True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 153: JFK 101 (Pt. 1 of ???)
Aired: 2021-04-23
Duration: 01:20:11


=== Lee Harvey Oswald Reconsidered (05:19) ===

[00:00:00]  See, my whole thing is, is that what if, you know, by some very small, almost impossible chance, Lee Harvey Oswald was just a committed left-wing activist who thought he was doing the right thing and then have his whole legacy tarnished by everyone like, oh, he worked for the CIA, or like, oh, he didn't even do it, and all this stuff.
[00:00:21]  But, like, you know, what if he's a guy who is staunch in his political views and also has tremendous accuracy, can fire off three shots of the Carcano rifle in under six seconds?
[00:00:30]  The greatest Marxist that ever was, and the greatest marksman that ever was.
[00:00:36]  The Marxist marksman.
[00:00:37]  Exactly.
[00:00:38]  And now everybody thinks, oh, he works for the government, all that stuff.
[00:00:41]  It's like he didn't, you know.
[00:00:43]  You're an Oswald truther.
[00:00:45]  I'm an Oswald truther.
[00:00:46]  Oswald's not innocent.
[00:00:48]  He did it.
[00:00:49]  He's not a Patsy.
[00:00:50]  He is just a man who is strong in his convictions.
[00:00:54]  And none of these little kooky-dookie conspiracy theorists understand that because they're weak-willed and also don't understand that Italians are some of the best at warfare in the history of the not only the 20th century, the 21st and 19th centuries, and that their military equipment is superior.
[00:01:12]  I don't know why you're giving me this look.
[00:01:14]  You're Polish.
[00:01:39]  Okay, while the theme music was playing, Liz showed me some Wikipedia articles that changed my mind on this.
[00:01:45]  I think...
[00:01:45]  I think Lee Jarvey Oswald probably worked for the CIA.
[00:01:49]  Well, before we get into all of that, hello, everyone.
[00:01:53]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:54]  My name is Brace, and I'm Innocent.
[00:01:57]  And we are joined, of course, by Jung Chomsky.
[00:02:01]  Who is a Patsy?
[00:02:04]  And the podcast is TrueNON.
[00:02:05]  Hello.
[00:02:06]  Welcome.
[00:02:06]  Young Chomsky slightly shook his head when you said he is a Patsy.
[00:02:10]  He dismissed that.
[00:02:11]  He's like, that wasn't cool.
[00:02:14]  I just want to say that I never thought we would be doing a JFK series, to be honest.
[00:02:18]  Yeah.
[00:02:19]  And we're actually going to take the most annoying route possible.
[00:02:22]  We've assembled a panel of 14 to 17-year-old experts to decide: is JFK based or was he fucked up for being in a poly relationship?
[00:02:31]  We also examined the polyamorous relationship of Alan Dulles with both his wife and his mistress.
[00:02:37]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:02:38]  We're doing a little JFK 101, aren't we, baby?
[00:02:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:41]  This is kind of like, we're calling it JFK 101 because this is kind of like dipping our toes.
[00:02:46]  We're just starting, we're just getting in.
[00:02:50]  But it's going to be, I think it's going to be a real fun series.
[00:02:53]  Not sure how many episodes it's going to go.
[00:02:55]  That's what the question marks are for, but we'll find out real soon.
[00:02:58]  Wait, where was the question marks?
[00:03:00]  It's going to be the thing that says like one of one out of question mark.
[00:03:04]  This isn't exactly, you can't just do a one out of question mark.
[00:03:06]  That's what they do.
[00:03:07]  Crazy people.
[00:03:08]  Always do that.
[00:03:09]  All right.
[00:03:10]  If this ends up, listen, if you're listening to this episode and there's a one over question mark, you will find where the real power lays in Truanon.
[00:03:17]  Because if there isn't, which I'm sure there will be, if there isn't, though, that means Brace got to make the decision.
[00:03:21]  But no, I guarantee it's going to be one out of question mark.
[00:03:26]  Anyways.
[00:03:28]  Of course, it's going to be one out of question mark.
[00:03:29]  One out of that's like the tweet threads that are like, is fucking Yoshi, is it?
[00:03:34]  Is he did that for 9-11?
[00:03:37]  I don't remember that.
[00:03:38]  That was like 20 years ago at this point.
[00:03:42]  Will you keep all of this in?
[00:03:54]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City.
[00:03:58]  We have with us here today independent researcher and returning guest from our last series about deep events, Ben.
[00:04:08]  And of course, Aaron Good, who earned his PhD writing about U.S. hegemony, elite criminality, and the deep state dissertation coming soon on Skyhorse.
[00:04:17]  We'll have a link in the little bio of this thing.
[00:04:20]  And of course, joined by Liz and Young Chomsky.
[00:04:23]  I don't even know why I'm saying these things.
[00:04:25]  Anyway, welcome to Dallas.
[00:04:28]  Welcome to Dallas via the Soviet embassy in Mexico.
[00:04:32]  Yes.
[00:04:34]  We're finally doing it.
[00:04:35]  We're finally doing an episode about JFK.
[00:04:38]  Can you believe it?
[00:04:39]  I am enthralled.
[00:04:43]  Fellas, why have we gathered you today?
[00:04:45]  We're talking about Jack Kennedy, the greatest president in American history, who young life was tragically cut short all those many years ago in Dallas.
[00:04:58]  And this is going to be the first episode of, I don't know how many episodes we're going to do about this, but this is definitely the first one.
[00:05:04]  And we are talking here today about who JFK was, why someone might want to ice JFK, and what exactly whose toes did he step on to get his head blown off on Dealey Plaza.

=== Jack Kennedy's Foreign Policy (15:33) ===

[00:05:19]  Yeah, as a follower of the Immortal Science, you would think that I would not really care much about an American president getting killed.
[00:05:28]  But there's a lot about him and a lot about his death that marks a pretty significant turning point, I think, in the nature of the American state, in the way that it was governed, in who was running it.
[00:05:42]  And it was kind of the last, his presidency, I see, is sort of the last off-ramp before the worst people possible, as opposed to the not the worst people, but almost the worst people possible were already in power.
[00:05:54]  And then even worse people came into power.
[00:05:56]  And I really do see this event of his death as being like kind of a pivotal moment for that transition happening.
[00:06:03]  And it really set the stage for a long period of political upheaval in this country that really did not end until Reagan became president.
[00:06:12]  So it's a very important chapter in American history.
[00:06:14]  And I think understanding why he was killed and also by who he was killed and how he was killed is important for understanding how the American state works, how the American elite works, the nature of the society that we live in.
[00:06:28]  I think it's a really important lens to look at those things.
[00:06:33]  I know that Jim Garrison was fond of calling it a coup d'état.
[00:06:36]  And a lot of people have kind of followed in that, in his footsteps there.
[00:06:41]  Do you guys subscribe to that view?
[00:06:43]  Would you call what happened a coup?
[00:06:46]  Yeah, I think you'd have to.
[00:06:48]  The question of it or the way you really want to define it is going to depend on the way you want to define the state.
[00:06:55]  So that's one of the issues I'm kind of preoccupied with and have written a lot about.
[00:06:59]  So it's because some of the impetus for it came from outside or sort of above the state, it's not as clear-cut as some colonels overthrowing a leader, putting in a puppet.
[00:07:13]  You have to understand state society relations and the relationship between economic elites, organized crime, the national security state, and the dirty tricks department of the national security state protected by state secrecy in order to really understand what Kennedy is grappling with and the nature of power in the U.S.
[00:07:39]  Yeah, and from what I've always understood is people really sort of viewed Kennedy's whole presidency as this sort of slow rolling ball that kind of gains a lot of steam, especially in the last part of his presidency, of essentially pissing off every sector of society who makes up the deep state.
[00:07:56]  And like you said, organized crime, you know, sections of the intelligence community in the military, big business, and just various people who sort of straddle all three.
[00:08:08]  And that's something with like a lot of JFK theorists that you see is someone will pick like a discrete one.
[00:08:12]  It's like, well, it's the mafia that killed JFK, or it was the CIA that killed JFK.
[00:08:17]  Or, you know, if you really want to get out there, it was the KGB that killed JFK, which very few people, I think, subscribe to that one.
[00:08:24]  But, you know, some important figures do.
[00:08:26]  When in actuality, it was, it's kind of just all three components of the deep state.
[00:08:31]  You got big business, mafia, or, you know, whatever you want to call it, organized crime.
[00:08:36]  And then you have the intelligence and military community.
[00:08:39]  And I think it's worth, I mean, that's kind of worth spending this episode on.
[00:08:44]  I think it's worth going into why or how he pissed those people off.
[00:08:48]  Because JFK definitely did.
[00:08:50]  And there's probably going to be some differences of opinion here.
[00:08:54]  I know there are differences of opinion that I have a lot of JFK researchers where they sort of paint him as this peace Nick who would have never gotten to Vietnam, you know, would have definitely ended the war, which, you know, counterfactuals aside, he definitely did at least have what seems to be a pretty significant change of heart about how he was going about some things after some important events like the Bay of Pigs happened.
[00:09:15]  And so I think, I don't know, where do you guys want to start?
[00:09:17]  I think it's probably good to start at the beginning.
[00:09:20]  Well, you know, I would say there's a prelude to his presidency where I think you can glean more about his foreign policy and it can be used to kind of complicate the idea of him as just a sincere cold warrior and how much he really did change.
[00:09:41]  So I think he evolved over time in terms of his understanding about what he was up against.
[00:09:47]  But actually, even as a senator and a congressman, you know, as a congressman, he went to Vietnam and he met, he took counsel from Edmund Gullion, who'd worked as a journalist and also as a person for the State Department.
[00:10:01]  He was French, and who educated him about Vietnam and why the French were going to lose.
[00:10:06]  And he, you know, not long after that, becomes a, in the Senate, the leading critic of the French Empire.
[00:10:14]  So while the U.S. is paying for the entire war effort of the French in Vietnam so they can hold on to their colonial empire, he is saying that this is a doomed effort and that they shouldn't, the U.S. shouldn't put itself on the side of these colonial powers who really have no legitimacy.
[00:10:32]  And he gets proven right about that.
[00:10:35]  And he gets proven right about Algeria as well.
[00:10:40]  And so he takes certain Cold War stances that I don't, you know, that I don't think he necessarily believed as much, believed them so much as they were sort of prerequisites for even being taken seriously in U.S. politics.
[00:10:56]  So I'm not saying he was a hippie from the beginning, but I think that he was against imperialism.
[00:11:03]  He wasn't a wasp.
[00:11:04]  He was a Catholic Irish person.
[00:11:07]  And that experience makes you hate the British, you know, for good reason.
[00:11:11]  And his father was always a bit of an outsider anyway among these circles, even though he had made a whole lot of money because of that fact.
[00:11:20]  And, you know, it was after he gave his Algeria speech.
[00:11:24]  It was either the Algeria speech or the Vietnam one, maybe it was the Vietnam one.
[00:11:28]  And it was the very next day that Eisenhower came out and spoke about the domino theory, like seemingly in response to Kennedy, you know, speaking about perhaps not going in on the side of defending the existing power structure.
[00:11:43]  For those who don't know, the domino theory was a much subscribed to theory, which is kind of still subscribed to, although obviously communism has gets swapped out for whatever, or in the case of China, still communism.
[00:11:55]  But that, you know, once one country, specifically talking about South Asia at this point, once one country falls, then the next one will fall, and then the next one will fall.
[00:12:03]  Turns out the domino theory was somewhat correct.
[00:12:05]  That is what happened.
[00:12:06]  But, you know, these guys were, you know, this was in a sort of mindset of containment.
[00:12:11]  And they were talking about Soviet containment in Europe, but also Soviet and Chinese containment in Asia as well.
[00:12:17]  And that is sort of what led us to the Vietnam War.
[00:12:20]  Yeah.
[00:12:21]  And with so when Kennedy does take office, he's he gets suckered into this Bay of Pigs thing, right?
[00:12:30]  And it's more or less, he's tricked by Dulles into believing and the other joint chiefs that there's going to be a popular uprising.
[00:12:37]  Later documents show that they knew that that wasn't going to be the case.
[00:12:41]  So he's almost like the victim of a covert operation right away in that he was expected to, rather than be defeated at the Bay of Pigs when this stupid operation, you know, that had been conceived by Eisenhower is carried out, he says, no, I'm not going to send in troops.
[00:12:56]  I'm not going to just attack this country.
[00:12:58]  That's just like straight up imperialism.
[00:13:00]  That's not how I want to start off.
[00:13:01]  I'd rather take a failure and go from there.
[00:13:05]  And after that, that was a very early lesson for him about these national security people.
[00:13:10]  And it soured them, him against them.
[00:13:12]  He said he wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.
[00:13:15]  And he said that the joint chiefs were, you know, just a bunch of old men.
[00:13:20]  He called them joint chiefs, sons of bitches.
[00:13:22]  And he said Lemnitzer, you know, who was one of the top guys there, he was a dope.
[00:13:26]  He wasn't going to listen to him.
[00:13:27]  He fires Alan Dulles.
[00:13:29]  He fires Bissell, fires Cabell, two other top guys at the CIA.
[00:13:33]  I mean, he really shows a lot of character in that episode in terms of what he did by not sending troops and the way that he sort of went after some of these guys right away.
[00:13:44]  I mean, firing Dulles was a bold move.
[00:13:48]  Yeah, let's actually, I want to pause on Bay of Pigs for just a second.
[00:13:52]  And Ben, I think I actually want to toss it over to you because I feel like this is something you might know a little bit about.
[00:13:59]  But Bay of Pigs was a pretty spectacular operation.
[00:14:03]  Yeah, and it was, it was, Aaron, you mentioned Eisenhower's, you know, it was sort of Eisenhower's plan, but the person running the day-to-day of this operation was Richard Nixon, of course, who was basically the action officer for this operation.
[00:14:18]  And not only did Dulles, I mean, Dulles basically asked JFK, you know, we're going to need military support if this thing goes south.
[00:14:26]  And JFK said, under no circumstances am I going to do that.
[00:14:30]  If this thing fails, it fails.
[00:14:31]  And then Dulles, after the fact, went to some of the friendly press and told them that JFK had lost his nerve, that he had promised that he would support this.
[00:14:42]  and he betrayed the CIA essentially.
[00:14:45]  I mean he didn't use those terms, but and they immediately painted JFK in this poor light despite the fact that he had taken steps to not escalate the situation beyond where it was.
[00:14:59]  JFK is kind of the furthest edge of liberalism as far as Cold War foreign policy was concerned.
[00:15:04]  They didn't want explicit, you know, he didn't want explicit invasions of these countries.
[00:15:09]  All of the economic components of imperialism, obviously, he didn't have a lot of issue with.
[00:15:14]  He didn't really question that.
[00:15:16]  But the most violent elements of it, which were represented by the Dulles faction, which had pulled off a coup in Guatemala, in another part of the world, of course, Operation Ajax, that was their way of operating.
[00:15:32]  And Kennedy had a different point of view about that.
[00:15:37]  He thought, I mean, he believed in American exceptionalism.
[00:15:41]  He thought that these independent post-colonial countries were going to want to deal with the U.S. on fair terms.
[00:15:47]  That was how he viewed it.
[00:15:49]  That was what he thought about it.
[00:15:51]  And he didn't see the need for this kind of thing, particularly not, you know, as Aaron mentioned, the very first days of coming into office.
[00:16:00]  Yeah, I should note too.
[00:16:02]  I've actually been to the Bay of Pigs and I went swimming there and had some fish on the beach.
[00:16:07]  It was very nice.
[00:16:09]  I also went to their museum where they've captured American weaponry, which was kind of cool to walk around in.
[00:16:14]  I want to come back in a little bit to Alan Dulles because we got to spend some good time talking about him.
[00:16:20]  But I have some actual questions because I know that there's a lot of debate around Kennedy's posture, policies, possible turn with Vietnam leading up into his assassination, obviously.
[00:16:36]  But it seems like there has been a lot of kind of scholarly debate over basically trying to suss out whether or not Kennedy actually, let me rephrase that, whether Jack, trying to be my must-boomer self, whether Jack Kennedy was kind of making a turn towards withdrawing the U.S. from Vietnam, which would have been obviously a massive, massive, like almost unthinkable turn in U.S. policy.
[00:17:05]  And it seems like there's a lot of historical debate about that.
[00:17:09]  Yeah.
[00:17:10]  So I believe that if it were not so politically charged and it did not have such grave implications, and that if scholars were allowed to just look at things dispassionately and weigh the evidence, that it would be why it would be a consensus that Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam.
[00:17:33]  And I say that because this was kept sort of secret.
[00:17:37]  And even the Pentagon papers are very strange about some of the things that they leave out.
[00:17:41]  Like a lot of the gaps are the last months of the Kennedy administration.
[00:17:46]  And the first person to look at the, even with the gaps of the Pentagon papers and say Kennedy seems to have had a withdrawal plan that was reversed by some sort of national security memorandum that's not a part of the record, but that is alluded to.
[00:18:00]  That was actually Peter Dale Scott by looking at the Gravelle version of the Pentagon Papers.
[00:18:06]  But there were people like his aide, Kenny O'Donnell, who said that he had been told that they were going to get out of Vietnam.
[00:18:14]  There was going to be a big change when he got back from Dallas that would be even more widely put into action, but that he couldn't really pull out until after the election or there'd be another Red Scare.
[00:18:26]  I think that perhaps the most, what really could be the decisive thing is when Oliver Stone's movie comes out and it gets attacked because of this Vietnam thing.
[00:18:35]  That's one of the main things that JFK got attacked for was this notion that he was pulling out of Vietnam.
[00:18:40]  Now, he used as a consultant for that John Newman, who's a former NSA officer, military intelligence person, who wrote his dissertation on Kennedy's getting out of Vietnam.
[00:18:51]  And he uncovered a whole lot of new material that's really been, I think, vindicated afterwards.
[00:18:55]  But a few years after that, Robert McNamara releases his memoir in retrospect.
[00:19:02]  And there's a whole chapter that basically confirms what Stone and John Newman had really been crucified for, for arguing.
[00:19:12]  Okay.
[00:19:12]  And for McNamara, this is, I think, it's not that McNamara never told a lie or anything like that because he was involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, which was based on, you know, many falsehoods.
[00:19:26]  But here he is testifying against interest and the story laid out by, and also because he reverses himself under Johnson and then prosecutes the war.
[00:19:36]  So this is not information that makes McNamara look good.
[00:19:41]  And he has some, you know, some details about it.
[00:19:44]  What happened with Kennedy and Vietnam was that he realized that it was difficult to get to reverse the momentum of the military brass who wanted to be there.
[00:19:54]  And so he needed to have the Joint Chiefs of Staff come in, along with the Secretary of Defense, to come up with a sort of statement of how they were going to withdraw and when they were going to do it and so on and lay out a timetable for it.
[00:20:07]  And he does this in a deceptive kind of way in that he sends Taylor and McNamara on this mission to Vietnam, a fact-finding mission.
[00:20:15]  Okay.
[00:20:16]  And while they are there and over there, and even in the time leading up to this, you have two other guys, Fletcher Proudy and his boss, General Victor Krulak.
[00:20:24]  And they are given instructions by Robert Kennedy, who had been given instructions by Jack Kennedy to write the Taylor McNamara report, which could have been called the Krulek Proudy Report, or it really could have been called the Kennedy Report, if you were going to be honest about its authorship.
[00:20:38]  And this lays out the case of like how they need to get out of Vietnam by a certain time and it sets forth these recommendations.
[00:20:46]  And then it's presented by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, and the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.

=== Robert Kennedy's Strategic Dilemmas (10:48) ===

[00:20:52]  It's basically, as I understand it, they were handed these bound copies of it when they like get back home.
[00:20:58]  Okay, you went on your trip.
[00:20:59]  Here's your report.
[00:21:00]  This is what it says.
[00:21:01]  And then in SAM 63, the famous document, the withdrawal statement, makes reference to putting into action the recommendations from the Taylor McNamara report.
[00:21:14]  So Kennedy really went about this in a sort of deceptive but clever way to try to work around the resistance of these bureaucracies that were against any sort of withdrawal in Vietnam.
[00:21:27]  And so your sense is that he was going about it in this way because he knew he was up against a bunch of, let's say, figures in various parts of the bureaucracy.
[00:21:38]  And an election in 1964.
[00:21:40]  So he left these people twisting in the wind for a time, and he was not as clear about what he wanted to do for political reasons.
[00:21:52]  But his deception is the flip side of Lyndon Johnson, who campaigns with the girl pulling the daisy petals off and the atomic bomb.
[00:22:02]  runs as a peace candidate, and he's saying that he's also deceptive about either withdrawing or sending troops into Vietnam.
[00:22:16]  But in his case, he is disguising his desire to escalate, which we know now because he tells people very early in his presidency, the Joint Chiefs, just get me elected and you'll get your damn war.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  And he basically reverses everything.
[00:22:31]  I mean, there had been Pentagon cuts that Kennedy had passed.
[00:22:35]  Those didn't happen.
[00:22:37]  There was obviously the stuff that, you know, we can get into this too, what Kennedy was, you know, doing with the Fed and trying to work around the central banks.
[00:22:48]  A lot of policies get reversed almost immediately.
[00:22:51]  Especially in the third world.
[00:22:53]  And this is probably where Ben and I would disagree a little bit because I think that he wasn't connected to these Rockefeller people and these other people connected to big businesses much.
[00:23:06]  And he had enough money.
[00:23:09]  I think that he was motivated by different kind of incentives in that as other people.
[00:23:15]  He's not like Obama who knows he's going to like, oh, now I'm going to have a whole lot of money afterwards.
[00:23:20]  You know, this is going to be great.
[00:23:21]  He had all the money he wanted.
[00:23:23]  The things that would motivate people, power.
[00:23:25]  He had power.
[00:23:25]  He was the president.
[00:23:26]  He had money from his family.
[00:23:30]  He had plenty of handsome man.
[00:23:32]  And he had, yeah, I mean, what else motivates, you know, most people?
[00:23:36]  Like, so it just seems that's why he, that's why people like him and Roosevelt, who seem patrician, you know, and you could say, oh, they don't understand the working class or whatever.
[00:23:47]  And Kennedy kind of acknowledges this.
[00:23:48]  He was campaigning in West Virginia and he said to a worker, a coal miner, he said, looking at you, I feel like I've never worked a day in my life.
[00:23:56]  And the coal miner said, yeah, well, you know, you haven't missed much.
[00:24:01]  But he didn't have this desire to like please power so much.
[00:24:05]  And I think that's what made him dangerous.
[00:24:07]  One of the things he did with that really gets reversed, returned to the former Eisenhower policy is in Indonesia.
[00:24:15]  He actually helps Sukarno to nationalize U.S. businesses.
[00:24:19]  He assists him and offers some financial assistance and technical assistance to allow the nationalization of U.S. business interests.
[00:24:26]  I mean, that is a very unusual policy and totally the opposite of the Eisenhower-Dulles, Dean Atchison consensus before, and then the people that LBJ has running foreign policy once he takes power.
[00:24:40]  Yeah, I mean, I think we would agree about that.
[00:24:44]  And Kennedy's dad had a famous distaste for business people.
[00:24:47]  And I agree.
[00:24:49]  It is why, you know, Kennedy was not, he didn't know business people.
[00:24:53]  He wasn't involved in business.
[00:24:55]  He was just not a part of that world.
[00:24:57]  He certainly wasn't a part of, you know, apart from having been in the military during World War II, he wasn't a part of those military or intelligence circles.
[00:25:04]  His dad did have connections to organized crime to some extent, but who didn't in those days.
[00:25:11]  I've seen the departed.
[00:25:12]  I know what happens in Boston.
[00:25:14]  But yeah, this is, I mean, this is my, you know, this is my case to communists listening to this to care about this is that I do, because I agree, JFK does not, he doesn't represent finance capital in the same way that, for instance, you know, LBJ would do everything that the Rockefellers wanted to do in Cuba or in Indonesia or in the Congo or anywhere else.
[00:25:34]  But he, you know, he believed in the free market system.
[00:25:37]  He believed in capitalism.
[00:25:38]  He believed that if these countries become independent post-colonial countries, that they will enter the free market, that they will enter this capitalist system the way that the Europeans are a part of it, the way that we're a part of it.
[00:25:50]  And he thought that that was what was going to work.
[00:25:53]  So, you know, I think that you can see the nuance in his position.
[00:25:59]  It's not the case that there's just the most extreme, violent elements of finance capital and then there's communism.
[00:26:06]  There are shades in the middle of people like Kennedy.
[00:26:09]  And as you say, he had a good relationship with a lot of these post-colonial leaders like Sukarno, like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana.
[00:26:19]  He was working with Dag Hammerskjold in regards to the Congo crisis.
[00:26:23]  So on a lot of these, which was totally pushed by Rockefeller and those types of Skatanga separatist movement, which comes up with some characters later on in the story about this.
[00:26:34]  But he had these different aspirations for what the global picture would look like.
[00:26:43]  It was not going to be this total dictatorship of finance capital over every element of the world.
[00:26:48]  It was going to be this pretty, in my opinion, naive liberal picture of international relations.
[00:26:55]  But nonetheless, he also, in many respects, was a realist and understood that this kind of war in Vietnam, for instance, he knew from the beginning was going to fail.
[00:27:06]  As Aaron mentioned, his speech about the French colonialism there, it's not hard to understand why he took the position he took on Vietnam when you put it in that context.
[00:27:17]  He understood that it's interesting, like McNamara in that documentary tries to downplay that this was just a war of national independence for the Vietnamese, that it wasn't really about expanding the so-called totalitarian communist system.
[00:27:34]  But I think that Jack probably did know that.
[00:27:37]  I think he did understand that as he gave that speech, he seemed to understand that this was a national liberation movement.
[00:27:44]  This was a post-colonial movement.
[00:27:47]  So I think that, yeah, I think he definitely represents a distinct, and that's why I call it kind of this off-ramp, that this was like this one last chance.
[00:27:58]  You know, history only goes in one way.
[00:27:59]  There's dependency here.
[00:28:01]  So there's no going back.
[00:28:02]  There's no counterfactuals.
[00:28:03]  But I do think that that was the last kind of gasp of a certain different type of American foreign policy.
[00:28:09]  And you do see it in the way that he relates to many of these post-colonial leaders.
[00:28:13]  Yeah, I'd agree with that as well.
[00:28:16]  I mean, I do know the one thing that I've always sort of been curious about, though, is that Robert Kennedy or RFK, I believe via JFK, did help start up Operation Mongoose after the Bay of Pigs failure, which set up JM Wave, which was a massive, I believe the second biggest CIA station in the world outside of headquarters, although I don't know if you go headquarters a station.
[00:28:40]  Massive budget too for the time.
[00:28:42]  Huge budget, employed everybody from all of my cousins to both of my grandparents to most other people I've actually met in my life.
[00:28:52]  But, you know, they did set up this sort of covert war against Castro that did not go very well, to be clear.
[00:28:58]  Like Operation Mongoose was on its own terms, if you're taking the terms for what they're supposed to be, the overthrow of Castro and the government of Cuba and revolution, was a failure.
[00:29:10]  But certainly, I mean, what Bill Harvey was there, I believe Ed Lansdale was pretty heavily involved in it.
[00:29:16]  Lansdale ran it.
[00:29:18]  Exactly.
[00:29:18]  And so these characters that later pop up, well, a little after Operation Mongoose was established or after JM Wave was established and buying back.
[00:29:28]  But I think that's an important point to make that like, okay, like, you know, I agree.
[00:29:33]  Like JFK was not anywhere close to what my politics are.
[00:29:37]  I don't think JFK was some, you know, JFK was running right now.
[00:29:41]  Well, I don't think JFK, if JFK, what's the red-headed cat guy?
[00:29:48]  If JFK Jr. Jr., I can't remember that guy.
[00:29:50]  No, don't even put him next to John John.
[00:29:53]  He did slow down the Kennedy.
[00:29:56]  He was a wild vote for him.
[00:29:57]  They established residency in Massachusetts.
[00:30:02]  But I'm saying embarrassment, the gene pool.
[00:30:05]  Kennedy wasn't exactly like a closet red or anything like that.
[00:30:08]  But even with as far as he was willing to go with stuff like mongoose, starting with a partial withdrawal from Vietnam, the fact that they even killed him despite him doing all of that, I think is really important, right?
[00:30:21]  Because that nuance extends even to that sort of logic.
[00:30:25]  Well, it's not like they killed Kennedy because he was about to announce a secret plan for world peace.
[00:30:30]  Although, you know, that's he was heading in that direction of, you know, of tending towards peace.
[00:30:36]  It wasn't a secret, though.
[00:30:37]  He actually said it.
[00:30:38]  Yeah, he was, you know, the AU speech and stuff like that.
[00:30:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:30:41]  But like, they killed him even before really any of that could get going, right?
[00:30:46]  Like they like, this guy is tending not in the direction that we want him to tend in.
[00:30:50]  And so make his head explode.
[00:30:52]  Yeah.
[00:30:52]  I mean, we haven't even mentioned his relationship with Khrushchev, which, you know, I mean, the, you know, the ways in which he was attempting, it seemed like at least, you know, and yeah, I mean, it seems like as through as many avenues as he had, he was trying to freeze the Cold War as quickly as he could.
[00:31:16]  Yeah, he wasn't just trying to freeze the Cold War.
[00:31:19]  I mean, well, he was trying to end it.
[00:31:22]  And he was also, one of the things he suggested was just to scrap the space race, start cooperating, sharing, you know, rocket technology and so on with the Soviet Union in order to explore space together.
[00:31:34]  And he had back channel discussions with Castro to, you know, talk about normalizing relations with Cuba.

=== Speculation On JFK Assassination (15:34) ===

[00:31:41]  And it's actually one of those back channel discussions or links.
[00:31:46]  Jean Danielle, a French journalist who's with Castro, and they're discussing this prospect of normalization.
[00:31:51]  And Castro is very enthusiastic about this.
[00:31:54]  And when he gets the news, and then Castro thinks, oh, God, this changes everything.
[00:31:59]  And he basically, you know, becomes like Oliver Stone 25 years later, making that essentially the same case.
[00:32:05]  He gets on the radio and talks for hours about it in the days afterwards saying, this is so obvious, what has happened.
[00:32:11]  And he basically lays out what I'll, you know, a very quick version of, you know, what a lot of these scholars have come up with over the years happened.
[00:32:21]  And the CIA was monitoring, you know, the security agencies were monitoring what he was saying and his communications to the extent that they could with these people, including like Chris Chev and Castro.
[00:32:33]  And that there's this famous, a sort of famous story.
[00:32:36]  It's in, I think, Polgrain's, Greg Polgrain's book, where Sukarno is visiting the White House and they all go and hang out in the bedroom, Jackie and Sukarno and JFK.
[00:32:50]  I wouldn't worry anywhere.
[00:32:52]  I know him.
[00:32:53]  I know well.
[00:32:54]  I know.
[00:32:55]  He's the guy that they made that fake porno of.
[00:32:57]  Exactly.
[00:32:59]  I don't know.
[00:32:59]  I don't want to get into that.
[00:33:01]  But the real reason is that they think that that's part of the place that's not bugged.
[00:33:06]  So they're like, let's just hop.
[00:33:07]  Let's sit here and have a conversation because I'm pretty sure it's not bugged.
[00:33:10]  Probably what.
[00:33:11]  Absolutely.
[00:33:13]  Yes.
[00:33:15]  But these were things that if, you know, it's always debatable whether the assassination, assuming it was carried out by the state on some level, was this really written down anywhere?
[00:33:25]  Was this an operation that had state sanction or did it just use state assets and then carried out by some other body, some other entity or group of conspirators that comes together on this basis?
[00:33:39]  But if this, you know, like they killed Frank Olson, you know, with the Office of Security, James McCord, a guy involved in the Kennedy assassination, was the person who responded to Frank Olson.
[00:33:49]  If there was a mechanism, you know, connected to continuity of government and such that would allow for extreme measures such as killing a government official like Frank Olson, could that have been, is there some entity within the state that would have the, you know, that would have been endowed with the statutory or some sort of, you know, usurps, usurpation of this authority to carry out that kind of action that could have actually done it with the president.
[00:34:17]  I'm agnostic on this, but I actually think the logic of it is not something that makes it so you can't just dismiss that.
[00:34:39]  Before we get into that, I do think that there's a couple other elements we have to mention that Kennedy pissed off because we haven't yet talked about the steel and the Texas oil industry, which are two big guys.
[00:34:52]  Now, I know that this is something when, Aaron, when we had you on for the deep state episode, the kind of like intro episode we did with you.
[00:35:00]  And also, Ben, when we did the 9-11 episodes, this is something we really tried to hammer home that, like, when we say CIA, when we say deep state, we're talking about this very porous entity that, you know, encompasses a lot of different things, both like within the state, outside of the state, private, public.
[00:35:20]  You know, and that sometimes we, you know, you say CIA or whatever, and it becomes a catch-all term, or you say deep state, and it becomes kind of a way to kind of articulate some of the boundaries of whatever this sort of nebulous entity is.
[00:35:34]  But like finance, we mentioned a little bit about finance capital, but oil, I mean, Texas oil and steel, Kennedy had made real enemies of those guys.
[00:35:44]  And, you know, we should get into that because it, of course, happens right in their backyard.
[00:35:49]  Yeah, the U.S. Steel part is that was the biggest corporation in America at the time.
[00:35:54]  That was created back in the Gilded Age with Carnegie and his steel monopoly and then financed with a big injection of a gazillion dollars from JP Morgan that created U.S. Steel.
[00:36:06]  And they had worked with the government to come at an agreement over wage increases and price freezes and so on.
[00:36:15]  And then these people led by, I believe, Roger Blau was the name of the C, of the CEO of U.S. Steel.
[00:36:24]  And in April of 1962, they break this agreement, raise steel prices.
[00:36:29]  And so JFK is expected to actually acquiesce to this.
[00:36:34]  And it almost seems like he was, Blau was not acting as just the CEO of U.S. Steel trying to make a buck, that he was some sort of statesman for business, that he was there to in such a way to demonstrate, you know, he's there to like make Kennedy bend the knee in some fashion.
[00:36:52]  Almost like how the Chamber of Commerce works now, you know, it's just sort of like kind of like shadowy entity that just pops up every now and again to let everyone make sure they know.
[00:37:03]  Yeah, they made like there was a, there was a change under Obama where it was either the business roundtable or the chamber or maybe one, maybe another industry group, but like this was the first time and they show Obama like walking down the street in D.C.
[00:37:14]  And it was the first time that like instead of them going to the White House, like the president had to like, you know, get out and hoof it over there.
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:22]  Why would they, why do that except to just, you know.
[00:37:25]  Well, the Chamber of Commerce also threatened to Gaddafi Obama in the New York Times, which is one of my favorite fun facts.
[00:37:32]  Yeah.
[00:37:33]  Well, so Kennedy was given a threat in Henry Luce's magazine, Fortune magazine, after he, so instead of just like doing what U.S. Steel says, Kennedy uses the government and the power of the state to go out to fight what they're doing.
[00:37:47]  So he takes these Pentagon contracts and instead of buying steel from U.S. Steel, he's going to buy from small producers.
[00:37:54]  And he has RFK as the attorney general resume antitrust investigations against him that had been suspended.
[00:38:01]  And as a result, U.S. Steel backs down.
[00:38:04]  But Henry Luce, if you know Henry Luce, he was the guy who wrote that essay, The American Century, basically called, you know, before the Council on Foreign Relations, he was a part of that.
[00:38:13]  Basically, Wall Street's think tank and their plan for global hegemony after World War II.
[00:38:17]  And he owns his publishing empire, Fortune, which is the, you know, the most obviously pro-business one, although time and life are just not really far behind.
[00:38:25]  But Fortune has an editorial called Steel, The Ides of April, where, which is a reference to the Kennedy assassin or the Caesar assassination, right?
[00:38:35]  I mean, prophecy and it's just, it's just a, it's kind of the hubris of that is really something.
[00:38:43]  And of course, you could say it's a metaphor for whatever, but it shows that they were very pissed off about this.
[00:38:50]  And, you know, that may ultimately be the decisive part that big business, you know, was not happy with Kennedy and that these other entities kind of exist at the pleasure of big business, CIA and the Pentagon with its relationship to these business, you know, these military industrial firms and so on.
[00:39:10]  So this is a, that part is a big deal.
[00:39:12]  The U.S. Steel episode, I think, is instructive to see what Kennedy did and what other presidents today don't do.
[00:39:18]  Yeah, I think the Texas oil elites are another key thing, especially because that specific milieu is obviously being based chiefly in Dallas, is heavily involved directly in some of the actual mechanics of how JFK was killed.
[00:39:38]  So the fact that he pissed them off has a very particular, you know, I don't know that the CEO of U.S. Steel had much directly to do with JFK getting killed, but many top oil executives absolutely were directly involved in getting him killed.
[00:39:54]  And it really goes back to, I mean, especially the oil depletion allowance, which he was trying to remove.
[00:40:01]  But there had earlier been legislative efforts that he had passed.
[00:40:06]  Because again, so first off, you know, Johnson was senator from Texas.
[00:40:11]  Obviously, you do not get to be senator of Texas without having very close connections to the oil industry at that time.
[00:40:18]  And so Johnson was really their guy.
[00:40:21]  And when he joined Kennedy, he became much less their guy.
[00:40:26]  So they immediately had a distaste for him because of that.
[00:40:29]  They lost one of their key allies, one of their key informants.
[00:40:32]  I'm not saying that he didn't still have a relationship with them, but it was very different than it had been when he was just a senator.
[00:40:37]  And Kennedy, I think it was in 62, passed a piece of legislation that basically cut their profits on foreign investments.
[00:40:46]  It was kind of an America-first piece of legislation.
[00:40:49]  And it basically cut a lot of their profits from foreign investment.
[00:40:52]  Because even by this time, you know, in the 60s, the actual oil in Texas and the Southwest was getting a little bit dry.
[00:40:58]  So they were going elsewhere.
[00:40:59]  So this hurt them in that way.
[00:41:01]  And then there had long been this oil depletion allowance since I think the 20s or 30s, which was meant to allow the U.S. to have a greater supply of oil.
[00:41:13]  It was meant to incentivize domestic production of oil for national security purposes.
[00:41:17]  And this essentially became not necessary anymore.
[00:41:20]  It was essentially a tax giveaway to these oil companies.
[00:41:23]  And Kennedy in 1963 proposed getting rid of this and started putting out feelers that he was going to get rid of this tax break, which would have cost like, you know, $300 million or something like that, you know, which in 1963 is a tremendous, enormous, huge little bit of amount of money.
[00:41:38]  Yes.
[00:41:39]  So you can imagine that he did not endear himself to these people for all of those reasons.
[00:41:45]  And then many of the people who are executives, people like Jack Crichton, people like H.W. Bush.
[00:41:51]  Yeah, I just wanted to mention him.
[00:41:53]  Yeah, like for the first time.
[00:41:54]  We're going to mention him a lot throughout because he's one of our favorite recurring Trunan characters.
[00:41:59]  But these people are directly pissed off by things that he has done directly to them, hurt them very directly in their pocketbooks.
[00:42:08]  And yeah, they become core figures of how he was killed.
[00:42:12]  Yeah.
[00:42:12]  And they are not, Texas oil people are not politically progressive, enlightened, enlightened people.
[00:42:20]  Well, they are now, but they don't have like diversity day at Texaco or whatever.
[00:42:27]  But in early, there's one character who was, you know, there's a malia of oil people and military industrial complex firms that are all intertwined in the Sun Belt, on the West Coast.
[00:42:41]  You know, so through Texas, through Arizona, California, and, you know, in Washington state, you have Scoop Jackson, the senator from Boeing, as he was called, right?
[00:42:52]  But there's one character that is in this story that's related really at the intersection here named D.H. Bird or David Harold Bird.
[00:43:01]  And in November of 1963, D.H. Bird, who his friends, because his oil fortunes had sort of declined, they called him Dryhole Bird, right?
[00:43:12]  Because he couldn't find any of that.
[00:43:13]  Wait, they called me Dryhole Belden.
[00:43:16]  That's going to go right on Wikipedia, Phoebe.
[00:43:20]  So Bird, this dry hole fellow, and his investment partner, James Ling, in November of 1963, they spent $2 million of their own money to buy stock in their own company, Ling Tecmo Vought.
[00:43:34]  And in February of 1964, after the Kennedy assassination, they received from the Navy the first big LBJ prime defense contract for a fighter plane that's going to be used in limited wars like Vietnam.
[00:43:47]  And Peter Dale Scott calculated that this $2.5 million insider purchase between these two men ended up being worth $26 million by the end of 1967.
[00:43:59]  And that this very, you know, wise, prescient purchase was 100 times the size of any other insider purchase in aerospace industry at that time.
[00:44:09]  Wait.
[00:44:10]  Aaron.
[00:44:10]  And this guy owned the Texas School Book Depository building.
[00:44:16]  But hold on.
[00:44:17]  You're not saying that anybody would do insider trading related to aerospace companies in the context of a huge event that kills people and becomes a focal point of national security afterwards.
[00:44:32]  Yeah.
[00:44:33]  Killed, you know, the Vietnam War and that whole era kills maybe 8 million people in Southeast Asia if you add in Indonesia.
[00:44:40]  And so I think that to that 8 million, you might add another one, John Kennedy.
[00:44:47]  I mean, I think if they would kill all those people, they might kill one more.
[00:44:52]  Yeah.
[00:44:52]  And so he, you know, he, what Peter Dale Scott hypothesizes is that he may have like been in connection with military intelligence people or other intelligence people to put Oswald in that, you know, and Oswald was in that building, perhaps on a surveillance assignment or something like that.
[00:45:10]  Or he would have been led to believe and Bird could have known about this.
[00:45:13]  This is this aspect is speculation.
[00:45:16]  The insider trading part is documented.
[00:45:19]  And the fact that he owned the Texas School Book Depository.
[00:45:22]  That's just a little cherry on top, isn't it?
[00:45:25]  I guess that's the point I really want to drive home to, though, about the business interests is that like these are not discrete interests.
[00:45:32]  Like the kind of the legislative stuff and the antitrust stuff aside, like the war machine in Vietnam and making sure that DOD Keynesianism was ramped up to the highest order.
[00:45:46]  Like that's all part of the same fucking machine.
[00:45:49]  Right.
[00:45:50]  So Kennedy was really throwing sand in the gears of a lot of this from a lot of different angles.
[00:45:57]  But it was all kind of culminating with this one big decision, it seems like, right?
[00:46:03]  That ended up impacting all these different guys.
[00:46:07]  The Vietnam aspect, you mean?
[00:46:09]  Yeah.
[00:46:09]  Yeah.
[00:46:10]  And I mean, the oil industry would have made an enormous amount of money.
[00:46:13]  Copper, I mean, there's a huge, I mean, that's what it's the, it's the biggest money-making scam in the world is war.
[00:46:21]  The Chilean cop, like Kinnecott and Anaconda, you know, those companies that Allende nationalizes later.
[00:46:26]  Like Michael Hudson pointed to a some sort of study that showed for every American in Vietnam, there was some crazy amount, like a half ton of copper that needed to be produced, which I don't understand why that works.
[00:46:41]  But he said that you would think that they were just shooting copper ingots at people, you know, given that kind of a statistic.
[00:46:47]  But those mines made profits that were enormous.
[00:46:51]  And that's what Allende tries to say later.
[00:46:52]  He says, these are like exorbitant profits.
[00:46:55]  And we're going to take those, that money, and apply that to our debt.
[00:46:59]  And we're not going to pay you that.
[00:47:00]  And that's part of how Allende really pisses people off because that precedent of like saying like, hey, your companies have ripped us off so bad that maybe we're not going to pay down the money that you say we owe you.
[00:47:12]  And so Allende had to go for that reason, among other reasons.

=== Drug Trafficking And Covert Operations (04:59) ===

[00:47:16]  It's also hard to like mention Vietnam and the CIA and money and then not talk about the drugs, which I feel like maybe we should talk just a little bit about.
[00:47:25]  Well, okay, listen.
[00:47:28]  There were some downsides to, yes, maybe importing a lot of heroin and using the money that you make from selling that and decimating countless communities in America and then funding assassinations and overthrows of governments abroad.
[00:47:42]  Okay, I understand that.
[00:47:43]  But have you tried heroin, Liz?
[00:47:47]  I mean, give me a break, baby.
[00:47:48]  It's all right.
[00:47:49]  Well, yeah, so that's the other thing is when the CIA goes into South Asia or Southeast Asia, they realize that one of the big cash crops over there, and again, more, and there are a lot of parallels, but talk about a parallel with Afghanistan, is they realize that there is a lot of opium poppies being grown in them hills and that people are willing to give them to them at dirt cheap prices.
[00:48:15]  Now, the Guomindong and various sort of warlords who had fled from the communist takeover of China had already sort of established themselves in some of these areas.
[00:48:26]  So it's not like there wasn't anybody there doing this.
[00:48:29]  But of course, ex-Kuomindong generals are very easy to assimilate into the CIA's global power structure.
[00:48:37]  And if their buddies in the World Anti-Communist League hadn't already given them a little ring.
[00:48:44]  But yeah, they get into some, they figure out a new kind of crop to start selling.
[00:48:49]  And the profits from Southeast Asia, of course, are enormous.
[00:48:53]  I mean, the CIA establishes their own airline and then they make a comedy movie about it, if I remember correctly, Air America.
[00:49:01]  Well, this goes back before that.
[00:49:04]  When you were talking about they started doing this, this is the very, one of the earliest things in the Cold War that, and this is even World War II, like a lot of them in Manchuria, the Yakuza and then the Japanese promote people from the Yakuza into like admiralships, like Yoshi Okodama, and he runs the Manchurian opium racket over there, opium trade.
[00:49:27]  He loots the underworld, and then later he gets recruited as a CIA asset.
[00:49:32]  So all of these figures are brought into this kind of underworld component that's intertwined with the state.
[00:49:40]  And in Southeast Asia, you have this Operation Paper set up in 1950, but that is the U.S. government side of it, you know, carried out by the OPC, the early, you know, the an early dirty tricks part of the CIA.
[00:49:54]  And these people who were OSS people had been involved in that trade, working with the Chinese nationalists, you know, the Flying Tigers, Kuomintang people to fight the Japanese and also deal with, you know, some of the drug traffic.
[00:50:04]  And after the war ends, the World Commerce Corporation, which is headed by like William Donovan and Sir William Stevenson, who was like the top British intelligence person, they work to reestablish the drug connection in Burma and Thailand, working with the Chinese nationals, KMT, who have, you know, and even after they have lost the revolution, you know, and they're on Taiwan, in Taiwan.
[00:50:30]  they go back into this opium producing region and they're supposed to actually attack and retake the mainland, but that never even comes close to happening.
[00:50:38]  They just, they, they fight some battles and get their asses kicked every time.
[00:50:41]  And they realize that fighting against the Chinese, you know, army is hard, but growing opium isn't as hard.
[00:50:47]  And they actually can do that successfully.
[00:50:49]  And so some of these people that set up these proprietaries, like Paul Helliwell, you know, he was ex-OSS and then becomes a CIA guy.
[00:50:56]  He was also Meyer Lansky's lawyer, you know, and these people set up a connection to drug trafficking that later evolves into Air America, which Liz was talking about.
[00:51:10]  You know, it goes like from the Flying Tigers in World War II to civilian air transport, which is one of those Paul Helliwell shell companies, then to Air America, which he also founded.
[00:51:21]  And then elsewhere there are money laundering banks like Helliwell.
[00:51:25]  Helliwell was the guy who also set up Castle Bank in the Bahamas, which was at that time the big one.
[00:51:30]  And then when that gets shut down, up springs, Newgan Hand, which runs for a while.
[00:51:35]  And then BCCI kind of takes over after that.
[00:51:38]  So there's this whole realm of drug trafficking that's intertwined with covert operations and geopolitics.
[00:51:46]  And there's a financial infrastructure that you need to run this as well.
[00:51:50]  And I cannot imagine that the people like Kennedy would really be in the weeds about this stuff and have any idea that this stuff is going on.
[00:51:59]  I mean, I just, I don't, I, I really, that's a, that's an area where you really wonder how much civilian control there is even among like National Security Council people over these kind of operations, which you have to assume are still existing in some form today, especially with Afghanistan.

=== Cuba's Floating Casino (05:12) ===

[00:52:15]  Where does all that money end up?
[00:52:17]  Yeah.
[00:52:17]  I mean, there's another thing too.
[00:52:19]  I believe one of the Flying Tigers guys actually was involved with the Luses, who we talked about earlier.
[00:52:25]  They're civilian raids, civilian raids using exiles into Cuba to attack Soviet shipping.
[00:52:31]  I can't remember the guy's name, but one of the big wigs with the Flying Tigers was also assisting with that too.
[00:52:38]  So, I mean, all of these things are connected, right?
[00:52:40]  Like, it's, it's, I mean, this is, this is why when we talk about the deep state, it is a combination of all of these things.
[00:52:46]  And sometimes you have these individual figures who literally will straddle every single sector.
[00:53:05]  But there is one sector we have not talked about yet.
[00:53:08]  Well, kind of two.
[00:53:09]  We haven't really talked about the exiles that much, but the mafia.
[00:53:12]  And I got to say, everybody's talking about Cuba and the mafia.
[00:53:17]  They're always talking about Myer Lansky.
[00:53:20]  And as, you know, as a person who maybe shares a faith with Myrlansky, I do want to remind people there were also Italians involved.
[00:53:27]  It wasn't just us, okay?
[00:53:30]  Myrlansky just did it better than all those fucking Italians.
[00:53:33]  And so everyone gets mad at him for it.
[00:53:35]  But Cuba, I mean, prior to the revolution, was something like a floating casino for a lot of these guys.
[00:53:44]  I mean, you know, everyone, all these people sort of talk, and there's still this sort of like notion of romance of this era of old Cuba, of these grand casinos.
[00:53:51]  And, you know, that's all they talk about.
[00:53:53]  They don't mention anything else.
[00:53:54]  There's nothing else.
[00:53:56]  Everyone else is happy with sugar.
[00:53:57]  There are billions of dollars.
[00:53:59]  Yeah, but I mean, Cuba was a major mafia outpost.
[00:54:03]  And the ascension of Castro and, you know, kicking out Batista, that really put an end to a lot of that.
[00:54:10]  I mean, I think the mafia was there for like, what, six more months after Castro came in and then he made him get out of there.
[00:54:17]  But that hit a lot of those guys in their pocketbooks pretty badly and they were not happy about it.
[00:54:22]  And they had powerful friends, too.
[00:54:24]  I loved that scene in The Irishman where Robert De Niro's character is delivering something to some people who appear to be training for some sort of invasion, perhaps at a bay, a porcine bay of some kind.
[00:54:42]  That's just a very funny illusion.
[00:54:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:46]  Because the mafia represent like Peter Del Scott calls it sort of the overworld versus the underworld.
[00:54:57]  Not that the overworld is this legit space and then there's this little tiny portion of it that's sort of the black market.
[00:55:03]  It's really the flip side, the other side of the iceberg.
[00:55:06]  There's this whole other universe of things happening.
[00:55:10]  And amongst, you know, talking about the drug, you know, you guys talked about the drugs and the gambling, but all sorts of essentially business operations, which have to go around some of the official laws and rules and who to pay off and all of these things.
[00:55:25]  These are also managed by the mafia.
[00:55:28]  So it goes beyond sort of like what you would think of as strictly illegal activities into like actual, much more legitimate business activities.
[00:55:38]  I mean, these people are facilitating that as well.
[00:55:40]  And they have close links to the business community for that reason as well.
[00:55:43]  You know, it's not just, and, you know, of course, also unions and those sorts of things as well.
[00:55:49]  They have these political purposes too.
[00:55:51]  But so it goes beyond like this sort of small black market, you know, that they were losing money because they had to close, you know, the slots or the tables in Havana.
[00:56:02]  Their incentives were a lot bigger than that.
[00:56:04]  There was a lot more at stake than that.
[00:56:06]  Yeah, the Tropicana casino that Meyer Lansky owned in Havana was managed by, run by Lewis McWillie, who in 1959 had a special visitor come and see him, Jack Ruby, you know, to talk about, I don't know what, how to win at Canasta or something.
[00:56:26]  Sure.
[00:56:27]  Back in the strategies.
[00:56:29]  Yeah, and the mafia on that island and also in places like, you know, Somoza's Nicaragua, they would be used for, you know, to make sure labor didn't get uppity.
[00:56:38]  You know, you got those people who are like slaves, but not slaves who like pick all the sugar.
[00:56:43]  And so the mafia would be used for those kind of operations.
[00:56:48]  And if you were wealthy, you could go and hang out at, you know, Meyer Lansky's casino for fun.
[00:56:54]  Probably was fun if you were those people.
[00:56:56]  As you say, it's kind of romanticized now and Godfather kind of contributes to that, right?
[00:57:00]  Godfather films.
[00:57:01]  And, you know, the Boardwalk Empire, Boardwalk Empire is worth watching, I think, all the way for like a sort of meditation on deep politics.
[00:57:10]  It's pretty sophisticated in many ways, I think, the corruption.
[00:57:14]  And you really see in that film or in that series, the intertwining of legit and not legit, and the politician and the gangster and so on.

=== Lansky And Luciano's Docks (03:14) ===

[00:57:27]  And you have as recurring characters in that, Lansky and Luciano.
[00:57:31]  If you guys have seen the whole series, I mean, it's kind of like those are the days when they were just sort of establishing themselves and they take over all these.
[00:57:38]  You know, they set up the syndicate, this big empire.
[00:57:41]  And in World War, you know, in World War II, Luciani, Luciano is in jail.
[00:57:46]  And Meyer Lansky, they, you know, the OSS people supposedly need, which is the precursor to the CIA, they need people to help them, you know, basically pacify and secure the docks.
[00:57:58]  And so that's time for Lucky Luciano to show his patriotic bona fides, you know.
[00:58:04]  So they spring him from jail and they set up Operation Underworld.
[00:58:09]  And this relationship between these people, OSS, and the syndicate, you know, Lansky and Luciano, it continues, like, as I said, Hellywell working for a Lansky bank and setting up all these proprietaries and setting up, because who is it that the CIA, these CIA assets in Southeast Asia, you know, the Golden Triangle?
[00:58:29]  Who is it that they're selling drugs to?
[00:58:31]  Not like there's a special CIA booth on the corner where you go and get your heroin from a friendly CIA guy.
[00:58:41]  They have to, they have these other go-betweens, you know, and that's that sort of relationship.
[00:58:48]  I mean, if you've seen Kill the Messenger, it still, you know, it goes on.
[00:58:52]  And the links between them, as I think Lyd said, that these guys pop up or brace that they always pop up.
[00:58:57]  Like Eugene Hasenfuss, you remember the guy that crashes in a Ran-Contra affair and exposes the whole thing.
[00:59:02]  If you've ever seen that picture where he's being frog marched by Sandinista, his last sad, he looks all sad because everybody else died.
[00:59:09]  And I think he was the kicker was his title, which I think, I guess that means like maybe you're flying.
[00:59:14]  I don't know because I don't really do these things like as a job.
[00:59:17]  I've had a lot of jobs, but not that.
[00:59:19]  But like you fly over and you kick the drugs out.
[00:59:22]  Yeah, he just would literally just throw them out of the plane.
[00:59:25]  Yeah.
[00:59:25]  Yeah.
[00:59:26]  Because he was Burley.
[00:59:27]  I can see him being the guy that did that.
[00:59:28]  But he was an Air America veteran before that.
[00:59:30]  So he had, you know, he maybe had to do a little bit more.
[00:59:33]  He's probably thinking like I was close to retirement.
[00:59:35]  Exactly.
[00:59:35]  You know, I just had to throw out a few more straws.
[00:59:40]  Yeah.
[00:59:41]  So getting too old for this shit.
[00:59:45]  I mean, you know, you talk, you talk about springing Luciano from jail, too.
[00:59:48]  I mean, they, they, they, I believe they sent him back to Italy and use him and his compatriots in not, um, I mean, sort of the, the theory was that they would help them sort of liberate Italy.
[00:59:59]  And, you know, they had all these contacts there.
[01:00:01]  But what they really did was they helped put the mafia even more back in power.
[01:00:05]  But they used the mafia connections to, I mean, just like in France after the war too, to kill sort of any left-wing opposition that their guys might have.
[01:00:16]  In fact, in France and docks in Marseille, a lot of that had to do with heroin trafficking and assisted, I should add, by the French Socialist Party.
[01:00:26]  But yeah, docks and heroin.
[01:00:27]  You know, that is a huge problem.
[01:00:29]  Let the mafia take over the docks.
[01:00:31]  What could go wrong, right?
[01:00:32]  I mean, and crush the labor movement in the meantime and pave the political way for your economic program to reshape Western Europe.

=== Mafia Docks and Heroin Trafficking (06:42) ===

[01:00:41]  There was a push to make Sicily the 49th state after World War II, too, which is very funny.
[01:00:47]  Just a fun fact.
[01:00:49]  Yeah, the Sicilian independence.
[01:00:50]  Yeah, I like that.
[01:00:54]  Yeah.
[01:00:55]  So needless to say, the mafia was not happy with JFK because his brother was a little harsh on them, too.
[01:01:03]  I mean, as anybody, he's seen the Irishman a lot.
[01:01:05]  They certainly take Bobby Kennedy's name in vain quite often in that day.
[01:01:10]  It's funny, too.
[01:01:11]  I think, you know, people, another thing to remember is that there were just like Kennedys popping up everywhere.
[01:01:18]  And I do think that people saw, I mean, especially the old guys in power, the old guard, these guys that we're talking about.
[01:01:25]  I mean, they saw how young and popular Kennedy was.
[01:01:28]  And I do think that that, I mean, I don't, again, I'm going full boomer for these episodes.
[01:01:34]  So I'm just going to go straight to it.
[01:01:36]  There was like a real fear of how popular, I mean, they called it a dynasty in the making for a reason.
[01:01:41]  And I think that they saw not just Jack, but Bobby as these like, you know, that they would be a threat for a very long time, right?
[01:01:51]  That these were not going to, like, I think that, you know, they didn't try to scare him.
[01:01:56]  You know, they went for the kill.
[01:01:57]  It was like a one, you know, this was the shot and they made it.
[01:02:01]  And they made that for a reason.
[01:02:02]  And then, you know, obviously Bobby as well.
[01:02:06]  But like, you know, it, they, they didn't think, like, they felt they had to kill is what I'm saying.
[01:02:13]  And that's like, that's very serious.
[01:02:14]  That's a huge line to cross.
[01:02:17]  That, I mean, it's even, it's so crazy because I know this sounds stupid, but even when we were like going through all this, this is all stuff I know.
[01:02:23]  It's not like I'm not red-filled on JFK and all that, but I'm still like, dude, they killed the fucking president.
[01:02:28]  That's so insane.
[01:02:30]  That's so insane.
[01:02:32]  And when you really start internalizing it and looking at all the facts of the case, like as we're going to lay out in these episodes, it really is stunning, you know?
[01:02:43]  Am I correct?
[01:02:43]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:02:44]  I don't, maybe I sound stupid saying that.
[01:02:46]  Yeah, but like Bryce, you mentioned you were reading that Peter Dell Scott book, Dallas 63, The First Deep State Coup.
[01:02:52]  And I do think like it, it, you know, you can say whatever you want about bourgeois democracy and how it works and all the different problems with it, but, but this is like, that's gone.
[01:03:02]  Like forget about whatever that was.
[01:03:05]  That is fully, completely dead at this point.
[01:03:08]  Like a president in the United States, you know, because even at the time that Kennedy was killed, people didn't know about what the CIA had done, what the OPC had done in Italy in 48, what the CIA had done in Guatemala, what the CIA had done in Iran, what the CIA had done in the Congo.
[01:03:23]  People didn't know about that at the time.
[01:03:25]  And they didn't know about all the assassinations, assassination attempts against Castro.
[01:03:30]  But now that we know all of that stuff, we know what they're willing to do in these other countries.
[01:03:36]  I think the idea that they would kill an American president is not beyond our pale.
[01:03:40]  And the implications of it are that, you know, they had no issue destroying whatever democratic structures existed in those post-colonial countries.
[01:03:50]  And they have no, also no qualms about doing the same thing in this country.
[01:03:53]  There's no, there's no question about it.
[01:03:56]  And obviously the, you know, like Aaron, you mentioned very early on about, you know, JFK sort of had to take the received wisdom about, you know, anti-communism and had to take this Cold Warrior position.
[01:04:09]  So they still control the bourgeois political system.
[01:04:12]  They still define the terms of the debate in that aspect of things.
[01:04:16]  But also if you if you don't tell their line well enough, they don't even need to use the political system to defeat you.
[01:04:22]  They will just kill you.
[01:04:23]  Like they have no problem with doing that.
[01:04:25]  And the implications for that are pretty staggering.
[01:04:27]  I mean, it amounts to a complete this, you know, it sounds very silly to say, but everything that you are taught about how the structures of this government work, it is not actually, it does not apply today, if it ever did.
[01:04:42]  And these new theories, I mean, not to plug Aaron's book that is going to come out soon, but I mean, these new theories about how the political structures of this country actually work, this is that mechanism at play here, that these elements of the big businesses, finance, elite lawyers like Alan Dulles, these intelligence connected people, that they have the means, the motive,
[01:05:07]  the opportunity to do this and control the various structures of our society.
[01:05:16]  And murder is no thing for them.
[01:05:19]  It does not bother them.
[01:05:21]  It is a deeply, it is like a very, very, it's a very concerning thing, obviously.
[01:05:27]  And it is, I mean, when you really sit with it and think about it, it's just very hard to, it's very hard to process.
[01:05:34]  But I do think that, I do think it's, it just, I don't know, I don't, Lizzie, I think you were worried this sounded silly to talk about, but I really don't think it is.
[01:05:42]  I think it is so worthwhile to just sort of sit with that fact that, you know, anytime you talk about an election, anytime you talk about somebody getting voted in or what the media is saying about this, that, or the other horse race, yeah, that stuff is real.
[01:05:54]  That stuff matters.
[01:05:55]  That stuff exists.
[01:05:56]  But also they will just off people and they have no problem doing that.
[01:06:01]  Yeah, they don't.
[01:06:02]  The democratic aspect of it, you know, I lay out that there's the way we're governed, you know, there is a democratic state with some elections and there's the national security state and then the sort of deep state, which is collectively all those institutions that really allow for top-down rule to subvert democracy.
[01:06:20]  And they would opt for, I mean, look at they, look at what they did, the Sanders conspiracy.
[01:06:26]  I mean, Sanders did not get his head exploded in broad daylight at high noon in Texas, right?
[01:06:32]  But the outlines of the conspiracy against him are like so, you know, obvious if you're not just a complete schmuck, that it just shows the way that the establishment would unite against somebody who threatens.
[01:06:46]  And really, what did Sanders even threaten?
[01:06:48]  Like a return to a sort of New Deal?
[01:06:51]  I mean, that was supposed to be what the Democrats, that's what the Republic, I mean, even Eisenhower supported the New Deal.
[01:06:58]  So somebody who's threatening to return to that and they will conspire to get rid of them, him and defeat him.
[01:07:04]  And to kill somebody like that is staggering.
[01:07:08]  And, you know, like, as Liz says, it's you wrap your mind, you try to really think about it and your mind sort of reels because it is so far away from what we are led to believe is the core of our American democracy.

=== Conspiracy Theories Exploited (06:45) ===

[01:07:23]  And for me, I spent so much time studying these things.
[01:07:26]  I'm kind of detached, like pretty, I have an ironic detachment from it in part because if I didn't, I'd probably, you know, really find it super depressing, which I, and oftentimes I just, I look at civilization in the long run and civilization is a history of top-down domination.
[01:07:42]  I mean, that's, that's been the way from the beginning.
[01:07:44]  That's just the nature of civilization.
[01:07:47]  And there has been some progress towards something different that recognizes the humanity of people, or at least feels a need to create institutions that give the appearance that the humanity of people is recognized and honored in some way, which perhaps represents, you know, it does represent some kind of progress.
[01:08:07]  We don't torture Christians and feed them to lions anymore and cheer in the public square exactly.
[01:08:13]  We have the NFL and stuff, but that's a little different.
[01:08:17]  But sometimes it would hit me in the course of doing all this, like the gravity of it.
[01:08:21]  And I would just feel very sad and have to take a break and go play some Nintendo or something.
[01:08:29]  This is why Professor Scott writes poetry, right?
[01:08:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:34]  You got to process it somehow.
[01:08:36]  I really think you do.
[01:08:37]  Well, I think kind of growing up, you know, I was sort of like aware, secondarily aware of how big an event that this was on like the generations that preceded me, the people who were alive back then.
[01:08:48]  I remember sort of knowing the phrase like, where were you when JFK was shot?
[01:08:52]  Like growing up, you know, you hear it mentioned in TV shows and that kind of stuff.
[01:08:56]  And, you know, and I remember thinking like, well, I mean, why was this such a huge event for people?
[01:09:02]  I guess I remember where I was when 9-11 happened, but that's just because I was on my way to school when 9-11 happened.
[01:09:08]  But, you know, if you really get down to it and think on this and sort of like sit with it for a little while, I mean, it was a huge, huge event.
[01:09:17]  And I think on some level, people understood that.
[01:09:20]  And the way that people talk about it, and usually these pretty vague terms, like, you know, this was the day that Hope died.
[01:09:25]  This is the day that everything changes, even if they aren't really fully aware of all the machinations behind this, which I do think a lot of people are somewhat aware of this.
[01:09:35]  I mean, Kennedy being assassinated by a conspiracy is probably the most believed of the conspiracy theories that there is, you know, hands down.
[01:09:45]  Depending on, you know, obviously people have different ideas of who did it.
[01:09:49]  But I think the fact that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination is agreed upon by most people.
[01:09:55]  In fact, I think like the vast majority of people.
[01:09:59]  But, you know, you can see like this was a sort of like shock that hit people beyond just like the killing of a president, I think.
[01:10:06]  You know, I think on some level, people understood that things were, things were changing.
[01:10:11]  And it did.
[01:10:12]  I mean, you can see as the 60s went on, you know, things got a lot crazier.
[01:10:20]  You know, it really did seem to be one of those events that sets off this huge chain and sort of leads us to where we are today.
[01:10:27]  I mean, it's the echoes of it are just enormous.
[01:10:29]  And I think that like, you know, not to harp on this again, but like the parallels to 9-11 are just endless with it, you know, and Professor Scott calls these sort of deep events.
[01:10:41]  And I think that's a really, that's a really apt description for it as a deep event.
[01:10:46]  I would say that I think one of the I do think that a lot of people suspect that obviously something was not correct about the official story.
[01:10:58]  And obviously, I mean, them killing Oswald right away probably didn't help with that.
[01:11:02]  But I do think that the kind of push on, oh, it was the mafia, or oh, it was this, or oh, it was only that, did a great number on like convincing people that it could not have possibly been the government and that anyone that believes that it would be the government, or I shouldn't say the government, because even that is like imprecise.
[01:11:24]  But we'll say elements within the government, within this kind of deep political state that we talk about, would be crazy.
[01:11:33]  I mean, it's still to this day called, I mean, I remember there was just, I think it was like earlier this year or last year.
[01:11:39]  It had to have been early last year because I think Trump was still president.
[01:11:43]  But there, you know, you saw it with all the QAnon crap where I think it was like John Oliver, one of those guys, did some bit and he was talking about like, how do people like fall for conspiracy theories?
[01:11:54]  How do these liberals like, you know, or not these liberals, how do these crazy QAnon people, you know, they think stupid things.
[01:11:59]  And one day you're saying this and one day you're believing JFK was killed by the government and you're thinking, and I mean, he's lumping in this with, you know, Trump is a white hat saving humanity from pedophiles or whatever.
[01:12:13]  And, you know, people are lizards, et cetera.
[01:12:15]  Tonight, let's talk about conspiracy theories, particularly why they're so appealing, how to spot them, and what you might be able to do about it.
[01:12:23]  And let's start with the fact that these theories are a lot more popular than you might think.
[01:12:27]  Take the JFK assassination.
[01:12:29]  That event shook the world.
[01:12:31]  And the very idea that a lone gunman could cause such chaos was inherently unsatisfying.
[01:12:36]  So people, perhaps understandably, reached for a much bigger answer.
[01:12:40]  That op, which I want to be clear, it's an actual op that has been deployed by the CIA through its assets in the media.
[01:12:51]  We refer to them as journalists, but they're also known as assets from inside the agency, has been so incredibly fucking effective over the past decades that it's been used.
[01:13:02]  And you mentioned the movie JFK, which is just fantastic.
[01:13:06]  I mean, it's just fun, regardless of what, you know, we can, we'll probably at some point talk about it.
[01:13:12]  But the kind of ramp up before and after that movie and the deployment of different kind of media narratives that were done was just stunning.
[01:13:21]  I mean, I remember it and I was a kid, you know, like, so I think that while it's, it's, it's interesting because I think that one of the things that always inspires kind of like fear and awe in me is how good and effective I hate to say they because I hate when I just rely on that kind of like catch-all,
[01:13:47]  but that kind of they are at understanding like the way people's brains work and what kind of narratives latch on and how certain narratives being so close to the truth actually work to push people away from investigating or learning more about what actually the true nature of events were.
[01:14:06]  And it's just sort of, I mean, it is awe-inspiring, you know?

=== Warren Commission's Legacy (04:07) ===

[01:14:09]  So I do think that while people maybe have a kind of gut feeling that something's not wrong, that that's been very effectively exploited over the past, you know, decades to ill effect.
[01:14:24]  Aaron and I were just talking the other day about the Alex Jones effect.
[01:14:27]  Oh, yeah.
[01:14:28]  And this role that he plays.
[01:14:29]  And in fact, I mean, like, you know, Professor Scott used to go on his show.
[01:14:32]  It was the only place to talk about any of this stuff.
[01:14:35]  But once you go on there, or I think about in the COVID-19 context, he's had Francis Boyle on, who's a, you know, big, you know, who was the guy who wrote the enabling legislation for the ban on biological weapons in this country.
[01:14:48]  But you go, you're on his show and you get tarred with that brush and now you have lost any kind of legitimate mainstream credibility you might have had.
[01:14:55]  It's a, it's a classic tactic.
[01:14:57]  And Jones's possible connections to the dirty apparatus.
[01:15:03]  Yeah.
[01:15:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:15:04]  And his buddy Stone.
[01:15:05]  I mean, come on.
[01:15:06]  Oh, yeah.
[01:15:07]  Yeah.
[01:15:07]  When you say that the public, even though they might not be able to settle on what happened, that they had a sense that something was wrong, that they had been lied to, it's actually 1964.
[01:15:19]  If you look at these surveys on people, on public opinion and how many people trust the government, it's really 1964 when it really starts to decline.
[01:15:31]  And oftentimes people will blame the Vietnam War for that, but that doesn't start until 1965.
[01:15:36]  1964 is when the Warren report comes out.
[01:15:40]  And it's a steady decline in trust of the government from that point on.
[01:15:45]  And in 1976, they finally show our man, Geraldo Rivera, shows this a pruner film for the first time.
[01:15:54]  And support for the Warren Commission, you know, the idea of the two lone nuts, you know, the one lone nut who gets killed by another lone nut, right?
[01:16:02]  The support for the Warren Commission version of the Kennedy assassination drops to single digits, like 8%.
[01:16:09]  So the public can be confused in different ways and they might be herded into sort of silly, you know, conspiracies that don't necessarily make any sense the more you think about it.
[01:16:22]  This, but they knew it was a minority.
[01:16:25]  Like, so John Oliver goes on and says, these people, Holocaust deniers and JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, they're just the worst.
[01:16:33]  But it's like a tiny minority of people that actually believe that Warren report conclusion.
[01:16:40]  And it wasn't the people we know now that like Nixon didn't believe it.
[01:16:43]  LBJ thought CIA was involved.
[01:16:45]  Nixon thought CIA could have been involved, tried to figure out if they were.
[01:16:49]  And Robert Kennedy wanted to reinvestigate.
[01:16:53]  So it's only the media and the people's public pronouncements, the officials' public pronouncements.
[01:16:58]  That's like the majority of the people who support the Warren Commission, it seems.
[01:17:03]  So now that we've covered some of the aspects and some of the players in the deep state who might not have been too happy with Liz's friend Jack, we are going to get a little more granular with it and actually talk about the events leading up to that fateful day in Dealey Plaza.
[01:17:18]  so if you want to hear actually if jfk was shot who shot him and if they used a gun tune into the next episode well we cracked the case didn't we liz No, there's more to come.
[01:17:42]  There's much more to come.
[01:17:43]  I'm very excited as we kind of like continue wading through the murky gulf, murky waters of the Gulf.
[01:17:54]  Real quick, I do want to say that friend of the show, friend of the pod, Blowback from Noah Colwyn and Brendan James, they just premiered season two, which details the Cuban Revolution and I'm assuming the blowback from the Cuban Revolution.
[01:18:16]  They have a great show.

=== JFK Assassination Revealed (01:54) ===

[01:18:17]  I really recommend everyone, you guys interested in more and more kind of stuff around, you know, U.S. foreign policy, specifically with Cuba, Kennedy, CIA, check out Blowback Season 2.
[01:18:32]  We'll probably link to it because why not?
[01:18:35]  There was also, if you want to get, because Liz is right to mention that, because we're doing a 101 here.
[01:18:40]  If you want to get into more granular detail, which with the JFK assassination, you really should because some of it will blow your fucking mind, man.
[01:18:50]  Michael Judge's podcast, Death is Just Around the Corner, fantastic series on it on JFK, which we can link to his page too.
[01:19:00]  But yeah, so both of those highly recommend.
[01:19:03]  Yeah.
[01:19:03]  He does some great stuff getting into Kennedy too.
[01:19:06]  Kennedy's career.
[01:19:07]  That's real fascinating.
[01:19:08]  Also, one-man podcast, which is unreal.
[01:19:11]  How does he just do that?
[01:19:13]  Just goes.
[01:19:13]  I want to know if it's one take.
[01:19:16]  I was actually thinking about that.
[01:19:18]  I because some of them he likes, well, we can figure this out later.
[01:19:22]  I guess we could also just ask him.
[01:19:23]  Yeah, fair enough.
[01:19:25]  Okay, so my name is Michael.
[01:19:27]  If you're listening, I'm not going to ask you.
[01:19:29]  Yeah, I'm not going to ask.
[01:19:30]  I'll just figure it out for myself.
[01:19:32]  All right.
[01:19:33]  So, what are our names?
[01:19:34]  My name is Bryce.
[01:19:38]  Oh, my God.
[01:19:40]  I'm Liz.
[01:19:41]  We are, of course, joined by Young Chomsky.
[01:19:43]  The music on tonight's episode is by Stellium.
[01:19:47]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:19:50]  Bye-bye.
[01:20:10]  Come on, come on.