A Sneak Peak Inside "The Cedar Valley Covenant"

 With "The Cedar Valley Covenant" now available at all your favorite book sellers, take a quick sneak peak at the first two sample chapters! 

CHAPTER 1

            The Handlers had relented. At last they gave in and they would let the Predator have her. He couldn’t function if he couldn’t have her. He couldn’t carry out his mission if he wasn’t allowed to dream about her. She had taken over his fantasies. She had come to possess him, to take over and control his thoughts as much as he needed to take over the thoughts of his targets tonight.

            But the Predator’s Handlers had given in. They, too, after all, were in his head. They understood the condition he was in. They understood his need.

            If the Handlers wanted the Predator to kill the two men sitting across the restaurant, they had to let him take the payment he demanded.

            Jessica.

            Her name rang through the chambers of the Predator’s mind. He was picking up flashes of her, images of her, the closer he got to his targets.

            He needed Jessica.

            It they wanted the Predator to go through with it, they had to let him take Jessica.

            Sure, the Predator realized, they could just as well kill him and find someone else to carry out the hit, but that would take too long. They needed the Predator for his very special qualities. They needed him for his very special modus operandi. They couldn’t let all of his previous work go to waste. It would take too long to set up another assassin to take his place.

            For now, the Predator had the upper hand. The Handlers needed those two men—sitting there and drinking, discussing science and philosophy, teaching methods, the price of South Illinois real estate—dead as quickly as possible. They especially needed Dr. Nelson Danziger dead. His companion, Dr. Brock Randall, was merely a secondary target. The Handlers hadn’t cared about Randall originally. Or, rather, they didn’t care about him enough to want him dead just now. But the Predator had the power to force Randall’s execution. If the Handlers wanted Danziger eliminated, they had to let him go after Randall too.

            Brock Randall had to die because of what the Predator had discovered in his mind. When he read Randall’s thoughts, the Predator found Jessica. From the moment he found her, everything changed.

            Jessica. Brock Randall’s beautiful daughter. Randall and his estranged daughter had started talking to each other again. The Predator knew because he scanned Randall’s mind every day. He could see Randall looking at Jessica’s pictures when he was on the phone with her. The Predator saw her exquisite photo sitting on the desk in Randall’s office. When the Predator shared Brock Randall’s vision, when he intruded into his thoughts, he saw Jessica, he heard Jessica, he saw her photos all over Randall’s house. 

            But Jessica was so far away. The Predator had to get to her. He needed to bring her to Cedar Valley right now. She had become his addiction, his madness. He knew that Randall’s sudden tragic death would bring Jessica to town.

            The Handlers wanted Danziger dead and the Predator was going to kill him before the night was through. But Brock Randall would die at the same time. The Predator would not be denied. Not even the Handlers could stop him now.

CHAPTER 2

            “Brock, to tell you the truth…” Nelson Danziger said and looked Randall square in the eyes. He paused, raised his snifter of scotch and smiled affably. “The impression Cedar Valley State has made on me is really great…”

            Brock Randall swirled the rum around the bottom of his glass. He thought he heard a “but” about to be tagged onto the end of Danziger’s remark. Of course, Randall wasn’t supposed to be the one apprehensive about what Danziger was about to say. Randall, a representative of Cedar Valley State University, was supposed to have been the one with the upper hand here. They were the ones about to offer Danziger a job.

            Except the truth was that Danziger, no doubt, had several other offers waiting for him. He wasn’t a desperate new Ph.D., fresh out of grad school with a few years of adjunct teaching, a pile of student loans and maybe one or two conference presentations under his belt. Nelson Danziger’s CV read like a novella. He already had five books published, two of them with commercial houses in New York. And, despite the subject matter he wrote about, his mainstream success only stood to help the school, to boost enrollment. That success was the reason a small school like CVSU was willing to spend as much money on Danziger as had been allocated for him in the hiring budget.

            “Glad to hear that, Nelson,” Randall replied but paused quietly. He could sense Danziger had more to say.

            “So now I wait and hope for the best. I hope the search committee’s been impressed,” Danziger said.

            “Oh, I’m sure about that.”

            Although Randall had been asked to take Danziger out for his farewell dinner, he wasn’t actually sitting on Danziger’s search committee. Danziger was interviewing for one of the rare full-professor openings in the Psychology Department. Randall was an interpersonal communication specialist. Cedar Valley State being so small, however, almost made the school a big family. Every department took an interest in every single full-time faculty hire. Danziger’s guest lectures, his research presentation and discussions with the Psychology Department’s search committee, had been observed by representatives from every other department. 

            Now that Danziger was about to go home to Tampa while the search committee deliberated, Randall had been asked to take him out for a farewell dinner.

            “You have to admit, though,” Danziger said and paused.

            Here came the “but,” Randall thought. He was annoyed by how much trepidation he felt, but the fact was that this entire interview process had been a seller’s market. And Danziger was the seller. The college needed him desperately.

            Randall just raised his eyebrows and waited for Danziger to complete his thought.

            “They did ask a lot of nervous questions,” Danziger said.

            “Nervous?” Randall asked and sipped some rum.

            “I think they’re asking themselves if they’re hiring a psychologist or a writer from a supermarket tabloid.”

            “That’s not the case at all,” Randall said and chuckled, regretting the words the moment they came out of this mouth. He made himself sound defensive. The key to this entire hiring process was not to make Danziger feel too powerful, too needed.

            “Well, how do you think they feel about my work?” Danziger asked bluntly. “I’m sure my books have impressed the school to a certain degree, and I guess at this point it’s up to the Psych Department’s search committee to make its final decision, but they take input from all the faculty members who’ve observed me.”

            “I think they’re trying to figure out how to deal with…with the implication that you don’t seem to think people who’ve experienced the…”

            “The unexplained?” Danziger asked and drank some scotch. “That they’re not all insane?”

            “Well, you’ve got to admit that your arguments for the objective reality of parallel worlds and the spirit world are fairly radical,” Randall said.

            “Yes, I suppose they are,” Danziger said and stared off into some distant corner of the nearly empty restaurant past Randall’s head. Then his focus came back onto Randall. “I suppose they really are,” he reiterated. “But I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea.  Do you?”

            “What do you mean?” Randall chose to evade Danziger’s question.

            “Our line of work. Research, higher education, isn’t it supposed to be a battlefield of ideas? Nothing is supposed to be too radical. We’re supposed to throw all ideas out there and see how they can be defended.”

            Randall shrugged. “Well, you don’t really have a hostile audience here, you know.  My department has a couple of committed post-modernists.”

            “Aha, the post-modernists,” Danziger said and chuckled. “Nothing exists, nothing is real, we can’t trust any rules and any reality. So my candidacy’s not entirely a lost cause.”

            “It’s the people in your own hard-sciences you have to watch out for,” Randall said and finished the rest of his rum.

            “Should I be very worried?” Danziger asked and smiled lightly.

            Randall thought he smiled a little bit too lightly. There was a cockiness emerging from this guy now. 

            “You must have met Tom Lancaster from the Physics Department, right?” Randall asked.

            “Can’t recall his face.”

            “Tall, dark-haired, good looking…”

            “Snappy suits, right…?”

            “Yeah, break those scientist stereotypes. No pocket protectors on that one.”

            Danziger laughed. “Looks like a yuppie stock broker.”

            “Yeah, that’s the one,” Randall said and guessed that Danziger must have been wondering how many students Lancaster was sleeping with. Randall, though, was certain that the answer was none. Lancaster was a real stand up you guy, he had to admit. He always pegged him as highly ethical, if not a bit stiff. He was, of course, a zealot when it came to certain aspects of his work, but he was a straight shooter, nonetheless. Maybe that’s why Randall thought he would have been happy setting him up with Jessica.

            “But anyway,” Randall continued, “he wrote a book a while ago called The Naked Ghost.”

            “Yes, of course,” Danziger said with a knowing smile. “Now I remember.”

            “Well, he’s still trying to save the world. Shining the light of science.”

            “Yes, he’s the one,” Danziger said quietly. “Good for him if he’s trying to save the world, though. Even if sometimes he writes outside of his area of expertise.”

            “He would probably take issue with some of your ideas.”

            “Who knows,” Danziger said and shrugged lightly.

            Randall thought he could sense that cockiness again.

            “Maybe he, too, believes in that battlefield of ideas,” Danziger said.

            “I’m sure he probably does.”

            “Yeah,” Danziger said slowly and drained the last of his scotch. “I remember the reviews of his book. Very zealous guy, indeed. His book was pretty successful.”

            “Not as successful as your books,” Randall said.

            Danziger returned a humble smile. “Well, whatever differences I might have with someone like Tom Lancaster, I hope CVSU will decide it’s a big enough place for a diversity of opinions,” he said diplomatically and leaned back in his chair.

            It was time to wrap up this farewell dinner, Randall realized, glancing at his watch. He still had to drive Danziger to Cedar Valley Municipal Airport, from where he would take a commuter flight to Chicago and catch his connection down to Tampa.

            After settling the bill to be placed on the school’s account, Randall and Danziger left the nearly empty restaurant.

            Only one other patron haunted Bertucci’s Tratoria this late at night, Randall noted as they headed for the front door. A man sitting in the farthest, darkest corner of the restaurant seemed to be staring at a barely-touched plate of pasta in front of him.

Teachergate and Gay Frogs

This fall semester I am teaching my class on the history of conspiracy theories and conspiracy entertainment again, and this time we’re busier than ever. As I post supplemental materials on the course Blackboard shell, it becomes harder and harder to keep ahead of the students. They’re often able to top me finding the most outlandish conspiratorial claims in the shortest amount of time. It’s especially gratifying—or is that disturbing?—to see them find older theories that somehow still finds some adherents.

 

For example, when one of my students found Alex Jones’ rants about the New World Order introducing chemicals into the water supply that turn frogs gay, lots of laughs were had in class. Check out this YouTube clip where someone edited Jones’ histrionics into a music video. While the clip was posted three years ago, there are still Jones fans out there worried about those homosexuality-causing chemicals in the drinking water.

 

The frog theory and video, aside from being hilarious, were also quite useful for our discussion of the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy theory of the 1950s and 60s. That was a theory Stanley Kubrick had already lampooned in his 1964 classic, Dr. Strangelove. Yet fluoridated-water theory still has its staunch believers to this day.

 

The students’ final project will be the Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise, where they will have to create their own conspiracy theory using the typical conspiracist’s tricks of the trade: cherry-picking facts to support preconceived ideas, quoting people out of context, making spurious connections between unrelated variables. Usually in the past I had seen some remarkable creations of conspiracy fiction that rival the professional charlatans like Jones or the people at the State of the Nation and the Millennium report sites. This year, however, I’m not sure how the students’ work will stack up against the unadulterated madness of the pros.

 

I mean QAnon? Really people? A vast cabal of human-sacrificing Satanists led by Tom Hanks congregating in tunnels deep underground to drink human blood? Take a look at this Time article to see how committed the QAnon followers are to their cause.

 

And then I noticed a series of posts on the Before It’s News site that quite impressed me. No major news event is left unexploited by the truly committed conspiracists. School closings, apparently, are suspect for a writer named Hank Wolfe, with online education being just a part of a vast 5G mind-control plot he calls "Teachergate." In his posts, Wolfe draws a line between school closings, 5G towers, the New World Order, brainwashing, and all the way to Elon Musk’s neuralink microchip and teachers being replaced by perfectly realistic artificial intelligence simulations on the screens of millions of students across the country.

 

Wolfe’s complete thesis can be read across the following four postings:

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/07/online-education-and-5g-mind-control-exposed-2517291.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/teachergate-school-cancellation-agenda-exposed-2517416.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/elon-musk-brain-implants-and-nwo-mind-control-2517431.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/09/musk-5g-and-the-school-shut-down-scam-2517449.html

 

The one disappointing thing about Wolfe’s posts is the way he didn’t weave Satan, the Antichrist, or blood-drinking, devil-worshipping celebrities into his yarn. Perhaps it’s because A Call for an Uprising is working that side of the street. Or maybe Wolfe just didn’t get around to it yet. Perhaps that will be his next major revelation.

 

But with theories like Wolfe’s out there, my students will be challenged to reach deep inside their creative core and really work extra hard to top harebrained craziness. 

9/28/20 - Learn the Secret of the Covenant!

The release date has been set! On September 28, my new novel, "The Cedar Valley Covenant" will be released by World Castle Publishing. In the meantime, however, take an exclusive look at the book's jacket copy!

A TOWN OF BRILLIANT MINDS…

Jessica Lafayette, best-selling relationship author and soon-to-be radio personality, had a near-perfect life. But she dreamed of reconnecting with her estranged father. Then an accident along a dark stretch of highway shattered everything. Instead of making peace, Jessica comes to attend a funeral in the idyllic Southern Illinois college-town of Cedar Valley.

A PACT WITH A MIND-BENDING EVIL…

After claiming her father’s ashes from the local funeral home, Jessica begins to suspect the unthinkable. The urn she had been given does not contain ashes, and the remains of the dead might be used in the savage rites of an otherworldly power that has taken control of the town.

Pursued by a murderer in thrall to the evil controlling the town, Jessica finds herself involved with an esteemed scientist and shadowed by an enigmatic outsider, all the while struggling to understand the corruption haunting this town. From eminent thinkers to a rising political power broker, Cedar Valley’s best and brightest should have the resources to fight back. Except somehow, some of them have chosen to collude with an Apocalyptic force that will soon alter the course of all life on Earth. 

With no way out, Jessica must fight back and uncover the devastating secret of…The Cedar Valley Covenant.

The exploitation of tragedy.

Every time we think the cesspool of today’s conspiracy culture can’t get any worse, it finds a way to sink even lower, to show a heretofore level of unseen callousness and heartlessness.

For several days now, various media outlets have been reporting on the quick spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and riots. This is a fairly detailed story about the conspiracy theories from the BBC.

As we are witnessing an American tragedy, the reminder of how fragile our culture is because of race relations, the second tragedy is to see its exploitation by individuals in order to spur even more division, even more distrust and fear among Americans. At a time when the culture needs to come together, to find common ground, to communicate with each other and find a way to live together as one nation and one people, individuals who take this unrest as an opportunity to encourage more suspicion and distrust are little better than murderers themselves.

But as we've seen the handiwork of those who traffic in unsubstantiated conspiracy fantasies before, their behavior should be of no surprise now.

Those who fail to learn from history…well, you know the rest.

So I just ran across this article from a couple of days ago about the eerie parallels between the 1918 Spanish Flu and the current COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, it’s an article about how the frustrations with the 1918 forced social-distancing and mandatory closing of businesses inspired many to rebel and push back. As understandable as their frustrations were, once they crossed into irrational revolt against even simple cautionary regulations like the mandates to wear face masks, the results were tragic and foreseeable. There was a second wave of the disease outbreak in the fall of 1918 and more lives were needlessly lost.

Are we on a path to repeating what happened in 1918? As we just came out of the Memorial Day weekend, in many places in the country it sure seems like it. We just saw headlining stories about acts of such mindlessness, sheer thoughtless stupidity that it makes one test which is stronger…one’s skull or the nearest brick wall. Hundreds of people packed into pool parties, backyard get-togethers, bars, and beaches while refusing to wear facemasks and ignoring social-distancing practices makes me wonder whether or not at some point in the very recent past we might have suffered from another silent pandemic. And that would have been a pandemic that quietly attacked the brains of huge swaths of the population and drastically reduced IQs. 

But as I had written before, I am completely sympathetic to the call for reopening of the country. It needs to be done before the current economic crisis slides toward a catastrophe to rival the Great Depression. Yet why do we have people asking for the restart of the economy sabotaging their own message with their madness? As infection rates are spiking in several parts of the country, why do we still have to listen to this insanity about how asking people to wear a simple facemask in certain public places is akin to a totalitarian takeover? 

Oh yeah, because despite the fact that we are living in a time when communication technology can give access to information, knowledge, facts, scientific data to virtually everyone at a fraction of a second, we are just incapable and unwilling to learn from history. Learning from absurd conspiracy theories on the internet and hysterical fear-mongering about a totalitarian takeover, sure. Learning from history and scientific authorities...forget about it.

Do you want to exercise your rights? Do it with a facemask!!

And no, making you put on that mask in a crowd while you exercise your rights to free speech and to organize protests is not a part of the creepy commie globalist menace run by International Bankers and Globalists.

Just as we started a well-justified discussion of how long and to what extent a national lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic needs to go on, the one way you could definitely derail your argument for reopening the country is to follow the lead of various gun-toting and flag- and sign-waving yahoos getting a lot of recent attention for their rallies in places like Michigan, Washington, Ohio, and North Carolina among about two dozen or so states.

And planning to reopen the country is, in fact, crucial. It must be done very soon. Daily news updates on the COVID-19 crisis will, without fail, look at the ever-worsening economic situation. At this writing 33.5 Americans are unemployed. Those are people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to pay their rent, their mortgages, or their children’s education. To feed their families, they now need to stand in line at food banks and wait for handouts. Their frustration and fear of a disintegrating economy is understandable. We must keep this pandemic from forcing this country—the world—to relive the 1930s.

This link to a recent New York Times Magazine article about how imperative it is to restart the economy presents various points of view on the issue, including the ethics of weighing the potential death tolls against the devastation wrought upon lives and families by a collapsing economy. From bioethicists to economists and healthcare and civil-rights activists, the piece presents a roundtable discussion of how common sense can somehow let us try and deal with a crisis that will have no easy solution.

If you take a close look at strip malls or any shopping centers where grocery chains and Walmarts and Costcos stand open next to various other closed small businesses, the logic of pushing for reopening is obvious. I myself live next to a Walmart and a ShopRite grocery store, both of which have been open seven days a week throughout the entire pandemic lockdown. I also live next to a very long stretch of strip malls where tile stores, electronics shops, clothing boutiques, and a TJ Max have been closed for weeks. During this lockdown, one could always find more people inside the Walmart or the ShopRite than the tile store or TJ Max at any time before the pandemic. Of course, in both the ShopRite and the Walmart the sizes of crowds had been regulated and plenty of signage is encouraging people to keep at least six feet away from each other. Although neither store, up until now, has mandated that all people wear face masks when they enter, most people do. All of the employees of these establishments also wear masks and gloves at all times. By the same token we could protect the public health and work toward flattening the infection curve and allow more small businesses to open and send more people back to work. That, I believe, is just common sense. 

Common sense, however, seems to be at a frustratingly all-time-low supply in this country. The anti-lockdown protest movement gives evidence to this. One needs to take one look at their absurd signs waved around at the rallies—demanding the right to risk their own lives and those of others by refusing to wear masks—listen to their conspiracy theories about Bill Gates implanting people with microchips at the behest of the global fascist takeover, and any inclination to speed up the reopening of the country will evaporate from most sane people’s minds. The dialogue about the crisis of our times is being derailed, the argument for the need to restart the economy as soon as possible has been poisoned by, hijacked by a conspiracy-addled lunatic fringe. This is a lunatic fringe that insists on living in its own self-aggrandizing fantasy world where they see themselves as collection of action heroes saving freedom and democracy from jack-booted forces of evil. 

To be sure, this anti-lockdown conspiracy crowd is relatively small and their position is not shared by most of the country. The majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, support precautionary measures against the spread of COVID. Yet the reckless gatherings of these “patriots” where a lack of precautions against infection is a sign of idealism and defiance will keep prolonging the disease, will keep adding to the death count. That, in turn, will prolong the return to normalcy and will keep the economy sinking further and further into an abyss.

Belief in the 5G/Coronavirus connection: A study of a world gone mad

This is a recent article I was quoted in about some of the most demented conspiracy theories involving COVID-19. There is an especially strong focus on the claims of a link between 5G technology and the virus, something I'm certain most rational people can't quite wrap their minds around. As I had written in the previous post, the idea of cell-phone radiation having anything to do with a respiratory infection spread by saliva droplets is so ludicrous that it should barely be addressed. Except a growing subculture of the paranoid out there are willing to believe it and there are unscrupulous charlatans all across cyberspace who are more than willing to profit off of telling them what they want to hear.

So check out the article for more of the 5G craziness and other COVID-19 theories. Like the link between testing for the infection and the Mark of the Beast...