HellwQrld Presents: "Who Killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald" Episode #1
"Who Killed JFK" is sweeping the nation. Mike and Haley push back on the conspiracy theories Rob Reiner is peddling and talk about some obvious mistakes the podcast made, how Soledad O'Brien is letting Rob say whatever he wants, and we go over what really happened leading up to Ruby shooting Oswald. Plus we explain some of the case against Oswald which is something Rob's never going to do. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Poker and Politics, and welcome to the first episode of the Who Killed JFK?
It was Lee Harvey Oswald!
It was Oswald podcast.
This is a response podcast to the Soledad O'Brien and Rob Reiner podcast, quote, Who Killed JFK?
We're answering it for them.
We're going to tell them who did it because it was Oswald.
And my guest on this magical adventure is Arizona right watch, a.k.a.
Haley.
It's me.
It's me.
I'm here.
I'm not an expert.
I'm very similar to Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien in this situation.
In the fact that I'm actually not an expert on the JFK assassination and don't pretend to be.
The thing is, is that, like, I think the idea of being a quote-unquote expert in this is weird, because it's mostly just reading the same books, doing the same research.
And Rob Reiner, basically, in his explanation for why he was an expert, is mostly, I went to Daily Plaza and I talked to some people.
And that was really about it.
How dare you?
He also listened to a comedian.
Oh, yes.
We'll get into Rob Reiner's crippling pildom in a little bit, yes.
But Rob Reiner basically said that he has been looking at this for a long time, and that makes him an expert.
And Soledad O'Brien basically explains this podcast as being one day Rob Reiner just called her up and said, hey, I want to talk about the Kennedy assassination.
Let's do a pod.
And she was like, I'm in.
Say no more.
This sounds like the greatest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
It sounds like you're an expert.
It sounds like you're an expert.
How could I not believe you when it comes to what happened with JFK?
I'm in.
I'm in yesterday.
I'm so bought into this.
So, Soledad O'Brien Lends her journalistic credibility to this thing.
And she even states at one point that she's like, I'm a journalist, but here Rob is the expert.
So I'm going to let him take the wheel.
Now I will push back when I need to.
And that's like the last time you hear from her.
She's it's kind of like disappears.
She disappears after that.
She stops talking.
She stops asking questions.
She's just like, go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, just go, Rob.
The floor is yours.
My journalism is completed now.
I've established your bona fides as an expert in the Kennedy assassination.
At one point, she does bring up the fact that her mother had to flee Cuba due to Castro's revolution.
But really, that's about it.
She's really hands off on this whole thing.
She's basically just sort of like, the Kennedy assassination is wild.
And now here's Rob Reiner.
And his expertise in the Kennedy assassination is that he's famous.
He's old.
And so he was a teenager when Kennedy got murdered.
And he went to Daly Plaza and talked to some people.
And that's about it.
So Rob.
You remember throw mama from a train?
This makes him an expert.
He did Spinal Tap.
Oh, my God.
You guys like Sleepless in Seattle, right?
That makes you a JFK expert.
Right.
And the thing is, is that, again, I really think that me and Rob probably have the same level of knowledge about this stuff.
Really?
I don't.
Because I did the same thing he did.
I got pilled.
I went deep into this rabbit hole.
I bought into it.
I didn't have Morton Saul doing a set after my set at a comedy club.
And I didn't walk in on Morton Saul screaming about the CIA murdering Kennedy.
He's ruining his career.
And we're ruining his career.
Right before this, we looked up Mort Sahl, and it was basically just like, Mort Sahl wouldn't shut up about the Kennedy assassination, so people would just stop booking him.
He went broke.
Yeah, he basically went broke.
The gist of it was that he would just not do his set.
He would just go on stage and be like, hey everybody, how's it doing?
By the way, the CIA killed Kennedy and the Warren Commission's a bunch of lies.
So, anyways, I just flew in and boy are my alarms tired!
By the way, Oswald didn't do it.
It was just this thing.
And apparently, after one of his comedic outings, Rob Reiner walked in, saw Mort and Saul do this, and then was just like, oh man, that guy's right.
He's right about everything.
The Warren Commission's all lies!
And just, that was it.
Rob was just, 19-year-old Rob Reiner, hopelessly pilled.
And he's just carried that pildom inside him for the rest of his life.
Whereas 19-year-old Mike Raines was hopelessly pilled.
And then one day I just sort of said, you know, this is dumb.
This is just dumb.
I've run up the grass, you know, a thousand times and I've never seen a shooter.
I'm starting to ask some questions.
I'm starting to think that maybe I was wrong.
And that's kind of the difference between me and Rob Reiner, was that he never got off the train and I did.
And that's really it.
And again, I was going to, I was going to hate listen to this podcast series.
Well, I originally, I was going to listen to it.
And then after the first episode, I realized what it was.
I started to hate listening to it.
And then I was just going to be like, you know, maybe I'll throw this into the pod.
Maybe I'll just like, say some things, make some jokes, maybe make Ellen Haley roll her eyes at me.
But then Soledad O'Brien was just kept posting on Twitter about how this is the hottest podcast in America.
Everyone's listening to it.
It's like the top three podcasts right now going.
There's a podcast I don't even know the name of that I don't care about, but the Kelsey Brothers podcast is number two.
So it's like the power of the Swifties and the NFL is barely holding back Kennedy murder from second place.
So I just got to a point where I'm like, Everybody's talking about this.
Apparently a lot of people are listening to this.
There needs to be a rebuttal, and my tiny little soapbox will be an attempt at that rebuttal.
I am going to do what pushback I can, and for the 0.00001% of people that listen to them and listen to me, you're actually going to hear the other side of this thing, which I think is important because Rob Reiner, in one of the biggest lies ever told, was just
as, I'm going to put all the facts out there for people to hear
it.
And no, Rob, you're not. You're not listing all the facts.
You're just listing the conspiracy bias view of this thing.
So, yeah.
The media has told me he solved it.
All right.
Yes.
Yes.
There's a bunch of media hype about that.
Rob Reiner's going to name the people who killed Kennedy in this series, which like, I can't wait.
60 years since the assassination.
Now Rob Reiner has solved it.
Like, did he though?
Did he?
Did he do that?
Oh, he locked it down.
Totally solved it.
So He decides to do this thing where he's like, we're going to start at the end of the story, which it's not the end of the story.
He's like, we're going to start at the end of the story, which is when Ruby killed Oswald.
And I'm like, I think the end of the story is kind of more along the House Select Committee on Assassinations or the Warren Commission or any of the...
Like the story doesn't end of the Kennedy assassination.
It's an ongoing story.
It's never ending because people like you are making podcasts about it.
You see the, I mean, the JFK cult people are at Dealey Plaza yesterday or today, yesterday.
48 people are still hanging out in Dealey Plaza.
This is, this is American history.
Yeah.
It's forever.
Yeah.
So.
Rob has did this thing and he opens it by saying that we're starting at the end, which is the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
And what's weird is that he just sort of gives a very superficial view of what happened, but he basically makes that enough.
And the gist of it is he's like, Jack Ruby was mobbed up and he killed Oswald.
Because his mob overlords gave him the edict to silence Oswald.
And he might be digging into that more later on in the pod, because I listened to the first two episodes, and I decided to do this episodically, the review of it.
And thank God I listened to episode two, because if I listened to episode one only, This pod we're doing right now would be two hours long.
And then when I listened to episode two, I'd be like, everything I wanted to say about episode two was covered in my review of episode one.
So episode two is going to be like sort of like, Rob's just lying more.
Catch you all later.
Bye.
It's been a very, a very unappealing episode two to this pod.
But basically what happens is he just says that Oswald was murdered by Ruby because Ruby was mobbed up and his claim that he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of having to come to Dallas for the trial of Oswald was a lie.
And he then brings up the fact that Oswald said, quote, I'm just a patsy, which he's like, that's proof that Oswald was going to rat out the people who did him wrong at the trial.
And it's like, Rob, um, Lee Harvey Oswald is in front of a live microphone addressing the nation.
He could burn the people that set him up right then, right there.
He didn't have to wait for the trial.
Like, the reporter sticks a microphone in his mouth and is like, Mr. Oswald, what do you have to say?
And he's like, my case agent's name is Bob Smith.
He works at the CIA office in New Orleans.
He put me up to this.
Jim Brown, he's another CIA operative.
He got me the money for the gun.
This lady, Stacey, she got me the job at the Book Depository.
Oswald could have started burning people the moment they put a mic in front of him.
He didn't have to wait for the trial to start burning people.
Which, this brings me to my- You're such an honorable guy!
Oswald's like, I will say everything I need to say at trial.
I'll wait until I put my hand to God and testify before the Lord before I snitch.
Yes!
I will not snitch until I take the witness stand.
This makes it incredibly convenient for the people who wish to kill me before I stay in trial.
However, this is my oath.
These are my ethics.
I will abide by them.
It's got a really strict line.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the Ned Stark of assassins, a man with a moral code so strong that he is just going to ride that thing out no matter what happens to him.
Oh, honorable Lee.
Truly the greatest of all of all presidential assassins.
Because John Wilkes Booth, total scumbag.
He would have ratted you out in a heartbeat.
That guy, that guy sucked.
Leon Czolgosz, terrible human being.
And I'm not even going to name the guy who killed Garfield because that guy just wanted fame and screw him.
He ain't getting no fame from me because no one knows his name.
So but anyways, so The idea that the CIA or the people that were involved in this shooting wouldn't have just killed Oswald on sight to make sure he didn't snitch is ridiculous.
The Dallas police, when they arrested Oswald, the cops said that Oswald drew on them, that Oswald was literally reaching for his gun as they were subduing him in the Texas theater.
And it's like, and I don't know about you, but nowadays police, if someone draws on them, that person's dead.
They just kill you if you try to draw on them.
So the Dallas police showed unremarkable restraint in subduing the presidential assassin that tried to draw a gun on them.
We have that.
And oh yeah, I saw that O'Brien also brings up that the two, both of them are very stringent about the fact that Oswald was quote unquote suspected of killing the president.
It's, me and Haley brought this up about our trip to Dealey Plaza, about how people aggressively have scratched the granite around the word allegedly on the sign on the Texas School Book Depository.
It was Reiner himself.
Yeah, Rob Reiner himself got out his pocket knife and put in a few scratches on that thing.
And he's just like, allegedly, allegedly Mort Sahl told me this was a pack of lies.
Mr. Reiner, Mr. Reiner, please calm down.
Please calm down.
Stop defacing the property, sir.
Stop defacing our property, Mr. Reiner.
We know you made misery and it was good, but chill out.
That just reminded me of a quote from during Garbage's first album tour.
At one point, they started defacing a wall.
They were just writing crap on it.
And the people at the bar gave them more beer as they were scribbling whatever gibberish.
And that was like Shirley's reaction was, oh wow, when you're famous,
instead of getting arrested for graffiti, you get more beer.
This is, being famous is awesome.
You get to deface people's, the walls of people's bars.
And they're like- They gave Rob a sharper knife.
Yeah, they just, they're like, Mr. Reiner, the exacto knife you're using
on the mural is not sharp enough.
Please take this one.
We've sharpened it far better.
It will cut into the granite around the world allegedly far swifter.
We are here for you, Mr. Reiner.
We will do whatever we can to make you happy.
The fact that the conspiracy let Oswald live to the point where he could get in front of a live microphone is kind of a bad spot for the conspiracy.
I think they would have killed him quicker to make sure he didn't talk.
But again, as we've already stated, he had the Ned Stark loyalty oath and was just going to wait till the trial before he ratted anybody out.
So Ruby kills him.
Now again, Rob Reiner just says to us, Ruby was mobbed up and Ruby killed him and that's all there was to it.
The actual story about what happened is Oswald was supposed to be transferred at 11 that morning.
His transfer was delayed because he gets shot at 1121.
And this is important because Ruby wakes up that morning and he gets a phone call from one of his employees that one of his dancers at his nightclub needs some money.
So Ruby gets into his car with his gun and some money, and Ruby goes to a Western Union and wires that dancer $25.
And the employee at the Western Union testified before the Warren Commission that Jack Ruby was his customer.
And the Western Union, the bill of receipt is timestamped.
And the timestamp for that receipt was at 1117.
So basically, Ruby walks out of that Western Union and then decides to walk over to the Dallas Police Department.
And then he sneaks his way in and he ends up shooting Oswald four minutes later.
If the transfer of Oswald had went off when scheduled, Ruby wouldn't have been there.
He would have missed it by over 15 minutes.
But the schedule, it was delayed, and that's the only way Ruby was able to get in there.
Now, I know the conspiracy theorists are like, oh, they were waiting for Ruby the whole time.
And actually, one of the people that delayed this was not the conspiracy, it wasn't the cabal.
One of the people that delayed the transfer of Oswald was Oswald.
Because Oswald had been wearing the same ratty t-shirt that he was arrested in, and Oswald requested a change of clothes, and he actually got that change of clothes, which is why you see him wearing a black sweater when he got shot by Ruby.
So it is very possible that if Oswald had not requested that change of clothes, Ruby wouldn't have made it there in time to kill him before he was transferred to the jail to await his trial.
So this whole idea that the whole thing was massively set up and orchestrated so that Ruby could get to Oswald is ridiculous because the conspiracy, the Illuminati are sitting there going, where's Ruby?
What's going on?
What's going on?
And someone's like, buddy, he had to, he had to bail out one of his girls.
He needed the Western Union.
One of his girls, 25 bucks.
And they're like, damn it.
Tell him to hurry up.
Oswald's about to walk out the hallway.
So.
This was a very spur-of-the-moment, very much off-the-cuff event, where Ruby literally just happened to see the crowd still waiting for Oswald, happened to walk into it, and then was able to find his way to the front of the crowd and shot Oswald.
And if you want to say that he was mobbed up and did it under mob orders, well, he He was really lucky because he should not have been there.
It should not have, uh, he should have missed it and he would have had to try again later.
So the actual story around his shooting of Oswald is what I told you.
It's not Rob Reiner randomly just saying that Oswald was mobbed up.
I mean, Ruby was mobbed up and that's all there is to it.
And now the other side of the equation is Lee Harvey Oswald, which through two episodes, Oswald is almost not even part of the story at this point.
I mean, he's kind of there as the guy that allegedly did it, but Reiner and Soledad aren't really talking about him.
And he even brings up, I talked to the guy that drove Oswald to work.
Now, if he actually wanted to tell us the story about Oswald and about the guy that drove him to work, What Rob Reiner would have to tell us is that Oswald got this job in early October, so Oswald had a routine.
And that routine was that he would work Monday through Friday, and he lived at a boarding house near the Texas Public Depository.
And on Fridays, the guy that would drive him to work would drive him to where his wife lived, and he'd spend the weekend with his wife, who he was estranged from.
And then on Monday, this buddy would pick him up, drive him back to the board and drive him back to work.
And then he'd go back living in the boarding house for the week.
And that was Oswald's routine for like the six odd weeks he worked at the Texas School Book Depository before the assassination.
Kennedy is going to arrive on Friday.
He's going to be in Dallas on Friday.
Thursday, Oswald goes up to his driving buddy and says, Hey buddy, I need a ride to my wife's place today.
And his buddy's like, well, usually you go there on Friday.
And Lee's like, yeah, I'm picking up some curtain rods for my boarding house.
So I need to go get the curtain rods from there.
And his buddy's like, OK, whatever.
So Lee shows up with a package under his arm Friday morning, drops it in the back seat of the car.
And the guy's like, hey, what's the package?
And Lee's like, the curtain rods I told you about before.
It's a rifle-shaped curtain rod.
Rifle-shaped package.
It's one of those novelty curtain rods.
It's just like a rifle, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
So, um.
Now I will say, because unlike Rob Reiner, I'll tell both sides of the story.
The driver guy claims that he doesn't think it was a gun.
And he also alleges that Oswald carried the package into the school book depository, where one part of the package was under his armpit and Oswald's hand was on the bottom of it.
So it was like tight to his body that way.
And if that was the way the package was carried, the people who've done the research would say the gun couldn't have fit in that way.
But again, What we do know is that Oswald mysteriously broke his pattern of how he got to and from work that week.
And that Friday morning, he shows up to work with a package that could very easily have held a gun in it.
I mean, this whole conspiracy falls apart if Oswald walks into work that day empty-handed.
If Oswald just shows up to work the way he did every other day without a mysterious package in his possession, guess what?
He's innocent.
We can't pin the murder of the president on him.
He just happens to win the negative lottery and is carrying a rifle-sized package into work that day.
So unlucky.
What a tough break for Old Lee.
He had the receipt.
He had the receipts.
One pack of curtain rods.
Parentheses, not a rifle.
And so, and this is the thing is that you have that.
And you also have the three witnesses that were on the fifth floor, who heard the shots being fired over their heads from the sixth floor.
There's even a photo of them like looking out the fifth floor window being like, yo, someone was above us, they were shooting.
And you have two eyewitnesses that were outside the Texas School Book Depository who saw somebody firing from the sniper's nest.
You see that guy?
He just killed that guy.
Holy smokes.
You see that guy in the window? He just killed the president. Ain't that crazy? Holy smokes.
So this is the thing is that we'll see where their podcast goes with actually presenting evidence down
the line because so much of this episode is mostly about cementing Reiner's bona fides as an expert and just him
planting seeds for where the podcast series is going to go.
It's mostly funky spy music.
And there's a lot of funky spy music in it.
You can tell Rob's having fun.
He's like, I want to play detective.
Put on the LA Noire music.
Yes, that is all happening.
Very much a big part of the of the series.
And there's a lot of hinting at what's going on here, which is very funny to me, because you would think that if you were telling a story and you were doing a podcast, you would just try to get the story out.
You would just tell the story.
But it feels very much that Soledad and Reiner were mapping out this thing, and they came to the conclusion it should be a 10-episode series.
And they were just sort of at this point where they were like, you know, I don't know if we're going to get 10 episodes, so we need to pad the runtime on episode 1 here.
Episode one needs to be more of a groundwork establishing pod to build the later episodes, because episode two is very aggressively, the CIA killed Kennedy because Kennedy was the peace president.
And episode one's just hinting at that.
It's just building up the narrative that Reiner is going to tell us in episode two, which is that- Mark Saul was the hint.
Oh yeah, Mort Sahl broke this man.
It's the funniest thing.
It's so weird that all these stories begin in a really odd place.
And not to compare Rob Reiner to Mike Smith, the guy who did Out of Shadows and is totally hopelessly ill and needs a lot of help, but in Out of Shadows, Mike Smith is sitting there and he's saying, Yeah, I suffered this crippling injury and when I was being treated by a doctor, my doctor pilled me and now I'm nuts.
And in this series, Rob Reiner's just like, yeah, I listened to Morton Saul and now the government killed Kennedy.
And it's just... And someone who helped on the LBJ movie, right?
That was part of it.
Well, yeah, Rob directed LBJ, which was a very... LBJ is a good movie, but it's just a movie that got no runtime, no one saw it.
It came out, I think, around the same time as HBO's version of the movie was, which was All the Way, and Bryan Cranston was...
There was a stage production of All The Way.
It was like a theater, it was a Broadway show, and Bryan Cranston played LBJ in the theater production.
And then they just turned the theater production into an actual movie with Bryan Cranston.
And he was coming off Breaking Bad, he was the new hotness in Hollywood, and all that kind of stuff.
And I mean, Woody Harrelson's fine, but I just feel like People didn't know they wanted Woody Harrelson to be Lyndon Johnson, whereas everyone was like, oh my god, Bryan Cranston just killed it as LBJ on Broadway.
So the LBJ movie was just kind of overshadowed because people were really looking forward to seeing Cranston do his theater LBJ in an actual movie.
But it was fine.
It was a fine movie.
It's really funny to me that Reiner did a movie where it's just straight Oswald killed Kennedy, LBJ takes the reins of the presidency and works to enact Kennedy's agenda and is a good person.
Meanwhile, Reiner in the back of his head is like, No good bastard.
He killed Kennedy to take the presidency and do the CIA's bidding and get us into Vietnam.
It's like, oh my god, really?
Really, buddy?
Oh, man.
Rob, no!
Rob!
Pull up!
Pull up!
Don't be billed!
But yeah, it's really funny that way.
So you've got this movie or you've got this podcast series where they're going really slow with it.
And they're really laying the groundwork for you.
And what's really funny is while they're doing all of this, they made one egregious error.
Which was super funny to me.
Soledad O'Brien states that JFK was our youngest president, which he wasn't.
This is like seventh grade history stuff.
Theodore Roosevelt was our youngest president at 42 years of age.
Kennedy was 43.
The record that Kennedy holds is the youngest elected president because Roosevelt got in via the assassination of McKinley.
Kennedy actually won an election at a young age.
Another really weird thing that Reiner brings up in the series was the big question on the campaign trail was, could JFK with his youth stand up to Nixon and blah, blah, blah.
And it was like, buddy, Nixon was 45 at the time of the campaign.
Nixon and Kennedy were incredibly young men running for president.
I saw a broadcast of the live 1960s election results, and the anchorman was talking about how a lot of people view the President of the United States as a sort of father figure.
But that tonight the winner and the new and the president elect is going to be more like a brother to a lot of men in America because it's going to be a dude in his early to mid 40s.
It's not going to be an old guy because FDR was old.
Truman was kind of old.
Eisenhower was old and constantly having heart attacks while president.
And then you had this Kennedy versus Nixon election and they were both young.
I mean, I feel like Reiner was misspeaking and he meant to say that in his youth could Kennedy stand up to Khrushchev, but that was kind of the question about both Kennedy and Nixon.
They were both super young to be running for president at that time.
I think Nixon would have set the record, too.
I'm not sure, because I know Clinton got close to Kennedy's record for youngest elected, but we just weren't electing presidents in their 40s back then.
It was an old man's job back then.
Something that's definitely changed.
Oh, I am going to enjoy punching so many walls over the next 12 months as I have to listen to our media being like, Oh man, old man Biden.
I don't know if he's up to it.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump's using a walker, slurring his words, screaming about President Obama.
And it's like, you're worried about Biden when Grandpa QAnon can't even speak.
The collective age of two of them is like 300.
Like, come on, let's be real.
It's Methuselah!
It's just like two old guys.
They're really old!
I just love these people who are like, there's no way an 80-year-old man should be running America.
It's like, guess what?
If you elect Trump, we'll have an 80-year-old man running America in two years.
You know what?
I'll only accept an 80-year-old man running America for two years.
Four years is unacceptable.
Like both of these people are older than my grandparents.
So that's why they're both old.
They're both old.
They're both very old.
Calm down, people.
Calm down.
It's team old running for president.
That's it.
Dude, that should be our shirt.
It's team old.
Yes, hashtag team old.
So that thing about Kennedy being youngest president ever was annoying.
Rob Reiner then brings up the quote because He basically absolves Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs very quickly.
He's like, look, now Kennedy got a bum hand from Eisenhower, who set up the Bay of Pigs, then screwed it from office.
The CIA just hit Kennedy with this thing out of the blue.
Kennedy was just a wet-behind-the-ears novice who didn't know any better.
He okayed it.
It didn't work out.
So Reiner just blames the CIA entirely for the Bay of Pigs.
And he then states the quote, That Kennedy said he was going to splinter the CIA to a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
And this is a dubiously sourced quote because the first time the quote was ever published was in 1966, three years after Kennedy's assassination.
And it was sourced by one anonymous person talking to a reporter from the New York Times.
So This quote, which conspiracy theorists love to use to show that Kennedy and the CIA were at each other's throats, and it was very obvious that the CIA had motive to kill Kennedy, it's not a quote that was actually used in Kennedy's lifetime.
And we, again, only have one anonymous source that ever claimed Kennedy said it.
So if Rob Reiner was quote unquote, telling us all the facts, he would have been a bit more honest about where that came from.
And he, but he wasn't because again, it's a great quote.
Conspiracy theorists love it because it's, it paints the picture they want painted.
And you can totally see where Kennedy would have been mad about the assassin, about the Bay of Pigs and how it didn't work out and that he fired Alan Dulles over it.
So.
It's a thing that is easy to process.
It's a thing that's easy to say.
But we don't actually have any concrete proof that it was something Kennedy actually said.
He probably did voice some frustration about the CIA to somebody at that time, because I'm sure he was furious about what happened.
But that exact quote said that way.
There's not a lot of evidence to support that it happened.
So I just think that that is an important bit of context.
Another thing that's really funny is the series, they work really hard on making Kennedy more peaceful and more about reaching detente with the communists than what was going on at the time, I believe.
I mean, Kennedy was obviously speaking about peace and he was doing these things, but We'll get into the weeds more about where JFK actually stood on Vietnam and all that kind of stuff.
But no, if JFK lived, we would have world peace and everything would be good.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, 100 percent.
Absolutely.
He was a visionary man that would have just transcended humanity and made everything ultimately better.
But the no good CIA killed them because they love war and death and Moloch.
All of these things.
The CIA is pro Moloch.
I agree.
Yeah.
One thing that you'll never hear in any of these conspiracy theorists' views is the missile gap.
And the missile gap was something that Kennedy ran on.
In 1960, which was the idea that America wasn't pointing enough nuclear missiles at Russia, and that the Soviet Union had too many nukes, it could blow us up, and we would not be able to blow them up effectively.
So we needed more nukes to close the missile gap.
And you will not hear that because that's an incredibly hawkish thing to say.
So, um, and again, there's a lot of hand-waving about that in the series about how the Kennedy that was on the campaign trail, the Kennedy before the Bay of Pigs was a Cold War liberal.
But as the, as he got into office and he saw the dangers of what was going on, he became more and more, um, Yeah.
So yeah.
determined to forge peace between the two sides. And he did talk of peace a lot, but
he also talked a lot about how we have to stay in Vietnam and how we have to make sure
that we don't withdraw because if we show weakness to the communists, let Vietnam fall,
that'd be bad.
Classic peace. I love that. I love that kind of peace.
The best peace. Yeah. So, yeah. So, but again, episode one, Reiner is building.
He's planting seeds.
These seeds will germinate probably a lot of them in episode two and on and on.
And we're going to go through it as we do.
But, um, this episode about the assassination itself is very bare bones.
It is very much.
Just a few things here and there, a few lines here and there.
Another little thing that was mentioned by Soledad O'Brien was she said that at almost 12.30 the motorcade rolled into Daly Plaza.
It was exactly 12.30.
It was not 12.29.
It was 12.30.
There was a giant clock that showed 12.30 when he was shot.
Again, just nitpick detail thing, but this is supposed to be a very well-produced, well-run podcast.
This is the experts.
Rob Reiner, you know, he made the bucket list.
He made, you know, The Princess Bride.
This is Final Tap.
When Harry Met Sally.
You're supposed to trust this man.
Yeah, this man's supposed to be on top of things.
A lot of this episode is like, but do you really know how to kill JFK?
That line, I think, is said repeatedly.
Yeah.
Now, this is one of the weirdest things in this episode.
I was triggered by this.
It's just something that's really bizarre to me.
I don't know who made this editorial choice.
I don't know why the people who did this did this.
They start playing audio of the events in Dealey Plaza before the shooting, and it's all the standard stuff.
Like, here's the President landing in Dealey Plaza with his beautiful wife Jackie, and blah, blah, blah.
And oh, look, the President's in his limo, and now he's heading to the trademark, and everyone's cheering, and we're all so happy to see him.
And it's just the happy, the President's in town, everyone's glad to see him kind of stuff.
They then get to this radio broadcast by a guy.
And I've heard this radio broadcast a million times because I'm a brain-poisoned person.
And this is the radio broadcast.
I'm like a complete dumb-dumb.
I didn't put this to my soundboard, but I have this on my phone.
So I'm just going to play this because this is the audio of this guy's reaction to basically seeing the assassination happen in real time.
But he doesn't know it because he's kind of at a distance, so he's not picking it up.
It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route.
of minutes before he arrives at the trademark. I was on Simmons freeway earlier and even the freeway
was jam-packed with spectators waiting their chance to see the president as he made his way
towards the trademark. It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route.
Something I repeat has happened in the motorcade route.
So that's the actual audio.
That is what was said on the radio when this happened, or this is the broadcast.
So this is what I've heard so many times from people when they talk about the Kennedy assassination and the quote-unquote as it happens sort of broadcasts.
So they start playing those things.
And this is what happens when they play this clip on the Who Killed Kennedy podcast.
So you just have them edit out like 20 odd seconds of that audio, and they just cut from
the president's car has turned on the Elm Street to immediately going to it appears as though
something has happened in the motorcade route.
It's so bizarre.
That they decided that the Kennedy assassination needed punch up.
That they were like, the actual audio just wasn't good enough at conveying the horror of what happened.
And they just had to edit out all the things the guy said before it got to him realizing that there had been something terrible taking place.
Well, if you left in those 20 seconds, you wouldn't get another funky beat, you know?
You wouldn't get another funky beat.
You wouldn't get another ad plug.
There's so many ads.
I was like, is this for real?
Is this for real?
There are a lot of ads on this podcast.
A lot of ads.
A lot of ads.
Solid Ad and Rob Reiner need to make some money apparently.
I mean, it is wild how many ad breaks there are in this thing.
But yeah, so it's just so strange that they were just, they got this audio and they were like, yeah, take out all the parts that have context because we don't need context.
We know he's getting killed on Elm Street, so screw it.
Just go straight to the murder, straight murder.
Don't have this guy talk about all the people on the freeway and all that good stuff and how happy everybody is.
Just straight to the guy panicking and freaking out that something terrible has happened, which was just really bizarre.
I don't understand why they did that.
It's one of those things where when you start editing audio in that way, it makes it so people might suspect you're doing other duplicious stuff with the stuff you're editing.
I just don't get it.
I just truly don't understand why they did that.
It was very strange.
It was a very strange editorial decision that they made to just crop that audio to get the sound bite they were looking for.
If you're going to do that, just go directly to the, it appears something has happened.
You don't even have to have the guy talk about the president's car turning on Elm Street.
It's just strange.
It was just very strange.
So that's pretty much, I think, covers this episode.
I feel like, because again, they're, they're just planting seeds.
They're just starting to build their narrative here and they're just laying groundwork.
So at this point in the story, uh, this episode is a commercial for the podcast wrapped with a bunch of other commercials.
Yes.
This, this, this is episode.
If you enjoyed, if you, if episode one has actually like gained your attention to the point where you want to actually start hearing the real podcast.
We'll get into that.
Because for now, we're just going to talk about how Rob Reiner was very traumatized when he was 16 years old and found out that Kennedy had been murdered.
And then three years later, he was killed by a Canadian comedian who wouldn't tell jokes and just complained about the Warren Commission a lot.
And Soledad O'Brien is just going to nod and go along with it.
She's just going to let Rob tell his story.
And that's just the way this works.
And They're not going to tell you about the time stamped Wells Fargo or Western Union or wherever.
They're not going to tell you about the time stamp on the money transfer.
They're not going to tell you about Oswald bringing a package to work when he broke his schedule and all that stuff.
They're not going to tell you about those things.
They're just going to tell you this conspiracy-based, the CIA did it kind of thing.
It's wild.
It's really interesting that In the year of our Lord 2023, we're still getting basically the movie Oliver Stone's JFK, but in podcast form.
Did you enjoy JFK the movie?
How about a 10 episode podcast series about it?
Because that's what you're getting.
Boy howdy.
Again, I wouldn't have cared, but apparently this is the hottest thing in America right now.
It was too much for him.
It was too much.
No.
I just because if you've listened to the clips of the Kelsey Brothers podcast, they're hilarious.
It's a great pod.
That pod should not be neck and neck with the CIA killed Kennedy.
Where's Hellworld on that top 10, you know?
Oh, man.
A distant 10 millionth.
Oh, man.
Although we should probably edit our thumbnail to just be the thumbnail for this part of their podcast.
But just with the word Oswald next to who killed Kennedy.
And we just write the word, scrawl the word Oswald in.
That would be funny.
That's good.
Who killed Kennedy?
We are the Oswalds.
Boom.
Nailed it.
Time to go home, everybody.
No month, no fuzz.
So, um, This week we had scheduling crises and so that's why we didn't record the regular weekly pod.
The plan going forward is to record the regular weekly pod and then to do this one on top of it.
I was going to do this after all 10 episodes came out.
It just got to a point where I'm like, no, it's not going to be nearly as impactful.
It's not going to matter nearly as much because right now this thing's in the zeitgeist and it's ridiculous.
Someone needs to speak against it because...
I really, I just really hate JFK conspiracy theories because they're so normalized and they're so mainstream that it's basically this kind of thing where if you don't believe in conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, you're the odd duck.
You're the weird, you think Oswald did it?
Oh boy, get a load of this guy!
The magic bullet!
Are you kidding me?
I mean, and we're gonna get into all that.
We're gonna get into that stuff, because you know who didn't get into it in Episode 1?
Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien!
We barely talked about the assassination!
I mean, we talked about Ruby shooting Oswald, and that was like four minutes, if that!
So...
So yeah, we're going to get into the weeds on this thing.
We're going to talk more about it.
We're going to cover all of it.
Hayley's going to push back on me more than Soledad pushes back on Rob Reiner.
I promise.
Oh yeah, for sure.
I'm a total expert with the ability to push back.
I'm just kidding.
Well, the thing is, I think you could ask me, Mike, how do you know that?
Or Mike, what is your source for that?
Things Soledad O'Brien apparently cannot say to Rob Reiner.
An absolute impossibility.
On her behalf.
On her half.
On her half.
On her behalf.
Words!
Good words!
So, uh, having said all of that, um, we only have me as the excellent remixer of our hilarious intro now to talk about for credits.
Also, Hayley, thank you for doing this nonsense with me.
I appreciate you.
Anytime.
Uh, if you want to, uh, give me money, go to patreon.com slash poker politics.
Help me out.
Helped me battle against my new mortal enemies, Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien.
Didn't think that was coming, but here we are.
So, yes.
So, next week, regular Hellworld and episode two of Who Killed Kennedy?
Lee Harvey Oswald.
That's who.
I hear Q's coming back.
Oh, next week's 90 Minutes of Hellworld is going to be a tight 90 because we're going to have a lot to cover.
