NEWS SERVICE blog post entitled "Missing Scientist’s Shattered Car Sparks Chilling Mystery in Remote New Mexico Mountains":

[N]ew scrutiny has emerged as researchers and defense-linked officials connected to New Mexico continue to disappear or die under unusual circumstances.

[Ingrid Coleen] Lane disappeared on October 15 after beginning a weeklong retreat at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center, roughly 51 miles from Albuquerque.

According to reports, she unexpectedly left the retreat the following morning and told the retreat director she planned to travel to both Albuquerque and Los Alamos before later returning. Friends noted she had visited the retreat center on and off for nearly a decade.

Her final confirmed sighting occurred later that afternoon when two hunters reportedly encountered her along a remote dirt road near State Route 144 in the San Antonio Mountain area.

The hunters reportedly helped Lane after her vehicle sustained damage and offered her a ride back toward the main road, but she refused, reportedly telling them she was ‘determined to get to the top of a mountain.’

Inside the vehicle, authorities reportedly found three laptops, an unactivated burner phone and Lane’s keys still sitting in the ignition, while a massive boulder had mysteriously shattered the rear hatch window.

To read the entire post, click HERE. 

HAPPY ALMOST FATHER'S DAY... TO ME!

A CRYPTOPOST NEWS FLASH!!!: My daughter (the main inspiration for my Wonderland Award-winning collection, THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK) just graduated high school! Do you know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? This means it's time to extend my little tin cup and begin building the "Send Robert's Daughter to College" Fund, so please don't hesitate to purchase a copy of THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK directly from the publisher, Madness Heart Press! 

By the way, since the inimitable Crossroad Press pays royalties on a monthly basis, I would also suggest picking up a copy of my Rondo Award-nominated novel, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD. Not only will you be helping me out, but in exchange you'll be receiving the best Bela-Lugosi-centric novel ever written! Gary D. Rhodes (Lugosi's premier biographer), PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE, CEMETERY DANCE, and Alan Moore all loved it! What more do you want?

PRAISE FOR THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK:

"Robert Guffey’s The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is weirder than parthenogenesis, weirder than the Republican Party, weirder than the fetishizing of pregnancy that suffuses our culture, weirder than all the back issues of Weird Tales combined. You will laugh, gasp, and scratch your head in pleasurable bemusement. I can’t recommend this tongue-in-cheek tour de force too highly."

—James Morrow, award-winning author of Only Begotten Daughter and Behold the Ape


"Here it is. THE perfect baby-shower/gender reveal party gift. Forget all the binkies, blankies, cute little onesies, and diaper-service subscriptions. Those are so overdone and boring. Want to make a REAL impact? This book. This book right here [...].

"Well-written, lively, engaging, easy to read, and tons of fun. If I were a truly evil imp with plenty of money, I’d sneak copies into every OB/GYN office and ‘Parenting and Family’ bookstore section in the country."

—Christine Morgan, award-winning author of Spermjackers from Hell and Lakehouse Infernal 

 

"We've got plenty of people who think that they know best--better even than a given pregnant woman. We don't need more of them, but we could damn well use more examples of them turned into buffoons just like we get to see in the Handbook [...]. [The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook] is often weird, often funny, frightfully well written, and it gives us that unique satisfaction that only fiction can provide by putting the bastards into a magic circle of their own disinformation and locking them away. Isn't it sweet to think that they'd stay there."

 —Géza A. G. Reilly, Dead Reckonings 

 

You can hear me talking about the secret origins of THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK on multiple podcasts and radio shows including Steven Snider's THE FARM, Matthew M. K. Hopewell's THE AP STRANGE SHOW, and Seriah Azkath's WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?

 

PRAISE FOR BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD:

“Blending intertextual rampage through the horror-movie canon with engrossing noir mystery and a backdrop of Hollywood esoterica, Robert Guffey serves up an intoxicating pulp cocktail that will leave you wanting more. A crepuscular treasure from a fascinating author.”

--Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen

“In Robert Guffey's latest and greatest novel, dreams of old movies and nightmares of classic horror rack into sharp focus through the lens of a brave film historian, one determined to squint clearly at fleeting grains of film through the shifting sands of time. Never has the truth of Hollywood been so well revealed through fiction. As a result, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD delightfully and definitively proves that Bela Lugosi isn't dead.” 

--Gary D. Rhodes, author of Lugosi and Tod Browning's Dracula 

"[H]orror fans will delight in how Guffey cleverly immerses movie monsters in the real world. Film buffs and monster enthusiasts will relish the supernatural characters brought to life in this atmospheric celebration of monster mayhem." 

--Publishers Weekly

"The sensation [of reading BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD] is like being led deep underground while your flashlight grows dimmer and dimmer, until you’re left in total darkness. That’s when the lights of a subterranean crypt flash on to reveal that you’re not where you expected to be, and where you are is far worse than you could have imagined. The result is an ending that left me chilled and took me a few days to fully process. As shocking as it was, everything was set up from the beginning. I know, I went back and checked, and have to give Guffey credit for pulling off a literary sleight of hand that caught me by surprise. I won’t spoil it with more, except to say that like the frog in water that’s warmed so slowly it doesn’t realize it’s coming to a lethal boil, Guffey’s readers face an equally stunning conclusion." 

--Terence Taylor, Nightmare Magazine

"BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD is a remarkably authentic, hypnotizing interpretation of all the glitz and pure talent behind Lugosi’s fame, as well as the hubris that steered his downfall. Guffey depicts how Lugosi’s Dracula transformed horror from a genre of make-believe to one that spreads the notion that monsters lurk among us."

--Haley Newlin, Cemetery Dance

Back in 2021, Adam Sayne and Serfiel Stevenson of the CONSPIRINORMAL podcast interviewed me about BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD, focusing on Lugosi's relationship with esotericism and Manly P. Hall. You can hear that entire interview on YouTube:

Conspirinormal 372- Robert Guffey 4 (Bela Lugosi's Dead):

I Make My Debut Appearance on THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE!!!

The latest episode of THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE has just dropped! Hosted by Seán O'Quoi, this episode covers my most recent nonfiction book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD (Headpress, 2025). Topics include the Many Facets of Hollyweird, Darwinian Horror, Cultural Codes, Val Lewton and the Snake Pit, Surrealism and Hollywood, Philip K. Dick and Transgressive Science Fiction, Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare, Curt Siodmak and the OSS, Loren Singer and THE PARALLAX VIEW, Walter Bowart and OPERATION MIND CONTROL, Edward L. Cahn and CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN, UFOs and Government Propaganda, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Political Assassinations, the CIA's Influence in Hollywood, Occult Symbolism in Cinema, Victor Sjöström's THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE and Hidden Esotericism, and Vince Gillgan, 9/11, and THE LONE GUNMEN! To watch the entire episode, see directly below...

Things Visible and Invisible: How the CIA Became Interested in Hollywood (6-11-26):

HORROR AND INDIGENEITY

 

I just received my contributor's copy of HORROR AND INDIGENEITY: LITERATURE, FILM, AND TELEVISION, a handsome volume edited by Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes (published by the University of Texas Press). The book includes my essay "We Had a Mutant Bear Problem," which analyzes the image of Native Americans in such horror films as John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY, Elliot Silverstein's THE CAR, and other films and television shows of the 1970s (including one of my favorite TV shows of all time, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER). This article situates these cultural artifacts in the context of AIM, the wrongful conviction of Leonard Peltier, and the activism of Native American standup comedians like Charlie Hill. I'm not certain if this was on purpose, but the book is scheduled to be released next month during the Semiquincentennial of the United States.

Here's the publisher's description of HORROR AND INDIGENEITY...

How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of Western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indigenous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.

Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary antiracism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provocative terms.

PRAISE FOR HORROR AND INDIGENEITY:

"Horror and Indigeneity is a must-read for scholars, students, filmmakers, and horror fans everywhere. It makes a major contribution to the fast-growing field of Indigenous horror studies while providing context and meaning for authors, producers, practitioners, and audiences alike. Through fifteen fascinating chapters, this book explores the spectrum of Indigenous representation across time and genres, first unpacking the history of the tropes of the 'uncivilized Native,' the 'Indian burial ground,' and 'the merciless Savage' as they have played out in literature, film, and television over more than a century, before delving into the trajectory of Indigenous counternarratives of colonialism-as-monster. Through interviews and chapters exploring the slashers, dramas, documentaries, mysteries, and thrillers that have featured spirits, mutants, zombies, windigos, ghosts, and other fearsome figures, this book unsettles the horror genre and answers the question: Who are the real savages we should fear?"

-- Heather Igloliorte, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada

"This ambitious edited volume makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies and fills a gap in the scholarly study of horror films, novels, and television shows from the perspectives of other disciplines aligned with Indigenous studies. The coeditors pull all the threads together, and the accessibility of different chapters will make them useful in both undergraduate and graduate studies courses."

--Cailín E. Murray, editor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History

"Horror and Indigeneity is a significant contribution to horror studies, representing an important early step in introducing decolonial perspectives into the study of horror and providing a foundation upon which future scholars can build. As editors, Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes do an excellent job framing the volume and establishing the need for it. The scope of the volume will make it an important scholarly resource that will undoubtedly appear on the shelves of many horror scholars."

--Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

You can order HORROR AND INDIGENEITY through Amazon.