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Nov. 26, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
23:39
The JFK Conspiracy Explained

This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman go in depth on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, including their own unique theories on what really happened in Dallas in 1963.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is your Weekender Black Friday edition for patrons only.
First of all, I hope that you and yours have had a wonderful, safe, good, enjoyable Thanksgiving.
Hopefully you didn't have too many arguments about, I don't know, Hopefully Rittenhouse didn't even come up.
Just keep it out of here.
We got a special little show for you to say thank you.
It's something that, Nick, I know that I've been waiting on I think you've been waiting on.
I think a lot of our listeners have been waiting on.
We watched this new documentary by Oliver Stone, who remains obsessed with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
It's called JFK Revisited Through the Looking Glass.
It is a summary of a lot of the theories around that assassination.
So that is right.
Our Black Friday gift to you is that Nick and I are going to get into the weeds.
We're finally going to let Nick go.
We're going to let him talk about the assassination of JFK, which is... Nick, tell me if I'm wrong.
It's one of your favorite subjects.
In general, correct?
I mean, it's to the point now where I'm kind of thinking that I've reincarnated, I've come back, this is my second life, or maybe more, and I think either I was JFK or I was Lee Harvey Oswald.
I'm thinking that must explain why I'm so into this and fascinated by it.
There's no other explanation.
We are off to a galloping start, is what I'll say.
We are going to not only discuss the film, we're going to get into all the background.
I don't know.
Nick, just to give the people a preview, do you have a definitive theory of what you think happened?
Absolutely.
Okay, I don't have a definitive theory, but I have a theory that if I had to put money down, I'd put money down on it.
I'll reveal that as we go along.
But we're also going to go ahead, as we do on the McRig podcast, we're going to go ahead and talk about conspiracy theories, where they come from, the effects, long-term effects of our politics and culture.
Plus, also, we're going to get into the CIA, that history that surrounds this entire thing.
We're going to get really, really deep in depth on this.
We hope you enjoy this.
Again, we hope you had a great holiday.
But before we begin, Nick, how did you feel about this particular movie, JFK Revisited, Through the Looking Glass?
I mean here's the thing because I've been thinking about trying to do a podcast I'm like the definitive JFK podcast for a long time and once it's almost like trying to comprehend space you know you get out there and all of a sudden is there's so many directions it's almost overwhelming to the point where you can't even you can't consider it all and this is one of those things where they did a very good job to keep it tight and focused under two hours and
They wanted to make sure that they discussed, you know, the newer, you know, documents that have come out since, you know, JFK was released.
So, I feel like it was a really good job.
I mean, obviously, there's like 50,000 different things they didn't bring up that are interesting that I would like to hear more about.
They certainly did a good job with what they decided to pick and the most important things, how they were able to dispel a lot of those myths.
And also, we know a lot about what they had basically confirmed with these new documents.
All these different theories that have been out there for a long, long time that we weren't really sure if they were true, but it felt that way.
Are now verified and that's that felt really good too to see okay Those are the documents I got that confirms this this and that so, you know It lets you know that a lot of the people who were you know Sort of pontificating on these ideas were actually completely on the right path Yeah, so I just want to say first and foremost, I think Oliver Stone is actually a really good filmmaker.
You know, we can have conversations about whether or not he fudges around with the truth, which he absolutely does.
I mean, he's a propagandist.
That's who Oliver Stone is.
But I will say, That much like, you know, some people would talk about singular filmmakers, like if you showed me 10 minutes from a movie and didn't tell me Oliver Stone made it, I would know that Oliver Stone made it.
There is a really kind of an amazing ability that he has to capture fever dream conspiracy theory moments.
And of course, he's very, very famous for his JFK movie that came out in 1991 with Kevin Costner.
It is, I want to say two hours, 40 minutes.
with some incredible performances in it.
It is one of the definitive documents of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory world.
As we see in this documentary, more or less he took all of the sort of things that he felt were compelling in the situation and dramatized them.
And I think to good effect.
But one of the things that I think Stone also is really good at, I think his movie Nixon is really underrated, which has Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon.
It's a really interesting portrait of Nixon as this sort of paranoid, obviously clammy, sort of ham-fisted, sort of petty, petty tyrant.
But he also portrays Nixon as not being in control of the government, as being sort of chasing after what Nixon constantly referred to as the beast.
Which is of course the military-industrial complex that we're gonna get into in depth in this this conversation I thought W with Josh Brolin had moments.
It wasn't that good You know they it didn't really work out, but I will also recommend for anybody who's interested in this stuff he had another series on Showtime called I believe the hidden history of the United States and Which I want to say is like a six part, seven part type documentary series.
It was pretty good.
It hit on some decent stuff.
This is a pretty effective documentary.
I think it asks a lot of questions.
It poses a lot of things.
If people are at all interested in this, and I think that you should be, I think this is a seminal moment in American history, I would recommend people watch this.
Sure.
I mean, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention, you know, Wall Street, Platoon.
But those movies didn't really tap into a deep influence he has from the French New Wave, which is what he taps into to then create this fever dream and make you uneasy in movies like Natural Born Killers.
And then certainly Nixon had flashes of that as well, and so does certainly JFK.
Full disclosure, I actually worked on Natural Born Killers when I was in Chicago.
I was a location scout, believe it or not.
Wow!
Yeah, so I was part of having them filming some of that stuff.
And it was cool to be around him, to be around Robert Downey Jr.
at the time, and Woody Harrelson.
It was interesting to see that, soon after JFK comes out.
That's really kind of cool.
I had no idea.
You know everybody you've been everywhere.
It's incredible shit.
I have to say that.
Well, I got a story in every port.
Whatever that metaphor is.
And by the way, full disclosure, as far as the JFK stuff, I spent a year every night minimum of an hour a night for a year straight going through as much as I possibly could on this and then that ended probably you know two or three years ago well yeah around 2017 or so when I ended so 2016-2017 so you know I I was as deep of a diver on this as a lot of people can and interestingly enough I'm on YouTube now post the Trump everything and
It's not as easy to find any of these videos if they're even still up or if they're just buried by the algorithm even during search.
So, I don't know how easy it would be to recreate what I did for that year because they're not recommending videos like they used to.
The search does not reveal the same kind of videos that I'd seen.
It's hard to find.
I didn't bookmark them as a stupid ninny.
But at the very least, you know, I have it and I know it's taken notes at some point.
So, it's in here.
It's in the head somewhere in the beautiful mind.
Well, on that note, I think that's really interesting that, you know, basically what you just said is that you did the research.
And, you know, now that has like some really bad commentations, you know what I mean?
Like going out looking into vaccines, looking into QAnon, all of that.
I think we should have a couple of disclaimers before we begin.
Just because conspiracy theories denote paranoia and or occasionally like fascistic leanings, those types of things, that doesn't mean that there are not conspiracies.
Obviously, since mankind has been in close quarters, since there's been such a thing as a society or politics, people have been engaged in one conspiracy after another.
We know that the United States has been guilty of just some far out shit.
I mean, we're going to talk about Alan Dulles here in a little bit.
Alan Dulles was the head of MKUltra, in which the United States of America, and this is not paranoid, this isn't tinfoil hat stuff, were dosing people with LSD, they were messing around with mind control, they were messing around with telepathy, all kinds of crazy shit, because they thought the Russians were doing it, and so they had to do it.
Like, the stories from that, I mean, will make your hair curl.
But this is from an era.
What we're getting ready to talk about is from the deep, deep abyss of the Cold War, which is where America, of course, believed that it needed to do anything and everything in order to win that war and further its geopolitical sort of situation.
So a lot of what we're getting ready to talk about, there's a reason to doubt official stories.
And I think a good place to start would be to say, If I, and I'm not going to say anything definitive, Nick, but I would say to begin with, I have deep, deep entrenched doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas.
Well, you're not going to be a minority here.
I mean, 70-75% of the country now believes that.
And I always find it interesting, whenever I encounter someone who's alive and is an adult at that era, it's interesting to me when I encounter someone like that who actually does believe that he was the lone gunman.
It's almost like a breath of fresh air because you don't encounter too many more people that way.
But, you know, what we can't ignore is that in 1963, that's the height of the Men in Black.
You know, it's now sort of a quaint, fun movie series.
But these Men in Black were real.
These were the G-Men.
These were the SCIA guys.
These were the guys who would show a badge and then everyone would completely, you know, back down.
Yeah, and I think that that distrust of the American government is earned.
It truly is.
do that and be part of that conspiracy, if you will, where people felt like it was part of their patriotic duty to some degree to, you know, if they told you to do something, you would do it.
And that even could mean change your testimony of what you saw.
Yeah.
And I think that distrust of the American government is earned.
It truly is.
I mean, what we watched in this modern era, particularly, and we've talked in depth around and around in this podcast.
From the very beginning, America believed in top-down power, believed in aristocratic control of the country, that there was the tyranny of the mob that had to be avoided.
Eventually, it turns into state secrets and reality can't be trusted in the hands of normal, everyday Americans.
I I think when you look at this thing and And the Warren Report, that is a different question about what happened with the Warren Report.
We can talk about what conspiracies are, how they work, what they do.
In a lot of ways, one person's conspiracy theory, which is Allen Dulles and all of these people, including Gerald Ford, by the way, in a smoke-filled room deciding how history would be changed and the way to move things around.
I want to be frank, that's exactly the kind of shit that did take place in Soviet Russia.
Like, that's what they did.
They would get in a room and they would decide how reality would work and what was best and how to change it.
I'm not saying that didn't happen, but occasionally it happens when people want to believe one thing or they feel like their own interests are being endangered or one of those things.
You know, we're not talking about reptilians in a room.
We're not talking about the New World Order with puppet strings or whatever, which of course is an anti-Semitic trope.
I simply don't hold much stock in the official explanation as it has been given to us.
It feels like a bucket without a bottom in it.
There are so many reasons to doubt it, which of course then opens up not just the need to look through history and do the research, so to speak, But also to question the basis of American power moving forward, which I think is one of the reasons we're in the position we are now.
Uh, yeah.
And if you want to go over just sort of what the official line was, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had lived in Soviet Russia for... Oh, no!
We gotta hold that back, because that's a whole different ballgame.
What are we talking about?
Okay, well, okay, but, okay, we won't... Fine.
This guy... No, you know what?
Okay, let's go ahead.
Well, we'll talk about the actual details of the assassination three shots by one person the sixth floor with a car moving away from him at a certain speed You know one shot hits in the throat Well the back of the neck which becomes a throat shot depending upon who you're talking to.
Oh, yeah Yeah, and then wildly misses and then somehow hits a headshot with, well, gosh.
Yes, that's the question.
Do we want to get into the evidence of the actual bullets?
Or do we want to talk about who Lee Harvey Oswald was?
Do we want to talk about what JFK was doing right up to this point?
You know, and what LBJ was doing?
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe we're coming up with a way to do a definitive multi-part documentary because those are the ways you would start to organize the chapters, right?
And those are the three big ones.
Well, you know, I'll start with this because I want to get into the Oswald thing and I want to start the conversation there because I think there are a lot of ways to go and then we can start dissecting some of this.
And I want to say, when I teach fiction, when I'm teaching students how to write fiction, one of the things that we talk about a lot is avoiding coincidence.
Right?
Avoiding things because as you're reading a text, as you're absorbing a text, as you're thinking about things, you don't want to think, like, that's weird.
That's strange, you know, because all of a sudden the story starts to, it starts to wrinkle up.
The Oswald thing, there is no end to the stuff, but I will tell you what my, like, big pause was.
It was when I started looking at Lee Harvey Oswald, and for those who don't know, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine.
Lee Harvey Oswald while he was a Marine.
Spent a lot of time in places where intelligence was based, where intelligence was operated.
And I have to tell you, if you know anyone or have come across anyone who spends a lot of time around intelligence, I hate to tell you this, chances are that they have links to intelligence.
Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Nick, how many people are usually welcome back after defecting to the Soviet Union in the 1950s?
Oh, zero.
Zero.
Zero.
Well, guess what?
Lee Harvey Oswald came back in 1962.
And by the way, for the record, that means that he almost undoubtedly went to the Soviet Union As a quote-unquote fake defector in order to gather information and carry out intelligence operations within the Soviet Union.
So he comes back to America and they don't even talk to him.
There's no official meeting where they talk to him to ask what he learned or why he came back or what his intentions are, which is protocol.
So he comes back and all of a sudden he starts working on both sides of the Cuba issue.
And of course, for those who don't know, the Cuba issue is that Fidel Castro, a communist, was in charge of Cuba.
The United States deeply, deeply wanted to get rid of Fidel Castro, and so they funded a lot of paramilitary, off-the-books operations, including things like the Bay of Pigs, in order to try and overthrow Castro.
Oswald worked with the anti Castro people one day and the next day worked with the pro Castro people and Constantly was surrounded by intelligence operatives.
They knew where he was the files show that they kept a really really close watch on him They didn't talk to him.
They didn't bring him in He was always working with informants and people around it, which says that Lee Harvey Oswald is At the very, very least, without drawing a lot of lines or starting to connect thread, was tangentially connected to American intelligence.
The idea that that guy ends up killing the President of the United States, that's a really massive coincidence.
And when you realize that, all of a sudden you have to ask questions.
Right.
Well, here's the thing.
It gets more interesting because he was on TV, in local TV in New Orleans, discussing his positions and they filmed him on the corner handing out leaflets with Ted Cruz's father.
Never mind.
And by the way, that isn't as far-fetched as I would believe.
Nonetheless, we'll save that for a whole other documentary.
And so, you know, it's reasonable to sort of surmise that like, you know, what they're trying to do is establish Lee Harvey Oswald as a certain kind of person and have a public record of who he is.
And certainly the anti-Castro stuff is powerful if you're talking about wanting to establish him in that realm and then later on using him as this patsy.
Because they can now point to all of a sudden evidence, you know, like it's not often that people are getting filmed on the streets in 1962 or 63.
That's rare to have a remote news segment like that.
So you have to wonder how that all got put into place as well and how they had this footage ready to go and it was easy to find.
So those are the things that start to give a lot of fuel to people who want to say this is why he was set up to be this role where they can blame him for the assassination.
So the idea of a patsy and this is one of those things.
So when we start talking about why he was on TV or why he was photographed all of a sudden then my problem with that is all of a sudden we start projecting motive.
Do you know what I mean?
Whenever I start looking at this thing and I start running it through my head, and you're exactly right because you can lose your mind doing this.
You absolutely can, which is actually, to go ahead and give some context, That's exactly what a government wants you to do.
They want you to feel like there are all these machinations and plots and conspiracies.
Intelligence constantly runs operations to keep people confused.
I've talked to multiple people who believe that if QAnon didn't start as a psychological op for the intelligence community, it sure as hell got there.
Right.
So part of it is you're supposed to be confused as if you can never sort of put your finger on the pulse of things.
So do I think that Oswald was set up as a patsy?
Maybe.
But I think there's another opportunity here that hasn't necessarily been explored by Stone because I think he has his own narrative that he's going with.
Which is that by traveling in these circles, by being around these people, Oswald was in the proximity of a lot of different operations, and when push came to shove, found himself in a situation that obviously led to him being arrested and then assassinated himself.
Well, listen, he defects in October of 1959.
Kennedy was not a president then.
So that kind of blows up a lot of this argument saying, oh, well, they had planned this way ahead of time because you didn't even know that Kennedy was going to be president.
He was a pawn out in the field.
Which is what a lot of these people are.
I mean, to think that a lot of this is long term planning is kind of crazy.
What we've seen and what we've been noticing over the past few years, so much of this is reacting.
Do you know what I mean?
And for all of the stuff that American intelligence has done and American politics has done, they're not good at carrying things out.
Things happen.
They move around.
All of a sudden they backfire.
There's unintended consequences.
All of a sudden you look over here and you say, this is a person that I could burn.
Here's an opportunity.
And I'm not going to say too much because I don't want to give away my theory yet.
Okay.
But what do you think about Oswald as the supposed killer?
Oh, I don't think that he had the headshot at the very least.
In fact, I don't think any of his shots hit.
There's a real question of whether or not he was on the sixth floor and he actually fired bullets at all.
And that goes into a lot of things.
I mean, I was in Dallas in 2018.
I got the picture of me standing in his backyard holding, you know, fake holding a gun in the pamphlet.
So I can maybe put that on the Discord so people can see.
So, you know, and there's a lot of back and forth about whether those pictures were faked or not.
But the bottom line is it really there's a lot of doubt about whether or not he was ever even on the sixth floor.
Now, I believe someone was on the sixth floor firing at that point, but I don't believe that the headshot came from there, and I'll believe the first shot that hits Kennedy when he clears and the Zabruderfield clears the sign, I don't think that was that way either.
I'm willing to believe that the wild miss that hits off of the curb, that hits James Teague underneath the overpass, that angle winds up pretty well.
So that seems to me there.
I was there.
I stood on the X. I looked up.
I could see the angles.
When you're there and you realize, like, kind of how small Dealey Plaza really is and what the angles really look like, it's impossible to picture any way that either the first bullet hits the way they said it.
It's impossible.
And then without a Doubt!
There's no way the second bullet hits him in the head the way we saw in the video from that angle.
There's no way.
Plus, there's trees in the way, so there's a lot of doubt that, again, I don't think anything from that sixth floor actually hit him, and I have doubt.
I don't know exactly how much, 50% doubt, that it was ever even Oswald on that floor.
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