HellwQrld Presents: "Who Killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald" Episode 5: Think Wilderness of Mirrors
This week Mike and Haley enter the Wilderness of Mirrors to hear about Rob's newest Big Bad and then Rob goes to Crazytown by claiming Ruth Paine was a CIA agent that tricked Oswald into taking a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Is any of that true? Of course not, and we'll explain it all to you. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You Adventures in Hellworld presents Who Shot JFK?
Who Shot JFK?
Who Shot JF Hello, everybody.
Y'all ready to get sheep dipped?
Oh, we are getting dipped in sheep.
Oh, let me tell you, I called Haley, the host, because I love that the Who Killed Kennedy podcast opens with, I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien.
And now you're going to hear me for about 20% of the rest of this video.
Literally, my only job is to throw it to Rob, or then to throw it to another expert, and then remind you who that other expert is, and then throw it back to them again.
You are host in name only, Soledad.
You exist only to launder your credibility to Rob Reiner's passion project of being absolutely pilled on the Kennedy assassination and not letting it go.
That's what this guy is all about.
And it's just pretty wild that this is what we have going on in this series.
So we start episode five with our new villain, because the Kennedy Conspiracy Cinematic Universe cannot have enough names.
Rob Reiner cannot throw enough names at us.
It is an impossibility for this man to stop making the Story bigger and bolder and crazier than it already is.
And our new enemy is James Jesus Angleton, who I believe is mostly known to people as James Angleton.
But for some reason, Rob's going to throw that his middle name is Jesus in there.
James Hussein Angleton.
Yes!
It's so funny.
I mentioned this on Twitter that Meathead was trending and it was all queuing on people being mad at Rob Reiner for being mad at Trump.
And it's like, I'm a flaming lib, and I'm mad at Rob Reiner, too!
This would be like Jim Stewartson getting buddy-buddy with The Authority and Matrix because they hate Michael Flynn.
It'd be like me getting buddy-buddy with QAnon because they hate Rob Reiner.
I'd be like, yeah, you guys aren't so bad.
You hate Rob Reiner, too.
But you hate Rob Reiner for a thing that you agree with him on.
You guys all think that Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy.
So you guys probably would like him if I actually explained to you what was going on.
Like, wait!
No!
Rob Reiner's kind of cool!
He's pilled!
He's pilled about Kennedy!
Yeah, I occasionally do keyword searches about this podcast and I have been seeing a few people who are clearly not liberal or leftist or anything of the sort being like, what's up with Rob in this new podcast?
He's doing, he's pretty, he's pretty okay on the Kennedy stuff.
That's interesting.
I wish he would wake up on all the other stuff.
So good audience that you're attracting, Rob.
Yes.
You're diversifying your portfolio into nutsville.
It's lovely.
Absolutely lovely.
This episode is kind of nutsville, isn't it?
It's kind of like, at this point, because at this point we've gone over that like, okay, the Kennedy photos are actually fake.
The headshot photos aren't the photos that are really the headshot photos and the real headshot photos show that his head was blown out from the back.
Everything that you know is a lie.
And also, have you considered that everything in Oswald's life is also a lie?
Right, right.
I mean, like, we did Oswald in Russia, and for the most part, he kept that on the level.
And then we get here, and suddenly the story gets really bizarre.
And the best part about it is, is at one point he tells Soledad, but things will become clear.
But before they become clear, they're going to be very confusing.
It's going to get real confusing.
That's how it kind of opens.
Right.
You know, he was like, we're going to confuse you.
And Rob tries to blame the confusion on his new villain, James Jesus Engleton, or as his bros call him, J.J.A.
That's what I call him.
It's like, so, yeah.
So when you're hanging out at Deep State University, you use those kind of terminologies.
So our boy, J.J.A., is evil and bad.
They are obsessed with building him up.
Because this is one of the big parts of these kinds of mythoses, is that you have to make people bigger and larger than life.
James Jesus Angleton can't just be James Angleton, and he can't just be James Jesus Angleton.
He's the poet spy!
Mm-hmm.
He has to have a name, he has to have a title of some kind.
He has translucent skin.
Oh yeah, they go into this bit where they talk about how ugly he is, and that's really weird.
It's so bizarre that they're just like, oh yeah, by the way, James Angleton is a Creepy, ugly dude with practically see-through skin and bug eyes.
And Soul Dad's like, I can confirm that.
That's literally what she says.
She's like, oh, he's hitting us.
Oh, my God.
No wonder he was a weird spymaster.
This dude couldn't get laid in a whorehouse with a fistful of 20s.
Oh man.
This ugly creep.
I mean, this is the thing that's so weird about this is that you have Rob Reiner Generically famous liberal person.
And Soledad O'Brien, who is investigative journalist.
And they're basically doing the Alex Jones bit where he talks about how Brian Stelter looks like a pedophile.
And it's just like, buddy, you're supposed to use evidence and facts and logic here.
You're not supposed to go, this guy's hideous.
You wouldn't let him babysit your kids, would you?
I mean, you just look at that guy and you're like, no, I don't trust him.
He's bad.
He's bad news.
Like, that shit is fucking InfoWars-level stuff.
I mean, come on, let's have a little more, like, respect for what we're talking about than just being like, yeah, this uggo helped kill Kennedy.
I mean, it's like, wow, really?
That's where we're going here?
We're trashing this guy's looks?
That's your big win?
So it opens with that.
It opens with us hearing about how James Angleton is an ugly man.
And we then get into Oswald.
Oh, the other big thing that they love is the Wilderness of Mirrors.
It's the name of the episode, isn't it?
The name of the episode, and they say it many times.
If you took a drink every time they said Wilderness of Mirrors, you would be tanked by the end of this episode.
You would be inebriated.
It would not go well for you.
And the Wilderness of Mirrors comes from Engleton.
So again, they have to build this guy up, such a powerful boogeyman, that he's the poet's spy who lures his enemies into the Wilderness of Mirrors.
It's like, can't we?
Do we need mythmaking?
Can't we just go with the evidence, please?
Evidence, por favor?
I mean, I'm just begging here.
I'm just begging.
No, nothing that you believe is real.
He, he's, um, he is the master of deception and misconception and all the words that he, he created.
They literally say, like, he created the reality.
Like, they say, like, he created the reality, like, around us.
Like, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
They basically, so.
The Angleton storyline is that Oswald starts a chapter for the Fair Play for Cuba committee in New Orleans, and Solid Ed asks Rob, she says to him, Rob, so what does Oswald think is going on here?
I don't think Oswald knows what's going on.
I think Oswald is just oblivious to the fact that he is caught in this web of intrigue and espionage and that he is just this Just naive waif.
Just blowing in the wind.
Some guy handed him a piece of paper and a couple hundred dollar bills and told him to start the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
And he's like, sounds good, boss.
Golly gee willikers.
Oswald's just this naive child.
Everything since he was 17 has just been nothing but CIA handlers and CIA operatives and sheepdogs sheepdogging him and his life is a total lie is basically what they're getting at here.
Yeah, they just they create this narrative around Oswald that is so bizarre because the point of this episode is That Oswald's post-Soviet defection life in America is merely to set him up as a pro-Castro, pro-Soviet communist.
That is to be his persona.
Thus, when he is framed for killing President Kennedy, that will be the fall guy that is brought to the American public's attention.
That the killer of their president was this filthy, evil communist.
And I don't understand any of this because by this point, like when people dig into the history of Lee Harvey Oswald, when they talk about his life, uh, they talk about how when he was in the Marines, he was like learning Russian and he was like pro communist and he was a weirdo for that shit.
And the other Marines were like, Hey fucking commie, leave us alone with your bullshit.
And.
He defected to the Soviet Union for crying out loud and he comes back from the Soviet Union.
How much sheep dipping do you need to do to make this guy look like a communist?
I mean, he, he's already a communist.
We didn't need the bonus points.
Yeah, I don't get Rob's point here, especially because he's like, he's complaining simultaneously that Oswald got off too easy coming back to America.
He was like, why didn't they question him?
Why wasn't his wife questioned?
Why was nobody ever questioned?
And then it's also like he's simultaneously telling you that everything in his life is nothing but a careful puppet of the, he's a careful puppet of the CIA getting just put here and there and he doesn't even realize why.
And it's like, Well, why are you questioning?
You're telling me two narratives here.
You're telling me both that, like, it's mysterious that he got in easily, but also, like, the CIA was handling him the entire time.
So which is it?
Is Oswald living the Truman Show where every move is carefully choreographed by shadowy powers beyond his control?
Or was the government just turning a blind eye to him and somehow missing this?
The government either is negligent or omnipresent.
It can't be both of these things.
It has to be one or the other.
Now, what's really funny is they mention that When Oswald gets on the dock in New Orleans, he meets, or when he gets back to America, Hoboken, he runs into this guy named Spaz Ratkin, and immediately Reiner indicates that Ratkin is CIA.
Like, he's just like, Oh, yeah, this was a spaz racking guy.
He was part of a group that was a front group for the CIA.
And like, that was what happened there.
So I had to figure out this guy's name.
And because spaz isn't a very common first name anymore in America.
And So I looked him up, and it turns out that the CIA interviewed Oswald before Spaz got a hold of him.
And Spaz was trying to talk to him about, hey, what was Russia like?
What was your life there?
How were you doing?
And then when Oswald killed the president, Spaz sees his photo on TV.
He's like, oh shit, he calls the FBI.
And then the FBI interviews him about it, and it's just this little thing that happened to him.
Mark Lane, the conspiracy theorist guy, does a speech at Rankin's university where he's
a professor at.
And Lane says at that speech that Oswald was met by the agent of the CIA, Spaz Rankin,
who is now stationed in Guam.
And a lot of Rankin's students turn and look at him.
And they're like, bro, what the fuck?
And Rankin was just like, I don't know what this guy's talking about.
That evening he called Mark Lane up and he protested.
He's like, dude, I'm not in the CIA.
What are you talking about?
And Lane couldn't explain where he got the allegation that I was CIA from.
But now it's just part of the narrative.
It's just a part of the narrative that this guy who just lived a normal life and was part
of this little group that dealt with people that were integrating back to America.
Let's do a little side bit here.
overseas and then became a history professor at a college is just part of the CIA.
Just literally part.
This is part of the JFK conspiracy universe is that everybody everywhere is CIA.
You're all in the CIA.
Every last one of you.
You know who's actually kind of involved with the CIA?
Let's do a little side bit here.
Yes.
Rob Reiner.
Rob Reiner is part of the CIA.
Yes.
He's not part of the CIA, but he is on an advisory board or was to the committee to investigate Russia because I was getting a little bit sussy on Rob this episode because some things he says are just, they sound a little bit, he sounds like he's, he's just like, Oh, that person speaks Russian.
That's suspicious.
You know, so I was looking a little bit into Rob and he Is on the advisory board or was to the Committee to Investigate Russia with Max Boot, James Clapper, the Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA.
Jed Johnson, former U.S.
Secretary of Homeland Security.
Michael Morrill, former Acting Director of the CIA.
Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar, is how he's described.
Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, former Director of the CIA, former White House Chief of Staff.
Rob Reiner, director, actor, activist.
Charlie Sykes, he's a conservative commentator on there.
And then Clint Watts, Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow and former FBI agent.
Interesting, Rob.
Very interesting.
Maybe it is you who are, you know, caught in the wilderness of mirrors, sir.
Maybe Rob's being sheep-dipped.
Maybe he's being sheep-dipped.
Maybe, hmm, interesting Rob.
Yeah, it's, and this is, this is literally the game that Reiner's playing where everyone's guilty by association of everything.
Everyone is somehow connected to something in some way.
And it's just this endless thing where this is it's literally all Podesta art.
It's Podesta art all the way down where like a person's just like, hey, that looks that that that shit's weird, isn't it?
Don't you think that's something weird about that?
And they just they're just egging you on to agree with them so that then they can lure you down the rabbit hole.
And He, uh, they do a quick recap of Oswald's life and again, give a wink and a nod about MKUltra.
It just like, oh man.
And.
These two episodes are very obviously a setup to tell you that at some point that.
Oswald was like, uh, basically like a robot along with apparently four other people.
And just kind of was, he was, uh, MK Ultrod and killed Kennedy without even realizing why he did it.
Oh, well, Episode 8 is absolutely delusional.
It is the weirdest.
Next week, listeners, we're getting Episode 6, which is absolutely insanity.
So if you're like, man, Mike and Hayley, what the fuck are you guys doing?
I'm listening to you because I like Hellworld, and blah, blah, blah.
Trust me, next week, you're going to get a payoff because episode six is absolutely bonkers.
And there's a bit of that that bleeds into this episode.
So we're going to have I'm going to give you I'm going to give you something delicious in a little bit.
I promise.
Episode six is absolutely insane.
And then episode eight is pants on head delusional.
Like the the story that Rob tries to craft about, quote unquote, Oswald's perspective on what happened on November 22nd, 1963, is So unmoored from reality and it makes so little sense that it's just like, wow!
I can't even wrap my head around the fact that when Rob and the script writers and the people that were working on this stuff and the guy who follows me on Twitter, who's from there, whenever you guys finish crafting that script, boy howdy, boy howdy.
I don't know what you thought you were doing, but you shouldn't have done it because it was a mistake.
I don't want to get into spoilers and just start talking about Episode 8 when Hayley hasn't even listened to it yet.
and just start talking about episode 8 when Haley hasn't even listened to it yet.
But it's just, it is the strangest thing in the world because you have the two possible
conspiracy theories around Oswald in the sense of like when the CIA kills Kennedy,
what is Oswald's involvement?
And it's either Oswald was just a dull-eyed knave who had no idea what was going to happen, or that Oswald was somehow in on it.
And Reiner just Solomon's the shit out of that shit.
He splits that baby, and you're just sitting there holding your chopped baby going, what the fuck?
I don't even understand what you did!
Why didn't you saw the baby in half, you weirdo!
It's just this incredibly bizarre narrative that you're probably going to have a lot of really awkward pauses in three episodes.
Because I'm just going to have these moments where my brain is just going to short circuit trying to rationalize why these things are being said.
and it's just it's gonna be a trip. It's gonna be an absolute trip. But anyways, getting back to
the wilderness of mirrors. Re-entering the wilderness of mirrors.
Bye!
Again, we could say that thing like 10 times, we might tie them for the number of times they said wilderness of mirrors.
Might tie them.
But they love their turns of phrase and they love their titles.
The poet spy has said so many times in this thing.
And Solidad, this is the first episode where Solidad pushes back ever so gingerly, ever so slightly against Rob, and Rob bristles like a porcupine.
Like his little quills just start shooting everywhere.
Solidad is impaled against the wall for daring, for daring to offer the mildest of pushback.
She's literally like, Hey, you ever heard of like Occam's razor?
I know you've heard of that.
You know, maybe, maybe Oswald was just kind of like a communist.
And he's like, it's possible, but this is the height of the cold war.
And he's like, now it's time to enter the wilderness of fucking mirrors.
Like.
Yeah, basically she says, with Occam's razor, wouldn't this be the answer?
And he's like, maybe.
But hold my hand, little girl, as I take you into the wilderness of mirrors and try to explain this to you.
And then- He literally just goes, it's possible.
That's his- But no, put a pic in it, little girl.
Shut up, dame.
I mean, it's just, I don't know why I grant misogyny to Rob Reiner, but I just want to, because I'm just so angry at him that on top of his Kennedy nuttiness, I just want him to just have this dim view of Soledad because she's a woman.
Well, he- the Occam's Razor thing happens, and then later in the episode, when she's talking about the sheep dipping, she says to Reiner, basically, isn't it possible Oswald's just a communist?
And he says, if you believe that, then you fell for the trap the poet spy has set for you.
Yeah, he's like, the poet spy has succeeded.
And then it's like, the poet spy, if you remember, is James Jesus Angleton.
The podcast is really cheesy.
Oh, speaking of the cheese, oh, the straight Velveeta.
The thing that's really bad is that It's obviously a scripted podcast.
It's obviously a scripted podcast where, like, people write out what Rob and Soledad are going to say.
Rob and Soledad, obviously being executive producers, have control over those scripts.
They read them.
They send revisions back.
The script is sent back to them.
There is nothing organically said in this podcast.
This is not a free-flowing conversation between two people.
Like, me and Haley, she has some notes, I have some notes.
We don't compare notes before the podcast.
We just get in here, we start talking to each other.
This is an actual organic conversation.
I'm not saying it's better or worse.
I'm just saying there's a difference between the styles of what we do.
And in the middle of this episode, Rob Reiner says, at this point, Oswalt is being sheep-dipped.
And Soledad is just like, sheep-dipped?
What does that mean?
Her music gets funky.
It's like...
You know, you got to snap to it a bit, you know, cause it's a little bit of jazz beat.
Oh, and I think that's what it cuts to commercial.
It literally did.
I think for me, it's like, he's about to get sheep dipped and then it's like funky beats play out.
And then that's commercial.
And it's like, Hey, I'm Tosh.0.
You remember me from Tosh.0?
I now have a show called Tosh Podcast.
And I'm like, what is happening?
Please stop.
And then we come back and saw it and it's like, what's ship dipping mean?
It's so contrived.
It is like the worst improv you've ever seen.
It's two people trying to sell you on the fact that they're having an actual conversation when they're not.
They're actors playing parts and they're doing it badly.
The whole point of this episode is Rob is trying to explain to us that Oswald is being lured into a persona that will then be used to discredit him after he is framed for killing Kennedy.
And, again, Like, if he didn't do any of the shit that Rob's talking about in this episode, if Oswald literally just came back from the Soviet Union, did nothing that mattered, just literally got a day job, worked it, then killed the president and got arrested for it,
People would have been like, let's dig into this Lee Harvey Oswald fellow.
Oh shit, he defected to the Soviet Union, tried to renounce his American citizenship, failed to do so, then came back.
This guy's a weird communist!
But Reiner's like, they had to carefully craft this narrative of Oswald being a communist.
It's like, they already had it.
They sheep-dipped him in the Soviet Union.
They didn't have to re-sheep-dip him in America.
This whole thing where they were like, oh my God, we got to build this narrative about Oswald being a communist in New Orleans.
Why?
You already have that narrative.
It's already been established.
We don't need more.
Yeah, this is the interaction.
It's like, and here in New Orleans is where Oswald is about to get sheep dipped.
Sheep dipped?
What does that mean?
Sheep-dipped is a term of art in the intelligence world.
That means coding someone to give them CIA operative status.
It's a tactic of deception.
It gives the appearance that the person is someone other than who he really is, Soledad.
So how does that even work?
By using assets of the agency to build a narrative around the person that you're carefully led into a new identity.
And it's all documented.
You yourself may not even know where this new identity will lead, but when it's finished, you'll have the bona fides of someone who appears to be completely legitimate.
And the plan for Oswald in New Orleans was to sheep-dip him in order to make him look like he was a pro-Castro-Communist.
Soledad, couldn't he just be a pro-Castro-Communist?
If you think that, the poet spy has succeeded, kid!
And that's- Now make me a simmich!
Yeah!
Just- Oh, and before that he did the bit where he was like, solid, I'd read this for me.
Which is the most patronizing shit.
Every time that happens I get so angry.
Because it's like, Rob, read your own notes.
Read your own notes.
It's like, Like, there are moments in this podcast where I realize that I'm talking a lot, and I understand that, because, like, I'm, quote-unquote, the expert, and Haley is, like, my sounding board.
That is how this, like, two-person podcast works.
But never at a point when I'm talking a lot, and I'm like, man, I'm dominating this conversation, do I think to myself, I need to do some sort of weird lead-in to let Haley talk for a moment.
I never think to myself, we need to get Haley's voice into the screen, so I'll be like, Haley, say your thing!
Tip out for a moment.
Broad?
Yes, he's a broad.
Yo, Jones, these people need to hear a female voice for a moment.
It's so weird.
It's such a bizarre thing where it's like he just knows that Solid Ad hasn't been, Solid Ad hasn't talked on the podcast for like three minutes and they're like two minutes away from an ad break.
So he's like, Solid Ad, take these next 45 seconds for me.
So then she like reads a thing and it's just, it's just so bizarre.
And, This whole, if Lee Harvey Oswald was just a schmuck, I could understand the New Orleans thing, but you already have the litany of the backstory of his life.
In episode four, we covered his life in Japan, where he was a weirdo and a communist.
And we've covered, and he defected.
The man is already there.
You don't need to build him up.
This isn't like some, like, jamoke 18 year old Who lived in Arkansas, joined the military, and then the army was just like, we need to paint this guy as a part of the KKK.
And they give him some money to start his own chapter of like, he becomes a grand cyclops of his community or whatever.
And they build him up as this like weird, horrible racist or whatever.
And then after he does his terrible crime, You, the investigators go back into his life and when they interview him in the military, they're like, oh no, he hung out with the black guys all the time.
He was the coolest bro in the world.
That man didn't have a racist bone in his body.
And then you start reviewing his history and it's like this weird line of demarcation where When he was 20 years old and he left the military, suddenly he just became a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
But before that, he was totally not racist and just a bro.
With Oswald, you don't have that weird demarcation line.
Just literally, Oswald's whole life, raging communist.
Just loves communism all the time.
Like as a teenager, he's like reading communist literature and getting pilled on communism.
They even talk about this in the podcast, but apparently it was all lies.
Up to the point where they say that an incident where he was handing out flyers Right.
was just a completely, it was completely staged.
It was a completely staged incident to sheep dip him into looking like he was actually a pro Castro communist.
Right.
You know, they do this whole thing where they talk about how Oswald got a couple of guys
to hand out leaflets with him in a more anti Castro section of New Orleans.
And it leads to an incident where these guys get into a, like a,
in the fisticuffs with him.
And the police break it up and they all get arrested for disturbing the peace.
And then Oswald gets interviewed by the local radio station.
And then Oswald, and now this is the thing that's really awesome about this is that, and Reiner doesn't bring this up, but after Oswald got into these like discussions, Oswald appeared on the radio with them a few times and actually like, like debated like communist ideology with, um, With these radio people and so the idea that The idea that he was sheep-dipped and had no idea what was going on it's like no this guy was Like Lee Harvey Oswald, he has this interview.
There's like a YouTube clip.
It's like a two-minute long YouTube clip where Where Oswald goes into this very in-depth discussion about the differences between Marxism and Communism.
He's explaining these different concepts based around the works of Karl Marx.
This doesn't sound like a guy who's being sheep-dipped and has no idea he's being tricked into being presented as a communist.
This is a guy who's like literally being interviewed by the news station is like, hey, I'm a communist, and I'm going to tell you about the differences between Marxism and communism.
And I think that I'm trying to remember the The interview off the top of my head, but I even think at one point Oswalt states that he is a Marxist and not a communist.
And the interviewer is like, so what's the difference?
And Oswalt's explaining this.
He's like breaking down the details and the differences between these ideologies.
And that really doesn't strike me as somebody who's just being tricked into being a communist.
This guy is in the weeds.
This guy knows his shit.
He's like into it.
It's like Mike Raines was being sheep-tipped into liking 90s alt-rock, including the band Garbage.
It's like, no, I wasn't sheep-tipped.
I'm just into it.
It's my jam.
It's so strange that Reiner thinks that Oswald just has no idea what's happening to him.
When, you know, again, Soledad was like, maybe he just is a pro-Castro communist.
How about that, Rob?
And Rob's like, no, shut up!
No, the poet spy has succeeded, if you believe that.
It sounds very QAnon-y.
It's like, why are we speaking in code?
Why are we doing this?
Think Wilderness of Mirrors.
That's the name of this episode!
Think Wilderness of Mirrors.
Yeah, but it's just that.
It's just this really, it's so overdone.
Why would the CIA waste all this time and effort to manipulate this guy into presenting
himself this way when it didn't seem like there was any work to do that?
It seemed like Oswald was very much gung-ho about being a communist.
Now one weird thing that happened in this episode is when they bring up the Fair Play
for Cuba committee, like four different voices then say the words Fair Play for Cuba.
Fair Play for Cuba committee, Fair Play for Cuba committee, Fair Play for Cuba committee.
Fair Play for Cuba committee.
Oh yeah, Macho Man, Randy Savage.
They have a weird Donald Trump voice.
The Fair Play for Cuba committee, the most beautiful committee that I've ever seen.
It's just, it's like the old-timey newsman Trump.
So shut up.
They haven't done this yet, Ed, but they did this for this.
And I was like, why am I tripping?
And what I think is going to happen here, and I haven't listened to episode nine yet, which is about Jack Ruby.
So, but, um, I think what they're going to try to do here is they're going to try to ally About what happened.
They're going to try to make the movie JFK into reality, which is a bad thing to do because the JFK movie is all of a sudden JFK is absolute dog shit and has no basis in reality at all.
But what happens in that movie is.
They like to have b-roll footage in black and white to kind of show you like Jim Garrison's recollections of things or what Jim Garrison thinks is going on.
And there is this moment in the movie where the officer who's got Oswald arrested says, And this Lee Oswald fella was part of the Free Play for Cuba Committee.
And then in the movie, Jack Ruby in the background, by himself, yells out, Fair Play for Cuba Committee!
And then the officer's like, Oh, that's right.
It was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
My apologies.
And you, the watcher of the movie, JFK, is like, How does Ruby know that?
How is Ruby so in tune to Oswald that he was able to correct that officer when he said the wrong thing?
Obviously Ruby's like part of the plot to kill Kennedy and now cover it up by whacking Oswald.
And in reality, when you, if you actually find that clip online, which you can, when the police, the police officer does screw it up, the police officer does call it the free play for Cuba committee.
What actually happens is like multiple voices correct him.
Many people in the press yell at him because.
Once Oswald was arrested, Oswald's arrested around 2.30 or 3 or so in the afternoon, and like the first press conference is like four, five, six hours later.
And so people are digging into him because, and now the conspiracy narrative about this is that, oh, the media was too quick to get information about Oswald, blah, blah, blah.
And how they justify that claim is that they'll be like, oh, Oswald was in charge of killing the president until way later in the night.
And then by that point, suddenly the media had all this information about him.
When the media and your regular person at home was putting two and two together that, oh, the guy that got arrested for killing a cop a couple, like a half hour after the president got shot, Maybe that guy killed the president, too.
That seems possible, if not likely.
So people were honing in on Oswald from the jump.
The moment he got arrested for killing Tippett, People were already piggybacking off of him being the murderer of the cop to also being the murderer of the president because people found out Oswald worked at the Book Depository and they figured out the Book Depository is where the shots came from.
And even though he wasn't being charged with killing the president yet, again, he just killed a cop and he happened to be in the building where someone shot the president.
It's probably him.
It's probably him.
So, The information that Oswald had started a chapter of the Free Play for Cuba Committee was public knowledge by the time the cops screwed it up, and that's why the cop was shouted down by lots of people for getting that wrong.
So now, when Episode 9 happens, we'll see if Rob Reiner goes with the JFK version of reality, or with the reality version of reality.
I give it 2 to 1, he goes with JFK reality.
Um, he also, uh, at one point is, he says like the, that James Angleton publishes a letter about his like opinions on Cuba weeks within Oswald's decision to move New Orleans almost the exact time.
And it's like, you're supposed to be baking this.
You're clearly supposed to be baking this, you know?
Yeah, again, this is Podesta art.
This is inference.
This is, oh, oh.
Isn't that convenient?
Right.
The poet spy is moving pieces on the chessboard, deftly navigating them through the wilderness of mirrors.
And it literally says, and then seven months later, Kennedy would be assassinated.
Because you're supposed to pin the two and two together, you know?
Right.
Like, you know, Reiner and Soledad are holding your hand and guiding you along this stuff.
And so we have that.
And then we get to the actual star of this episode, which is George DeMorn Schmidt.
And because George is a big character in the Kennedy assassination.
He is, he's a large character in the movie JFK.
He's this big entity because he's a weird, he's a weird, it's a weird, it's a weird story, his relationship with Oswald because Dermot Schmidt is a successful dude who apparently like lived the high life and he's, he's in middle age, he's like in his 40s or 50s and he befriends this young Weird dude who just, like, came back from defecting from Russia.
And because DeMorne Schmidt and Oswald's relationship is obviously funky, people gotta add more spice to it.
And it's gotta be, oh, DeMorne Schmidt was his CIA handler, or he'd been directed by the CIA to do these things.
And It's that kind of story that you got to add to the story.
You got to build on the story.
And DeMorne Schmidt can't have just been a weirdo who befriended a fellow person who left Russia and all that stuff.
Nope.
He had to be involved in the CIA, either overtly or through back channels and just new people in the CIA.
And he had to be doing work on their behalf.
Like, uh, Dimorne Schmitt's last interview with someone, he claims that he's like, oh, I would never have gotten involved with Oswald if that CIA operative hadn't told me to do so.
But Dimorne Schmitt is saying this, like, over a decade after the fact.
Like, this is one of the problems with the story is that Everyone knows what they're supposed to say now.
Everyone knows how you get on the conspiracy circuit and how you draw attention to yourself.
And that is by saying the right things.
By saying stuff like, oh yeah, the CIA guy told me to hang out with Oswald so that's why I did.
And these are not extemporaneous comments by DeMorne Schmitt.
DeMorne Schmitt said this stuff like 15 years after the assassination.
And then we get more Arkansiding.
We get more bullshit about conspiracy deaths.
Because DeMorne Schmitt committed suicide At this point, right before he testifies before the House Committee on Assassinations, and it just couldn't be that this guy who lived a very weird life, had like five wives, was constantly divorced, I believe struggled with alcoholism, and all this kind of stuff.
If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.
I will mention it on the pod.
But, DeMorton Schmitt had his demons.
DeMorton Schmitt had his issues.
And it's very possible, like, that testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was a stressor that triggered a response that was very unfortunate.
Because as Reiner even brings up in the pod, DeMorne Schmidt was a big, he was one of the biggest witnesses the Warren Commission had.
He testified with the Warren Commission for a long time.
He answered a lot of questions.
He spent a long time in front of the committee.
And then years after he testified to the Warren Commission, he started changing his tune.
He started being like, oh man, I made Oswald out to be a bad man.
I probably helped him convict Oswald in the court of public opinion.
I don't feel that's right that I did that.
Lee was a good guy.
He probably didn't kill the president.
I feel for him and I feel for what I did for him.
So When you have Desmond Schmidt in this headspace where the last time he saw a governmental investigative body, he kind of threw the book at Oswald.
He kind of helped pin the murder on him.
And now he's going to have to do it again.
And now he's going to have to testify again, and he freaks out.
I mean, I think that's plausible, but I only think that's plausible because the poet spy has tricked me into the wilderness of mirrors, and I'm buying into his nonsense, much as Soledad did.
According to Wikipedia, DeMorne Schmidt was discussed at length in True TV's conspiracy with Jesse Ventura and Ventura claims that DeMorne Schmidt was in fact a CIA handler for Oswald.
So that's the level that Rob is on.
It says also on this Wikipedia that Demar Schmitt is a popular figure by conspiracy theorists regarding the assassination of JFK because some do claim he's a CIA handler but others have claimed that he's like a KGB operative and he's actually his Soviet intelligence handler.
So, lots of conspiracies going on here with this guy.
Also, here's a fun fact.
Bill O'Reilly, as in the Fox News Bill O'Reilly, claimed in his book, Killing Kennedy, that he actually heard DeMorne Schmidt kill himself. He says he was knocking on DeMorne Schmidt's
door when he heard the shotgun blast that marked his suicide. This is a completely fake story
that Bill O'Reilly made up and he was not even in the same state when this happened. So...
That's awesome.
It's cool that people just latch on to this guy.
His story continues, you know?
Thanks, Bill.
News.
Thanks, Bill, for just making shit up and lying about George Zemord Schmidt's suicide.
You were literally on the other side of the door going, No, George, no!
You have so much to do before!
You have to tell the truth!
You have to exonerate Oswald!
He's like, I can't do it!
My KGB overlords wait, and then O'Reilly's like, no, no, don't say that!
Say CIA!
Say CIA!
Oh god, yeah.
Fantastic.
Good job, Rob.
Yeah.
And also, yeah, just good job, everybody all around.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just one of those things where, like, whatever DeMorne Schmidt's history was, Oh, one of the things that comes up, if you dig through DeMorne Schmidt's connections to Oswald, and this will obviously not come up in the episode.
It doesn't come up in this episode, it hasn't come up yet in episode 8.
I have a feeling it's never going to come up, because Hayley brought this up previously, about Oswald taking a shot at General Walker.
DeMorne Schmidt allegedly saw Oswald's gun While he was hanging out with him and DeMorton Schmidt jokingly said to him, Hey, were you the one that took that pop at Walker?
And Oswald like gave him a smirk, like didn't even react to it.
And so like that thing where it's like, Oh yeah, by the way, uh, General Walker was shot at by somebody, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Warren Commission both said that that attempt on Walker's life was done by Lee Harvey Oswald.
And we're just not going to hear about that.
Just not going to hear about it.
And I think that's really very interesting that this is, again, episode one, Rob Reiner's like, I'm going to leave all the facts on the table, and those facts are going to lead to conspiracy.
So you're not going to leave.
But there's a big factor in not leaving on the table there, Rob.
Edwin Walker had someone shoot at him, and you're not bringing that up.
It's probably Oswald who did that.
So, I mean, it's just very dishonest, this podcast.
And we mentioned it last time that General Posner, who did the Oswald Dundidit book, Was interviewed by Reiner and they just did left it on the cutting room floor because they didn't want to talk about it.
And so I just think that's very this is not leaving it all on the on the table.
This is not showing us all the evidence.
So this is just conspiracy stuff.
This is just It's just, it's just nonsense.
It's just, it's just the CIA killed Kennedy.
And that's what we're going to tell you because that's the story we want to tell you.
Yeah.
He was an MKUltra agent.
His entire life from when he was a teenager was a lie.
Um, and then after he did it, everything that we know about the JFK assassination, including the goddamn photos of his head getting blown off is fake.
Yeah.
That's what we're getting at here.
Yeah.
I'm reading here that apparently one of DeMorne Schmitt's wives was an alcoholic and he was not an alcoholic.
So I'm retracting my claim of alcoholism for DeMorne Schmitt.
Did we ever get anybody correcting us on the mallets, Sidney Gaultier?
No, no one said anything about Sidney Mallets.
Listeners, please help us.
Are we right?
Are we wrong on this?
We know that one of the, one of the producers followed you from the Who Killed Kennedy podcast.
You should, you should just reach him out, reach out to him and ask, like, you guys get this wrong.
And now I have another thing that says, yes, I actually interviewed my friend Steve Porter for the Sixth Floor Museum's Oral History Collection because he was the Mornschmitt's maintenance man back in the 1970s.
He said they were always drunk and acting erratic and they had lots of dogs.
So I un-retract my statement.
The Mornschmitt wasn't alcoholic, so I don't know.
We've all been there, buddy.
Yeah.
And then this other person says, Janine was a full-blown alcoholic from the mid-60s, but George was not.
They argued loudly a lot during the 70s.
They always had plenty of Manchester Terriers, so those must be the dogs he was remembering.
The battle over demorgement's alcoholism continues apace.
We'll say he dabbled.
We'll say he dabbled in the Boozatrons.
Dogs?
He was full-blown on dogs.
He was dog-billed, but we don't know if he was an alcoholic.
He was 100% based in Dog Pilt.
So now we're going to move into the madness.
The madness that I thought was only in episode six that bled into this episode.
So now we are going to take our Rob Reiner supported ad break, because we only do one on this show, unlike Rob's podcast, which is seven.
So we're going to take our ad break, and when we return, we're going to get into the magic of guiding hands, which is like something that is an actual conspiracy theory terminology I've heard from other people, and not like the wilderness of mirrors, which Rob and Soledad were just obsessed with.
So we'll be back in one moment.
Boom, and we're back.
So, now... Get that dinar or whatever.
We're getting our Dutch Kroners.
Oh, I got like 12 bucks in Dutch Kroners from the last episode.
So big!
Dang!
Yeah.
So I'm thinking I'm going to sneak an ad into the mailbag breaking hell world.
See if I can get 12 Dutch Kronars every podcast, not just the JFK podcast.
Boom.
Just making it rain Kronar.
12 days of Kronar.
It's going to be awesome when it turns out that the Kronar is just an incredibly strong currency and I'm getting like $3 for every Kronar.
I'm like, oh my God, I'm rich!
That's gonna be like the Iraqi dinar scam, only like in bizarre reversal, and it's actually real.
One day that Kronar will be worth it.
Yes.
But um, oh yeah, I'm hooking you up with all the Kronar.
You have no idea.
But um, so now we're, so now after the de Mourne-Schmidt nonsense, And this is the thing.
All we know about de Mourne Schmitt and Oswald is that they hung out and that they knew each other.
And exactly how or why they knew each other, there's no there there.
This is all implication by association is all we have.
But now Rob gets into guiding hands.
And what guiding hands is, is The CIA not only sheep-dipped Oswald and made the American people and the world think he was a pro-Castro communist, they also got him the job at the Texas School Book Depository from which he could be framed for killing the president.
And in order to propagate this guiding hands narrative, we have to believe that Ruth Payne, the woman that Marina Oswald was living with, that Ruth Payne somehow got Oswald the job at the Texas School Book Depository.
And Rob implicates that Ruth Payne is CIA, because everybody's CIA.
And he brings up that Ruth Payne's sister was working for the CIA.
He hints that Ruth Payne's father was working for a group that was a front group for the CIA.
Because Rob doesn't actually have any evidence that Ruth herself is CIA.
So again, he has to use all this implication To make it sound like Ruth is CIA so that you'll just put those dots together.
You'll just connect the two and two and be like, Oh yeah, Ruth Payne is CIA.
She was totally a part of this.
And I think Ruth Payne is like still alive now.
And I mean, honestly, if I were her or I were a lawyer that had her phone number, I would be looking to sue Rob Reiner for defamation because this is insane.
It's ridiculous that Reiner is, um, that Reiner is doing this stuff where he's implicating Ruth
Payne as being a part of this plot to kill the president. The conspiracy. Yeah. And so
basically, the gist of what Rob Reiner is saying is that Lee Harvey Oswald basically says, man, I
really need a job.
And Ruth Payne's like, oh boy, how do you do?
I got a job for you.
And next thing you know, Oswald's working at the Texas School Book Depository.
And that's not at all what happened.
From this article that I read, it's from medium.com, slash, at West Wing Report, The Kennedy Assassination, No Conspiracy.
That Oswald found work at the Book Depository is nothing less than a miracle.
Many little pieces, seemingly unconnected, had to fall into place.
And they did.
Just a week before, Oswald nearly got a job as a typesetter trainee at a printing company far away from where Kennedy's motorcade would be.
He wanted the job badly and made a favorable impression on his would-be boss until his boss called Bob Stovall, a prior boss at the Paget Printing Company, who fired Oswald in April of 1963.
Stovall told him of Oswald's poor attitude and lazy work habits.
He was a troublemaker and maybe a communist.
Because Stovall fell for the poet spy's cunning deception of sheep-dipping Oswald.
Stovall said, adding, if I was you, I wouldn't hire him.
Had Oswald been hired, the world may never have heard of him, as it was likely Kennedy's visit to Dallas would have gone smoothly, as it did until his dark blue Lincoln Continental turned on the Elm Street.
This guy is word padding like a motherfucker.
He's like, blue Lincoln Continental!
Nope, nope, dark blue.
There we go.
I'm going to hit my thousand-page word content for the day.
It is important to note that even Oswald was about to become a father for the second time.
He lived alone in a cheap boarding house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.
Marina, eight months pregnant and tired of Oswald's beatings and unstable behavior, was living in suburban Irving at the home of Ruth Payne.
Again, Rob Reiner is defending a domestic abuser and he never brings this... I mean, I don't know if he remembers he brought up that Oswald hit his wife.
But, uh, this was literally one of the things that Ruth Payne was doing.
She was keeping Oswald separate from Marina so that Oswald wouldn't beat his wife.
So this woman who and Ruth Payne was Ruth Paine was all about trying to find brotherhood and solidarity with the Soviets.
She was trying to learn Russian.
That's convenient.
Oh, how convenient!
How convenient!
Literally, Soledad says that.
They set that up as a bit that you're supposed to make realize is mysterious about her.
Right.
She wanted to learn Russian since 1957.
She'd been studying it for a long time.
And this is basically how she gets in with the Oswalds, is that she finds out that Marina came from the Soviet Union and speaks Russian.
And Ruth Payne is like, oh shit, a native Russian speaker, and Oswald also knows Russian.
This is my dream.
I'm running into these people who speak this language I've been trying to learn because the Cold War is going all around.
Ruth Payne's a Quaker.
Ruth Payne's all about trying to find peace and common ground between peoples.
So she wants to learn Russian so she can communicate with Russians.
That is her goal here.
But of course, in Soledad and Reiner's world, She only wants to learn Russian as a cover for getting closer to the Oswalt so she can lure Oswalt into the wilderness of mirrors and get him a job at the Texas Public Depository.
Now, returning to the article, on the morning of October 14th, Ruth and Marina were having coffee at a neighbor's house.
At one point, the conversation turned to how Oswald needed a job.
Two possibilities were raised, one at a local bakery and another at a gypsum plant.
But both those jobs required driving, and Oswald didn't know how to drive.
So again, if Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to have more career opportunities, he could have learned how to drive, and maybe Ruth would have been able to loan him her car, or maybe he could have got a car.
But Oswald not being able to drive hindered him, so he was kind of stuck with whatever work he could find.
But then another neighbor in their little coffee clatch, Linnie Mae Randall, mentioned that her brother had just gotten a job at a place called the Texas School Book Depository downtown.
It was a busy season, Linnie Mae said, and perhaps they could use another man.
Ruth Payne and Marina, who wanted Oswald to pull his weight, called the depository and Superintendent Roy Truly said he would see Oswald the next day.
Oswald proceeds to lie his ass off to get the job.
He calls Truly, sir.
He says he was out of the Marines and that he lies about his discharge being honorable.
Truly doesn't background check him the way the typesetting guy did and offers him a job for a buck 25 an hour and Oswald
takes the job Now not only is all of this
Part of how Oswald gets this job But on the day Oswald is going to show up for his first day
of work Oswald and another person show up
and Truly needs one person to go work at an auxiliary
location that the Texas School Book Depository has like an office in and
they need Oswald to
and they need someone to stay at the main building and And Oswald's boss nearly told Oswald to report to the storage warehouse elsewhere, but at the last minute he decided to go with Oswald as being the guy that was going to go to the main building.
So if Oswald reports to the auxiliary warehouse, he's nowhere in the path of the motorcade.
And the decision to hire Oswald is Roy Truly's.
The decision to put Oswald in the main building is Roy Truly's.
All Ruth Payne did was suggest the job to Oswald and he interviewed for it and he managed to get
the guy, the supervisor that was in charge of hiring to hire him. If Roy Truly told him
to fuck off or if Roy Truly put him in the other building, then Oswald would not have been in the
book depository when Kennedy was assassinated. So I'm waiting for Rob Reiner to say that Roy
Truly is CIA because he has to.
He has to or this makes no sense because Ruth Bane did not get him the job and did not put him in the location needed to be framed for killing the president.
Roy Truley did.
He was the one that had the power in this situation.
This, oh my God, this is madness.
This is so dumb.
This is so dumb!
It's... I...
Nah!
Hayley, read this.
this. It's just the guiding hands is such a ridiculous theory because of what I just
laid out. Like Ruth Payne didn't get him the job.
He got the job because he couldn't get any other job, because he couldn't drive a car, and he didn't have the training necessary for those jobs, and he just happened to luck out and get this job in this place, and the guy who hired him didn't have to hire him, and he didn't have to put him in the building where he was!
So it's just, it's just absolutely the most frustrating nonsense, and You didn't hear about that auxiliary warehouse on the podcast with Rob and Soledad, because of course you wouldn't.
They would never tell you about that.
And for some reason they don't blame Roy Truly for anything.
Roy Truly is just an innocent person.
But Ruth Payne, CIA to her bones.
It's just so...
It's just super ridiculous.
So yeah, that is guiding hands.
That is the idea that everything about Oswald's life was so carefully orchestrated up to and
including him getting that job and that this was all set up.
And now there's an awesome little documentary on YouTube called the Kennedy Assassination
Inside the Book Depository by Lemino.
And that video just talks a lot about the guiding hands as well.
It says basically what I'm saying about it, because it's the situation.
And what was I going to say?
Come on, brain.
You can brain.
But yeah.
There's no evidence of anything really happening that would indicate that there was something nefarious about Oswald getting this job.
And on top of that, this motorcade route wasn't assured.
There were two possible locations that after they got into Love Field, there was like, I believe it's like the Women's Union of Voters was one location and the Dallas Trademark was the other.
This is from the Luminio video.
And Governor Conley was the one who fought hard to get the Dallas trademark to be where the motorcade was going to end up.
And as a reward for fighting for the Dallas trademark, he got shot in the chest.
So take that Conley, you prick.
So, um, The route of the motorcade wasn't etched in stone when Oswald got this job.
Oswald getting this job wasn't the work of Ruth Payne.
It's all just nonsense.
It's all very silly.
Mm hmm.
Very bad.
Very bad.
Very good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's basically it.
I mean, that's this episode.
Dimorne Schmidt is the big bad, is this boogeyman thing.
We're mad at James Engleton for reasons that I don't really understand, but he was a CIA operative, so he's bad.
And Ruth Payne is also bad.
I mean, it's just, all of it is very silly and very bad.
But That's where we're at.
We have been led through the wilderness of mirrors to this moment and this point.
And now we are finally arriving at something resembling the assassination.
And we're going to get to next.
The next episode is Richard K. Snagle, who I had not done a deep dive into because he was always a very tangential character to the conspiracy.
But next week is absolute Nonsense.
I dug into Nagel, and Nagel is a clown the way everyone is.
Rob, Soledad, all the rest of them, jokes.
Just absolutely dumb jokey jokes, and it's pathetic, and next week's gonna be six hours.
It's gonna be a six-hour podcast.
I hope Hayley has all day to listen to me talk, because it's gonna be horrible.
So I hope you enjoyed this one.
Get ready for the blockbuster next week, and we will catch you later.
