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April 14, 2025 - I Don't Speak German
01:28:01
News Brief: The JFK Files
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Time Text
Sir, we have an executive order ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
That's a big one, huh?
A lot of people are waiting for this for a long, for years.
for decades.
And everything will be revealed.
Okay. Give that to RFK Jr.
This is I Don't Speak German.
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he /him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
Start with the obvious joke.
And we're back, and to the left.
Daniel, how are you?
I'm doing well.
I think you do a version of that joke every time we talk about this topic.
I love it every time, though, so it's great.
Yeah, I'm a terrible self-plagiarist, and people who've been listening to me for a while will hear.
I'm sure lots of self-plagiarism in this one, because you and I have talked about the Kennedy assassination on a podcast before.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A very old podcast.
That one is long and it's got other people in it.
Maybe we could cut a little bit of that and kind of put it out for the audience as a bonus or something, but, you know, I think it's fine.
Could be fun.
Could be fun.
A little re-release or something.
We discussed the movie JFK and, well, we discussed JFK and Nixon and kind of went through.
You know, kind of the historicity of it and, you know, kind of what it's saying and all that sort of thing.
So again, that's, it's, it's kind of like, it's funny how that project was, was very much like kind of what we ended up doing here just, you know, 10 years ago.
Yeah. Yeah.
For people who are completely lost listening to us, welcome back by the way, Daniel and I very, very long time ago, we, we.
Well, I mean, it started out as my old solo podcast.
I had you and James Murphy and Kit Power on, and we talked about the Oliver Stone movies, JFK and Nixon, and it turned into a massive discussion, which was a two-part episode.
And Daniel did loads of research, well, brushing up, I should say, because Daniel's a bit of an old Kennedy assassination buff from years back.
But you did loads of brushing up on the subject, and in the space of our conversation, you just completely...
Debunked the entire conspiracy narrative, as I recall, which was great fun.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun when one of you guys would bring me something, but what about the witnesses?
What witnesses?
Tell me which witnesses.
They were confused.
You're in the middle of a alleyway.
Come on.
Anyway. Something like that.
It's a French man, Umbrella Man, Babushka Lady, etc.
All this stuff.
I guess from the title.
If you're listening to this episode, you know we are not really going to be talking about the JFK assassination.
We're going to be talking about the release of the JFK files and some of the conversation around that.
So we're not going to be getting in deep into the assassination today.
Although, by definition, we have to cover a little bit of it.
We take it as a given.
Well, that gives the wrong impression.
We start from the assumption that Oswald acted alone, and so did Jack Ruby, by the way.
Not really because it's an assumption, but because it's just a proven fact.
It's just objectively true.
I want to phrase this a little bit less harshly than I may have in the past.
I am open to being convinced.
If somebody comes out and has really decent evidence and has a real compelling narrative through line as to who killed JFK if it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald or if Lee Harvey Oswald had an assistant or had help,
I don't know.
I'm open to being convinced, but to me, the simplest, most logical explanation is more or less what was published in the Warren Commission report back in 64. Now, we know that there are things that the Warren report got wrong.
So not to the person, not to the, you know, like, they had the timing of the shots wrong and they had some other details wrong.
But more or less, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Generally speaking, the stuff they got wrong, when you correct it, it makes Oswald look even more guilty.
Definitely. I'm perhaps a little less charitable than you.
I would say my mind is pretty foreclosed on this.
I've spent many, many hours on this.
I don't think I'm going to see a convincing argument.
I always like to say, look, I'm open to the idea.
Especially... You know, somebody in the audience really has a particular thing, but I've looked at a whole lot of this stuff and it never holds up for more than five seconds.
It's just, you know, the moment you expose it to any kind of logic or facts, it just collapses.
If someone in our audience has new information and wants to bring it to us, so we can break the case wide open.
Yeah, no, we might be able to...
We might be able to go full-time if that happens.
The day before recording, of course, we both get found mysteriously dead.
This is actually kind of interesting because, look, the evidence proves pretty much completely conclusively that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy alone.
And Jack Ruby killed Oswald alone.
If somebody were to produce evidence that...
That completely disproved that?
That rubbished all the evidence showing that Oswald and Ruby acted alone and independently?
Yes, of course I would accept it.
But it's like with any other, you know, every, there's no such thing as absolute truth and every claim is essentially provisional.
But some things are so well supported that it's perfectly reasonable to say, look, this is just a fact like gravitation and evolution by natural selection and other means.
The fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.
You know, the Holocaust happened.
Certain things are just established.
And yes, in theory, somebody could come along with fresh evidence.
But if somebody was going to unseat some of these things, it would have to be such a stunning and staggering amount of new evidence that would represent a complete paradigm shift.
It's just not very likely.
So it's reasonable, I think, to say it's not going to happen.
The only thing that you could really produce that we convinced people would be some really clear connection, like the CIA paid Oswald or something.
And Oswald did it at the behest of...
Even if that's true, you'll never find that document.
That was destroyed 70 years ago.
That was destroyed the day it was produced, basically.
That document, for instance, is not sat in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Pentagon or the CIA, and it's going to be released because time's up.
That seems to be the implicit assumption behind a lot of the talk about this thing about the JFK files.
Like, somewhere in a filing cabinet, there's going to be the minutes of the meeting where the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA got together and planned the assassination, and the government's just going to release that, because it's time for it to be released.
Like the Vonsi conference notes, you find that before the JFK assassination.
I mean, one of the things that I think you can say positively about the Oliver Stone film is that...
You know, it did create, you know, there were a bunch of documents that were secret that shouldn't have been secret in 1991.
And in the, you know, years past, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, yes, HSCA was kind of formed, and they went through and systematically released a bunch of those files.
And as you say, the current release, the JFK files release that Trump just did was basically just, you know, with even less redactions.
And so, I mean, there's still some redactions, but I mean, a lot of it, they've just kind of released it all.
And some of these people are still alive.
So, you know, like letting out people's social security numbers who, you know, happened to work at a filing clerk in an office at the CIA back in 1965.
I mean, this is really what has spurred this episode, which is the recent release by the Trump government of, at least in the rhetoric, the last remaining...
Secret JFK government files, which really amounts to that the whole thing about the files on the Kennedy assassination is kind of a complete red herring anyway, because I don't remember the exact details, but government policy or law regarding secret files was changed shortly after the Warren Commission laid down.
I think it was the Warren Commission or whoever it was, after the Warren Commission said these files, they have to be kept secret for.
70 years or whatever.
Whatever it is Kevin Costner says at the end of the trial in JFK.
Not long after that, at the end of the 60s, they changed the rules.
And I think over the years since, because of that, and especially, as you say, after the House Committee on Assassinations, and then it became a big public thing in the 70s because the Zapruder film was aired on television, I think by Geraldo Rivera.
I think I'm right in saying.
I can't remember the details on that.
No, they published stills from it in Life magazine in the 60s.
Yeah, but somebody put it on TV, didn't they?
I can't remember if it was Geraldo or not, but somebody aired it on television.
It was finally aired, and that just sort of creates a whole atmosphere.
Because now that you have moving footage of it, you can analyze every frame.
Well, it's supposedly the Zapruder footage shows...
Kennedy's head going back and to the left.
And supposedly, when we watch that, we're supposed to say, oh, he must have been shot from the front right.
Spoilers, everybody.
Firstly, his head goes forward and down, and then it goes back and to the left.
And that is completely consistent with what we actually know about the wound, because the bullet comes from behind.
It doesn't go straight into the back of his head.
What it actually does, if you look at the autopsy evidence and the skull, It clips the top right of his skull.
The top right side of his skull is basically blown off.
The fact that his body goes to the side and leftwards is completely consistent with a reaction to that shot.
But the public perceived it partly, I think, because they were directed to perceive it this way by people that were interpreting it for them as...
It's incongruent with the idea of a shot from the depository, and it's supposed to indicate a shot from the grassy knoll, despite the fact nobody saw anything happen on the grassy knoll.
And people saw stuff happening in the book depository.
I'm getting into the assassination.
Yeah, we're not supposed to be doing this.
We're not doing that.
It created a public pressure, and that led to some of the documents being released.
And then, as you say, the movie in 91, Oliver Stone's JFK came out in 91. That produces another sort of bit of public pressure.
And over the years, almost all this stuff has come out.
Biden released some more stuff.
So most of this stuff that's just been released by Trump is just stuff that's already been out, but they've re-released it without redactions.
And most, as Daniel says, the redactions actually mostly seem to be covering things like people's social security numbers, some people who are still alive, which has caused huge problems.
So that's the Trump administration up to its usual standard of competency.
I think there was an example of like, you know, in one of the documents, it says government of blank, and it was some other country that was, and then the redaction is just, it's just Australia.
It turns out, okay, it was the Australian government, you know, makes no difference.
It's just, you know, okay, that's fine.
Yeah. Where so-and-so was an envoy to such and such, and, you know, like that sort of thing gets redacted.
So, you know, and I mean, I'll fully admit I have not gone through these documents, but I have, you know, spent some time listening to, you know.
Conspiracy theorists talk about the release of the documents, and there's nothing there.
At least they haven't found anything.
But yeah, it does largely seem to be stuff we already had.
I want to come back to this slightly.
But firstly, I think we'll talk around this a little bit.
The reason we're doing this in the first place is because Daniel and I have been doing a series of bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers, hint hint everybody, about movies.
About or featuring presidents, stories about presidents or featuring US presidents.
And the most recent one we did, which I haven't actually released yet, but which will be released by the time you hear this, is an episode we did on the 1990...
When was it?
The movie In the Line of Fire.
93. In the Line of Fire, where Clint Eastwood is a Secret Service agent who was one of the agents there in Dealey Plaza who failed to save Kennedy, and then in the 90s he's up against another presidential assassin.
Give us a dollar on Patreon and listen to us talk about it.
Which was, by the way, it's a fun movie, and that was a fun episode.
It's a good movie, yeah.
But as we were prepping that, Daniel sent me a clip of...
I think the way this happened was I mentioned it to you in the prep or after we were finished recording that I had heard this.
And we both rolled our eyes.
And then I sent you the clip because I'm like, yeah, you can put this as a cold open for that bonus episode.
And you got so enraged that you started wall texting me like, we have to talk about this now.
So yeah, this is Bill Maher's show.
It's Real Time with Bill Maher.
And he is sitting and he's chatting with Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan.
And boy, again, you know, I just use the term nightmare blunt rotation when you think about that.
That's just, you know, you do not want to be in that room.
Jack from the future popping in to remark that since we recorded this, Bill Maher has talked about...
Going to visit Donald Trump.
Attending a private White House dinner with the President and Kid Rock.
According to The Independent, he said, Marr accepted the invitation in an attempt to soften hostilities between the pair as, quote, there's gotta be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away, end quotes.
I don't know why.
Continuing to quote The Independent, but the comedian was surprised to find that he enjoyed Trump's company.
Yeah, I'm not surprised, Bill.
Calling him, quote, gracious and measured and far different to the crazy man he watches on TV.
Quote, why he isn't that in other settings I don't know and I can't answer and it's not my place to answer.
Unquote. Did you hear that?
It's not my place to answer.
Quote, he's much more self-aware than he lets on in public.
Unquote. And, says The Independent, overall he said Trump gave him, quote, a generous amount of time.
And showcased a willingness to listen and accept me as a possible friend, even though I'm not MAGA.
Yeah, right, Bill.
So, yeah, possibly the least surprising development ever, but still a development.
Continued Marr.
I'm not the leader of anything except maybe a contingent of centrist-minded people who think there's got to be a better way to run this country than hating each other every minute.
Unquote. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what you do when you dislike Americans hating each other and making hate the basis of politics.
You snuggle up to Donald Trump.
So yeah, I don't think Andrew Sullivan speaks, but I'll link to the full clip so you can watch it.
It's free on YouTube.
Oh, and the full clip.
Let me just give you a bit of context, listeners, because most of this is actually Andrew Sullivan talking a lot of bollocks about the lab leak theory of COVID.
And Bill Maher wholeheartedly agreeing with him, as Bill Maher would, and going through his usual, how can you possibly believe it came from a wet market when there's a lab in Wuhan?
You know, all that crap.
And Ezra Klein being very, very cowardly and refusing to...
I don't believe Ezra Klein believes the lab leak theory.
I don't believe Ezra Klein believes that there was a massive conspiracy to kill JFK.
But he's being very cowardly and evasive throughout this clip, and the whole thing is just...
We have our issues with Ezra Klein, Jack and I. We do not heartily recommend Klein's work, either his policy or his analysis.
But he's smart enough to know better than he lets on here.
And it's just because he's in this media ecosystem where it doesn't behoove him in his book sales to really step up and say, oh no, that's kind of bullshit, Bill.
But that's where it goes.
I actually have a list of these seven Yeah,
because obviously that's the thing we should be worried about.
That's the main problem at the moment.
Then, privatization of space travel is licking Elon's balls a little bit there.
And then, should Democrats run as independents?
And, you know, Klein has some actually interesting things to say about that one.
That one was actually cool.
And then he explains what right-to-choice voting is to the ignorant, to the other two ignorant people.
So, you know, when Klein gets to speak, he actually has some interesting things to say.
Again, I don't wholly endorse Klein, but that's just like a 16-minute clip, and that's what they talk about.
The first two are...
You know, just off into conspiracy land.
And as you say, Klein, literally, like, he just verbally is like, I'm staying way out of this one, guys.
Yeah. I'm sure in his head, Klein is doing some sort of calculus.
Like, if I can get onto this very high-rated, very much-watched show and get a little bit of what I perceive as good sense across to the audience, then it's worth it for me to go along with these two conspiracy idiots talk a lot of nonsense.
And not cause a ruckus.
But yeah, I disagree, Ezra.
Because it's clear to me, I mean, it was clear to me anyway, but listening to this clip, it just came home to me.
Yeah, Bill Maher is just Joe Rogan, but on TV, and maybe even less intelligent and less intellectually curious, but even more smug.
But let's get into the clip.
Okay. Okay.
Should we expect to learn anything revelatory from the JFK files just released?
Well, what do you mean expect?
We saw them and we didn't.
Is it time to move on from this conspiracy theory?
Well, I mean, do you think it's a conspiracy theory?
I mean, plainly, there was not a single gunman, right?
We all agree on that, no?
I mean, that...
I have such weak opinions on this.
I have made such an effort to not...
But the magic bullet.
There could not have been a bullet that went through a guy, went around him, came back, went through the other guy, got lunch at the diner, came back, shot him in the back of the head.
I mean, it's just, come on.
Everybody heard a shot from the grassy knoll.
I don't think we care.
Honestly, I'm done with it.
I don't think we'll ever know for sure, because this was the final news dump.
And if they don't know now, they don't know.
So, yeah.
Andrew Sullivan's being pretty cowardly there as well, actually saying, I don't care.
Like, it doesn't matter.
I think he starts, I think he starts kind of getting in on what Bill's throwing down there a little bit later on.
But I mean, I think it was more like, yeah, we just, you know, we just don't want to touch this topic.
It's just, you know, but yeah, no, I also, because I'm a glutton for punishment for this kind of stuff, I lurk in the like RGFK assassination subreddit.
And I mean, this is, this is like bottom tier stuff.
The, you know, the, the magic bullet and, you know, the thing that goes on, it goes to the store, it goes to the market, you know, like, it's like, um, I don't know.
It does not take much to debunk this.
If you look at like where the, if you look at, if you look at these as a Bruder film, if you look at the photos taken of the scene at the time and how people are actually sitting in that limousine, as opposed to like the kind of like the stagey, you know, kind of version that you saw, like the JFK movie where.
It shows, oh, the bullet's going this way, and it's going this way, and how did that happen?
It's like, no, it's a straight line.
It's a straight line through Kennedy's neck.
I mean, it just is.
And, I mean, there have been computer reconstructions, there have been, I mean, you know, and so the whole thing with, I mean, like, if you believe there's a conspiracy, you can, I mean, you know, I'm not going to dissuade anybody by just saying, like, just look at the documents, because then you can say, well, everything's fake, you know, like.
Eventually, what you have to do when you start debugging is like, well, maybe the autopsy was wrong.
Maybe that wasn't Kennedy's body.
That wasn't Kennedy's brain.
And then you get to pick and choose which documents and which photos and which that you believe are genuine.
And you build another narrative around all the surrounding stuff by just ignoring things because, well, the CIA was just into a lot of shit, so of course they're just faking it.
But if you look at the evidence that we have, the clearest evidence, It's a straight frickin' line through all those wounds, and there's just no, there's just no, like, you know, it just is.
I mean, I'm sorry, it just is.
This drives me round the bend, I confess.
When you sent me this and I played this, it just sent me into an absolute fury, because the absolute blithe self-assurance with which Bill Maas has...
We all know that there were two shooters.
That single bullet.
We all know that, surely.
We can all agree on that.
No, Bill.
No. That's...
The second...
I think it's the second...
No, it's the third bullet, isn't it?
The one that they call the single bullet.
The magic bullet.
That proves that it was one guy.
No, the magic bullet is the second.
The first one misses completely the second.
The magic bullet, and the third is the headshot.
Yeah, of course the third is the headshot, yeah.
It proves it was one guy.
If you actually look at the...
All this stuff, the stuff that lodges in the public mind is actually this physical stuff.
The magic bullet, back and to the left.
Oh, he couldn't have recycled the rifle in the correct amount of time.
When you actually look at the basic, simple facts of this, they all prove that it was.
Three bullets fired by one person from one position, the sixth floor of the Texas school.
They all prove it.
The whole magic bullet thing comes entirely from an inaccurate sketch of the car drawn by a conspiracy theorist, which has Governor Connolly sat in front of Kennedy.
I'm doing it again.
But this drives me around the end because the sketch is wrong.
It has the position of the two men wrong.
If you put the sketch right based on the design...
The car that you can still go and see at the museum and photographs of the car and the two men sat there on the day, as you say, it's a straight line and it's been replicated in real life.
It's been done, as has the firing three bullets in the correct amount of time.
In the JFK movie, as they're saying, you can't possibly reload and fire this rifle three times in this amount of time while doing it on screen.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, I don't know if that happens in the JFK movie, but there are definitely documentaries where some crank will be like, oh, you can't cycle this rifle and then cycles it faster than Oswald would have had to cycle it.
There's a lot of stuff out there that it's comical, really.
We're doing what we said we weren't going to do and talk too much about the actual assassination.
I swear.
I swear to God, I'm done with the true crime shit.
Okay, I'm done.
It's just the blithe self-assurance with which he looks around at the others and goes, we all know, we all agree, surely, we all know it wasn't.
You don't know anything, Bill.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And you're sitting there in front of millions of people talking with absolute self-assurance, expecting every reasonable person to agree with you as a matter of course, and you do not have the first fucking clue what you're talking about.
You're basing, and this really, I think this is why this chimed with me, because this strikes me as a paradigm for so much political discourse in our moment, because he's basing these conclusions, which he takes as so completely obvious.
And he takes himself as having absolutely the right to promulgate them in public, to spread misinformation.
He's basing it just entirely on folk wisdom and internet rumor and, you know, Bill Hicks comedy albums and a movie he saw.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And it's just, you know, you do 10 minutes work of the research into this and you look at, okay, what do people, what is the mainstream story?
We challenge mainstream shit all the time on this podcast.
We're leftists.
That's what we do.
But you can't debunk the thing until you know what they're actually saying.
And I mean, I would respect Bill Maher a lot more if he at least knew the actual narrative and he knew what you and I would actually believe about the assassination, like the quote-unquote, the official story, which is just basically history at this point.
But he doesn't know it because all he knows is...
It's the diagram in the JFK movie.
He's opining on it without ever thinking about it for more than 10 minutes.
I don't know.
It's just so lazy.
It's so incurious.
It's infuriating.
As I mentioned before, the topic they did before this was talking about the COVID lab leak, and it's the same logic.
It's the same logic.
Yes, this is the key.
Because if it was just the Kennedy assassination that he was doing this with, I would say, oh, wow.
Let's leave it to the, as you say, the arguments on the subreddits.
But he's doing exactly the same stuff when he talks about COVID and vaccines and Western medicine and wokeness and trans kids in sports and all these issues.
And this is absolutely standard for him and people like him.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, yeah.
There's no need to do a Bill Maher episode.
I think Bill Maher is enough of a clown to out-debunk Bill Maher by himself.
Millions of people listen to him and laugh along.
I was a fan in the early 2000s, right after 9 /11, when he first moved from ABC to HBO.
I had an HBO subscription, and I enjoyed the content.
You know, there it was more, you know, like making fun of George W. Bush and, you know, being against the war.
And so, you know, you kind of learn to roll your eyes for the alt-med bullshit and all that stuff.
But, you know, it is, you know, I was a fan and it took me, you know, it took political evolution on both of our parts for me to just see him for the fool that he is today.
But yeah, an infuriating fool, as you say.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We've talked about this before,
the inherent anti-Muslim bigotry that went along with so much new atheism.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely.
He's a fanatical apologist for the crimes of the State of Israel and the IDF, and it's fundamentally because of anti-Muslim bigotry, which is contextualized in his so-called atheism.
And it's all in display in that movie he made, Religulous, which is about, you know, he treats, basically, he interviews a rabbi who is, I don't know anything about the rabbi that he talks to.
I'm not endorsing that guy.
He might have all sorts of bad opinions.
I don't remember it exactly.
I mean, I'm not endorsing this particular guy.
But in the course of that film, he talks to a rabbi who, as I remember it, stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli apartheid and occupation.
And he treats that guy.
As akin to the creationists and the right-wing religious fanatics that he talks about.
And that, for me, is the key to Bill Maher.
That's the fundamental disorientation at the heart of his thinking.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, just vicious anti-Islam, anti-Muslim bigotry of, you know, God, maybe we do need to cover Bill Maher at some point.
You know, we could cover that.
Man, the Ben Affleck thing where it's him and Sam Harris and Ben Affleck on the set of Real Time, that's just an all-time classic moment of just Ben Affleck is 100% right and the two dipshits are 100% wrong.
But it's the lack of principles to orient you, I think.
Because Bill Maher, when you look at his history of pronouncements, he supports Occupy Wall Street and then he condemns Occupy Wall Street.
He endorses Bob Dole and then he endorses Ralph Nader.
This is not a guy with a coherent compass based on principle.
It's fundamentally opportunistic.
And I think it's interesting because I think it's fundamentally the same with Andrew Sullivan.
If you look at him, he's progressive on some things.
He's a gay man.
He's very into pro-LGBT rights and stuff like that.
He's also been transphobic.
He's constantly on about the bell curve.
He's into biological determinism and scientific racism, IQ stuff about black people.
He's Roman Catholic and he says you can't be pro-BLM and be a Christian.
It's all over the shop because there's no fundamental principle guiding it and stopping it from slipping in.
And this is how he ends up slipping into this conspiracy ball stuff with the lab leak theory.
I mean, I read Andrew Sullivan maybe a little differently than you.
I read him as, I mean, other than his, I mean, he's a gay man, so of course he wants, he's pro-LGB, not T, of course, but he's pro-LGB.
Yeah, sorry.
Or mostly the G, he's mostly pro-G, but, you know, he makes the right noises on that issue.
But everything else, I mean, he strikes me as a pretty reactionary conservative.
He just does it in a British accent, so, you know, it comes across less harshly than it does for others, I guess, you know?
I mean, he's not as bad as someone like Douglas Murray, but, you know, I mean, he is clearly on the right.
I know he kind of flirted with some of the anti-Trump stuff, but it's, you know, like, oh, he's a little bit too uncouth a right-winger for me.
It's kind of what the never-Trump Republicans always seem to be to me.
Like, this isn't a principled stand.
This is, you know, well, it's a different side of the right-wing movement in the United States that suddenly has power, and I'm against them getting power.
Not really against most of what they stand for.
I think you're right, yeah.
I think I was being a little bit too charitable to him.
But I was emphasizing the idea that there's no guiding principle.
It's incoherent and it's opportunistic.
But speaking of outright reactionaries, I know you looked a little bit at a certain person that we've covered on this show before talking about this issue.
A certain Baldy McDigface.
Yes, indeed.
So, but yeah, no, I just, before we got on today, I was watching Tim Pool with a couple of conspiracy guys talking about the JFK assassination and, you know, it's all, it's all, well, LBJ was the real ringleader, you know, it's just, you know, that's kind of their ultimate conclusion.
I checked their channel out and they have a lot of other conspiracist nonsense and they are notably strong Trumpists as long as, as well as being, you know, as well as being JFK assassination buffs because typically, typically people who believe that JFK was, was, You know,
murdered by the CIA or whatever, tend to be more on the liberal side at least.
You know, you tend to not get, you know, kind of right-wingers that way.
But literally in that interview, they're sitting and talking about like, you know, no, no, JFK was a lot like Donald Trump.
You know, they were both rich guys.
They were both donated their salaries.
They both, you know, both have been on TV and all that sort of thing.
And it's like, oh my God.
I mean, just stop.
Just stop.
I think the question of the politics of conspiracy belief with the Kennedy assassination is an interesting one, but I think it's drifted over the years.
Certainly back in the 70s, well, 60s and 70s onwards for a long time, my impression anyway is that the belief that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy was generally associated with sort of...
Anti-establishment leftist beliefs.
I mean, I've read stuff from the 70s.
I know Ramparts magazine did stuff about the Kennedy assassination, where it's, you know, otherwise very sensible left-wing people, they believe that Kennedy was killed by the establishment and stuff like that.
Right. Largely on the mistaken belief that Kennedy was strongly anti-Vietnam War, which she was not.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that...
Fair disclosure, I used to believe a version of the Kennedy conspiracy stuff.
It wasn't just the Oliver Stone movie, but that did come along at just the right time in my youth, and it did sway me.
And I read a book by the journalist Anthony Summers called Conspiracy, and I recognise now that what I was doing was that I was searching for a respectable validation of a belief that I already held or wanted to hold.
So I allowed that book to persuade me.
I now have completely dispensed with that.
But for a long time, it was kind of a left-wing...
It was the province of left-wingers, I think, to believe that.
And as you say, one of the things that dissuaded me was just reading a very...
Again, I have my issues with Chomsky, but a very thorough debunk of the idea that Kennedy was some sort of anti-CIA, anti-intervention, anti-Vietnam War crusader who was a danger to the military-industrial complex.
That does not hold up.
No, not at all.
But it does seem to have migrated the Kennedy assassination.
It does seem to be...
I mean, it's still a majority viewpoint.
They took a poll a couple of years ago for the big anniversary of 2023, and it was something like two-thirds of Americans believe that it was a conspiracy.
About 65% believe that there is a conspiracy, possibly involving or not involving Oswald.
They just kind of lump it all together.
Because those are two distinct kind of regions of, if you're in this thing, you know, whether Oswald was involved or not is sort of a big question among the conspiracists.
So 65 and then like 25 are kind of firmly where I am, which is, you know, I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and et cetera.
And then about 10% are not sure or don't answer.
So that's kind of where public polling has been for the last, you know, 10 years or so from what I kind of gathered.
As you say, A conspiracy.
That's a very vague term.
That can mean all sorts of things.
But apparently, something like two-thirds of Americans believe that at least more than one person was involved.
So in such a huge sample, you're going to have a lot of political diversity.
It certainly seems like the people who are still most interested in it and most focused on it are on the right these days.
This sort of conspiracy belief, it's become incredibly mainstream.
It's become incredibly diffuse.
The internet obviously has facilitated this to a huge extent.
The Kennedy assassination now seems to be a part of a wider ethos, really sort of a conspiracy view of history, or certainly American history anyway, which is incredibly prevalent and seems to be mainly concentrated on the right.
That's the impression I get, which is why this kind of gets to why I wanted to talk about this, because it's interesting to me that it's...
The Trump administration, it's Donald Trump and the people around him and the people that are fans of him who seem to be most focused on this and most concerned about this now.
It's him who's wandering around the Kennedy Center and by word association it suddenly pops into his head.
Oh yes, the Kennedy files.
And suddenly they're releasing all the files.
And we've talked a little bit about the release of those files.
Following on that, we have this committee.
It's got six months or something.
It's a congressional committee.
It's supposed to be bipartisan.
It's being headed by, I think, James Comer, he of the Hunter Biden's laptop witch hunt nonsense, and Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican congressperson from Florida.
And they are apparently, well, maybe this is time to play a little clip that I have of the press conference where Anna Paulina Luna was talking about what this committee is going to be investigating.
Yeah, that's right.
This time Jack brings the clips and I respond.
I haven't listened to any of the rest of these yet, so let's get moving.
To put it in perspective, I think that this issue transcends not just one administration, but multiple administrations.
And it hasn't been until now that we've been able to get people actually in positions of power that will push for transparency.
Now, if I find that different entities in the various intelligence agencies are stonewalling us, I'm going to make that known to the American people.
But as of right now, we are cautiously optimistic.
Epstein 9 /11.
Our first investigation will be announced, but it's going to be covering on a thorough investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination.
And I can tell you, based on what I've been seeing so far, the initial hearing that was actually held here in Congress was actually faulty in the single bullet theory.
I believe that there were two shooters.
And we should be finding more information as we are able to gain access into the SCIF, hopefully before the files are actually released to the public.
Can you identify the Democrats who will sit on the task force?
And could you talk a little bit more about the role of Democrats in this?
Yeah, so again, this is a bipartisan commission.
Remember, JFK was a Democrat.
RFK was a Democrat.
And I'm sure that...
I think the entire conference has a question on what actually happened with Dr. Martin Luther King, but also UAPs.
You guys know that that was the biggest bipartisan bicameral hearing that we've ever had, I think, in congressional history.
I do not know who their members are yet.
They've noticed it, but they're taking this very seriously.
This is not a conspiracy theory investigating committee.
We're actually looking to present truth to the American people, and it's in my opinion that no one person elected to office is more important or more...
What sort of witnesses?
Would you like to jump in?
Yeah, I was going to say, based on what we're actually looking to do with the JFK investigation, I'm looking to actually bring in some of the attending physicians at the initial assassination, and then also people that had been on the various commissions looking into, like the Warren Commission looking into the initial assassinations.
There's been conflicting evidence, and I think that even the FBI at the time reported some anomalies in the initial autopsy.
All of those, though, seem to have been rinsed and repeated in the media to push a certain narrative that we don't agree with.
And so I think that in order to put to bed some of the theories that have been out there on John F. Kennedy, we have to know the full truth.
And the full truth starts with transparency, and that's why these files are so important for the American people to read for themselves.
Daniel, I noticed you laughing at a certain point during that clip.
We're going to bring in the original physician, Sue, back in 1963.
How many of those guys are even still alive?
That's 62 years ago.
I was an attending physician.
I was 25 years old.
I'm now 90. All these people have been...
I mean, it's funny.
It's like, oh, we're going to bring these people in and we're going to ask them questions.
I promise you, every single person was there.
Like, if you were a JFK lore guy, and you admitted this to, and I will also clarify this, I was a big believer in the Oliver Stone JFK movie when I saw it.
I saw that hook, line, and sinker.
For about a year and a half, I obsessively studied all this stuff until I found the books that actually convinced me, oh, no, no, this was all bullshit.
But no, no, I mean, all these people have been, like, anybody who was in Dealey Plaza that day, every single person.
Who could possibly have been identified, has been identified.
And quite a few people who actually weren't.
Quite a few people who weren't there are mistakenly identified, et cetera, et cetera.
But you know, it's, it's a, you know, it's like this was, this was, this is the, it's been 62 years.
You're not, you can't get blood out of that stone anymore.
I don't know.
The idea of bringing back the original physicians is like, you know.
I have no idea if any other people are still alive.
Sorry, that's just absurdity.
That's amazing.
As you say, every single one of those physicians has been interviewed officially and unofficially hundreds and hundreds of times.
There's nothing new to get.
I don't know if any of those doctors are still alive.
I do know that every person on the Warren Commission is dead.
So her announced determination to bring in people that were on the Warren Commission...
She was roundly mocked for that after this, and she immediately backtracked and said, oh, I meant people who were assistants or aides and things like that.
Yeah, okay.
Okay, fine.
So, you know, I filed papers for six months working on the Warren Commission in 1964.
You know, why does that person know anything more than anybody else?
I don't know.
Like, you know, okay, fine.
All right.
Sorry. That bit of absurdity just struck out at me, and I just had to laugh.
That was pretty crazy.
There's a couple of other things I want to note about that.
Firstly, it's led by, you might not have heard it, listeners, but the reference to UAPs.
Oh, yeah.
I was going to highlight that.
Go ahead.
UAPs are, I believe it stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or something like that.
Yeah, that is correct.
It's the more politically correct term for UFOs.
I was going to say, it's the woke term for flying saucers.
It's the government lingo for flying saucers, yes.
Yeah, it is pretty clear to anybody who's reading between the lines, and you don't have to read very far between the lines, that Anna Paulina Luna is a...
Is a believer in flying saucers and aliens.
And she's very determined to use taxpayer money and congressional time to investigate apparently secret files that she believes that the Pentagon and the Air Force and people like that have been holding back and stonewalling information about all these flying saucers that they've encountered and stuff like that.
And, of course, the JFK, RFK, MLK assassinations.
You notice, the other thing I wanted to really highlight in there is that she is announcing, this is the press conference where she's announcing what they're going to be doing.
And she is telling, yeah, one thing, she's very decidedly not concentrating on the Epstein files.
That's definitely not a priority.
Somebody asked about the Epstein files, and she goes right back to JFK.
No, no, we're not talking about Epstein.
No, no, no.
Those files don't get unredacted for another 70 years, you know?
And the other thing that I was going to say was, you notice she's announcing their investigation begins, and in the announcement of the commencement of the investigation, she's telling you what her belief is.
She's telling you what her conclusion is.
She's telling you, oh, this is not what we believe, and I do not believe in the single bullet theory.
Which is something she said on Glenn Beck's podcast as well.
And she also said it to...
I have another funny clip where she's talking to Jesse Waters.
Now, the sound quality on this clip is bad because the only place I could find it is on the substack written by the author Gerald Posner.
Oh, God.
Okay. Now, Gerald Posner...
So it's probably Posner, American.
Gerald Posner is a...
Very interesting guy.
He wrote a decent book about the Kennedy assassination quite a long time ago called Case Closed, which I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a pretty good demolition of the idea that it was.
It's probably the best single source.
If you had it in a book, the best single source for why Oswald acted alone.
There's definitely stuff in there that's probably not true.
Some stuff I just don't know and some stuff that just strikes me as fanciful.
Yeah. The best book overall is Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History, which is massive.
It's about 1,500 pages, not including masses and masses of footnotes.
And it's a massive exercise in proving something, which really is a single prosaic, banal, obvious fact.
He insists on tackling absolutely everything.
Like, he addresses every single thing that any conspiracy theorist has ever said.
But, yeah, Posner wrote a much shorter, more popular volume where he puts forward very, very, as you said, Daniel, and as I said, with some caveats, a very convincing case for Oswald acting alone.
Posner. Yeah, problematic guy.
Fanatical Zionist.
Fanatical apologist for the state of Israel and the IDF, like Bill Maher.
Trump apologist.
Not quite exactly fully on board with MAGA, but very, very definitely a fellow traveler, certainly when it comes to things like deportations and anti-wokeness and stuff like that.
Very, very nasty, gender-critical, anti-trans guy, fully on board apologising for JK Rowling, talking about puberty blockers, and yeah, very, very nasty stuff.
Jack from the Future popping in again to say, Daniel and I both knew that Gerald Posner was bad.
You know, Israel apologia, transphobia, etc.
Neither of us knew just how bad.
This has turned into a bit of a rabbit hole for me.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about Posner's website.
On the front of his website, which is...
I think it's an adapted substack, which is called Just The Facts.
Ah, great.
You have, right at the front, The Truth About Puberty Blockers.
My op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Guess what that's about.
The Assault on Freedom of Speech.
That's basically going in for all the kind of...
Woke authoritarianism is stifling free speech on campus stuff that Michael Hobbs is constantly debunking.
The transgender money pipeline, in which he reports upon the fact that in recent years transgender issues have become more of a subject of study and more charities have popped up, you know, in line with the general rise in visibility of trans people and trans issues.
He points out that...
The big charities and the big projects have been funded with money from rich people, including some rich trans people and some rich liberals.
And he frames this as an expose of basically a conspiracy.
He doesn't say that, but that's the tone.
He's revealing to you the truth about where all this has come from.
In the course of that, he approvingly cites Jennifer Bilek.
Bilek? I don't know.
Quote, I have tracked the flow of the money through public records charity and foundation filings.
Yeah, public records, Gerald.
Continuing the quote.
And reports from groundbreaking reporting from other journalists such as Jennifer Bielek.
Jennifer Bielek, in case you don't know, is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who has approvingly talked about David Icke.
The LGB Alliance in Canada got called out for having...
Commentary from Bielek, who used to be a member of an eco-fascist group called Deep Green Resistance, because she talks about the quote-unquote Jewish aspect of the quote-unquote transgender transhumanist agenda.
Bielek is very popular with both neo-Nazis and gender criticals.
But I repeat myself.
Jennifer Bielek is a really nasty piece of work.
There's an article at The Skeptic by Erin Rabinowitz.
I'm gonna...
Quote from that.
Jennifer Bielek, gender-critical activist and writer who runs the 11th Hour blog.
2018, Bielek wrote a widely shared article on the conservative website The Federalist entitled Who are the rich white men institutionalising transgender ideology, which purports to expose a billionaire transhumanist conspiracy that's using trans activism as a front to get everyone hooked on,
quote, a never-ending saga of body-related consumerism, unquote.
And as Rabinowitz says, her evidence is just donations, basically.
Quoting Rabinowitz again, Since at least as far back as 2018, Bielek has cited David Icke of"reptilian" overload fame and the openly anti-Semitic Keith Woods as reliable sources that are both"onto something".
Unlike Icke, Woods is a largely unknown figure who has mostly done explainers videos and panels with folks like...
Richard Spencer!
Our old friend Richard Spencer, so it all links up.
I encourage you to read that entire article.
It's called Fears of Creeping Transhumanism Give Space for Overt Conspiracism in Gender-Critical Communities.
I'll link to it in the description.
Also good is Antisemitism Meets Transphobia at the Progressive magazine.
That's by Ben Lorber and Heron Green-Smith.
And on Bielek, specifically in that, we have, quote, on her own blog, The Eleventh Hour, Bielek furthers the Jewish funder conspiracies.
And the article talks about how she names people like George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Martine Rothblatt, etc.
as being behind a transhumanist movement to erase women and quote, ultimately morph the human species matrix style into a terrifying global, techno-globalist future.
Just bonkers conspiracy theory, anti-trans stuff.
Again, good article, goes into the...
Revolting Kelly J. Keene and her links with somebody else that we've talked about on this show before, Jean-Francois Gariepi.
Go read it.
This is the person that the alleged enemy of anti-Semitism and alleged critic of conspiracy theories is endorsing in the cause of stoking transphobia.
And I think a very telling article on Posner's website is an article entitled Hitler, Musk and the Art of the Smear.
In which he basically says the left are smearing Trump and Musk as Nazis.
He goes straight into tackling Elon Musk's Nazi salute.
He mockingly quotes people that disapprove of it and call it what it visibly was, a Nazi salute.
And he describes it this way, quote, from Posner.
He struck his chest near his heart with his right hand and then extended his arm upward at an angle with his palm down.
Yeah, a Nazi salute, Gerald.
Continuing the quote, a gesture repeated several times.
Thank you for making it happen.
Thank you.
That's Musk.
Back to Posner.
When we watched the video clip, he means him and his wife, who's also a journalist, we thought it nothing more than him reaching out to the large crowd in a moment of intense excitement.
So that's all it was, folks.
I should also mention that Gerald Posner is one of those people who has a chapter in his Wikipedia page entitled Controversies.
And when you look at it, there are subheadings.
Which include plagiarism and quote falsification.
There's a whole H-Bomber Guy video's worth of plagiarism allegations against this guy, and I haven't researched this, but they seem pretty well supported.
In fact, he was at one point the chief investigative reporter at the Daily Beast and quit as a result of it being discovered that he had apparently plagiarised portions of his articles from other publications.
I'm not saying that I know what happened.
I don't.
I'm just telling you what's been alleged.
All this stuff on his website, this transphobic stuff, implying conspiracy-minded interpretations of the rise of trans charities and trans study, right-wing culture war paranoia about free speech on college campuses,
all this nonsense, this coexists cheek-by-jowl on his website with articles...
Good articles, sensible articles, debunking nonsense that people like Anna Paulina Luna say about the Kennedy assassination.
I think that's very interesting.
I think it shows that anybody can fall into this kind of thinking, even people who are immune to it when it comes to one subject, can fall into it with other subjects.
And it really comes down to ideological preferences, and I would say bigotry.
It's also very interesting to me, something to think about, that you can have somebody who is very credulous about JFK conspiracy theories, like Bill Maher, and also somebody who is completely incredulous of JFK conspiracy theories,
like Gerald Posner, both drifting into MAGA, an apologia for Trump and Musk, etc.
And again, we are looking at ideology pulling them towards These views, despite the fact that both are capable of knowing better when it comes to other things.
Ma has spoken out against climate change denial, for instance.
But Ma's Islamophobia and anti-wokism is leading him inexorably alongside platforming and endorsing loads of terrible people on his massive show.
We all know the list.
It's leading him to apologia now for the current Trump regime, despite the fact that he is posed as this ferocious critic of it.
Posner, again, is another example.
Somebody who is perfectly capable of knowing evidence-free, illogical, nonsense, conspiracy rubbish when it comes to the Kennedy assassination is falling for exactly the same kind of logic when he writes about big pharma and puberty blockers and stuff like this.
And it comes from...
Pre-existing ideological preferences which lead people to reason backwards from conclusions, despite the fact that they're perfectly capable of seeing the faulty logic and the lack of evidence in other things, when it suits their pre-chosen conclusion.
And both are finding themselves making common cause with fascist cranks as a result, in and out of government.
and with that thanks for your indulgence back to the episode music
But he is right about the Kennedy assassination.
Basically right about the Kennedy assassination.
And he has responded to these recent fluctuations in the story where he's addressed these new files that have been released.
And he says, quite rightly, in my opinion, there's nothing in them.
There are some tidbits in, like, we know a little bit more about the CIA having Oswald under a certain amount of surveillance, which...
Yes, of course they were looking at Oswald.
He was a former Soviet defector with known communist sympathies who at one point was trying to defect again to Cuba.
Yes, of course they were watching him.
And maybe somebody could have done something.
Who knows?
And there's some other...
I mean, I think that's the real cover-up, right?
Like, I mean, there was a cover-up about, you know, it was just, it wasn't the CIA did it.
It's like, oh, well, the CIA had this guy on their radar and they dropped the ball on it.
Like, that's the reason all the cover-up happened.
People did lie to the Warren Commission about the CIA collaboration with the mob trying to unseat Castro.
Yeah, true.
Not relevant to the Kennedy assassination.
So he's written about that correctly, and he's also written a little bit about this.
And the reason I mention him is, firstly, I find it interesting that he can be so aggressively, nastily wrong about some things while also being pretty much right about another thing.
And this is something that I find interesting about Ma.
And Sullivan, as I said before, I saw a pattern emerging as I was looking at this.
But he's also, he's the only source for this clip that I'm about to play, which is Anna Paulina Luna talking to Jesse Waters about some evidence that will blow the case wide open if only they can get the dastardly mainstream media to release it,
to stop covering it up.
And here's the clip.
A video that's never been seen before.
We're actually going to be sending a letter requesting that from NBC because to actually tell the American people, it was made aware to me this evening that NBC actually has a video that's never been seen before.
We're actually going to be sending a letter requesting that from NBC because it allegedly shows Oswald near the vehicle when the assassination took place, which means that he couldn't have been the shooter.
So again, we're tracking down all this information.
NBC has been...
Keeping this tape of Oswald under wraps.
Correct. In fact, Director Stone actually told us that he was shown this tape, that it was a secondary copy, and that he said that this could blow open the entire JFK investigation.
What I will also tell you, though, Jesse, is he said that NBC has been very, very much so guarding this tape, and so I believe that that tape belongs to the American people.
We are going to be sending a letter asking for that tape.
And I would encourage everyone to ask NBC to release that tape to the public.
It's important, not just for our investigations, but so the American people know the truth as to what happened with John F. Kennedy.
Jack from the future popping in one last time to remark that Daniel almost immediately found a pristine version of this clip online after we finished recording.
The bastard.
This clip, this piece of footage that she's talking about, this has been public for years.
You can watch it on YouTube.
It has not been covered up by NBC.
They just kept it in there.
Archive, because it was taken by an NBC cameraman.
It does not show Oswald somewhere else at the time of the assassination.
And you'll notice the reference in there, and this made me laugh, to somebody that Anna Paulina Luna refers to as Director Stone.
Director Stone.
And I kind of had a moment there.
I was like, is he referring to Oliver Stone or Roger Stone?
It could be either, right?
Yeah, it could be either.
It could be either.
Director Stone.
Director Stone.
Like he's the director of some government agency, which who the hell knows?
You know, you never know.
Yeah. Given, God, given Oliver Stone's, oh man, I don't think he would genuflect to Trump hard enough to be invited in, but like he's definitely got that, like some of that sentiment, you know?
And again, Oliver Stone is somebody I really respected like 25 years ago.
And yeah, no, not so much today.
Well, again, you know, Oliver Stone's movie, Nixon, you and I have talked about this before.
We talked about it in the podcast that we did years ago, that we talked about the opening of this episode.
It's one of my favorite movies.
Some days it's my favorite movie of all time.
As history, it's complete fantasy nonsense.
As a movie, I fucking love it.
He's completely off the deep end about this.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about Oliver Stone when I talked to Rob from the right podcast about...
The People's Party and that stuff on that episode where he guested, you know, he's basically a pro-Putin propagandist at this point.
And has been for, what, 15 years or so?
Yes. Yeah, it's been a while.
And he's got there via so-called anti-imperialist campus leftism and all that sort of nonsense.
It's not imperialism when it's Russia.
Exactly. It's only imperialism when the US does it.
A country that borders Finland and North Korea, not an empire, clearly.
But yes, she's getting this from Oliver Stone.
Oliver Stone was at the committee meeting or public conference or whatever you'd call it.
Of this congressional investigation that Anna Paulina Luna was investigating in the clip that I played you before.
She's on the panel with Eli Crane and Nancy Mace.
It's a real rogues gallery of wingnuts.
I'm surprised Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't involved.
Yeah, I think it's probably a bit too vanilla for her.
We will be talking a tiny bit about QAnon later.
Okay, good to know that's where we're going.
All right, gotcha.
I hear you.
The Republicans, it's not really our beat, but this subject leads there inexorably.
But yeah, the Republicans called Oliver Stone a film director to testify.
And this sort of information is what they get.
They also called some guy called James D. Eugenio, who seems to be another conspiracy theorist, and another guy called Jefferson Morley, who again seems to be a sort of...
I've heard of them, yeah.
Yeah, he seems to be at least a conspiracy theory curious journalist.
He's very much in line.
The Dems called some guy called Davison, and his thing was mainly about the Republicans.
Muffing the release of the files and the redactions and releasing the social security numbers because, you know, the resistance.
But yeah, that's pretty much where we are.
But it's an interesting phenomenon to me that this subject, the Kennedy assassination, now seems to have migrated.
And the RFK and MLK assassinations as well.
They seem to have migrated to being now an issue for the right.
And the wingnut conspiracy theory right, which has now migrated to the mainstream, that has now taken over the mainstream right in government.
And they're just completely pursuing the...
As I say, they've got Oliver Stone in to testify.
They're just pursuing that version.
Because on a fundamental level, Oliver Stone's vision of the Kennedy assassination as a coup d'etat by the military-industrial complex, it is basically the same as their worldview.
Which, you know, the deep state, it's basically the same thing.
You know, I was going to say, you know, it's funny that GFK the movie is so central to the modern conversation around this.
I mean, it's just such a signpost for it.
And very few people believe in the actual version of the conspiracy that's put on by JFK, the movie, in which Clay Shaw is Clay Bertrand.
That stuff, almost nobody accepts that today and thinks that Liam Garrison, who is the lead character who's played by Kevin Costner in JFK, and he's the guy on the trail of the assassins.
It's his book that is the basis of the conspiracy theory that Stone lays out in JFK.
He was a wack job.
He was a loon.
Everybody knew he was crazy.
And I don't mean that in a middling way or in a way that's diminishing to people with mental health issues, because I have mental health issues.
But yeah, no, he was a wack job.
He was a wacko.
It's fine.
And obsessively homophobic, which is why he decided to pick on the people that he picked on.
Be a bit of an asshole and correct you.
You said William Garrison, and I know you know that it's Jim Garrison.
William Garrison was, of course, the great 19th century abolitionist.
Very different figure.
Sorry, no, I got the name wrong.
Again, it's been a long time since I really dug my brain into this stuff.
I mean, it's been like 20 years since I was really in this every day.
I just wanted to highlight Poster again.
I don't know if you were going to go here and talk a little bit about Poster.
So you found that on his substack.
So is he arguing with that clip on his substack?
Oh, yes.
In absolute fairness to the man, and I find his views on trans issues and Israel-Palestine abhorrent and disgusting and deluded, in absolute fairness to the man, he is good on the Kennedy assassination.
And on his substack, he debunks all the claims that Luna makes in that clip where she's talking to Jesse Waters.
He explains what that...
Footage she's talking about actually is and what it actually isn't.
And I will link to that page, actually.
Yeah, that's, that's positive.
That's just positive.
I mean, that's just, that's just like basic honesty, you know?
I mean, the thing that I run into when you kind of talk about this stuff and kind of conspiracism in general is that, is how airy and light it is.
It's like cotton candy.
There's just nothing you can really like sink your teeth into.
There's nothing you can like hold onto and say, this is definitely part of it.
Whereas like actual conspiracies, when we, when we do, you know, find.
Real evidence of real conspiracies.
You know, there are people involved.
There are names.
I mean, we talked about the Holocaust earlier.
The Vonsi conference was a thing.
Like, we have notes saved from that that were supposed to be destroyed, but we have notes that were saved from that.
You know, we have thousands and thousands of documents that, you know, that go into that.
I mean, obviously, that's a different situation.
That's not a conspiracy in the same way, but it is.
You know, it's the same sort of thing.
And, you know, a lot of the logic behind Holocaust denial, like...
It goes the same way as some of the JFK assassination stuff, where you can't believe the official dog.
You can't believe what it actually says in front of you.
It has to be, you know, this is all staged.
It was all faked.
It was all, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it's coming from kind of different political angles, obviously.
And I wouldn't say everyone who doesn't believe in the JFK assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald is the same thing as a Holocaust denier.
But I mean, these are different things culturally as well.
But they kind of, they come, they rhyme.
They come from the same place.
Study one, I learn more about the other in some ways.
So, I mean, I think that's kind of where I'm comfortable kind of laying my flag on that.
So I know you got a little bit more, and we'll just respond to that.
One of the things I've always thought about, I mean, you brought this to my attention, really brought this home to me.
When we talked about this on that old podcast that we did, that we mentioned earlier, where you mentioned the fact that, you know, in that entire two-and-a-half-hour movie.
Oliver Stone mentions all sorts of things.
He crams in so much quote-unquote information, he doesn't find time to mention the long, thin package that Oswald brought into work on the day of the assassination.
Not Norb, does he mention Oswald's attempt to kill General Walker, who was a right-wing conspiracy theorist, by the way.
He was a bircher.
But yeah, conspiracy theorists never talk about the long, thin package that Oswald brought into work that morning, wrapped in paper.
Paper that was later found in the sniper's nest.
If another employee there had brought a long, thin package into work that morning, if somebody other than Oswald, they'd never let you hear the end of it.
You'd never hear the end of it.
No, no, it was the other guy.
Exactly. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, no.
So just so people were aware of the lore, Oswald did carry a long, thin package, which he claimed contained curtain rods.
Curtain rods!
His apartment.
Already had curtain rods, and no curtain rods were ever discovered in the Texas School Book Depository.
What they did find in the Texas School Book Depository was a rifle that he bought with his fingerprints on it.
Exactly. I find this detail because Oliver Stone completely leaves it out of the movie, and yet it seems like a very telling detail.
Sorry, I don't want to say smarter, but...
A more sophisticated version of JFK conspiracy stuff is to deal with those elements.
Particularly when I approached you with this originally, I told you about these two facts, the attempted assassination on General Walker and in the paper sack that didn't contain curtain rods.
I think that was knocked down evidence for a lot of people that I've explained that to.
It's like, no, once you hear those two facts, it's a lot harder to think it wasn't Oswald.
But there are conspiracy theorists who know both of those facts and have, you know, alternative explanations.
Or you look at the, like, how big was the bag really?
And people disagreed on how big the bag was.
And he said it contained his lunch to somebody else.
And so, you know, it's one of those things where, but it's a really telling detail that Stone leaves it out of the movie, you know?
Yeah. The point being that people can argue for a conspiracy as they do in the JFK assassination.
And then...
Again, I don't equate them, but people who are Holocaust deniers will take the absolute cast-iron evidence of a government conspiracy to commit the Holocaust that we have in the Van Zee Protocols, and they will use the exact same methods of obfuscation to argue against the existence of a conspiracy.
And that shows you that what's actually happening is that people are going in with the conclusion that they've already selected.
And then they are working backwards from the conclusion.
They are deducing the facts from their chosen conclusion.
And this is why I think conspiracy thinking is so, it's one of the reasons why it's so prevalent.
I mean, it is everywhere now.
On the right, it's basically the staple of mainstream right opinion.
Some version of the great replacement theory or white genocide down to just, and the way has been prepared.
With years of this going on and on and on, whether it's Benghazi or her emails or Whitewater or Hunter Biden's laptop, but the really dismaying thing is that you get it on the left as well.
And I'm not talking about the pseudo-left like Jimmy Dore.
I'm talking about people who are actually on the left and are actually trying to make good arguments.
You will hear people, for instance, say about the recent stuff that's been going on.
With the tariffs and then the 90-day freeze, the markets plummeting and then twitching back up, etc., you will hear people say stuff like, oh, it was all a big plan to play the markets, to short the markets and make a lot of money.
Or he's deliberately crashing the economy because rich people do well in recessions.
And that is a sort of a left version of the same kind of conspiracy thinking.
You are making the facts fit.
You're trying to put a gloss or a construction on events, make sense of them, otherwise chaotic and disorientating and frightening events that make sense to you within your political prism.
And it makes your enemies seem powerful and Machiavellian and in charge.
But what you're actually doing is reasoning backwards and coming to faulty conclusions because you're starting with your conclusion.
And I think this is something that we...
We really need...
I'm not saying that I'm immune to this.
As I say, I used to believe a version of the Kennedy conspiracy thing.
I've believed plenty of things in my time that were rubbish.
I think we all need to be aware of this tendency, in this possibility, this trap that we could fall into.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, you know, I would summarize that with Lee.
If I get to decide, if I just get to a priori decide which documents are real and which ones are faked, I can...
I'm not saying, by the way, that people didn't play the markets during all this, and I'm sure...
Trump gave his buddies advance warning that he was going to put the 90-day freeze on so that they could make money out of it.
He is good as admitted it in a White House meeting where he was pointing at his buddies and saying, oh, this guy here made $90 billion the other day.
But that's not the same thing as the whole thing being pre-planned, which I have actually heard some people say, supposedly from a left perspective.
Yeah, that annoys me.
Well, it's reaching, if nothing else.
You have...
The villainy that's right in front of you, and you have to, like, go one step further and just, like, discredit all of it.
Like, that's, you know, that's just bothersome, you know?
Yeah. So, I'll wrap up now with a clip from, a very short clip, from, actually, the Behind the Bastards podcast.
It's one of the episodes where Robert Evans, a friend of the show, and Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll of the Some More News podcast are the guests.
It's a few years old now.
I think it's from 2018, this episode.
But they're reading from the famous QAnon book, the book that was put on Amazon and was the best-selling political book on Amazon for a little while.
And it's basically a compilation of anonymous online posts by QAnon people.
And this bit stuck in my mind when I first heard it, and it's always stuck in my mind.
I find it relevant to the discussion that we've been having.
This is Robert Evans reading from that book, a book essentially of compiled essays, really, online posts by QAnon conspiracy theorists.
Reagan also had good intentions for the American people.
Oh, God, okay.
So they start talking about how they are making all the problems in the world.
They're creating wars.
They're doing this.
They're doing that.
Good people just want to get married, have kids, make a living and enjoy their liberty.
Well, there were good guys.
Many. One became the President of the United States in January 1961.
He knew about these criminals and wanted them gone.
He knew their intentions for us all, and he wanted to fight them.
Sadly, he had no idea how powerful they had become.
Reagan also had good intentions for the American people.
He knew this criminal mafia controlled almost everything by this stage, including the powerful rogue intelligence agencies.
His economic policies were promising, but the criminals needed a weak America to hold on to their power.
Reagan was shown with a bullet.
That a growing U.S. economy and prosperous citizens were not what these people wanted.
The criminals wanted.
Okay. Yeah.
That made me yawn.
Yeah, it's bad.
New friend of the pod, Robert Evans there.
Congratulations, Robert.
You got your voice on this one finally.
That clip, the key to it all is there for me.
Because, I mean, QAnon is not our beat, okay?
We said this quite a while ago.
But it is part of the overall situation that this podcast is trying to address and has always been trying to address.
It's sort of off to one side, but it is part of it.
It's very much a phenomenon of older people, for the most part.
And I think the fact that they choose the two good presidents as being Kennedy and Reagan, that is so telling to me.
Because, firstly, they're the two that were...
In recent times, anyway, they're the two that were shot.
I mean, there's also Gerald Ford.
Gerald Ford was shot at by Squeaky Fromm.
Nobody cares about Gerald Ford.
And it's also, of course, they're the ones, they're the presidents who were there at a time when boomers felt happy, basically.
That's what that's about.
Kennedy is freighted with all that sort of idea of...
The moment when things were getting better, the Golden Age, Camelot, and then everything went wrong.
After that, we had the Vietnam protests and we had Watergate and everything.
They were happy then.
And then from their point of view, everything went wrong.
And then Reagan came along and everything started to...
But it's fascinating to me on that level as well.
Again, they're reasoning backwards.
They're the two guys that were shot at.
They're the two guys that I like.
Therefore, they're the two good presidents.
They're the two white hat presidents.
They're reasoning backwards.
They're uncovering the conspiracy based on that backwards reasoning.
And they're also the complete acceptance of neoliberal politics there as well.
Because you notice the bit where it says the economic policies were promising and the implicit assumption Reagan was going to make America happy and prosperous.
But of course, the deep state didn't want that, so they warned him with a bullet.
Reagan, in this scenario, he's the victim of rogue intelligence services.
Reagan, who oversaw...
A massive expansion of violent, clandestine American intelligence operations abroad.
It's a completely backwards view of reality, but it makes sense to these people.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I know I listened to that when it was first released, but I had forgotten that little exchange.
But no, you're absolutely spot on here.
I mean, it is.
That's kind of how the conspiracism...
It works.
It is arguing backwards from a conclusion most of the time.
And when I was into it, I was definitely doing that.
Recognized. And you don't realize until later, like, oh no, I was totally just ignoring certain things because it was in the Oliver Stone movie.
It's got to be right.
And then when you see the actual details, you don't want to accept it.
Well, that must be fake because...
It's not what I believe.
It's not what I've already seen.
And so it's very easy to fall into this.
And I don't blame 65% of Americans for believing in conspiracy to kill JFK at this point.
I mean, it's just been propagandized to that degree.
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
That it's just part of the air we breathe over here.
I haven't seen surveys of the British public, but I assume the numbers are probably similar.
I don't know.
I don't blame people for believing it.
I just, I really just wish people would think about it a little bit more.
And, you know, if you're going to, you know, if you're going to believe in something, you should have a reason for it.
And almost no one has a reason.
It's, it's all like that Bill Maher clip.
Oh, and the bullet, it went down and went out for lunch, you know, et cetera.
It's, it's all, it's, it's that kind of bullshit, you know, by, by people who've just never looked at it.
And when you're a, when you're as someone as famous, when you have as big a microphone as Bill Maher does, you have.
That's it.
Is it Anna Lima?
Anna Paulina Luna.
Okay, sorry.
I can never remember her name.
I'm so terrible about that.
The issue of what exactly her name is is actually quite vexed when you look into it, but she identifies herself as Anna Paulina Luna, and I believe in calling people by the names that they want to be called.
That's fine.
I hate the thing that right-wingers do.
Oh, Casio Cortez or whatever.
I can't remember all these crazy names.
That's one where I just legitimately can never remember her actual name.
It sounds so generic Latina to me.
She's been pretty cynical in manipulating her apparent appeal or her attempted appeal to the Latinx community in America.
But she calls herself Annapolino Luna?
That's her name, because I believe in calling people.
Again, I just wanted to verify that, but no, I mean, she's actually an elected official with actual government power who's doing the exact same thing that Bill Maher is doing.
It's just doing it.
I mean, to me, some of this has to be cynical, right?
You've got to know you're never going to actually find the document that's going to blow the lid off this whole case or something like that.
I mean, it has to be cynical at that point to some degree.
You know, the more I say that, the more I'm like, no, I think these people actually are that incompetent at this point.
Well, no, I agree, because I believe that Anna Paulina Luna believes in UFOs, and I believe that she believes that, you know, in the magic bullet theory, and so on and so forth.
She's also a totally fake, phony grifter, and a cynical hypocrite.
If you look at her political career, this woman has no integrity.
And that's...
Really, what's behind all these people?
There's no integrity orienting.
I don't want to sound self-righteous, but we all have to try to have some integrity.
And there's no integrity anchoring people like Bill Maher or Andrew Sullivan or Gerald Posner or Anna Paulina Luna to a coherent position where they take the same approach to every set of facts on every issue.
Yeah, exactly.
No, I really can't say it.
I really can't say it better than that.
It is a question of integrity and honesty, ultimately.
And in this kind of media environment, a lot of what we, you know, a lot of what, what I do when I'm like studying these guys is like understanding the rhetoric is understanding, you know, how you're throwing out the smoke screen to support these like horrible policies, this horrible, you know,
genocidal agenda, which is not the same thing as what, what the JFK assassination stuff is doing.
But, you know, more generally what we do on the podcast is, you know, understanding, you know, how the rhetoric works, how you can avoid.
You know, basic human empathy, how you can avoid basic, you know, logic and basic, you know, just reality.
And so, you know, I, I think my years digging into JFK, we're not, we're not wasted ones given what I do now here.
It's, it's definitely rhymes, you know?
Oh, it all links up.
It's all connected, man.
I got the, got the board and the string, you know, that's fine.
You got to put in the, you got to put in the GFK audio clip now.
So the music.
Oh yeah.
If you think I'm not, if you think I'm not putting that musical cue in, you know, you don't know me.
You've only done it.
I think every time we've discussed this topic, you know, then again, I did it.
I did it.
I did it in an episode once where, you know, we were talking about what the conspiracy, it was like the frame rates were dropped in one of the white house press videos early in the Trump administration or something.
And one of our friends was talking about that, and when I edited the audio, I layered that little bit of audio in.
Yeah. Was that the Jim Acosta thing, where Jim Acosta pushed a woman's arm slightly, and it was turned into the most horrifying assault that anybody ever saw.
And I think it was Ben Shapiro that altered...
Yeah, was it Ben Shapiro?
I can't remember.
You remember it better than I do, but...
Whatever it was, it was stupid.
But yeah, no.
But that one, but that actually was a case of like somebody doctoring footage and then you can see the original footage and you can compare like, you know, and that's, you know, that's, that's, you know, and, and I mean, you know, again, I don't want to, I'm not arguing with people.
I don't, you know, we're not here to argue about the JFK assassination itself, but you know, it's been 62 years.
I mean, you know, at some point you have to admit that like the evidence just isn't there.
I mean, I guess, and it's just, I don't know, it's just at some point, it's just like, well, what do you expect to find at this point, you know?
Yeah. Well, you're not going to find anything that...
I mean, somebody saw him do it, for God's sake!
There's a witness to him hanging out the window, holding the...
It's so unfortunate that of all the photos taken to Lee Plaza that day, nobody has a photo of it.
That's just, you know...
Well, maybe they do, you know, maybe NBC have the photo and they're covering it up.
It turns out there were two Two rifles pointing out that, that, that moment.
And so, you know, they were actually firing both at the same time from the same angle.
Like, I don't know, like that's, it's a absurd, but you know, it is what it is.
Okay. Well, I'm happy with that.
So yeah.
Yeah, no, we're, we're done.
That was an episode.
That was an episode about whatever the hell that was about.
And I hope you enjoyed it.
I got it off my chest anyway.
I wish you would share the screenshot of the text you sent me after I showed you that clip.
There might be private details in it, of course.
But we can redact them!
Oh my god.
It was such a moment.
When I sent you that clip, you were so enraged for about 20 minutes.
I was like, alright, we're doing this.
It's fun.
It's fair.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
We'll be back with you soon.
In the meantime, bung us a dollar a month on Patreon, one of us anyway, and listen to our In the Line of Fire bonus episode.
and all our bonus episodes because they're fun we're good at uh bullshitting about 90s movies
At the moment, yeah.
Okay, bye.
Bye. That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
Follow us in all the places you usually follow podcasts.
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I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, and Daniel is at Daniel E. Harper.
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And our theme music is by Loon the Band.
This is a sample.
Of what we hurt.
And... I know a lot of why I'm here was ordained by the Lord.
What we saw.
I should think that the police would come and block off the street or something too, you know?
Who's your president?
I'm here to support God-fearing patriots in the movement.
A movement that on that morning...
What are you expecting?
What am I expecting?
Well, we'll let them tell you.
There was an event that was said didn't possibly happen here today.
Word on the street is that...
Junior, JFK Jr., will show up and introduce his parents.
12:29, the same time of day, the JFK Sr. was shot here in this spot.
Probably the majority of us know that JFK Jr. is alive.
You're expecting JFK Jr.?
Absolutely. Okay.
How's that going to happen?
It never does.
Are we going to see him today?
JFK Jr.?
Yeah. That's what everyone's telling me.
We're hoping.
We're hoping to hope and pray.
And then after that?
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