Lion In The Night

Lion In The Night is a new collection of short stories from Dr. Jack Armstrong. With original illustrations by Lena Rodriguez Gillett. #LionInTheNight

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

"The spirit briefly took on a definite form, the man's face transforming from an expression of anger to one of amazement, then profound fear."
-Jack Armstrong
#Angel
#LionInTheNight

[M. C. Armstrong @mcarmystrong]

We stayed on the land of a Scotsman who fought with our boys in Vietnam. Saw a black pine marten on the first night and a million visions in the days that followed: Faerie pools, sleeping giants, the misty munro manor of Jimmy Page, Loch Ness, black sheep, highland spires, wildhaired coos, and my father walking in the clouds above the flocks that dotted the Quirang Trail on the edge of the Isle of Skye.

The first picture is a proud Uncle Monkey (me) with his nephews on a battlefield where our family didn't fare so well. Four Armstrongs were taken prisoner during the rising of 1745 and the famous bloody battle of Culloden in 1746. Four of our boys fought with the Irish and the Jacobites to overthrow the Empire the American colonists finally defeated thirty years later.

That Empire was and is a wobbly thing, a conversation between a fool and a king. Our own Archibald Armstrong once served as a court jester, that sideways barb the crown used to allow. Our family came from "the debatable lands." That debate is still remarkably alive today. It was kinda wild to mess around in that site of diaspora. Good to debate and play games in the cars, fade to silence at the peaks, and talk dreams and visions in the morning looking out on the fog as it blew dragons all over the loch.

Wonderful to be together with family.

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@mcarmystrong @literary59451 @Judyth @Yorick28839188 @Rfk4POTUS @realTylerNixon @JoeBiden

[A.H. Literary @literary59451]

Thank you for bringing more light to Dorothy Kilgallen's work and memory, brilliant @mcarmystrong !

Researching it has been meaningful for me, and I am so excited to see what
@jes_chastain will do with this story. I will be there on opening night. ♥️🤍💙

[Tim Gardner Project @timgproject]

Ciphered Past Episode 67: Refusal of Silence with MC Armstrong https://t.co/lhHZ5aqUv5 via @YouTube @BowTiedPinto @mcarmystrong

[Tim Gardner Project @timgproject]

Refusal Of silence https://t.co/ghs4zuJhBQ via @YouTube

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@mcarmystrong @Rfk4POTUS Did Robert Caro really write that, @RogerJStoneJr ?

[M. C. Armstrong @mcarmystrong]

MURDER MOST FOUL: THE HOUSEWIVES UNDERGROUND

By M.C. Armstrong

New York just published a book about New York. Yes, a New Yorker wants to tell us a story about a New Yorker who just happens to be a gutsy woman and a bureaucrat. Boring, right? But wait. Don’t be so cynical, dear reader. That’s New York’s job. Could this particular author from the Empire City be more than just another hip cosmopolitan scold? Is Kaitlyn Tiffany more than just a broom of the system? Is it possible that New York is finally ready to tell the truth about the most consequential murder mystery in American history? Have you ever heard of Sylvia Meagher?

Sylvia Meagher (pronounced “Mar”) is an unknown legend. Meagher is a heroine of the unique subculture now often described as the JFK Assassination Research Community. As one of the most rigorous Warren Commission challengers in the first wave of this arguably counterculture scene, Meagher made her mark among the early “Warrenologists” by writing a book (Accessories After The Fact) and by crafting a Subject Index to the twenty-six volumes of The Warren Report. Why would the Warren Commission, appointed by Lyndon Johnson and staffed by men like Allen Dulles (the former Director of the CIA whom JFK fired), publish a gargantuan state document without a searchable index? This is one of the many fascinating questions Tiffany raises in her new book, The Housewives Underground.

Tiffany, operating as a public facing intellectual, maps a territory that lives at the crossroads of popular history, ethnography, and investigative journalism. Focal to her project are three JFK dissenters: Shirley Martin in Hominy, Oklahoma, Maggie Field in Los Angeles, California, and Meagher in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan. When Tiffany stays close to the primary documents that bring the struggle of these young and middle-aged women to life, her story is addictive and inspiring. These courageous citizens clip away at the mainstream media, poking holes in the official fictions of the state. Meagher, Martin, and Field risked their lives to criticize the men President Johnson appointed to rush an investigation of his predecessor’s murder in time for the election of 1964, and by doing so altered the shape of history.

“Today,” Tiffany writes, “it’s a fact of the historical record that the Warren Commission was not a fully independent and exhaustive investigation of the crime of the century.” Thank you for that, New York. But The Housewives Underground does more than just nibble at the Warren Report. Yes, Tiffany charts the course of beatnik women chipping away at the master narrative of old white men, but more interestingly she also documents the tension between this cohort of women and their allies among the charismatic guys in their subculture. The climax of this story is not Dallas or New York but, instead, New Orleans, site of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s failed attempt to speak on behalf of rigorous critics like Meagher in the only trial any man (or woman) ever brought against the alleged conspirators in the Kennedy assassination.

The lead-up to the showdown in the “The Big Easy” is compelling. Tiffany treats the Clay Shaw case with nuance and flair. But the strongest writing is in the beginning. In the early pages, Tiffany honors her activists by making them characters. She dignifies their irreverent pranksterish encounters with the federal government and the power elite, complicating her heroine’s position as an employee of the World Health Organization. This is not a simple story of a New Yorker worshipping the octopus of the government.

Referring to the televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by the self-proclaimed patriot, Jack Ruby, Meagher writes, “Why were they so anxious to punish the murderer of a President they had called a traitor and taught their children to hate?” Referring to a 1963 @Gallup poll that “showed only 29 percent of the population believed Oswald acted alone,” @kait_tiffany writes, “[t]he poll didn’t even ask about the possibility that he [Oswald] was innocent.” These are important questions and observations that still resonate today. After all, “the Feds” are finally reinvestigating the case here in 2026, an act of public inquisition and declassification that has been led by two women who just happen to be veterans, like JFK: former Director of National Intelligence, @TulsiGabbard and Congresswoman @realannapaulina of Florida.

Why, even today, do we see so many women at the forefront of the JFK conversation? Is the new frontier of the JFK assassination research community the collective contrarian voice of the women in this case? Am I mansplaining by simply asking such questions here on @X ?

Despite my gender and this platform, I’m going to dare a few more moments of critical thinking. In chronicling this high-stakes debate about murder and rigor, Tiffany sometimes fails to live up to her heroine’s high standard of inquiry. Tiffany’s book is smooth, breezy, and certain in some of the most interesting, debatable, and sophisticated places. For example, she writes “Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential commission was starting its work. Two of the seven men had been suggested by Robert Kennedy: former @CIA director Allen Dulles, who had been fired by John Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, and John J. McCloy, a longtime adviser to several presidents.” Fact-check time, America. Did RFK actually recommend Dulles to investigate Dallas?

Thank you for bringing this passage to my attention, @_JessConnell. @RobertKennedyJr? What do you think about this claim concerning your father? What do you think, @BowTiedPinto? You are the Sylvia of our day. Does this claim track?

I could be wrong, but from what I can gather, there is not one piece of evidence, in RFK’s words, that supports Tiffany’s claim. All the evidence corroborating this argument (two lines) comes from “Lyin’ Lyndon,” a man who hated RFK and wished him dead, according to not just many nutbar brainworm scholars from the contemporary JFK assassination research community, but esteemed Establishment LBJ historians, too. Here is Robert Caro:

“John Connally, who during the long days of conversation with this author was willing to answer almost any question put to him, no matter how delicate the topic, wouldn’t answer when asked what Johnson said about Robert Kennedy. When the author pressed him, he finally said flatly: ‘I am not going to tell you what he said about him.’ During the months after the convention, when Johnson was closeted alone back in Texas with an old ally, he would sometimes be asked about Robert Kennedy. He would reply with a gesture. Raising his big right hand, he would draw the side of it across the neck in a slowing, slitting movement. Sometimes that gesture would be his only reply; sometimes, as during a meeting with Ed Clark in Austin, he would say, as his hand moved across his neck, ‘I’ll cut his throat if it’s the last thing I do.’”

Unsettling disclosures like this passage from Caro do not mean that Tiffany is wrong when she writes that RFK wanted Allen Dulles to investigate JFK’s murder. And maybe Dorothy Kilgallen, the famous New York journalist who was herself writing about the assassination at the time of her untimely death, did simply die of “alcoholism,” as Tiffany writes, and maybe the disappearance of @DorothyKil11884's JFK manuscript and the death of her friend who held the other draft (which also disappeared) is just another bizarre JFK coincidence. But Tiffany doesn’t honor Kilgallen’s story with these complicating details.

Why?

Why reveal that her heroine once believed that the “ultimate truth” in the JFK case may have been that Lyndon Johnson was behind the plot, but then never dignify her heroine by revealing the credible debates beneath core claims like the one Lyndon Johnson made about RFK's urging the appointment of Dulles?

The final third of Tiffany’s book sometimes reads like a rushed book report, her publisher perhaps afraid that this timeless case is about to lose its timeliness. But even in those streamlined spaces, the book moves and informs and continues to dare penetrating questions right up until the end.

Towards the memoirish conclusion, where Tiffany travels to Dallas for the first time, she writes, “If the tragedies of the 1960s were not completely resolved, they were in the past. Their urgency was fading. They were subjects for novelists.” And yet. Tiffany did not write a novel. Instead, she wrote a fascinating work of history. Will her fellow New Yorkers properly savor that irony?

@MaryHaverstick @Andria816 @mona2thebeach @emilyjashinsky @CipheredPast @TheOliverStone @SolvingJfk @leytedriver @ErinBurnett @TSBD1963 @jimmydie1963 @FourDiedTrying @MonikaWiesak @nytimes
#JFK #TheHousewivesUnderground

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@BoardJfk

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@mcarmystrong @JohnKiriakou @Rfk4POTUS @TruthSerum2016 @TexasMonthly

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@Rfk4POTUS @leytedriver @CipheredPast T'was a murder most foul...

https://t.co/t0hg9ifLma

[Heal the Divide (#RFKJr Fan Page) @Rfk4POTUS]

They lied to us about COVID. They lied to us about Russiagate, the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, and yes, they also lied to us about the assassination of RFK Jr's uncle, JFK. Time for the systemic lying to stop.
#MurderMostFoul #TellTheTruth #Kennedy24
https://t.co/41Ck6zeLvT

[M. C. Armstrong @mcarmystrong]

I like your answer. There's no reason to tie your pride to Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, or Clinton. We shouldn't be bullied into loving politicians more than our family members or the people we view as true leaders. For what it's worth, I'm proud of you and the way you stood your ground today, during the ongoing genocide, and while working for @BernieSanders.

I was struggling with this question myself today. So I wrote a letter to America. Mock it if you want, my fellow Americans, but this is how I feel about Uncle Sam.

Dear America,

Thank you for your eagle. Thank you for your fox. Thank you for your turtle, your hawk, your raven, and your dove. Thank you for all the peaches, beaches, creams, bison, and salmon. Thank you for all the invisible people who used to pick fruit in my hometown orchards back when we harvested more apples than any other county in the country. I loved that blooming village that went back and forth more than seventy times in the Civil War. Was our rip our tether? Is it still the thing that brings us together?

Thank you for your moonwalkers, your code talkers, your misfits, your inventors, your sailors, your cowgirls, your pranksters, your planters, your pundits, your punks, your grunts, your gamers, your gadflies, and your gurus. Thank you for your outlets and inlets. Thank you for your lovers, your haters, and the ghosts of your peacemakers. Thank for all my Palestinian neighbors so I might know that these invisible under-the-gun freedom fighters are not just data points or talking points but real human beings with names like Maher, Naima, Faris, and Monera. Thank you for the barbaric yawps of scribes like Melville, Whitman, Baldwin, Wolfe, Hughes, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kesey, McCarthy, DeLillo, Whitehead, Packer, Hayes, Lahiri, Giovanni, and Hamid and the echo of their strange cries in the songs of smiths like Cash, Cline, Baez, Dylan, the Dead, Reed, Nelson, Hendrix, Mitchell, Petty, Young, and Springsteen. Thank you for your flag wavers and flag burners. Thank you for making space in this place for all the skirted and red-faced Scots who got sick of those imperial constipated Brits back in 1776. Thank you for giving me a home here in Greensboro, poltergeist battleground of the triumphant revolutionary retreater, Nathaniel Greene. Can a loss be a win in our strange scheme?

Thank you for your teachers and healers, America. Thank you for a wild JFK Democrat for a mama and a wise Goldwater Republican for a papa. Thank you for that purple DNA, my quietly heroic brother (@AarmstrongDuke) , and my angelic Buddha of a sister. Thank you for bravehearted @Andria816, eager Ripple, the First Amendment, the Rocky Mountains, the Shenandoah River, and that church in the wild I call my musical crew (@VivaLaMuerteNC ).

Happy birthday, America. I still love you!

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@mcarmystrong @Rfk4POTUS @bennyjohnson @GavinNewsom Yes

[M. C. Armstrong @mcarmystrong]

@RepLuna Who was Jack Ruby?
@CipheredPast
#JFK #DeepPolitics

https://t.co/GIkx47udeL

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@michaelpollan Fascinating.
@AarmstrongDuke

[M. C. Armstrong @mcarmystrong]

@JohnFKtweets @VivaLaMuerteNC Yessir. That's me. This is my band, sans bass and drums, from tonight's gig.

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@mcarmystrong @Rfk4POTUS @BernieSanders @realDonaldTrump Thinking is revolutionary when the people have brainwashed into outsourcing memory and analysis to state-supported AI tech.

https://t.co/J12mtTPKWT

[John McDonald☮️ @JohnMcDonald15]

At a certain stage, thinking in itself is seen as subversive, and, in fact, it is.

[Lion In The Night @LionInTheNight1]

@Rfk4POTUS @CipheredPast @mcarmystrong 💯

[Andrew Armstrong @AarmstrongDuke]

Particularly this supplemental figure showing the utility of LLM's checking each other to reduce hallucinations:

[Heal the Divide (#RFKJr Fan Page) @Rfk4POTUS]

Dear @elonmusk,

You may or may not agree with CovertAction Magazine on issue x, y, or z. Maybe you want America to invade Cuba. Maybe you want to continue the JFK coverup. But if you want peace, radical transparency, and a challenge to the mainstream media, will you please consider donating to CovertAction Press?

You blew the whistle on Twitter and made it X, the place/space where the truth could be told about COVID, Russiagate, Julian Assange and you. How do we build that critical mass that will finally compel the government and mainstream media establishment to acknowledge the truth in other stories like the JFK assassination? A new and powerful independent media ecosystem. That’s why Jeremy Kuzmarov and @mcarmystrong are launching CovertAction Press. Would you be so kind as to share this venture with your community and inquire as to whether some folks might be willing to support CAP's efforts?

https://t.co/MtwCCagS6B

CovertAction Press will not serve the half-truths or tribalized narratives of one political party or the other. CAP will be a radically disaffiliated press responsive to an audience drawn to courageous dissent, innovative art, uncontrolled opposition, and the proposition that the American book market is captured by the binary thinking of partisan politics and needs liberation pronto. The fastest growing political and religious category (unaffiliated) is our target audience. We seek to heal the divide by writing for this surging populist demographic.

Practically speaking, CovertAction Press proposes the publication of ten books between 2027-2032. With brave speech as our brand, these books, as both fiction, non-fiction, and collections would embody that focus. Successful examples of this brand would be @Snowden's Permanent Record, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and @sethharpesq ’s recent The Fort Bragg Cartel.

More specifically, CAP wants to build off the legacy of Philip Agee by publishing books that expose covert operations and present critical analysis on U.S. militarism and imperialism. That would include firsthand memoirs of soldiers and/or covert operators who offer critical perspectives on their careers or are whistleblowers. Perhaps you yourself might submit a manuscript one day?

The first two books we will publish, A People’s History of the CIA and Murder Most Foul, will fulfill this commitment to fearless truth-telling and superb storytelling. Murder Most Foul is an investigative memoir that studies the most recently declassified JFK files and Lyndon Johnson’s role in the JFK assassination. A People’s History of the CIA democratizes the story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s impact on the world, drawing on the stories of whistleblowers like @JohnKiriakou, torture victims like @MohamedouOuld, and journalists who were surveilled by the agency, like @DorothyKil11884 and Gary Webb. Both books will be released in October of 2027.

https://t.co/MtwCCagS6B

Many thanks for supporting the work of CovertAction Magazine by buying Twitter and turning it into @X. Please consider sharing this campaign to support and evolve independent media.

Pax,

Heal the Divide
CC: @TulsiGabbard @RobertKennedyJr @joekent16jan19 @TuckerCarlson @NicoleShanahan @TheOliverStone

MMF photo by @Andria816
#JFK #TruthOverTribe

[Four Died Trying — Feature Documentary Series @FourDiedTrying]

Matt makes some interesting points here. Indeed, President Kennedy did occasionally exercise effective control, and they feared he would do more—so he had to go. And certainly the Vietnam War changed this country; we are still living with the aftermath of it. The connection with the Dead and counterculture is interesting to contemplate...