What really happened to JFK? Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger joins the Liberty Report to discuss his latest book on one of the enduring questions of our times.
What really happened to JFK? Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger joins the Liberty Report to discuss his latest book on one of the enduring questions of our times.
What really happened to JFK? Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger joins the Liberty Report to discuss his latest book on one of the enduring questions of our times.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, with me is co-host Daniel McAdams.
Welcome, Daniel.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Good.
Daniel, today we have a special guest.
We both know him and respect him, so I'm very interested in having our conversation.
And that is Jacob Hornberger.
And Jacob, of course, started the Future of Freedom Foundation and established it in 1989.
And he's well known for taking a very, very principled position on liberty issues.
Jacob, thank you for joining us, and I'll probably call you Bumper along the way.
That's fine.
It's an honor to be here, Ron.
Well, good.
Good.
First, Bumper, you and I have talked before about your Texas roots.
So that, of course, makes you a very special person.
You're born and raised in Texas, which is pretty fantastic.
But you really don't fit the mold.
You know, we who were born in Yankee territory and we come to Texas, people say, oh, you're a Yankee, you're not a true Texan.
But the answer to that is we got here as fast as we could.
Now, what's the story here?
Why would you leave Texas?
This is really a challenge for a Texans.
But here we find you in Fairfax, Virginia.
Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of people don't feel that I'm a real Texan since I grew up in Laredo, which they kind of still consider part of Mexico in large respects.
But Laredo is on this side of the Rio Grande, and I was born and raised there, and I practiced law there for several years after I graduated from law school at the University of Texas.
But ultimately, I got offered a job at the Foundation for Economic Education.
And it was a choice that I just had to make.
And my heart was with libertarianism.
I'd been studying libertarian principles, Ludwig von Mises and Hayek and Frederick Bastiat.
And so when I got offered that position, I decided to go where my heart was.
And so I went up to work at what is known as FEE in Irvington, New York, and then ultimately left there and established the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Well, I'm glad you didn't remain a trial lawyer.
Some of them have bad reputations.
I'm glad you're in the freedom movement.
But obviously, FEE is a great influence, has been a great influence on a lot of us.
But do you remember who introduced it?
Was it sort of natural you just came across some literature or did one individual get you involved with the FEE Foundation?
No, it was actually a road to Damascus type of experience.
I was rummaging around the public library of all places in Laredo and looking for something to read.
And I was disillusioned with politics and I'd gotten involved with politics and there just something wasn't right about the process.
But I wasn't sure what it was.
And I'd grown up as a Democrat, a liberal, and there in Laredo.
Of course, everybody was a Democrat in Texas back then, practically.
But I was with the ACLU rep in Laredo.
I was serving on the Legal Aid Board of Trustees, which was providing free legal services for the poor.
But something just didn't feel right about the whole welfare state.
And so I came across these four little books in the public library that had been published by FEE back in the 1950s.
Now, this was in the late 70s.
And I started reading through these books, and they were just pure libertarian tracts by Leonard Reed, who founded the Foundation for Economic Education, Ludwig von Mises, other libertarian economists.
And they just opened my eyes.
I mean, all the scales came tumbling off about how great the welfare state was.
And here was where I discovered libertarianism.
And it was truly a revolutionary transformation of my life.
That's wonderful.
And your publications have been good.
And I understand you have a new book coming out right now.
Regime Change Conspiracies00:07:55
Yeah, one of the things we wanted to talk to you this morning about, Jacob, is you've announced that you're doing a new, I think it's an e-book, if I'm not mistaken, and it's delving into that sort of intractable debate that we've had for, what, 50-plus years now on the JFK assassination, which seems like a watershed event in American history.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you're looking into in this particular one?
Yeah, this has been a very interesting experience.
In fact, one of the most interesting experiences that we've had in our 25-year history here at the Future of Freedom Foundation, we retained a man named Douglas Horn to do an online recorded video presentation about the Kennedy assassination and specifically about the Kennedy autopsy that was conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
And now, Horn had served on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s on the staff.
He had served on that board trying to get government documents released that had been held secret by the National Security Establishment, the FBI, the Secret Service, for some 30-something years.
And that board had been set up as a result of the public outcry from Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, over the continued secrecy in the Kennedy assassination.
So we got Horn to do this video lecture, which turned out to be about eight hours long, almost entirely surrounding the autopsy.
And then we released two e-books at the same time, one called the Kennedy Autopsy that I wrote, and one that Horn wrote called JF's K War with the National Security Establishment.
Well, lo and behold, that video has just taken off.
I mean, gone viral in a sense.
We've received about 100,000, more than 100,000 views of that video lecture.
And then our two e-books just started taking off on Amazon, and both of them since January have consistently been in the top 100 of Amazon's best-selling books on U.S. 20th century history.
Recently, Horne's e-book dropped off, but mine is still like 29 or 30, and it's been there since January.
So this inspired me to write a new book that revolves not just around the autopsy, but puts the assassination in the overall context of what was going on in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with regime change operations.
And so I argue in this book called The Regime Change, the JFK assassination, which is already on Amazon, and it too has now broken into the top 100 best-selling books on 20th century American history.
It places the Kennedy assassination, which I argue was orchestrated by the National Security Establishment, in the context of other regime change operations during that time, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Africa, and so forth.
You know, we're always looking for signs of optimism.
And I think one place we can find it is that the American people will eventually wake up.
And, you know, it's astounding how many people are agreeing with you.
There's something strange going on, and the official report is not correct, and governments don't tell us the truth.
I think that is all healthy.
But I think you made a comment, or somebody in your book made a comment that once you challenge that, they accuse you of being unpatriotic because how could anybody in the CIA or any other place do anything other than what is very, very good for the country?
Could you address that subject on the kind of challenges that we have to face?
You know, I mean, we face that, especially in the Kennedy assassination, where researchers have done a remarkable job over the years of compiling and marshalling a tremendous mountain of circumstantial evidence that unfortunately points in the direction of the national security establishment.
But you've got to keep in mind that if things did were carried out as the way that many of us believe they were, that that doesn't mean that the people that were doing this were operating out of ill motives or bad motives or unpatriotic motives.
They themselves considered themselves tremendous patriots the way they do today whenever they're conducting a national security state operation.
For example, if you look at Chile, which is what I talk about a lot in my new e-book, Regime Change, that they affected the same type of regime change in Chile, where they got the national security establishment, the Pinochet military, to oust the democratically elected president from office.
And both national security establishments, the U.S. and the Chilean, considered themselves tremendously patriotic.
They were ousting a president that they considered was a threat to national security.
They were installing a regime that they believed would bring stability to the country.
So they were arguing from the purposes of national security, and they were operating out of what they considered patriotic notions.
And this is why I argue that the national security establishment, which came into existence after World War II, is a tremendously dangerous establishment.
Not because.
Yeah, not because it's doing bad things to us.
I mean, not because it thinks it's doing bad things to us, but because it thinks it's doing good things for us.
You know, I think it's very simple in my mind.
If you're defending the state, you think of patriotism of defending the state.
Those of us who think patriotism is defending liberty, it's an entirely different thing, but they all call themselves patriots.
Daniel, you want to follow?
Yeah, I was going to remark, that's an excellent way of looking at it, Jacob, because if you think about it, I'm sure the NSA, when they started collecting all of our metadata and compiling it, they probably thought they were doing something very patriotic, even though we would argue that they were violating the Constitution, which is probably one of the most unpatriotic things to do.
So I can see how they would justify it.
One thing I'm wondering, the critics will always say to a thesis like yours is, how can so many people be involved in a conspiracy like this?
That means it's too complicated, so it would be impossible to do.
That's what you often hear.
Yeah, well, first of all, on the patriotism thing, I think it's so great that you guys hone in on that issue because there really are two different visions, conflicting visions on patriotism in this country.
One says, you know, blind support of whatever the government's doing.
And the other is what we stand for is standing for a set of principles, even when that means standing against your own government.
And when you look at the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, they were considered unpatriotic by their government.
But we, the libertarians, consider them to be patriotic because they were willing to stand up against their own government in favor of a strong set of freedom principles.
Now, in your second issue about the number of people involved, actually, it doesn't necessarily have to be a large number of people, but let's keep in mind that people can keep secrets, especially in the intelligence community.
I mean, that's why there's so many prosecutions right now of whistleblowers, because their idea is you don't disclose our secrets, and if you disclose our secrets, we will come after you.
And that's exactly what happens in high-level national security state regime change operations.
They were able to keep a lot of those things secret for many years.
If you take, for example, the murder of Johnny Rosselli, who was the liaison, he was a mafia figure who was a liaison between the mafia and the CIA as they were planning their assassination attempts on Castro.
Today, nobody knows who killed Rosselli.
Secrets and Leaks00:03:52
And everybody's been successful in keeping that murder secret.
What we do know is that somebody murdered him after he did a little bit too much talking about the assassination before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
But the second thing to keep in mind is that there have been leaks.
And that's especially around the autopsy.
They required all the autopsy personnel to sign secrecy agreements, which is bizarre.
I mean, if this is just a low note, why do you need a bunch of secrecy agreements on an autopsy?
But over the years, there's been leaks.
And finally, it came out as a flood after the Assassination Records Review Board.
And everybody figured out that the events surrounding the autopsy were very, very suspicious, very, very nefarious.
But ultimately, there have been leaks.
And so even in the CIA realm and the national security realm, people are going to talk a little bit.
And that's how people have been able to figure out what happened at the autopsy.
Right.
And, you know, I've tried to summarize this by saying truth is treason in an empire of lies.
And you tell the truth, you can get into big trouble, and they charge you with treason.
And that's why our whistleblowers are always getting into trouble.
But I do want to mention to the audience at a meeting, a conference, a rally we had in Austin just recently, the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Glenn Greenwald was there, and Ralph Balco was there, and we talked about these issues extensively.
You know, I was very pleased with that.
We had a nice crowd, and there was a lot of enthusiasm.
I hope we had some new people come to that.
But you need to be congratulated on that.
And those are the kind of things that your organization does.
And hopefully you'll do this again.
How did people close to you respond to that event?
Were they pretty satisfied with how it went?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, it was just a fantastic event.
It was exciting.
A lot of the credit goes to our co-sponsor, the Young Americans for Liberty.
We worked together to put that thing on, and we were all excited with the results.
We had more than 700 people attend, and we had three speakers, yourself and Radley Balco, who works for the Washington Post and writes great stuff on the militarization of the police and what's going on in the inner cities, especially against black and African Americans.
And we had Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who leaked the Edward Snowden documents and who has been a fierce opponent of the war on drugs and the war on terrorism.
And you could just sense the excitement in this audience, predominantly students, but not all students, of all ideological persuasions, because, of course, Glenn Greenwald's a liberal, a progressive.
So you could just see the excitement.
And we've got the talks online on our website at fff.org.
And the panel discussion was absolutely fantastic, too.
So, yeah, it was a tremendous success.
One of the best events we've had in our 25-year history.
And fortunately, you will be able to do more of those.
As you understand, Ron and Dan, ideas matter.
They influence people.
They cause people to change directions.
And that's what we're about in shows like this, is causing people to change their thinking about issues that they've been long attached to.
All right.
Well, we got to run, but I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
I want to encourage you to do what you were doing all along, especially those rallies.
And because you have a Texas Connection, maybe someday we can all get together and have something like that in Houston.
Maybe we can rally some more Texans in that area.
So someday we'll keep working on these issues.
But keep up the good work and we'll stay in touch.