From Robin Levinson-King and Eloise Alanna's 11-14-25 BBC.com article entitled "At 16, I Was Experimented on by the CIA and Now I'm Suing":
The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell - almost medicinal.
"I didn't like the look of the place. It didn't look like a hospital to me," she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba.
That hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for "disobedient" behaviour.
It was there that Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA's top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. On Thursday, a judge denied the Royal Victoria Hospital's appeal, paving the way for the lawsuit to proceed.
According to her medical files, which she obtained only recently, Ms Ponting had been running away from home and hanging out with friends her parents disapproved of after a difficult move with her family from Ottawa to Montreal.
"I was an ordinary teenager," she recalled. But the judge sent her to the Allan.
Once there, she became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent.
Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved.
At the Allan, McGill University researcher Dr Ewen Cameron drugged patients and made them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times, in a process he called "exploring".
From Will Sommer's 11-24-25 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "QAnon Isn’t So Thrilled About the Epstein Revelations":
A day after the House passed a bill to order the Justice Department to release its Epstein files, Jon Herold, a QAnon promoter who broadcasts under the name Patel Patriot, seemed disappointed that more of Mr. Epstein’s crimes might be revealed. “All the awful things that people are saying, I hope it’s not true,” Mr. Herold said. “I don’t want to see any of it.”
Given that the conspiracy theory doubles as a cult of personality built around Mr. Trump, this sort of reaction isn’t particularly surprising. But the new emails do suggest the conspiracy theorists were right about Mr. Epstein’s significance — albeit not in the ways they thought [...].
Mr. Epstein should matter to QAnon because he was a rare example of the supposed sex-trafficking cabal’s machinations coming out in the open. While Mr. Epstein was mentioned relatively rarely in QAnon before his 2019 indictment, his mysterious death propelled QAnon recruitment and provided endless alleys for its amateur internet sleuths to explore.
But Mr. Trump’s long friendship with Mr. Epstein has always been awkward for QAnon believers to explain. Why was Mr. Trump, supposedly the ultimate avenger of abused children, videotaped palling around with Mr. Epstein? Why was he calling a known sex trafficker who paid dozens of girls, some as young as 14, to have sex with him, a “terrific guy?” Why did he appoint Alex Acosta, the prosecutor in Florida who helped give Mr. Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2007, to his cabinet?
The traditional QAnon explanation for the pair’s closeness has been that Mr. Trump was getting close to Mr. Epstein just to bring more publicity to his crimes. It’s not the most compelling argument, even by QAnon standards, and it’s looked even shakier as more Epstein emails about Mr. Trump have come out [...].
QAnon’s retreat from the Epstein story is striking because there remain real questions about Mr. Epstein that could make for a rich vein of new theorizing. How exactly did Mr. Epstein get so rich? Why were so many wealthy, powerful men friends with him? Why did he move so easily through the global financial system?
But for most QAnon believers the priority is protecting Mr. Trump at all costs. Even if it means no longer asking questions. Even if it means letting the moment they finally got something right pass them by. Even if it means continuing to thirst for a storm that will never come...
From Anand Giridharadas' 11-23-25 NEW YORK TIMES opinion-editorial piece entitled "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails":
As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?
A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?
But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped [...].
What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning [...].
Sometimes these people give the impression that their minds would be blown by a newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get your sense of Trump’s administration, policies.” And while it may seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein for political analysis when you can visit any number of websites, for this class, insight’s value varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the ultimate flex is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a meeting with Portugal’s prime minister.
Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money [...].
This class has its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block the blessing by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for busyness by invoking centrality — “trump related issues occupying my time.” When an intro is offered, the coldest reply is “no.” The ultimate power move is from Mohamed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s iPad.”
From Raheem Hosseini's 11-21-25 SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE article entitled "A California Woman Accused Both Epstein and Trump. Did She Ever Exist?":
It is still not clear who Katie Johnson was, or if she ever existed — though someone professing to be her contacted me in 2016 when I first reported on the lawsuits. Yet, thanks to emails released last week by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, we now know that Epstein was at least aware of her accusations.
In April 2016, Epstein forwarded a Reuters reporter’s request for comment about Katie Johnson’s lawsuit to several people, including attorney Alan Dershowitz and former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. To Tom Barrack, a Trump campaign adviser who is now the president’s ambassador to Turkey, Epstein wrote, “nuts but i thought you guys should know.” To journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein wrote, “here we go.”
In November 2016, two days after Trump’s election, Epstein forwarded a Daily Mail story about the lawsuit being withdrawn in New York federal court to several friends and associates.
New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. responded, “You called it,” and asked Epstein about his stock portfolio [...].
To some child safety advocates, speculating about the unknowable can distract from what is known.
More than a dozen women — from pageant contestants to Mar-a-Lago guests to former employees — have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Trump has denied all accusations.
Separate juries have found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and defaming her by denying it, awarding Carroll a total of $88.3 million in damages.
Trump’s first choice for attorney general, former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, withdrew over allegations that he sexually exploited a minor. Gaetz was the only member of Congress to vote against an anti-human trafficking bill that Trump signed in his first term.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will be in charge of releasing the Epstein files, was Florida’s chief legal counsel when Epstein received a knocked-down charge of soliciting prostitution, the Palm Beach Post reported.
Trump’s immigration crackdown has redirected federal agents who investigate child sex crimes, the New York Times reported this month. Federal prosecutions for child sex trafficking fell during Trump’s first term, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, including under the laws used to charge Epstein in 2019.
“Let’s say policing actually worked,” said Kate D’Amo, an expert on sexual labor and exploitation at Reframe Health and Justice. “If at any point anybody on the right actually cared about this, they’d be pissed.”
University of Pennsylvania political science professor Marci A. Hamilton, founder of the Child USA advocacy organization and a national authority on the clergy abuse scandal, said the Epstein saga is prompting people like her to re-explain what cover-ups look like. When Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said last month that he supported the release of “credible information” regarding Epstein, Hamilton said Johnson was invoking the Vatican playbook for shielding pedophile priests.
“That is the buzzword of the bishops. That’s how the bishops were able to cover up as much child sexual abuse as they did,” she said.
Goldman said Meagher brought him the Katie Johnson lawsuit motivated by a desire to keep Trump from being elected president. “But as we know now, he can almost do worse things and this never seems to affect him,” Goldman said.
Epstein expressed a similar sentiment in February 2016. Thomas, the Times reporter, emailed Epstein saying, “The stories you could tell …” about candidate Trump. To which Epstein replied, “Actually I don’t think he/voters would care.”
From Edward Helmore's 11-22-25 GUARDIAN article entitled "Politicians Shocked by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Surprise Resignation Announcement":
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s surprise resignation from Congress late on Friday, saying she refused to be a “battered wife” following her public fallout with Donald Trump, has been slammed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman and Greene’s frequent sparring partner.
“She’s carefully timing her departure just 1-2 days after her pension kicks in,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement on her Instagram account, and criticized her voting record on healthcare.
Greene abruptly resigned from Congress, effective 5 January, in a 10-minute video post outlining her unhappiness with Republicans on issues including the public release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in the government’s possession, US financing of foreign conflicts, Trump’s decision to potentially back a candidate against her, and the cost of living and healthcare.
After her service to Trump, she said she objected to being “expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me”.
“I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better,” Greene said.
But Ocasio-Cortez said Greene “is saying a lot but her ACTIONS have not backed up the rhetoric. For all her talk, she’s STILL voting with them to gut healthcare … ”
Greene voted in the summer for cuts to Medicaid and the reduction of enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but then in October criticized the ACA cuts as premiums soared.
Ocasio-Cortez also repeated some of her criticism of shares bought by Greene earlier this year before Trump said he was pausing tariffs. Greene has denied any impropriety in her stock trading.
To read the entire article, click HERE. Meanwhile...
ACT 3:
The Trump & Mamdani Comedy Hour
(or)
"You Can Just Say Yes"
(or)
"We Agree on a Lot More than I Would Have Thought"
ACT 4:
From Nicholas Kerr's 11-23-25 ABC NEWS report entitled "Trump’s Accusations of Treason Draw Bipartisan Rebuke":
President Donald Trump's comments accusing Democratic lawmakers of "seditious behavior" following a video encouraging members of the military to refuse "illegal orders" have drawn criticism across party lines.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, one of the six Democrats featured in the video, told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday that she believed Trump's attack, threatening the punishment of death for sedition, is "a tool of fear."
"He's trying to get us to shut up because he doesn't want to be talking about this," Slotkin said. "In fact, I would argue that one of the things that he's been doing by repeating it and talking about it is trying to distract us from the big stories of last week, which were the [Jeffrey] Epstein files and then the economy."
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul also sought to distance himself from the comments, telling Raddatz, "I don't speak for the president in terms of hanging members of Congress."
"I would tone down the rhetoric and tone down the theme here," McCaul added.
The White House and Trump have denied Trump was threatening death upon the lawmakers, who have military or national security backgrounds, but the president's attacks have continued despite the lawmakers reporting they've experienced a deluge of threats and have had to increase their security as a result.
On Saturday night, Trump again referred to them as "traitors," asserting the individuals "SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW" rather than defending themselves to the media.
Apocalypse Cultureedited by Adam Parfrey (1987) [This anthology is included on the list because it contains James Shelby Downard's infamous essay entitled"King-Kill/33°"]:
Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos by Robert Guffey (2025) [Alas, modesty does not forbid me from taking advantage of this opportunity to plug my latest nonfiction book, which includes a comprehensive chapter entitled "The Brain(s) that Killed Kennedy: The JFK Assassination as Seen Through Film"):
From Brittany Wong's 11-15-25 HUFFPOST article entitled "MAGA Won't Let Trump Off The Hook For The Epstein Files — And Psychologists Know Why":
No matter how hard he tries to either ignore it or change the subject, the president’s links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein won’t stop following him — and even part of his conservative base is having trouble grappling with it [...].
Trump had previously promised to release files on Epstein as recently as last year. QAnon conspiracy theorists in his base wonder why his administration is now treating the Epstein files like a nonissue. (Followers of QAnon consider Epstein a key figure in a satanic cabal of pedophiles that includes the world’s most powerful people. Though Trump was friends with Epstein for years, he’s long been seen as the white-knight figure destined to defeat that cabal.)
As more details emerge about Trump’s friendship with Epstein ― back in July, The Wall Street Journal released a report detailing an innuendo-laced birthday letter Trump gave to Epstein, and then it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi informed Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files ― the president has implored his supporters and the press to just move on.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump shot back at a reporter questioning the administration’s handling of the issue earlier this month. “Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”On Truth Social, the president called his base “stupid” and “foolish” for inquiring about Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation. Now, in November, new emails have been released that showed Trump knew about Epstein’s conduct. Team Trump and the president himself have tried to “flood the zone” on social media. But any story or Truth Social post they’ve thrown out to distract Americans from this latest controversy ― releasing thousands of files about civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and a bizarre AI-generated video of President Barack Obama being arrested and thrown in jail ― has failed to make a mark.
Republicans, it seems, are struggling to get out from this news cycle because, for once, it’s their MAGA base that is leading the charge against Trump. (When you’ve lost the support of “QAnon shaman” Jake Chansley, you know you’ve got problems.)
As many have noted ― Trump included, a number of times ― no rules apply to him in Trump world. Though he’s bragged about being able to “grab [women] by the pussy” and been accused of sexual misconduct numerous times, for many in the MAGA movement, Trump is still seen as the avenger of what they deem sex deviancy: gay people, trans people, celebrities and elites they claim are involved in pedophilia rings.
“When we look at the MAGA hardcore, we typically see the pathological ‘othering’ of two specific classes of people: immigrants and ‘sex perverts,’” said Steve K. D. Eichel, a psychologist who studies cults and other cultic relationships. Eichel believes the latter category is mostly the result of a moral panic that is also a projection of significant psychosexual confusion and repression on the part of hyper-religious MAGAs [...].
There’s some sunk cost fallacy going on here, too: QAnon believers have invested so much time and energy into the Epstein files, they’re not going to let go now.
“It’s sunk cost fallacy meets betrayal,” said Natalie Feinblatt, a psychologist who specializes in cult recovery.
“People who’ve poured years of belief, energy and identity into the MAGA and Q world are facing a painful internal contradiction: ‘I’ve given everything to this cause ... how could it betray me?’” she said. “These feelings are especially potent when the betrayal comes from someone you viewed as a savior.”
If you want to know exactly how we reached this point, consider reading my 2022 nonfiction book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP,
which maps out the anatomy of this ten-year-long campaign of
asymmetric warfare directed against the American people by Trump and the cabal of right-wing nutjobs who support him...
PRAISE FOR OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP
"It's great."
--Marc Maron, WTF Podcast
"Voltaire
suggested that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us
commit atrocities, and QAnon provided the practical demonstration.
Robert Guffey’s razor-sharp postings illuminate how a collage of Shaver
mysteries, Discordian prankster politics and recreational conspiracy
theory played out as dissociative American fugue. Jaw-dropping and
essential."
—Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen
"One
of the most difficult aspects of confronting QAnon conspiracism is
finding the time and resolve to delve into its ever-expanding network of
self-reinforcing connections and concepts. Robert Guffey does that work
for you in OPERATION MINDFUCK, a codex to madness and a critical
examination of how a massive fraction of our culture has imbibed a
counter-reality. Guffey also explores underground sources lost on many
mainstream historians, bringing us into an (occasionally ingenious)
netherworld of outsider thought forms. Guffey is the Ernest Shackleton
of paranoia—and one hopes his journey will result in a happier ending."
—Mitch Horowitz, PEN Award-winning author of Occult America and Uncertain Places
"It's
practically a guide to your character to discover whether you find this
expose of possibly the stupidest political movement in human history
funny, alarming, or infuriating.... Highly recommended."
—Richard Smoley, author of Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History and How God Became God
"OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP
by Robert Guffey tackles the conspiracy theories Q draws from, the
history of the Q phenomenon, and the eventual attempts by mobs at least
partially influenced by Q, and certainly influenced by Donald Trump, to
overturn the 2020 Presidential election. The book is well-researched,
with a full Bibliography of notes that reference and identify each quote
from each source that Guffey cites. Guffey, additionally, has a long
background studying conspiracy theories and their origins [...]. Guffey is not a lightweight."
—Steve Henn, author of And God Said Let There Be Evolution
"Whether QAnon is a religion, a cult, a joke, a political movement, or just an online game gone awry, Robert Guffey's OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP is his attempt to figure it all out. Guffey's pedigree in this area is unmatched [...]. Throughout OPERATION MINDFUCK, Guffey follows Theodore Sturgeon's advice he quoted in his book CHAMELEO: 'Always ask the next question.'"
—Roy Christopher, author of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future
"[Guffey's] expertise shines through in every chapter of this book. Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump
is not only a well written and well researched look into the abyss of
bullshit known as QAnon, but it is also very funny and quite sad at the
same time—an interesting, entertaining, and sometimes frightening read."
--Razorcake
"If
you are still dazed from this [QAnon] business, then Robert Guffey has
written a book just for you. In readable yet well researched fashion, he
lays it all out: where it began, who, why, how. He can’t make it go
away for you—or me, for that matter—but he can make the whole bizarre
business a bit less confusing... [T]his book is what you need. Get your
fire lit, your cup of coffee (or something far stronger), curl up (in
fetal position, if necessary), and prepare to learn."
Early last year, the President of CSU Long Beach nominated me for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Award for a series of articles I wrote about QAnon and Christian Nationalism for SALON and THE EVERGREEN REVIEW. I didn't win that award... but if I had won, I assure you it would not have been anywhere near as satisfying as taking home the Wonderland Award for Best Collection at BizarroCon.
Here's a footnote that might interest you: I was first nominated for a Wonderland Award back in 2021 for my novella collection, WIDOW OF THE AMPUTATION & OTHER WEIRD CRIMES, but I lost to John Skipp's short story collection, DON'T PUSH THE BUTTON. I thought this was appropriate given the fact that John Skipp co-edited the seminal splatterpunk anthology BOOK OF THE DEAD, the only book I ever shoplifted back when I was a wee lad in the late 1980s. That loss was karma, no doubt!
With this background in mind, you might imagine my surprise when I realized that John Skipp was the writer chosen to present me with the Wonderland Award. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank John Skipp as well as extend my sincere apologies for the six cents' worth of royalties I pilfered from him back in 1989. I've used my newfound influence to pull some strings, and I've been assured that John's Christmas stocking will be a few cents heavier this year. Merry Christmas, John!
Now that I've obtained the Wonderland Award, everything is right in the universe, the proper planets are aligned, the stars are shining down upon the green swards of Earth, and a new eon of happiness and prosperity is waiting in the wings for the entire human race due primarily to this ground-shaking development in the literary world.
I'd like to thank my wife's uterus, the XX chromosomes, my daughter (without whom this bizarro book would never have existed), and everyone at Madness Heart Press! Congratulations to all the nominees, but most especially to Christine Morgan and Susan Snyder for winning Best Novel for NYMPHO SHARK FUCK FRENZY (a title I wish I had dreamed up myself).
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
"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."
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