HellwQrld Presents: "Who killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald" Episode #7: A Cuban, a Mobster, and a CIA agent walk into Dealey Plaza
This week Rob and Soledad keep adding characters because they can't help themselves. Mike and Haley dig through all the nonsense and give us the alternate history of if JFK lived and if it would have led to world peace (Note: It would not have). Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
I am joined by the already talking Haley, aka Arizona Right Watch.
Hello everybody, that was a Freudian slip.
That is proof that the Mafia killed Kennedy.
Yes.
Your slip.
Yes, yes.
My misspeaking there was absolutely proof of everything that they've ever said.
100%.
Yep.
Oh my god.
So yeah.
Hello, everybody!
Yeah.
This episode, me and Hayley had like a 20, usually like we have like a quick like five to 10 minute little powwow as we get ready for this week's episode.
This week we had like a 20 minute powwow because this week's episode is so weak that it was just like, man, like we're just gonna have to like, we're gonna talk around this episode.
Talking about this episode is just not, not great.
Because it's very weird because you have a 10 part podcast series You would think you would do all the world building in like episodes 1 through 3, maybe episodes 1 through 4 if you had a lot of world to build.
But here, Reiner and Soledad, they get deep into the weeds on Lee Harvey Oswald, then they just pull it back to a 40,000 foot view, and it's just jarring.
It's just this really jarring episode where We go from the minute details of Lee Harvey Oswald's life to suddenly introducing just dozens of more characters.
Just more people.
New guy after new guy.
And it's like, Rob, you have three more episodes after this to put a bow on it.
Why are you introducing so many new players into the story this close to the finish line?
Before George R.R.
Martin stopped writing the books and HBO ruined the show at the end, Like, there was this, in one of the more recent books that George published in Game of Thrones, they came up with this new Targaryen character.
Spoiler warnings for people who haven't done that.
But anyways, the moment this character existed, like, my friend was just like, this is ridiculous.
This character can't possibly be a real Targaryen.
And he and I started calling the character bullshit Targaryen, and they never even put the character in the TV show.
And it was just, the truth of the story, the truth of what we were talking about is you can't introduce an important character that late into a story.
The audience doesn't have an emotional connection to that character.
They can't, like, they weren't rooting against or for that character for the last, like, four books.
And then suddenly you're like, oh, wait, this new real king just showed up in book five.
And by the way, the book, the series ends in book seven.
So it's like, really?
What?
No!
The new king can't show up in book five!
That doesn't work!
That's what Rob's doing here in episode seven.
He's just like, now here's a list of a million Cuban exiles who fucking hate Kennedy.
And now here's a bunch of mobsters that hate Kennedy.
And now here are more CIA agents than we previously told you about.
And these CIA agents also hate Kennedy.
Rob literally asked Soledad at one point, you know this name?
And she's like, no, remind me.
Like, it's in the podcast like that.
It's like, okay, we're introducing too many names.
Because he said it again also this episode, is I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you, which he did in a previous episode.
And it's like, you know, maybe you should cut, maybe you should cut some of this.
If it's so important that you get all these people in, then you had to format the podcast in a different and better way.
Because the podcast, as it was structured, was literally 10 half-hour episodes.
You were planning on solving the Kennedy assassination in five hours.
That was it.
And that seems ambitious, to say the very least.
And so if you have this big world to work with, make this a 15-part series.
Make this bigger.
Actually take more time on the episodes.
Make 45-minute to an hour-long episodes if needed.
I don't think any episode in this podcast series got over 35 minutes, pre-ads and everything.
And even that would include the credits at the end that Solid Ad does, which are like two or three minutes by themselves.
They're so funny.
It's so funny.
The credits.
It's just like, here's everybody.
Here's who does the sound, and here's who does the credits to the sound, and here's who... Just like, everybody.
Here's my grandma's name.
Like, it's a long credit scene.
I mean, we do our credits at the end of Hellworld, but I mean, it's like, it's really wild how produced these shows are.
It's a huge cast to produce this shitty podcast that's half an hour each episode.
The money that's going into this is pretty wild, you know?
I would not say that the podcast is shitty on production or any of that.
What's shitty about it is the information they're giving you.
The information they're giving you is just not wholly representative.
And again, this goes back to the fact that in episode one, Rob Reiner was like, we're going to give you all the information, and I think that will lead you to conspiracy.
And he's absolutely not doing that, which is why I made this response podcast to his podcast, because he's not telling you the truth about all these things.
So.
Speaking of good production, jazz music opening this episode.
Oh yeah.
So we know that we are in Miami.
We are in Cuba.
We are in.
We're in the American South with a lot of Cubans, a lot of non-whites, a lot of people that would really enjoy their, their jazz.
It was funky music opener.
So.
The show opens with the CIA asking the mob to kill Castro for them.
And they offer the mob piles of money.
They offer them fat stacks.
And the mob turns down the money and they say they will kill Castro for free because they're patriots.
And this is a very sort of weird jumping off point to this whole thing.
Where it's just like the mob and the CIA were hanging out and they thought it'd be really cool to kill Castro and they were willing to do it on the cheap because a freedom democracy.
It's just what why are we why are we saying this?
Why why are we doing this?
Like?
It's just but again, I think the point of this open is to introduce the fact that the CIA is tied to the mob and the mob is tied to these these activities that the anti Castro Cubans are aggressively in favor of and The main character in this group is Bill Harvey, a CIA operative who Reiner basically says was kind of the quarterback of the Kennedy assassination.
He was the guy, like, working the lineups.
He was like the head coach last QB.
He was working the lineups.
He was figuring out who the assassins were going to be.
He's, like, making the calls to who's going to get in the game to kill the president and this, that, the other thing.
The chess pieces are moving.
They said it again!
They did it again this episode.
The chess pieces on the board are moving.
I don't remember if he used them.
You're supposed to view this as, you know, it's like a man with a puppet hand and he's just puppeteering so many characters to eventually kill JFK.
It's really... Yes.
It's that energy.
Yeah, everyone, and literally hundreds of people are being quarterbacked.
At the end of the episode, at the end of the episode, They explained that two different groups of people were literally, quote unquote, benchwarmers for the Kennedy assassination.
That they were just in Dallas in case some of the people that were actually in the game, killing the president, got cold feet and decided not to do it.
At which point they would get a phone call saying, Hey, head to Daily Plaza right now.
We need you to kill the president, which.
That doesn't sound like a very good way to keep a conspiracy under wraps and to have a carpentum... I can't say the word, so I'm not even going to try.
Carpentumization.
At one point, Reiner even says, this was strictly on a need-to-know basis, So if it's need to know that you're going to be required to kill Kennedy, why do you then have like 15 other guys on the bench being told, hey, go to Dallas.
He literally said that Dallas was the Super Bowl of covert operations when Kennedy arrived.
I was watching the news, President has been shot in Dallas.
And they're like, I was in Dallas until the way by the phone that I can't put two and
two together.
I'm a moron.
He literally said that Dallas was the Super Bowl of covert operations when Kennedy arrived.
And it's like, OK, calm down.
And again, if you're doing that, how are you keeping the conspiracy from getting out?
If everyone's there, how does nobody get drunk at a bar that night and go, yeah, we done did it!
We killed that dumb Catholic son of a bitch!
Nobody has a sense of consciousness.
Nobody spills the beans to their wife.
Everybody's super...
Everyone's tight lipped.
Everyone's a super professional about this.
And the best part about it is, and they brought this up repeatedly, was that they're like, Bill Harvey is a drunk, raging alcoholic.
They brought up Bill Harvey's alcoholism like five times.
They were just like, this guy is just in the bag at noon every day, just fucking, like, just toped up to his tits.
Just, he's just ruined.
Hang in with mobsters and hang in with their wives, and like, also telling them information, apparently, that they're just gonna keep secret until this podcast.
And all I'm thinking while they're talking about this is like, yeah, the guy I want running the operation to kill the president is someone who's notoriously known for being drunk, because no one's ever said something bad when they're drunk.
Yeah, like, I don't know, a week, two weeks, a year after the Kennedy assassination, this guy orchestrated and mastermind.
He never got into an argument with someone like, you want to try this shit with me?
Kennedy tried shit with me.
See how that went for him?
Like, when you're a drunk, you don't have impulse control.
You don't filter your thoughts.
You say dumb things.
Think Rudy Giuliani.
Yes.
Yes.
Like, so much of his fuck-ups lately, or in recent years, has been like, this man is sauce 24-7 and should probably keep his mouth shut.
That was fucking Roger Stone in that fucking documentary, where he's like, Rudy can't help us.
He's too busy trying to get laid and drunk.
That's what Patrick Burns said about him, too!
In his book.
It's like, this guy's not carrying out.
The greatest assassination of all time.
Right.
This guy is a drunk psychopath.
Again, if you're the Poet Spy or any of these other super geniuses, like Alan Dulles, if you're any of these people, you're like, we need to murder Kennedy.
Who should we get?
Let's get Drunky McViolence.
The guy that hangs with mobsters and tells them everything.
Yes.
That guy is going to fucking run a tight ship, let me tell you.
Yeah, so what Haley's getting at here is that there's this moment in the podcast which is the most pure transition from the Kennedy assassination to QAnon bullshit.
I have ever seen.
And what I mean by this is, is that one of the things that QAnon loves more than anything is when public officials misspeak.
When people who are public and got a microphone in front of them and they say something, they slip up somewhere.
Suddenly, everyone gets all kinds of crazy because they believe that this is the truth being admitted by the person.
Like, there's a video of Barack Obama saying Michael instead of Michelle, and there's a lot of context to that, and he's not actually misspeaking.
People have explained what really happened there, but they play that clip, and they're just like, boom.
Even Obama admits it.
His wife's name is Michael.
She's transgender.
And their other two favorite ones are...
John Kasich, after John McCain's death, he stated, literally it was after the funeral,
the day after the funeral, and this interviewer was talking to him
and Kasich says something to the effect of, it's been 24 hours since John McCain was put to death.
And he's very upset.
He's obviously emotional and QAnon takes that.
And also his daughter, Meghan McCain, his daughter at one point when she was being
all grumble grumbles about people attacking her late father said, you don't have my father to kill anymore.
You can't kill my father again.
And QAnon was like, yep, she's admitting him for her father was killed.
And in the case of Meghan, I think that it's more like
when people are attacking your father, you can't say, well, my father's dead.
You can't dead him again.
I mean, you use the term kill as a sort of like statement about-
Yes, if the sentences work.
Yeah, exactly.
It's one of these things where it's like, you can't make my father die again is weird and clunky.
You can't kill my father again is very strange.
You can't brain cancer him again.
Right.
You can't give my father terminal brain cancer again.
Yeah, that'd be really a weird thing to say.
And again, McCain had been dead for over a week when Kasich said what he said.
And so, the fact that Kasich said it's been less than 24 hours since he was put to death, obviously he meant to say put to rest, but he misspoke.
But QAnon plays that clip, like once every two months I see that clip somewhere, somehow, and they're just like, and QAnon likes to call John McCain no name, because that's what Q called him, and So they'll be like, what really happened to No Name?
And then they'll play John Kasich's quote, and they'll be like, and then they'll get 100 replies being like, executed in Gitmo!
Woo!
Traders justice!
Woo!
And all that kind of stuff.
Why does QAnon call John McCain no name?
Because Q just literally said it.
No, but why does he call it?
Why does he call him that?
Is there a reason behind that?
Q just said, we hate to say his name.
Like, John McCain is just so scummy, so evil that they wouldn't even say his name.
He was just beyond contempt.
He was just so reviled by Q-team that they wouldn't even spit his name out in disgust.
Man, how did Trump lose Arizona?
I know!
And he's doing it again!
He's doing it again!
He was being like, you know, he was doing the whole, you know, fuck John McCain.
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's just, uh, yeah, it's just one of those things.
Uh, uh, trip codes, uh, QDROP 357, trip codes on four working, fly, Sid, fly.
We don't like to say his name.
And later Q-Drop, it said, like, they were putting all these initials of all these people.
Loretta Lynn Shirley Rowan McClinton, James Comey, and Rod Rosenstein, et cetera, et cetera.
There's a lot of initials.
I don't know all of them exactly.
But it says, we don't say his name.
Like, literally, that's how he states McCain.
And then Q-Drop 1022, we don't say his name.
Just, we're just, we just, we, we hate John McCain.
Like, so yeah, just, But yeah, the thing where they're just like, oh, you slipped?
You did a slip of the tongue?
That's proof of a major conspiracy and, you know, you guys are just hiding the truth and you literally can't even hold back on the truth kind of thing.
And that happens in this episode in the most hilarious way.
They are interviewing the widow of mob boss Johnny Roselli.
And before that, they talk about the relationship between this mob boss and Bill Harvey.
Oh, wait, no, it was Bill Harvey's wife that was talking, wasn't it?
I think so.
Yeah, it was Bill Harvey's wife talking about her friendship with and Bill Harvey's friendship with the mob boss.
And when she's talking, she accidentally says that Roselle was recruited to kill Kennedy when she meant to say Castro.
She quickly corrects herself.
She says that, like, immediately, she's like, Kennedy, I mean, Castro and Soledad and Rob.
Oh man, they love this.
They both freak out.
They're high-fiving, they're celebrating.
What a slip-up that was!
Oh my god!
What a brutal mistake!
What a slip up that was. Oh my God. What a what a brutal mistake. Oh man, just they're so happy that
they're that they got this.
That they got this moment where, oh, she gave away the game!
She admitted they killed Kennedy!
We got him!
Got him!
Oh, we win!
We win!
She's clearly old, too.
She's, like, ancient while giving this interview.
Yeah, again, this is one of their favorite things to do is interview really old people because, again, everyone who's involved in the Kennedy assassination is very old now.
Yeah, they're older, they're dead.
So they're interviewing this really old lady, she slips up in what she's saying, and boom, got em!
We did it!
Conspiracy proven, podcast vindicated, how do you like them apples?
And it's really childish.
It's incredibly ridiculous.
She slowly goes, that was quite the Freudian slip.
And it's like, come on, dude, like this is not, you can't, you This isn't proof.
It's because last episode, she literally said towards one of Rob's long conspiracies, like, so there's no smoking gun.
And it's like, this is the best they got for some of Rob's long theories that he's got going on.
It's like, well, there's no hard evidence to what you're saying, and there's a lot of There's a lot of claims going on here that are not backed up by fact.
So the best you got is a Freudian slip.
Right.
And this really is, this podcast is basically, this podcast is what QAnon dreams of having a podcast be for themselves.
Because you have in this podcast, you have Rob Reiner, who is like Hollywood royalty, and you have Soledad O'Brien, who's an independent journalist.
And I'm going to cough and pause.
He's coughing, everybody.
He's having an absolute fit right now.
Yeah, it's not great.
But anyways, you have these people who are mainstream, considered totally normal by polite society, and they're doing a 10-part series of baseless claims against the people that killed Kennedy that are just the spaghetti that Rob Reiner is throwing at a wall.
And no one in polite society is casting Rob Reiner or Soledad O'Brien out.
They're able to run this crank podcast, and it's considered totally normal.
QAnon is basically hoping in 30 years, future versions of Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien are going to be like, Adrenochrome!
Is it really that far out?
Is it really that strange to imagine that the global elites don't drink the fear-infused blood of children to obtain eternal life?
And then Snappy Jazz Beat will come in, and they'll interview guys who've written books about adrenochrome, and the mainstream media and everyone else will kind of ignore it.
And so we will have a future Rob Reiner on to talk about adrenochrome.
And he'll name the four people who are the major adrenochrome producers in North America.
And life will just continue as though nothing happened.
And that, that's what QAnon yearns for, that level of normalization of their absolute bullshit.
And that's why This Kennedy stuff is so upsetting to me is that it's so normalized.
And it's so strange to me because it's like you have this conspiracy that is the most absurd, the most ridiculous thing imaginable.
That's like literally the government rebelled against its leader and murdered him in broad daylight and got away with it.
And then the people that believe in that stuff will turn around and say to QAnon people, no, you guys are kooks.
And it's like, you think the CIA murdered the president with help from the Cubans and the mob?
And everyone just got away with it.
Everyone just walked away scot-free.
Why would you not think that our government was then capable of 9-11?
Why would you think that our government was not capable of more crimes?
How can you not hate our government if you believe that our government murdered the president?
That's the thing.
I just don't know how Rob Reiner and Soledad reign it in and then they're like, yeah, we're just gonna go to the ballot box and vote for Joe Biden and all good normie Democrat stuff.
It's just...
You guys should be the brain worms should have actually have managed to lay eggs and grow inside you and turn you into a nut.
I just don't know how.
What I really think it comes down to is that the JFK researcher people want to see themselves as like somber, serious and people that analyze evidence and came away with the truth.
And they say QAnon people is just kooks who will believe any dumb thing.
And then you smash cut to Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien going, Boom!
Freudian slip!
Nailed it!
Boom!
We did it!
Conspiracy proven!
Vindication is ours!
That's like there are way too.
I mean, I've only seen a few in my research so far, but there are definitely, as you say, it's been just normalized to the point where nobody even cares because there's not much traction online about this podcast.
And I've seen a couple interviews like CNN, I think interviewed Rob Cuomo on he got fired from CNN, but he did it on News Nation or whatever the fuck.
And Larry Wilmore.
Hey, what are you doing, bud?
Um, I interviewed Rob Reiner about the podcast and it's not presented in a critical way.
It's just like, so you have a new podcast and you're presenting new information.
Tell us about that.
And it's just kind of like an ad as if, uh, yeah, you should probably not be doing that.
It'd be like having on like, yeah, some fucking cute, like, hey, hey, Ron Watkins.
I hear you have a new book out.
Tell us about that.
Right.
It's just the fact that in America, we just accept that our government Killed the president because they didn't like him a while ago.
And that is, there is nothing that could have gotten more bang for the buck than this when it comes to Russian disinformation against America.
I'm not saying the Russians did, because like Mark Lane, who made like the first book, Rush to Judgment, about the Kennedy assassination.
And then there was like Six Seconds in Dallas.
There were a bunch of really early books.
These are the books that probably killed Mort Sahl and all the other people that then killed Rob Reiner.
But like, Mark Lane and a bunch of these guys were like, look, I didn't take any money from the Soviets.
Like, how dare you?
But I like, much like QAnon, I think once the Soviets saw that there was this conspiracy theory about our government killing the president, they weren't, they weren't opposed to throwing a little gasoline on that fire.
I mean, cause this is, like, Soledad and Rob even were like, back when Kennedy was president, Americans loved their government.
Then he died and a little while later, Americans were like, fuck the government.
Government's crypto shit.
It's like, I don't know why, maybe because we literally have had 60 years of people saying the government killed our young, charismatic, handsome president in broad daylight.
And destroyed world peace.
And they did it to deny world peace.
Literally, Kennedy was going to bring peace to the world, and he was murdered for it.
That was also a big part of this episode was like, could you imagine if he had just lived in terms of Vietnam and everything?
And it's like, maybe sure, but let's not pretend that because, okay, okay, we got to get into it.
Actually, I got to get, I got to start from the beginning.
Okay.
So because I was listening to this episode, because the whole point of this episode is basically three groups want to take out Kennedy, the Cuban exiles, the mob, and the CIA slash military industrial complex.
Which is, so this episode is like vaguely telling you that they are all working together secretly to take out Kennedy.
Sure.
There's no proof in this episode.
It's all just kind of vague.
Like they all kind of, here's how one group is connected to this other group.
We're not going to give you specifics of how specifically they put the bullet in Kennedy's head, but we're just telling you for the conspiracy, these groups all had motive to kill Kennedy.
That was what they said, like, oh, well, you got to look at the motive.
Because Soledad asked, like, it's hard to believe that any of this is real.
And Rob is like, you got to look at the motive and who's got most to gain.
And while listening to this, I couldn't help but think that it's kind of like QAnon in reverse a little bit where it's like, QAnon thinks that all the bad is after Trump, but he's strong and fights, you know, he's fighting against the military industrial complex.
He's fighting against whatever the current version of the mob is.
Uh, I mean, I've heard, I've heard even them bring up the mob.
Uh, he's fighting against, you know, the fucking Catholic church or whatever.
They all want to take him out, but he's too strong to be taken out because he's the big hero.
And with Kennedy, it was, they all wanted to take him out.
Because he was the big hero and they succeeded.
Yeah.
It's really that.
And then it's QAnon literally does the whole thing where they have the memes of Kennedy as quote unquote, the starter and Trump as the finisher.
Yeah.
Now I get those a little bit more.
It's the same conspiracy, just kind of.
Right.
And, and this is what people always tell me is like, people always ask me, yo, poker, how can the people that love Trump love Kennedy when their politics were completely opposite?
And the answer to that is, is that Kennedy was killed by the bad people, and the bad people oppose Trump.
Therefore, Kennedy and Trump must be good.
And that's just, that's the binary level of thinking that's going on here.
There's no actual analysis about what's happening.
It's just literally, Kennedy was murdered, and he had to have been murdered by the bad people.
That means that Kennedy was a threat to them, so he was a good guy.
And it's just really childish, and The thing that really blows my mind about this episode is that he brings up the executive order where Kennedy was withdrawing 1,000 troops from Vietnam.
He claims that Lyndon Johnson rescinded that order.
He did not.
The order that Johnson released affirmed Kennedy's decision to remove 1,000 troops.
Wow, really?
He ended that one on a commercial.
He was like, and the day after the funeral, he rescinded the order.
And then it like jazzes out to some music.
Yeah, and that actually did not happen.
It didn't.
Basically, National Security Administration Memo 273 did not revoke the withdrawal of troops.
It affirmed it.
it. Basically, the thing is, is that Reiner doesn't tell you what a thousand troops actually means.
There were 16,000 Americans in Vietnam at the time of that order.
So we just reduced our troop count from 16,000 to 15,000 as a result of that order.
And the thing about this is that literally, I've mentioned this before, but in Kennedy's speech that he was going to give at the trademark that day, he talks about support for South Vietnam and how that is part of America's foreign policy is to bolster and support democracy against the threat of communism in all of the world.
It really makes Kennedy look like a huge piece of shit when you think about what all these people are talking about, where basically Kennedy is giving all of these public speeches about, we stand with South Vietnam and we will fight the communists abroad and everywhere we can.
And then smash cut to election night 1964, living John F. Kennedy has just been declared the winner of the election in a landslide over Goldwater.
And he goes to the stage, he's like, thank you for reelecting me.
And now we are getting out of South Vietnam.
Fuck those people.
And it's like, bro, bro, what the fuck, dude, you, you were literally just like pro, like defending the South Vietnamese this whole time.
And now that you've won re-election, you're just going to fucking ditch out on them.
You're just going to fuck them over.
I mean, we've kind of jaded ourselves to this idea that presidents pull shit after
they win re-election, but my God, what an absolute, like, fuck you, it would have
been to America, to all of America's allies, to the South Vietnamese, to
everybody to have just been like, I was only pretending to support you until I
could win re-election, and now that I have done that, get fucked, dumpties.
I mean, it's just, wow.
I mean, like, it really, to me, it's like, you're really selling Kennedy short.
You're making him into this hyper-cynical politician who's just saying what he needs to say to win re-election.
Yo, JFK, if you want to get out of Vietnam, say it with your chest.
Say it before the election.
Be honest with us.
Tell us what's going on here.
But apparently, no.
The thing is, is that if he had done that, if he had actually done that, then guess what?
Now the Democrats go into 1968 as the party of appeasement, the party that lost Vietnam.
And in Reiner's telling of this story, somehow Kennedy achieves world peace in his second term, and we're all just cool with everything.
And one thing that he never brings up and that nobody else brings up about all of this is that Kennedy got murdered at the end of 1963, which ruins the American side of the American-Soviet relationship because Khrushchev and Kennedy were like working on a relationship to like thaw Soviet-American tensions.
What no one brings up is that Khrushchev was deposed by Brezhnev in 64.
So the Soviet side of this thing just goes to shit one year after the American side goes to shit.
So let's say Kennedy lives and he's campaigning through 1964 to win re-election, and then in the middle of 1964 he gets a memo, Mr. President, your bro in the Soviet Union, he has just been removed.
There is a new dictator in the Soviet Union who is probably not as cool about this whole peace thing as you would like him to be.
And then Kennedy's like, yo, Premier Brezhnev, how you doing?
And Brezhnev's like, fuck you, dumb young American.
I'm sick of you.
Damn.
And then Kennedy's like, well, guess what?
No world peace now.
Fuck.
I mean, there's more than just one side of this equation.
There's more than just Kennedy living that leads to the utopia.
Because Khrushchev was badly damaged by the Cuban Missile Crisis, because even though Even though he and the high-level people in the Soviet Union had been told, look, we're trading Cuba for Turkey.
So if you don't know, the actual diplomacy that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis was the Americans beat their chests and were like, you will withdraw those missiles from Cuba, you no-good commie warmongers.
And to the world, it looks like the Soviet Union's like, yes, Americans, we will not withdraw from Cuba.
We're so sorry we did that.
But in reality, what happened was the Americans told the Soviets, look, in six months, we're going to quietly withdraw our nukes from Turkey, which is what you've wanted this whole time.
We will never.
And if you try to make a link between Cuba and Turkey, we will deny it.
But that is what's happening.
You're going to get your missiles out of Turkey.
We get our missiles out of Cuba.
Everyone's happy.
And the Soviets were like, deal.
But the hardliners in the Kremlin and everyone was like, you know, Khrushchev got rolled on that shit.
Khrushchev was kind of a bitch there.
I mean, this is like Rob Reiner's story of this is that Kennedy was seen as a weak appeaser by the hardliners in America.
Well, guess what?
In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was seen the same way.
And instead of brutally murdering Khrushchev, Brezhnev and his crew in 64 was like, oh, yeah, by the way, Khrushchev, Nikita, buddy, amigo, compadre, you're no longer running the ship.
I'm running the ship.
You can go retire off to nowhere land now or die.
Those are your two options.
And Khrushchev was like, I'll retire then.
And Brezhnev was like, good call, buddy.
Good call.
So Like, there's more to this than just, if Kennedy lived, we live in a utopia now.
Because we wouldn't have.
Because, I mean, Brezhnev probably would have been super thrilled if Kennedy wins re-election, Brezhnev deposes Khrushchev, and then Kennedy immediately withdraws from Vietnam.
Brezhnev would have been like this big dick-swinging hero to the Soviet Union, being like, I remove Khrushchev, that spineless cuck, from the premiership, I become the chairman of the Soviet Union, and immediately weak-willed Kennedy gives me Vietnam!
Behold the power of Brezhnev!
Behold the power of the Soviet Union!
You think Kennedy's party is winning the election in 68?
You think America's on the path to not being antagonistic to the Soviet Union?
You think everything's going smooth at that point?
No, I don't.
I think that looks pretty bad.
I think we're probably a little more screwed than we were in the actual Cold War.
I mean, we don't have a bloody war in Vietnam, which is obviously cool, but geopolitically, I feel like the Soviets are kind of like on the front foot at that point in America kind of looks weak.
And I don't know, maybe we like overlook Watergate a little bit more.
Maybe we just let Richard Nixon be a fucking total nut bag when he's in the presidency.
And you know who probably isn't?
Like a super-ultra hero who doesn't, I mean, obviously he doesn't get martyred, but Bobby Kennedy's probably not seen as like some sort of crazy superhero.
JFK probably isn't seen as a superhero.
We probably hate Kennedy in that timeline.
We're like, oh yeah, Kennedy sold out Vietnam and then fucking Khrushchev's just waving his dick around everywhere and we're a bunch of spineless pussies until Richard Nixon fucking put his finger in Khrushchev's chest and told him to fuck off!
Yeah!
Like, in Ryder's timeline, Richard Nixon's our hero from the 60s, and Kennedy's a spineless cuck.
I mean, that's basically what happens.
Yeah, you hear, like, oh, worst president since Kennedy.
Yeah.
Oh, oh God.
Yeah.
Instead of like, oh, the photo of Bill Clinton shaking Kennedy's hand.
Oh, Bill Clinton's like fucking throwing that thing into a fireplace.
That never happened.
That man never touched me.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't have that Kennedy stink on me.
I mean, it was incredible for Kennedy's legacy that he got assassinated.
And Reiner and these people are just burnishing his legacy more by making his assassination not some dum-dum.
Oh, the gun shot him.
Nope.
The Illuminati got him.
The Illuminati thought he was such a big threat they had to take him out.
And it's just this myth-making around Kennedy, which again- That is this episode, is that he was not leaving Dealey Plaza with his head intact.
Because that entire place was hot.
Literally everybody you saw was right out of gun, you know?
Yeah, it was like the end of John Wick, where like everyone just sat there, and the 12-hour countdown just started, and they're all gonna kill him.
I mean, it's just that.
Yeah, it's just literally, it's just, yeah, the Zapruder film, Zapruder himself and everybody in the frame of the fucking video, they're just all firing.
They're all shooting at him.
They're all trying to kill him.
And it's just so silly, because Reiner's story is that the whole point of this thing, according to Reiner, is the anti-Castro Cubans are furious that Kennedy sold them out to Castro and didn't help them in the Bay of Pigs.
The mob is furious because they lost their Vegas in the Caribbean.
And the CIA is mad because Kennedy's soft on communism.
And so these enterprises are now going to work to kill Kennedy.
And they again throw Operation Northwoods in here to be like, and that because it's the strangest thing in the world that Reiner keeps going back to this thing where he's like, and this was done in order to provoke a war with Cuba.
When again, the Warren Commission was painstakingly crafted to avoid doing that.
The whole point of the Warren Commission was Oswald acted alone, no foreign or domestic entity aided him, he did it by himself, case closed, we're moving forward.
So, if I'm the mob, and I'm the anti-Castro Cubans, CIA gives me a call on the phone.
Boom.
They're like, yo, buddy, we got to kill Kennedy.
He's a real piece of shit.
He's fucked us over.
Yeah.
To the anti Castro Cubans.
He let this communist take your country, kill your families, exile you.
To the mob, yo, he took away your whorehouses and your casinos.
I love that they say in the show they're like casinos, like drugs, but then when they get to prostitution, they just say women.
They like whitewash prostitution.
There's like dames, broads, you knows.
Pretty ladies.
Pretty ladies!
Who, if you give them money, they'll let you touch their no-nos.
I mean, it's just, it's just, I don't know why, but it just made me laugh.
But it's just, so the mob says these things, the CIA says these things to the mob, and to the anti-cash row Cubans, and the mob and the anti-cash row Cubans are like, in, we're in.
So roughly 40 of each of those people are flown to Dealey Plaza.
They fire like a couple hundred bullets in the Kennedy's motorcade.
They murder him.
They leave.
And now if I'm the anti-Castro-Cubans and the mob, I'm looking at the paper and it's like, Castro loving communist kills president.
You're like, yes, we're going to get what we want.
We're going to get Cuba back.
And then a week passes and nothing's happening.
And then another week passes.
And then you start getting word that, wait, that Lyndon Johnson's building up a commission to investigate what happened and they're going to try to tamp all this shit down.
And if I'm the mob and the anti-Castro-Cubans, I'm like, what the fuck?
What the shit?
I did this so I could have Cuba back and now I ain't getting Cuba?
I mean, like, the thing that Rob and Soledad never bring up in this series is that the CIA fucked over the key anti-Catholic Cubans and the mob.
They didn't get what they wanted.
Like, the only people who won here were the CIA and They bring up Alpha 66 and Operation 40, these anti-Castro terrorist organizations?
I have to bring up that they interview the son of Ricardo Morales Sr.
because this was a hilarious bit to me.
Because we're supposed to take this guy's word as fact.
Even though he's the son who lost his father when he was a teenager and is telling a secondhand account, supposedly when he was a child, his father, Ricardo Morales Sr., told him that he had trained Lee Harvey Oswald at a secret CIA camp.
There is no proof.
presented.
It is just literally the interview with this Ricardo Morales Jr., the son of Ricardo Morales Sr.
and I looked up this guy and you know what?
First of all, Junior was also complaining.
He's like, you know, daddy was never around much during the Bay of Pigs and it's like, okay, so you didn't know your father that well.
He got taken out in a very, very, very, very shady way when you were a teenager and he supposedly told you when you were a kid that he trained Oswald at a secret CIA camp and I'm supposed to believe this shit?
And you look into Senior here and he was the CIA agent so I'm supposed to trust this guy even though I'm not supposed to trust the CIA according to Rob.
They pick and choose which CIA agents I'm supposed to trust.
The ones that help his narrative, those are the ones I'm supposed to trust.
The ones that do not help the narrative, those are the ones I'm supposed to distrust.
But anyway, this is one I'm supposed to trust.
He was a CIA agent who claims he did a stint in the Congo in 1964 where he claims to have killed hundreds while serving as a mercenary.
Now, it says claims, so I'm not gonna say that he killed- he is actually, uh, uh, got that number count.
But he is lying about- if this is a lie, his lie is I'm a violent, murderous mercenary in the hundreds.
Um, and, yeah, it seems like he was a big fucking liar, also.
There's a lot of stuff I won't go into with, like, terrorisms and bombings and lots of other violent things that he was involved with that means I should trust him, apparently.
But, um, He was shot in a bar fight in the Keys.
He was 43 years old, and after a month-long investigation, the police said the death was a justifiable homicide for which nobody would face charges.
There seems to be a lot of conspiracies about his death, too, because he was a CIA agent, but the situation that kind of is presented in his death is that someone called him The uh he they called him a homophobic slur and he took offense and they got into a fight and he was killed over it is kind of the that story but the Washington Post memorialized him by saying he was a spy, a counter spy, a mercenary, a confessed murderer, a bomber, an informer, a dope dealer, and an operator extraordinary.
And I'm supposed to believe this fucking guy's secondhand son's ass fucking account that he trained Oswald at a secret CIA camp.
That is the level of citations that we're getting here.
I just had to, I just had to, I just had to do that.
I'm sorry.
No, please do.
Much unlike Rob Reiner, I'm more than happy to let my co-host go on a rant here.
I mean, instead of just literally being like, yo, Dame, read this for me.
Yo, Brad.
Which is the level of stagecraft that we usually get in the broad Solid Ed conversation.
Solid Ed's job in this podcast is mostly to ask questions with incredulity.
Like, you know, Rob, is it really possible this could have happened?
I mean, she's just...
And they had this one bit where she was just like, so this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and this happened.
And then Rob was like, correct, correct, correct, correct, incorrect.
And it was just like, God, why is their interplay so stilted?
Why?
They just don't have this chemistry where they're just bouncing off each other and just hitting each other with stuff.
I feel like it's mostly because it's just Rob's world and Soledad's just living in it.
Yeah, and she's just like, okay.
Anyways, next week.
Right.
Yeah.
She kind of opens it.
She kind of introduces it like, hi, I'm Soledad and this is the podcast.
Right, I'm the host!
Yeah, I'm the host!
And you will occasionally hear her say a word or two in the series and then at the end she gets to read five straight minutes of this podcast is brought to you by.
Right.
Yeah, or she gets the she's also there to affirm Rob like again with the Freudian slip thing or she and she was all in on that Freudian slip.
You can hear them practically high fiving.
Yeah, it was like, yeah.
It was like, boom, got him.
Yes.
So anyways, we are pretty far along here.
So it's now time for our Rob Reiner mandated ad break so we can get some Dutch Kroners for the pod.
And we're back.
Thank you for listening to that so I could obtain Dutch Kroners.
It's truly the dream.
It's what I've always wanted as a podcast millionaire.
So anyways, so this all happens and the big sort of reveal we get in this pod beyond the fact that the Cubans are terrorists that are blowing up Cuban boats as part of Alpha 66 and all this kind of stuff.
And yet, after they and the mob get screwed over by the CIA, they don't do anything.
Like, if this Morales serial killer mass murderer guy wanted Cuba back, and he's got a body count in the hundreds, and then he watches Lyndon Johnson and the Warren Commission screw him over, Why does Alpha 66 start doing terrorism in America with the mob's backing?
Why are they not broadcasting that the CIA killed the president?
Why are they not airing everyone else's dirty laundry here?
Because they didn't get what they wanted.
I don't understand why those... Rob creates a triangle of the CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, and the mob.
Only one point of that triangle gets what they want out of Kennedy's murder.
And the other two points are just like, ah, shucks.
Them's the breaks.
You know, you know how it is.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
And it's like, if I'm part of the plot to murder the president and I don't get my payoff, I'm pretty, I'm pretty upset about that.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm calling the manager.
I'm going to be a bit of a Karen here.
I'm not letting that rest.
I mean, I don't know exactly how I try to fix that.
Maybe I go to the Goldwater campaign.
I'm like, yo, Barry Goldwater, running for president, eh?
How'd you like to know that Lyndon Johnson accepted aid to have Kennedy murdered so he could become president?
Might that be a campaign issue for you?
Here's some facts and evidence to support that claim.
Arizona heavy episode, Goldwater, McCain.
Boom.
Yeah.
Arizona all day, every day here, here on Ye Olde.
A-U-H-2-O.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
I remember that.
I actually remember that because I'm a politics nerd.
That's so good.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
I just don't understand why these violent, murderous terrorists just tucked their tails and slinked away after the CIA razzle-dazzled them.
And if you're the CIA, why are you even involving these people so that the sons of the murderous lunatics can then go on podcast 60 years later and talk about how they were part of the plot?
I mean, you're the CIA.
You just do this without needing anyone else's help.
You've already sheep-dipped Lee Harvey Oswald and all that good stuff.
Yeah, you got your bot that you've been training since teenage years.
What else do you need?
You've already had Ruth Payne, who got name dropped for the third episode in a row now.
Practically at the opening, he wanted you to know CIA connected Ruth Payne.
Yep, just immediately crushes Ruth Payne.
Just crushes her.
He's like the most implicated person in this assassination.
Right.
CIA connected Ruth Payne getting Lee Harvey Oswald a job at the Texas School Big Depository.
Oh, and then they again, they bring up the motorcade route and they blame the mayor of Dallas for the motorcade route.
Oh, that was so funny.
That was great.
And the thing is, it's so weird because if anyone, if you dig into the motorcade route, literally at all, The main promoter of the motorcade route going to the Dallas Trademark was John Connolly.
Period.
He is always cited in almost every source that I've read where there's all these different places where Kennedy could go after landing at Love Field and John Connolly really wants it to be the Dallas Trademark.
And I was even reading something where they were talking about there were too many catwalks inside the Dallas trademark, and they didn't like it because they didn't want people over the president's head, not only for shooting purposes, but they didn't want someone to spit on Kennedy from a high vantage point.
Well, it's a good thing nobody spit on the man.
Right.
But that's what happened to Adlai Stevenson before.
Adlai Stevenson was Kennedy's ambassador to the UN.
He went to Dallas.
I mean, but it's just, but that's what happened to Adlai Stevenson.
Before like the Adlai Stevenson was the, was Kennedy's ambassador to the UN.
He went to Dallas, someone spit on him.
And that there was talk inside Kennedy's inner circle of yo, Jack, Dallas is kind of a fucking
nutsoid place.
Maybe skip that on your Texas trip.
And Kennedy was like, Dallas is like the biggest city in Texas.
I'm not going to be a pussy and not go there because someone spit on my UN envoy.
Like, I'm not going to be afraid of the American people.
That's ridiculous.
And wrong call, Jack.
BT dumb.
So, but... Should have taken the loogie.
Yeah, should have taken the loogie.
But basically, Connelly and a bunch of like, Connelly and like the Secret Service and all these people, they have these running arguments for like weeks.
And then finally, begrudgingly, They give in the Connolly and they're like, okay, fine.
We will go to the trademark.
You'll get what you wanted.
And as a reward for his service, John Connolly gets a bullet through the chest and is almost killed along with Kennedy.
So congratulations, John Connolly!
Great, great decision for where to take the motorcade through.
I mean, that's the thing is that they can't say that.
They can't bring up that Connolly was the one that was fighting for this because at that point they're literally saying, John Connolly is a nut who is willing to die to kill the president.
He's literally going to be like two feet in front of JFK.
Whereas according to Rob Reiner, like hundreds of bullets are being reined in from innumerate assassins.
And of course one of them did catch Connelly in the chest and almost killed him.
I mean.
There is this grim scene at the start of All The Way, an LBJ documentary movie on HBO.
And Lyndon Johnson's on Air Force One flying back to DC from Dallas.
And he says to his wife, any word on Connelly?
And his wife says, doctors are optimistic.
And then LBJ says, well, at least there's that.
He's just like, well, at least they didn't kill him too.
I mean, so it's like, so, but, and that's the thing is that Connolly was the one that was obsessed with the Dallas trademark and anyone else they try to put into it, they have to put into it because those were people that didn't catch a bullet for this shit.
So like that thing, it's just, it's just so silly and.
So we slander Ruth Payne.
We slander the mayor of Dallas.
We start slandering all these other people.
We bring up Tosh Phillips again.
I know his first name's Tosh.
But we bring up Tosh Plumlee again.
And the thing about, again, what Reiner refuses to acknowledge about Tosh Plumlee is that Plumlee's claim is that he was part of a CIA team that was working to stop the assassination.
Which Reiner will never bring up.
He will just bring up the plumbly claim to be CIA connected, that he was flying people in to help kill the President.
Which is not true.
Plumlee's whole statement was that I was there to try to stop it, and it didn't work, and I'm bummed out about it.
So he's just cherry-picking these stories from these characters to try to make this case, and the final big payoff we have from this whole thing is that One of these anti Castro Cubans claims that they knew a guy that was going under the name of Maurice Bishop, and that this Maurice Bishop was actually David Atlee Phillips, one of the big, big boys in the CIA.
And This is something that, again, we're just supposed to take the word of murdered hundreds of people in the Congo guys' word for.
And Reiner even says that when asked to testify before the House Collect Committee on Excavations, He immediately and flatly denied it, which of course he had to because if he didn't, it would have been too explosive.
And it's like, so again, when CIA agents Rob don't like say things, they're wrong.
When they say things he does like, they're awesome.
This guy was Maurice Bishop, and how do we know?
Because our people said he was, and that means they're right.
And his denial is a lie, because he has to be wrong.
Because they're the bad guy.
And it's just that kind of thing, where I'm going to accept all the evidence that supports my claims, and evidence that is against me, I will deny and denounce.
Because that's what Rob Reiner said he was going to do at the start of this podcast.
Take all the evidence and throw away the evidence he doesn't like.
Oh, wait.
No, he didn't quite say that.
He said something else.
But this is what he actually did.
This is what he's actually doing.
Yep.
I couldn't unmute.
That happens every episode.
Yes.
The crippling professionalism here.
That's our problem is like when we have awkward sounds, we don't have a cool jazz sting to like float into the pod and sort of like comfort the listener for a few moments.
To know that it's okay.
But yes, this episode was weird just in general because yeah, it kind of just got thrown in right before we're supposed to get the big payoff in these next episodes.
I feel like, okay, if we're gonna have this episode, at least put it before all the Oswald stuff.
I don't know.
It was a weird, it was weird placement.
This episode was mostly pointless, listener.
If you are actually listening along, you can skip this one.
Yeah, because it feels like it's kind of just laying the groundwork.
I looked up a bunch of the people that they talked about in this episode, and a bunch of the people they talked about in this episode gave interviews where they named the assassins.
So I feel like I have Reiner's list of the people that killed the president through the interviews.
I feel like I have Reiner's list through the people that I've read.
Um, so we'll see.
We'll see if the compare and contrast works out.
Um, so now we are finally through this dumb episode and we're now we're moving on to episode eight, which I haven't listened to nine and 10 yet.
Mostly because I just don't want to be built up on them yet, but episode eight.
Um, you, if you're, if you're listening along with us, listen to episode eight, because it is nuts.
It is absolutely nuts.
This is the war.
Like this episode was boring and it was a filler episode and it made no sense.
Episode eight is literally just Rob Reiner.
Just.
Putting the tinfoil hat on.
He's, he's making a tinfoil helmet.
Like he took like a, uh, like he stole a helmet from a NFL locker room and he just slathered that thing in tinfoil.
And then he just straps it on.
Cause, um, episode eight is the strangest theory about Oswald and his involvement in the Kennedy assassination that I've ever heard.
It is something that is, it begs belief.
It is beyond incoherent.
And so that's my tease.
That's my tease to get you to listen to me next week, because boy, how do you do?
I think it's going to be great.
And my teases are better than Rob's teases, because Rob's teases are next week on the pod.
And then the voice of a 90-year-old person is like, and then the thing happened and I was wondering about it.
But you know, that's just how it was back in those days.
And thankfully during the teases, we don't get the thrilling conclusion to those teases, which is Rob or Soledad yelling at that old person because the old person can't hear them.
So now what you're saying is... And then the old person's like, yes, that's what I'm saying!
And I'm sure Oswald didn't do it because he was a good man, even though he beat his wife and he tried to shoot that general, and he definitely killed that cop.
But we're not digging into any of that on this podcast, and I'm very old, so... They still haven't mentioned Tippett, have they?
No, I don't think so.
But I mean, they are going to mention Tippett.
So yeah, I'm going to give, again, I'm going to give a little bit away on episode eight.
When they get to Officer Tippett, literally Rob Reiner's reaction is truck mode.
Like literally, literally.
They're just like, they're like, they're like, and then officer Tippett is killed.
Who killed him?
Fuck if I know.
Put him on to the next talking point.
It's just like, he does state, he does like, you could do a whole podcast series about Tippett's murder.
Me?
10 seconds.
Done.
Out.
It's just like, wow.
Like, maybe cut episode 7 out, make episode 8 episode 7, then your new episode 8 is Tip It, and then episode 9 is whatever the fuck it is you're doing with Jack Ruby, and then episode 10 is your big payoff.
How about that?
This episode did not need to be made because you're literally just rehashing things, and you are also just literally You're taking the movie JFK and adding this weird Cuba subplot to it, which again, doesn't work out because the anti-Cuba people don't get what they wanted.
It's so weird.
The CIA killing Kennedy because they wanted a war in Vietnam, that makes perfect sense.
That is a streamlined narrative where Kennedy was going to get us out of Vietnam, but they murdered him.
We escalated in Vietnam.
And the lizard brain of the person listening to the podcast goes, that makes sense.
Whereas your theory is the CIA, the anti Castro Cubans, and the mob hated Kennedy.
They killed him to generate a war with Cuba.
Kennedy is murdered.
There is no war with Cuba.
It doesn't happen.
That through line doesn't work.
There's no there there.
I just don't get it.
Your podcast hurts my brain, Rob.
It really hurts my brain.
Thank you, listeners, to the people who are hanging on to this.
Those of you who are still here, God bless you.
I don't know why you're doing this to yourselves.
Much appreciate you.
If you're listening to me this much, please give me money.
Go to patreon.com slash PokerPolitics.
Give me money.
It's great.
I love money.
I love money.
If you don't want to give me money, don't give me money.
Give money.
There's only so much Dutch Cronar that we can get from these ads, listeners.
Yes.
But if you don't want to give me money, go to love146.org.
Give them money.
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I will not give you five more minutes of credits.
I'll just say thanks to myself for remixing our audio theme.
It's awesome.
Thanks to the guy that does the intro for the JFK Show.
