by William Skink

Caitlin Johnstone wrote a post a few years ago with a title as true today as it was then: Whoever Controls The Narrative Controls The World.

I’ve been thinking A LOT about narrative control lately, especially as it relates to the past 10 years, and I’ve come to a conclusion about my writing activity: I’ve been on a decade-long counter-narrative operation against what Liberalism claims to be on the surface because I have come to understand what Liberalism is hiding in the basement.

What Liberalism claims to be, on the surface, is, according to wikipedia, this: Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.

I was a good, liberal-minded individual in 2008 when I started my new job at the homeless shelter. I attended Obama’s campaign rally at the Adams Center and his speech brought tears to my eyes. That year I also started a family, so my hopes were high.

I was high on hopium.

Obama’s cabinet selections were the first red flags. The Democrat response to Wall Street running a global ponzi scheme was the last red flag I needed. These weren’t liberal-minded people worried about equality before the law, or the consent of the governed. No, these creatures were something else, something neoliberal, apparently.

Jasun Horsely and his book, The Vice of Kings, is helping me to correlate a bunch of seemingly disparate topics that have swirled in my head for years. The subtitle is a big tell what you’re getting into with Horsley’s counter-narrative operation: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

The threat Bush posed to my young mind was easy to understand. The cabal he was a figurehead for connected to a dark underbelly of corruption in order to maintain power. Obama was going to counter all that, but he didn’t.

While that illusion was being dismantled by the reality of what Obama was doing (abroad) and NOT doing (domestically), the illusion I had of Missoula being a beautiful liberal utopia in an ugly conservative state was being confronted with the reality of how our community treated people without homes, and how a liberal politician wannabe by the name of Ellie Hill treated her hourly paid staff doing an impossible, dangerous job.

While I wrote about the disgusting foreign policy moves by the Obama regime, and the further eroding of our constitutional rights, I worked for 7 years navigating a broken health care system and a broken criminal justice system, thoroughly burning myself out while our Mayor drank his lunch and made self-deprecating fat jokes.

I watched from the inside for years how this liberal politician operated without being openly critical. That time is long gone.

Here is a quote from Horsley’s book that deeply resonated with me:

“One major factor in the maintenance of the illusion of the world as a more or less civilized or benign space (the belief that the kinds of things reported in this book simply do not happen) is our unconscious assumption that the people in positions of authority are reliable narrators who can be trusted to provide an accurate account of reality. We implicitly, unthinkingly, trust those who have assumed power in our society, just, just as we tend to distrust those without power—the poor, the old, the sick, the homeless, the drug-addicted, the mentally unstable. To a large extent, social authority is the authority to determine what is true or false, to dominate the narrative. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, those who are able to define what is true—truthfully or not—are for this very reason able to attain power in society. The lawmakers are also the spell-casters.”

Horsley (his emphasis) is echoing Johnstone when she says whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Our job as critical thinking citizens is to ask of our spell-casting lawmakers and elected leaders: ARE YOU RELIABLE NARRATORS?

Tax Increment Financing is a tool that provides a public benefit.

Is Engen a reliable narrator when he tells us this story about his slush fund?

Sean Stevenson was an out-of-state homeless man killed by Johnny Lee Perry when Perry used strangulation as the means of killing Stevenson in self defense.

Is Kristen Pabst and the County Attorney’s office she leads a reliable narrator when she tells us this story about someone’s family member who they can no longer talk to because he was killed in Missoula?

The story Missoula tells itself has slowly transformed from something that felt mostly rooted in authenticity to something that is wholly controlled by PR wizards. But behind the glitz and glamour lies something very dark.

The second part of Horsley’s book takes on the narrative control over the story of Aleister Crowley, famed British occultist who inspired people like guitarist Jimmy Page and child killer Damien Echols.

Did Crowley ever engage in the ritualistic sexual abuse of children, or are his own words that indicate his religious beliefs allowed for this depravity just a type of “joke”, as his apologists and defenders claim?

Another tightly controlled narrative Horsley takes on is the one that claims the pioneer of sex research, Alfred Kinsey, was a disinterested academic doing important, scholarly studies on human sexuality. The reality? Kinsey used the cover of academia to feed is own obsessions, and even enlisted the help of a serial child rapist.

For more on Kinsey, Judith Reisman is the expert to consult. Did I mention Kinsey was a fan of Crowley?

Working at a homeless shelter, one can’t ignore the underbelly. I remember the incomprehensible ramblings of one female client who disclosed a history of incest. Both her father and brother raped her.

While that abuse was familial, the system itself is comprised of abusers.

In 2015, near the end of my time at the shelter, a well known psychologist by the name of Jay Palmatier was arrested for having child porn on his computer. I actually testified in a legal hearing, along with Palmatier, to get a client committed for psychiatric evaluation. On the say so of someone like Palmatier, you can be committed to the psych ward of a hospital. How often is power like that abused by agents of the system?

Tomorrow I’m going to continue looking at the power of the County Attorney’s office and the alarming interpretation of self defense and justifiable force statutes in Montana because I know that Kristen Pabst is NOT a reliable narrator in regards to two cases of inexplicable NON PROSECUTION.

Pabst is protecting someone’s underbelly, the questions are who, and why.

Stay tuned…