The Mockingbird Mechanic

It was a stupid book, made worse by being stupidly popular. One of the low points of my childhood was being assigned to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” four times consecutively across four years, across both junior high and high school. The fourth time I didn’t even open it, I just passed the tests.

It wasn’t until this weekend that somebody made the connection for me between “To Kill A Mockingbird” and the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, its illegal infiltration of the domestic press… with the fact of the Civil Right Act’s passage only four years after its publishing.

From Z-Man’s blog

h ttps://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=30783#comment-370827

Jeffrey Zoar on September 22, 2023 at 11:51 am said:

You don’t have to be a dissident to question whether Harper Lee really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Many non dissidents have. But this is beside the point.

If you’ve ever read the book, as I did long ago, you know it’s not very good. Certainly no page turner. Not the kind of thing that would get normie charging to the bookstore. Normie charging to the bookstore at all, for anything, a questionable concept in itself. Yet we are told this mediocre (at best) book, written by an unknown, sold millions immediately upon publication, and was translated into ten languages within one year of release. Even Danielle Steele and Stephen King, much easier reading more page turnable authors, with name recognition and huge fanbases, never had a hit quite like this. That year of release being, coincidentally, 4 years prior to the passage of the CRA.

Then you look at the title again and realize the answer was right in front of you all along. Kind of like Alphabet Inc.

Time to dig.

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful.

Looking back, that was a big red flag. Harper Lee published no other work, yet TKAM sold faster than Harry Potter books at midnight openings.

Published 1960

Pulitzer Prize 1961

Movie adaptation, 1962

Mandated for public education, I’m not sure when, but <1977. Mass-market paperback was released 1962.

Segue

In the early 1960s, [Polish Jew Alan Jay Pakula] returned to [Robert] Mulligan with the proposition of directing To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee. Mulligan accepted the offer despite the awareness that “the other studios didn’t want it because what’s it about? It’s about a middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There’s no romance, no violence (except off-screen). There’s no action. What is there? Where’s the story?”

Millions of schoolkids have wondered exactly that.

With the help of a screenplay by Horton Foote as well as the pivotal casting of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch, the film became a huge hit, and Mulligan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

For this film to be released in 1962, it had to have started production almost immediately upon the book’s publication. We today recognize this as Ticket-taking behavior; Harper Lee may have been one of the first.

End Segue

Harper Lee’s second book was released in 2015… which is the original manuscript for her first book. Sounds like somebody had a ghost writer with lots of money and an agenda! Continuing the synopsis for now,

In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools.

Less so now that blacktivists demand whites no longer use the word ‘nigger’. Ironic. The ACLU appears to be opposing every attempt to ban TKAM, which isn’t what you would expect from that organization until you read further about one of their founders. Also ironic.

 The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.

Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a DODO, Dad Of Daughters Only. Also a lawyer, legislator and journalist. He pushed his daughters hard to become co-lawyers with him at his company. “Lee & Electras, Attorneys at Law”? One daughter did but Harper did not.

Harper was introverted with low self-confidence, and she was not inventive as a writer. The protagonist of TKAM, the lawyer Atticus Finch? Who represented a falsely accused black man? Her father once represented two black men accused of murder (they were hanged), and Finch was her mother’s maiden name. That’s… not impressive.

It gets less impressive when you learn her father sent her to study at Oxford, hoping that the more prestigious credential would interest her in law, and even less when she finally left home to follow a “close friend” and writer, Truman Capote, to New York City. She never married.

It’s not just women themselves who commit Original Sin. Sometimes their fathers push it on them.

When the book was released, reviewers noted that it was divided into two parts, and opinion was mixed about Lee’s ability to connect them. The first part of the novel concerns the children’s fascination with Boo Radley and their feelings of safety and comfort in the neighborhood. Reviewers were generally charmed by Scout and Jem’s observations of their quirky neighbors….

The second part of the novel deals with what book reviewer Harding LeMay termed “the spirit-corroding shame of the civilized white Southerner in the treatment of the Negro.”

THAT IS THE MOCKINGBIRD MECHANIC.

You get tricked into emotionally investing in the story, then Act 2 or 3 throws the Narrative in your face… when you don’t want to quit the story.

Back to Z-Man,

Sgt Pedant, September 22, 2023 at 1:59 pm said:

Whoeve wrote it, TKAM is a clever and sinister bait-and-switch.

It starts out as a rather wholesome children’s story about making Boo Radley come out and then veers off into pure anti-kulak propaganda once the hook has been set.

Jews operate this way instinctually. A lot of white artists and writers end up doing it too, because Jews control all aspects of the creative rackets.

Mycale, September 22, 2023 at 9:16 pm said:

I started watching a show on Netflix last year, my mistake I know, but I had little going on and the premise seemed intriguing. The first couple episodes were, in my opinion, pretty well done. Then, by episode 3, the white daughter of the protaganist had a fling with the random black kid whose presence on the show made no sense. This scene just came out of nowhere and then the kid disappeared from the show shortly after. Then, I got to thinking, and realized that this is basically what every show does these days. They get you with the setup, then drop in the subversion after a few episodes after you are “hooked.” Most will continue to watch it of course, as the subversion just gets turned up on you gradually.

Modern Hollywood, not even once.

I can confirm from my own life experience in Nerd Culture. I have friends who STILL watch Star Wars, because they like what Star Wars once was. As a result, they watch the Narratives and try to enjoy the show regardless of what gets thrown in their face.

Driving back from a viewing of The Last Jedi, which I watched only because 1. my friends & family were going and 2. they were paying my ticket, I excitedly brought up all the literary failings and violations of lore & suspension of disobedience, and… and they didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t WANT to notice the poison pills.

Heck, I’ll do it again right now. That show, the Mandalorian?

The reason for Reboot Mania is to seize the residual goodwill and fan investment, and use it like a pill-hiding dog treat to force Wokeness down our throats.

Here’s another example by Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, on the importance of timing microtransactions. A transcript follows, heavily formatted by me.

h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE

Credit to youTuber bigcudafish.

“When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not price-sensitive at that time… The reason the “play first, pay later” model works so nicely, is the consumer gets engaged in a property… they might spend 10, 20, fifty hours on a game… they’re well invested in it.

We’re not price-gouging, but… I can attest to how well it works. It’s a great model and represents a substantially better future for the industry.”

And after Electronics Arts became the scumbag of the video gaming world on his watch, here’s him doing it again as CEO at Unity Video Game Engines:

h ttps://kotaku.com/unity-john-riccitiello-monetization-mobile-ironsource-1849179898

Unity announced yesterday (amid layoffs, by the way) that it will merge with ad tech firm Ironsource. Among other things, this partnership will give developers who use the engine more ways to monetize and “rise above the noise,” according to Unity general manager Marc Whitten. At this point in the conversation, PocketGamer.biz characterized this focus on monetization as receiving “pushback” from some creatives, giving Riccitiello a chance to sound off.

“Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives,” Riccitiello said about the necessity of making monetization an early priority. “It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favorite people in the world to fight with—they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.”

Riccitiello, a veteran of the industry who previously served as EA’s chief executive, added that he sees a growing divide between game developers who “massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product” and those who, as in other art forms, maintain distance from the money side of things for creativity’s sake.

“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour,” Riccitiello said. “Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.”

*GunnerQ checks Unity stock prices.* What I hear is not what I see.

Riccitiello’s known political affiliations are UC Berkeley and Barak Obama.

End segue

So, that’s the Mockingbird Mechanic, as I’ve coined it. You’ve probably noticed by now that there wasn’t much mention of the CIA in that. When I dug into the human angle of how the book succeeded so unnaturally well, I found the usual suspects instead… who also would have had the funding to push it through… and may or may not be the same thing as the CIA.

h ttps://www.bustle.com/articles/96857-harper-lees-first-editor-tay-hohoff-had-a-lot-to-do-with-creating-to-kill-a

By Emma Cueto, 13 July 2015

Tay Hohoff was in her 50s when she first began working with Harper Lee in 1957 at the now defunct publishing house J. B. Lippincott Company. Lee originally delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman, but Hohoff did not feel the book was ready for publication. Instead, she started pushing Lee to explore the story more, and over the next few years, the book changed form and instead shifted focus from Scout as an adult to Scout as a child, eventually becoming the classic work we all know and love, To Kill a Mockingbird. Which sort of means that Go Set a Watchman is less of a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird and more of a first draft.

Hohoff’s position as an editor at J.B. Lippincott was very unusual at the time for a woman. Which raised the question of who parachuted her into that position, because as you’ll see in a moment, she didn’t gain it on literary merit!

As you might expect from the fact that she was able to steer Harper Lee from writing a story about a disillusioned young woman to instead producing a child’s coming-of-age story, Hohoff was very hands on and influential in shaping her authors’ work.

Doubtful, because Hohoff’s own books were beyond unsuccessful:

Around the same time she was working with Lee on To Kill a Mockingbird, Hohoff was writing a book of her own, a biography of John Lovejoy Elliott, an early 20th century activist from New York. The book, titled A Ministry to Man, was published a year before Mockingbird was released. It has long since apparently fallen out of print, but used copies exist on Amazon.

Marxist, not activist. Knowing female nature, Hohoff’s willingness to publish a biography like that… as her only work of significance… there’s an emotional investment to be explored.

As I said, the biography was her “only work of significance“. She also published a memoir, Cats and Other People in 1973.

You can’t make this stuff up.

THIS is the editor of the amazingly successful TKAM?

A former associate who had just started at Lippencourt when Hohoff was editing To Kill a Mockingbird remembers that Hohoff and one of the other female editors at the publishing house were the first women she knew to keep their names after marriage. And apparently Hohoff had strong feelings that women should not change their names.

Feminist confirmed, as if we needed confirmation.

…she seems to have been fiercely protective of her author. Burlingame told the New York Times, “Tay really guarded Nelle [Harper Lee] like a junkyard dog. She was not going to allow any commercial pressures or anything else to put stress on her to publish anything that wouldn’t make Nelle proud or do justice to her.”

What kind of editor guards an author from writing a sequel to a history-altering smash hit? The kind of editor who knows that the first success was artificial and had accomplished its purpose.

h ttps://prabook.com/web/john.elliott/3763765

John Lovejoy Elliot was a 20th century Ethical Culture Leader and Social Worker. Mr. Elliott took part in a social reform during the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

He was Scots-Irish and Hohoff was Quaker, but…

Elliott became ((Felix Adler))’s assistant and protege in New York City. There he settled into a round of activities as teacher, lecturer, scholar, and organizer for the Society for Ethical Culture, activities that put him in daily contact with stimulating persons in the arts, society, and politics.

In New York, he also moved among the disadvantaged, observing firsthand the desperate social conditions of the poor, especially the immigrant poor, in their dilapidated and noisome neighborhoods.

That was Communist recruitment, not charity.

As was the case with many young idealists of that generation, his conscience would not permit him to live sheltered from hardships suffered by others, and in 1895, he founded one of the great early settlement houses, the Hudson Guild, in the Chelsea district on the West Side of Manhattan, then a predominantly Irish neighborhood.

The Guild’s programs began modestly enough with boys’ clubs and a kindergarten for the children of working mothers but soon branched out to include a print shop for training children as apprentices, a cooperative store, an employment bureau for unskilled women, and a 500-acre New Jersey farm worked by Guild families.

An early introduction of feminism. Child care for working women was what enabled women to work away from family. Then he got the kids busy printing pamphlets….

Though Elliott devoted himself to the Hudson Guild, he continued his duties at the Society for Ethical Culture, and in 1933, following Felix Adler’s death, he became its senior leader.

The Society for Ethical Culture was an early-stage institution of Talmudic Reform Judaism. One that, frankly, fell away because it de-emphasized the importance of ((Tribal)) loyalties.

John Lovejoy Elliott is known as one of the chief founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).

QED.

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Adler_(professor)

Felix Adler was born in Alzey, Rhenish Hesse, Grand Duchy of Hesse, Germany, the son of a rabbi, Samuel Adler, a leading figure in European Reform Judaism, and Henrietta Frankfurter. The family immigrated to the United States from Germany when Felix was six years old so that his father could accept the appointment as head rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in New York.

Adler attended Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School and graduated from Columbia University in 1870 with honors. He continued at Heidelberg University where he studied as part of his training to become a rabbi. He received a PhD from Heidelberg in 1873. While in Germany, he was strongly influenced by neo-Kantianism, especially the notions that one cannot prove or disprove the existence of a deity or immortality, and that morality can be established independently of theology.

So, a Sadducee not Pharisee.

When Adler returned to New York at the age of twenty-three, he was asked to give a sermon at Temple Emanu-El, where he was meant to follow in his father’s footsteps as rabbi of the congregation. His sermon, “The Judaism of the Future”, shocked the congregation, as he did not once mention God. Adler introduced his concept of Judaism as a universal religion of morality for all of humankind. The sermon was his first and last at Temple Emanu-El.

Pharisees and Sadducees don’t mix? Two thousand years later, nothing is different.

In 1874, after it had become clear that he would not become a rabbi, members of his father’s congregation helped Adler gain a teaching position at Cornell University as a nonresident Professor of Hebrew and Oriental literature. He was popular with his students, with whom he discussed his novel religious ideas while illuminating contemporary labor struggles and power politics. He was attacked as an atheist for his views, and in 1876 Cornell declined to accept the grant that had paid Adler’s salary.

Cornell is probably where he met Elliot, who was able to became his protégé thanks to Adler’s teaching of pan-racism.

In 1902 Adler was given the chair of political and social ethics at Columbia University, where he taught until his death in 1933. There he opposed the formation of a Zionist student club, considering it to be a “divisive force”.

There’s that pan-racism again.

Did you know that the Pulitzer Prize is awarded by Columbia University? Adler and Elliot both died long before 1961’s award to Harper Lee, but left behind multiple endowments and chairs at Columbia.

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Adler_(rabbi)

In 1856 Adler removed to United States at New York City, and at the beginning of 1857, he received an offer from Temple Emanu-El, New York to succeed Leo Merzbacher, recently deceased, as the head rabbi of the leading Reform congregation in the United States.

He pushed for the recognition of gender equality within Judaism. It was through his influence that the mechitza, which had segregated the women from the men in the ancient synagogue of Worms, was leveled, allowing the sexes to sit with each other during services.

If Samuel Adler founded Social Justice, his strong ties to Germany could explain much about Current Year politics.

Adler gave special attention to the improvement of the religious instruction of the young, both in the city and in the rural schools he supervised. He made it his aim to enhance the order, the solemnity, and the dignity of the public worship. He was instrumental in founding a number of new charitable institutions.

Bolshevist institutions, I say with the benefit of hindsight. The guy unleashed feminism even among his own people!

So, Samuel Adler founded an NYC-based institution of feminism and what came to be known as Social Justice, with personal ties to Columbia University; his son and Elliot carried it on; and the next generation saw Hohoff take an insecure young woman’s manuscript and twist it into a vehicle of Social Change.

But where did her contacts get the funding?

One of Sam Adler’s two sons was Felix, the creator of Society for Ethical Culture. One of Sam Adler’s two daughters, Sarah, married into Goldman-Sachs. Although 1960 was two generations after Samuel, his feminist organizations… such as the ACLU… endures to this day.

There’s the money.

Assuming it wasn’t bankrolled directly by the CIA, but of course I found no headlines regarding their wealth and its uses. We do know that the Civil Rights Act was a priority for the Deep State. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was that gangster Lyndon Johnson’s top priority. The CRA was, after all, a massive expansion of Federal power into the lives of ordinary people.

There is one last thread to go down. Returning to Harper Lee’s Wikipedia page:

Lee found an agent in November 1956; Maurice Crain would become a friend until his death decades later. The following month, at Michael Brown’s East 50th Street townhouse, friends gave Lee a gift of a year’s wages with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

Rather generous, that. It was Brown who made the introduction and he the profile of an OSS recruit. Per his wikipedia page,

In 1940, at the age of 19, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Plan II program at the University of Texas, Austin. After attending Harvard University and the University of Iowa, he defended his master’s thesis in English Literature, on the writer Wilkie Collins, at the University of Virginia. During World War II he enlisted in the Army Air Forces on April 6, 1944. He attended Officers’ Candidate School at Yale, where Glenn Miller played in the mess hall. He served with the 723rd Army Air Forces Base Unit as a Cryptographic Officer (0224). The bulk of his time was spent in the Caribbean where he wrote and performed songs when not deciphering phantom enemy submarine signals. Up to the time of his discharge on June 4, 1946, he used his name given at birth, Marion Martin Brown, II. He moved to New York City in 1947. Thereafter, he used the name Michael.

A smart boy like that, spent his subsequent life as a cabaret performer? With money to spare? Homo with a Deep State paycheck.

The Man Who Helped Make Harper Lee

h ttps://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/maurice-crain-bonner-mcmillion-harper-lee-to-kill-a-mockingbird-go-set-a-watchman/398483/

Maurice Crain was a literary agent, a Southerner, and a personal friend to the reclusive author. And, as I learned from his letters to my grandfather, he was a champion for writers in the 1960s whose small-town settings were falling out of fashion.

By Ari N. Schulman

Paywalls prevent me from learning more. It appears that Crain was trying to publish stories of Southern small-town Civil Rights injustices in order to break or at least humiliate the Solid South, as the southern U.S. was called back then. Brown was a talent scout and Harper Lee was one of several they recruited. It took several years… as always, Satan rarely gets to recruit humanity’s brightest… but Lee’s work was eventually judged worthy of discrediting Dixie. Perhaps they were running out of time?

Adler’s Columbia University Awarded the Pulitzer.

Crain tapped his publishing sources, briefly making TKAM more popular than the Bible in terms of publishing rate. Although I couldn’t find hard numbers.

Money came from either Goldman-Sachs or CIA.

Not sure where Alan Pakula fits in, but I’d guess he is Reform-flavor Jewish and was thus an associate of Adler’s Social Justice organization.

Tay Hohoff was their controlled asset, a politically reliable feminist.

Harper Lee took that Ticket, gave her final public appearance at the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and disappeared from history, knowing that to write again… or even talk too much… would reveal her as a fraud.