Another piece of The New Hate

The New Hate is now being copyedited; in just six months, it will be between hardcovers. It never ceases to amaze me how tortoise-like mainstream publishing remains, even in this digital age. Friday I read that Regnery will be publishing Donald Trump's latest literary effort. "Designed to add some intellectual heft to Trump's light political resume, the book will lay out the New York City businessman's policy prescriptions for the country," Real Clear Politics reports. "Regnery's executive editor, Harry Crawford, has been tapped to take the lead in editing Trump's new work, which will be heavily ghostwritten, with Trump playing a supporting role in generating content."Never mind the cognitive dissonance between "add some intellectual heft" and "largely ghostwritten" and "supporting role in generating content." Trump's White House hopes took a pretty serious blow in the last couple of weeks--the release of the long form birth certificate, Obama's jibes, and the death of Osama bin Laden (which all happened within 72 hours) did a lot of damage. If a ghostwritten book is going to convince anyone that Trump is more serious than he seems, it'll have to be out there pretty soon, which is why Regnery is crashing it for late summer release. But late summer is the best they can do for a celebrity author like Donald Trump? A pop singer can pass through their entire life-cycle in four months....Anyway, here's another preview from The New Hate:Like Lyndon LaRouche, another conspiracy-obsessed megalomaniac, William Dudley Pelley was born into an old New England family that had ties to the shoe business; like L. Ron Hubbard, who also founded a religion, writing was his first career. Unlike Hubbard, who wrote pulp science fiction (and unlike his own father, a part time preacher and a restless, only intermittently successful businessman, who kept his family constantly on the move), Pelley enjoyed considerable mainstream success. His novels were critically acclaimed best sellers; he won two O’Henry Awards for his short stories; he covered the Russian Revolution for The Saturday Evening Post and wrote screenplays for Lon Chaney movies. In addition to his well-paid literary efforts, he had investments in a chain of restaurants, a real estate firm, and an advertising agency. But all of that changed in 1927, when he decided to take a sabbatical so he could “browse, ponder, meditate, and study.” He divested himself of his business interests, moved to a bungalow in the hills outside Pasadena with his police dog Laska, and commenced work on The Urge of Peoples, a racial history of the world.One night in the spring of 1928, he had an incredible experience that he would write about in a much talked-about magazine article, “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” which he later adapted into a book. One moment, he was lying in his bed in his bungalow, musing over the mystery of race—“How did it come about in Nature that one man’s skin was black, another’s white, another’s red, another’s yellow? How did it happen that a Chinaman would be a Chinaman for a thousand generations never mind where he lived?”—the next, in a scenario that could have been ripped out of the pages of one of Whitley Streiber’s books about alien abductions, from the autobiography of St. Theresa, or for that matter, from a clinician’s account of a hypnagogic hallucination, he was “plunging down a mystic depth of cool blue space not unlike the bottomless sinking sensation that attends the taking of ether for anesthetic.”At first he thought he was dying. When he came to, he was lying nude on a white marble pallet. Blinking against the “queer opal light,” he saw two “kindly faced young men in white uniforms” standing over him. When he asked them where he was, they exchanged good-humored glances. “’Don’t try to see everything in the first seven minutes!” was all the answer they offered.” They brought him to a “roofed in Roman garden, about fifteen feet high and thirty feet square.” Off to one side, a columned passageway led off into the interminable distance. After he bathed in a pool of immaculate water, he sat on a bench while one of the kindly-faced men—whom he now realized was a soldier he’d known, a southerner of good family who’d been killed in the Great War—began to answer his questions.First of all, his old friend told him, this wasn’t his first visit to this strange place. “You left this plane or condition to go down into earth-life and function as the person you know yourself to be….Everyone has lived before—hundreds of times before. People still in earth-life will live hundreds of times again—as they may have need of the mortal experiences.”Then he solved the enigma of race. It was all about Karma:"You wondered what races were. I’ll tell you what they are. They’re great classifications of humanity epitomizing gradations of spiritual development, starting with the black man and proceeding upward in cycles to the white. Each race is an earthly classroom to which people go to get certain lessons in specific things. When they've acquired the experiences from those lessons they come back into this condition and rest, absorbing the increment from those experiences into their characters and thus 'developing.'"Pelley stayed in contact with his dead friend for the rest of his life. Though he would write millions more words, he was now a man with a mission.By 1930, he was living in Asheville, North Carolina, writing religious tracts and political pamphlets and books and teaching correspondence courses through his unaccredited Galahad Bible College, building a national religious movement he called the League of Liberation, that mixed themes from his father’s fire and brimstone Christianity and the New Thought and Ascended Master Theosophy that he’d discovered on his own. In 1933, Hitler’s rise to power “supplied the key that unlocked a staggering sequence in my own progression,” Pelley later wrote. “When a certain young house painter comes to the head of [the German state]…. you take that as your time symbol for bringing the work of the Christ Militia into the open!”The League of Liberation became the Silver Legion, a religio-political crusade that was premised entirely on anti-Semitism and specifically organized to provide the organizational nucleus of a new Christ Commonwealth. The Luciferian Jews, an oriental race with “Dark Souls,” created Communism, Pelley believed (Moses was the “Stalin of his day”; Jesus wasn’t Jewish but a Galilean descended from immigrant Gauls). Pelley envisioned a US government that would be divided into nine administrative divisions, including Departments of Public Enlightenment, Patriotic Probity, Crime Erasement, and Public Morals and Mercy. Like Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Silver Legion’s members wore uniforms, which he sold them for $6.00—a cap, blue corduroy pants, a tie with a membership number stamped on it, and a silver shirt with a red “L” stitched onto the breast, signifying “love,” “loyalty” and “liberation.” Members were required to familiarize themselves with a number of foundational texts, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Pelley’s own No More Hunger, which laid out the debt-free monetary system which he’d largely derived from Frederick Soddy’s 1926 book Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: The Solution of the Economic Paradox. Pelley claimed that his vision was completely compatible with the Constitution, with Christian ideals of social justice, and with patriotism.