BY: MICHAEL H. BROWN

Perhaps not in our lifetimes has there been an election for President like the current one, and perhaps never before has America reached such a level of danger.

No matter which way the election goes, there is bound to be turbulence — and perhaps an unprecedented level of it. I believe the election of one candidate will tend to bring the social-uprising aspect of purification while the other will bring more of the natural events.

How’s that for wild presentiment?

But anyway, buckle your seat belts. Sit back.

Pray.

Are there deep issues with both candidates? Even evil, or at least, in one case, the occult (my focus this time)? How will America react? What does it all portend for the future?

I virtually never discuss politicians by name (the divisive, detracting, and harsh elements of that all are not becoming of our faith), but there are certain things, including spiritual aspects, that I will discuss in these special reports.

I’m no political expert, but naturally, like so many others, alarms are ringing (big-time).

I’ll discuss both major candidates but have to admit that much of this deals with Hillary Clinton, with whom I had a brief but too-close encounter years ago, a brush that I once reported in a secular book for Harper and Row and one that left me, well, startled.

I have no intention of being a “political” commentator here, a “pundit,” in the overused expression; just a reporter. I’m not a promoter of any candidate. But I will start out, to be even about it, by mentioning Mr. Trump (amazing candidate for sure, in the most mesmerizing primary of our lifetimes).

Are there problems with him?

There are certain negative facts we all know, and some many don’t.

It’s hard to emphasize how many times, at various apparitions — Medjugorje, Kibeho, San Nicolas: just about all of them — Mary sways us from the type of worldliness Mr. Trump embodies. The Blessed Mother constantly warns about just such materialism.

I recall a near-death episode in which a fellow named Don Brubaker found himself plunging in a dark tunnel in the presence of Satan, who told him he could avoid all pain and anguish and have anything he liked if he would just follow him. “Visions of wealth appeared before my eyes,” said Don, “like a three-dimensional movie. Diamonds, money, cars, gold, beautiful women, everything. I was overwhelmed by the vision. I could almost touch it, it seemed so real.”

At Medjugorje, the devil appeared as an extremely handsome man and offered the seer “happiness in life and love” if she would follow him (instead of the Blessed Mother).

But a good side? Perhaps a great one, for all we know. For all the pomp and hype, how can we know the bottom of Donald Trump’s heart? Trump certainly connects with the average person. His family seems loyal and tight. He is not a member of the secret clubs like Bohemia Grove. And he has more of an affinity for Christians than many do, certainly more than many current prominent Democrats (see: abortion).

One goes back and forth with perceptions. There is good and bad in us all. I’m trying to be objective.

On the other side is Mrs. Clinton, who has many of the same characteristics as Mr. Trump; added to that are the truly disturbing and alarming problems that surfaced with her husband, and the fact that she is possibly the strongest supporter of abortion ever to run for this office (though President Obama, as a proponent, while in the state legislature, of partial-birth abortion, is difficult to exceed); a dilemma there is. It’s impossible to get past abortion.

I won’t judge them as people. I don’t know what God knows. I don’t know the truth of many allegations. I don’t know what’s in the Clintons’ hearts. And I don’t know the burdens and baggage they were born with. Both work exceptionally hard and have obvious talents. Hillary Clinton, for all the denunciations, was a proficient secretary of state. The e-mail server issue significantly tarnishes her job. But she proved to be more than up to the job itself. Her competence is not in question. One can get into the “enabling” of her husband when it came to other women, and the way she supposedly sought to quiet those women (if reports are true). One can also delve into the disquieting notion that Mr. Clinton, for all his talents, might return to Washington. He paid $850,000 as a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assault and recently it was learned that he has taken at least twenty-six trips abroad on a private luxury jet owned by a billionaire who has done prison time for sex with and trafficking underage women. It’s hard to even write this.

I’m not going to judge her but I am going to relate a personal experience with her that I still found disturbing and also found perplexing and still do.

 

I “met” former Secretary Clinton on the phone in 1986. At the time, I was working on a book called The Toxic Cloud about harmful contaminants that are being inserted into the air we breathe. I’m not speaking about global warming and the “greenhouse effect” (carbon emissions). I’m speaking of the dioxins, pesticides, and solvents — chlorinated compounds — that you can’t see or taste — and aren’t even tested for in most cases. You find them in many places with pockets of high cancer (see Louisiana, Texas, and New Jersey).

In one Texas location, cows had died mysteriously and scientists testing the environment told me they’d found compounds so complex they had never seen them before. They didn’t know what they were!

This is in a region of tremendous petrochemical production as well as massive refineries (so large they create their own little local weather patterns, called the “heat-island” effect).

Not to far north of Texas is another major transgressor: the state of Arkansas.

Enter the Clintons.

While researching my book as a secular journalist, I conducted a little investigation into a company located in El Dorado. There, an incinerator was taking in PCBs and burning them. It wanted to increase its rate of incineration to 5,210 pounds an hour.

Just know this: when you burn PCBs, you can not only get dioxin coming out the stack, but a nearly equally toxic compound called furans. Now bear with me one more moment.

The people, some of whom lived within a couple thousand feet of the incinerator, were in an uproar. It was so hot and heavy that Vice President George Bush, swinging through the state on a fund-raiser, was drawn into the fray. The prominent and poor alike were protesting — filling auditoriums, marching in the streets. The incinerator was owned by a company called ENSCO (for Environmental Systems Company).

These are wastes that the government doesn’t even like to burn far out at sea!

A local attorney who opposed it, John H. Vestal, noted that the incinerator was said to burn more PCBs than any other in the country.

At public hearings, several doctors fretted about what they perceived (I can’t prove of any of this) as elevated levels of cancer, respiratory problems, and nasal deformities. Even the mayor and a local judge spoke in opposition to it.

There was a school nearby.

But the company had the state on its side — the state of Arkansas — and so skeptical were citizens of their own government, of the governor and his agents, that they were willing to pool their own money to study the risk (rather than let the state conduct it).

Some of their cynicism probably came from the fact that the governor’s wife — a woman I’d never heard of before, named Hillary Rodham — worked for a law firm that represented ENSCO. Vestal told me that the very desk in Governor Bill Clinton’s office (at the time, I had never heard of him either) had been loaned by a firm owned by the wife of the incinerator company’s chief executive.

Kids were at risk. And yet political levers were being pulled and favors granted, it seemed.

When I asked Vestal, the lawyer, how I could document his assertion that Clinton’s antique desk — the desk he used as governor! — was on loan from the company (or an affiliate), he said, “Why don’t you just call the governor?”

I thought he was joking. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“I have his private number,” Vestal replied — and gave it to me: the number for the private quarters at the Arkansas gubernatorial mansion.

It was a Friday, if I remember correctly. I called. The phone rang just a couple times and a woman answered. I assumed it was a secretary or the maid: some kind of an assistant. I asked for the governor. I can remember the episode like it was last year. “Who’s this?” the woman who answered asked very bluntly.

“Well,” I replied, “who’s this?”

“My name is Hillary Clinton,” said the less than cordial voice. “His wife. He’s not home.”

“Well, that’s okay,” I said. “I have some questions for you too.” Like I said, her firm represented ENSCO.

I asked Hillary if it were true that the owner of ENSCO, Melvyn Bell, was a friend. She proceeded to describe him to me as “a friend, sure — he just gave $8 million to our engineering school at the university on Saturday, but he’s somebody who’s a friend — that’s right. Wouldn’t he be your friend?”

It’s hard to convey the tone, which dripped with disdain, but in short it was a nasty, unpleasant exchange. She won. She caught me off guard with her attitude. When we hung up, I stood up, held the receiver, and actually stared at it — smiling with astonishment at her brazenness. I also remember, clear as a bell, saying to myself, “That’s the most arrogant person I’ve ever spoken with.” Excuse me for that. It is what I muttered to myself. I was taken aback — and I lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not exactly known for shrinking violets.

But that’s not the whole story. Never mind her harsh demeanor. Never mind that those residents and kids may have been at risk from the incinerator.

What I remember most was the incredible feeling that came upon me — and my entire apartment — after hanging up.

I was new to the Holy Spirit (at least in an active sense; my metanoia was underway and had started just a couple years before), but I immediately felt an enormous oppression, as if the air in my apartment was preternaturally thick, oppressive, and fuliginous: a descent of darkness. I could feel it. It wasn’t just to be brushed off. Even at the time, it felt,  I recall thinking, like a curse. Despite my “newness” to Christian discernment, I immediately felt it was a “spirit of witchcraft.”

And as I sit here now, thirty years later, I still don’t know the origin of that oppression.

My concerns are not on politics but on the “spirituality” — and especially any occultism — that may move into the Oval Office (unless this was just some passing phase for Hillary).

I seriously doubt that Mrs. Clinton took the time to “curse” me, or even would have known how to level one. Was it just something that automatically came from her or her environment?

This I can say: the sensation pervaded my apartment for a good two hours. I sat down and prayed it away from me.

Finally, it left, but the Clintons sure didn’t. Soon after I was astonished to see the Democratic Party choose Bill to give the keynote at their convention! — a speech that was the ignition for his national recognition. How could they allow someone who had ignored reports even of cancer among kids in El Dorado to speak for the party? I wondered.

Again, excuse my bluntness. I don’t doubt there is good in everyone. I don’t doubt there is goodness in them. We are told to see Christ in everyone; when we look, we can usually find Him. Sometimes it is harder than at other times.

You can imagine how it was to later see them ascend to far greater heights — and now, she is a top contender for the Presidency.

My question decades later remains: Why did I have the reaction I did? Where did the darkness originate?

I don’t know. Maybe it was my imagination. If so, I had never imagined something like that before and haven’t since, at least that I’m aware of. It was an oppression.

Has Hillary dabbled with the occult?

I don’t know that either.

I do know that when she was First Lady, Mrs. Clinton famously invited some New Agers to Camp David and the White House and that one was Marianne Williamson — the deeply occult author who promotes a “course in miracles.” (Father Benedict Groeschel, who knew Williamson’s mentor and ministered to her on her deathbed, described that mentor’s death as the “blackest” thing he’d ever experienced; prayer need there.)

Another White House guest (or “adviser,” as it was worded) was Jean Houston — co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, which was described as a group that studies the psychic experience and altered and expanded consciousness, according to a news network.

Houston has been portrayed as “an influential adviser” who urged Mrs. Clinton to write her book, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, and in the process “virtually moved into the White House” for days at a time to help with revisions, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

At one point, according to reports, Mrs. Clinton was advised by one of her guests on something that sounds like channeling (she framed it as more a psychological tool). According to legendary reporter Bob Woodward (the source for the Sun-Times article), the First Lady “held imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi as a therapeutic release.” He further noted, in a book called The Choice, that “The first lady declined a personal adviser’s suggestion that she address Jesus Christ, however, because it would be ‘too personal.'” It reminds us a bit of the seances Abraham Lincoln’s wife held while he was in office.

Not a good thing.

Not something that brings good “luck.”

There is a recent video floating around YouTube from a fellow who knew the Clintons back in Arkansas and claims (please underscore the verb “claims”) that Hillary used to fly to California to participate in a wicca-like organization (wicca is the religion of witchcraft).

I certainly hope none of that is true, and have seen not a shred of concrete evidence for that — though, to be blunt, it would go a long way in explaining the feeling I had back in that Manhattan apartment.

If she ever was involved, I wonder if it was just a phase — a lark, a psychological exercise, a short flirtation in search of spirituality; an extreme of feminism (which can spring from witchcraft).

Hillary says she is a believing Christian and talks about being a practicing Methodist and quotes the Bible, which she says she often reads. I’ll take her at her word. Many of us go off the right path in our youths. I certainly did. Many searching for spirituality initially find it in the wrong places.

But I fear that the spirit lives. She is a candidate who backs abortion like no other ever has. Abortion, as far as I’m concerned, has a connection to witchcraft. It’s a blood ritual (unbeknownst even to most abortionists). Many who pray at clinics have felt the spirit. Maybe that’s what I felt. She supports Planned Parenthood like no other politician on the national stage. She has sung the praises of its founder, Margaret Sanger (a Rosicrucian and editor of a newspaper called Woman Rebel, the motto of which was “No gods, No masters”). Quite the libber, Sanger urged women to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell” attitude. Unknowingly controlled by what famed occultist Aleister Crowley called the “secret chiefs,” Sanger was trying, in essence, to involve an entire society in an occult ritual of Saturnalia. If Spiritualism was the demon of magic, this was the demon of lust. The sexual revolution was on its way (made possible by contraception) and its fruit, abortion, was tantamount to the culminating ritual of witchcraft: as I said, blood sacrifice.

For centuries witches have promoted just what Sanger was promoting: free extramarital sex and the sacrifice of innocents.

Now this too is being done on a massive scale — by Planned Parenthood (America’s largest abortion-provider, and apparently also a supplier of baby parts, bringing us full circle back to Nazism).

In 2009, Clinton proudly accepted Planned Parenthood�s �highest honor,� the coveted Sanger Award, saying that she was �in awe of� Sanger.

Does that disturb one? Could that create a cloud, an oppression?

Of course it could.

The occult spirit engendered by Spiritualism and nurtured by the secret cults is now integrating itself in society’s mainstream under the disguise of liberated sex and feminism.

Sanger was the Marx of sexuality. She described herself (in My Fight For Birth Control) as part of a “secret society” of “agnostics and atheists” who were waiting for the “coming revolution.”

Maybe what I felt sprung from the future First Lady’s affinity for people like that.

Maybe either would be a great president, Clinton or Trump. Either might bring a new level of cohesion and leadership and competence. Who knows. I hope so. People change. One can hope. At least with Trump, there is no sense of occultism. I will continue to try and report on them objectively. Hate and judgment have no place. I pray and love and hope the best (spiritually, as far as eternity) for both. Perhaps they will be there above when the time comes and end up lending me a hand when we seek to climb out of purgatory.

For now, I sense a turning point for these United States, and whatever the decision, real danger.