Chapo Trap House - 578 - Assassination Day feat. Oliver Stone & Aaron Good (11/22/21)

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

On this, the 58th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, we’re joined by Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone to discuss his new documentary “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass”. We then discuss the continuing legacy and search for meaning in the assassination, as well as other ‘deep events’, with Covert Action Magazine’s Aaron Good. JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is now streaming on Showtime. Check out Aaron’s new podcast with Covert Action here: https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin Pre-order Aaron’s book here: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510769137/american-exception/ Grab your tickets to our 12/8 show at Asbury Hall in Buffalo: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chapo-trap-house-tickets-201713088277

Greetings everybody, it's Chopper at Trap House, coming at you this Monday, before we get into today's Coit, barren burner of an episode, you guys are going to really enjoy what's coming up, but December 8th, Buffalo, New York, Asbury Hall, tickets still available to our live show at chopotraphouse.com slash live, tickets available once again, that date December 8th, that location, Asbury Hall, Buffalo. Come see us live soon. Now, on to the show. Hey everybody, it's Chopper at Trap House, November 22nd, 2021, and if that date seems significant to you, you've probably been listening to our show too long. It is today, the 58th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and in just a little bit, we'll be talking to

Aaron Goode, editor-at-large of Covert Action Magazine, but before then, we are thrilled and honored to be joined by the director of JFK and the recently released JFK Revisited through the Looking Glass, Oliver Stone. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you, William. All right, so I want to talk about the movie, but before we get into that, I just was like the, you know, the recent news item from just the other week involving President Joe Biden, ordered yet another delay in the release of secret files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In a White House memo signed by Biden, he said, temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence

operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure. So just when you heard about this, Oliver, I mean, first of all, what could you think this, what do you think this identifiable harm could be referring to? And more broadly, what does this say to you about the ongoing success or failure of the men who plotted this murder and their efforts continuing on even beyond the grave? Well, just first of all, let me just say it. I'm a little disappointed because Joe Biden is an Irish Catholic and he should, he owes John Kennedy a debt as the first Irish Catholic president. And it seems to be, you know, and I think in his heart, he's a good man, but

I don't understand what, you know, it just seems like more double talk from the government. The government itself is classifying more documents than ever before. I hear there's a record number, thousands of documents that just declare top secret every day. So it's kind of become our government's become a covert government in exile. Really, it's just not there anymore. It's not responding to the people. And I feel that very much so. I mean, what they take polls and people say, well, we're against this war, that war, we're against this and doesn't make any difference. They just do what they're going to do. So it's kind of debilitating and depressing over time. I don't believe, you know, we've been on this case a long time. I still believe I made

a movie and you can judge it for yourself. It's a very strong documentary about what the real case is, what the evidence leads to, and people should pay attention because the Warren Commission is not the answer at all. It's a farce. We destroy their case. Bit by bit, we destroy it. I want to talk about the documentary in this second. And it is, like you said, I think a very cogent and well-assembled brief that at the very least the Warren Commission is a complete fraud. But before we get into the movie, I just wanted to ask you, do you remember in your own mind, like, do you remember a moment when the first incongruity in the official account of the Kennedy assassination that disturbed you or led you to conclude that there was something dramatically

wrong with what you were being told? Well, first of all, let me just say, I don't believe it's a complete fraud. I do believe there was will intention. Some people were well intentioned and they did their best, but there was no real investigation. There was no desire to uncover anything other than the three-bullet, one-gunman scenario, which allowed our country, so to speak, they thought, to go on without disturbance, which is to say, if one man does it and he's a lunatic, and we've solved the case, there's no need to discuss the whys, why he was killed, and what we're doing and what the Johnson administration is doing that the Kennedy administration was not doing. All those things get overlooked and the narrative of history continues. So that's very

important to realize. I don't think it was a completely fraudulent document, but definitely wrong, wrong and not well intentioned by having Alan Dulles basically running the commission was a huge mistake because he was fired by Kennedy and he was the CIA chief. And ask your other question, which was one again, I'm sorry. Do you remember like in your own mind, like the first time? No, I accepted the conventional story. I was in boarding school at the time and I was 17 years old. Everybody was very sad and shocked and I didn't think much about it, except I saw the Mark Lane stuff. It was interesting, but I didn't get into it until actually 1988 or so. After I'd done platoon in Wall Street, I was approached by a woman,

Ellen Ray, who had published Jim Garrison's version of the assassination on the trail of the assassins. After I read Garrison's book, no question, there was a lot of questions in my mind. And I met with Garrison, I met with many people down there in New Orleans, in the South, in Washington, and I was on my way towards making the movie. Well, in the most recent movie, in the documentary that you just released, I would say that like the case presented basically presents three main areas of inquiry that you used to marshal this case. And I'd like to talk a little bit about each one of them. The first being the forensics of the murder itself, the bullet, the autopsy, and the eyewitness accounts. Now, as to the forensics, which I

think can be sometimes the most difficult thing to communicate to a popular audience, I just want to focus on the bullet. This is probably the most ridiculous thing that's in the Warren Report. But could you talk a little bit about the pristine bullet, where it was found, and the idea that a bullet could be in perfect condition after, according to the Warren Report, having gone through Kennedy and Governor Connelly? Well, it's ridiculous. It's Alice in Wonderland, as we said, the only looking glass, because this magic bullet shows up in the hospital. It's found by the foreman there, one of the janitors, and it makes its way up. But it's not, we don't even know the chain of custody of that bullet. You see, we don't know that that is the

bullet. The chain of custody is not there, and that's thrown out of court. The chain of custody is off on everything. It's off on the rifle, too. We don't know what that was, the rifle. We don't know. The bullets, the wounds, the autopsy reveals, again, a chain of custody. We don't have, none of it, the autopsy was done by a military team who didn't have much experience in gunshot wounds like this, murders. They didn't want to open it up and have civilian forensics, which were much better. And unfortunately, a lot of misinformation crept in it, which we pointed out in the autopsy, including, we believe, doctored photos of his body. Additionally, to the primary evidence, the other problem is the identity of the shooter, which we call into question, which is

the Lee Harvey Oswald scenario. It makes no, we know that he was being working with, as an asset of the CIA for four years. He's been followed. They know where he is. He's been used. He's been sent to Russia as a defector. They opened his mother's mail for four years practically. He's definitely in the sights of the CIA, and we don't know. We know a lot about the people he met, but this is all very secretive area because James Angleton, the counterterrorism chief of the CIA, very strange character, walled off his file from anything else. They're not available, and that would be a nice file to see if we ever could find it. I don't know if it's still in existence. And of course, we have stories of the three women who were at the war. They were secretaries

and they're very, very, very good witnesses, but they were on the fourth floor when the shooting occurred. They went down the stairs. Two of them went down the stairs immediately, and they never saw an Oswald coming down those stairs. And so the whole scenario of him shooting and running out of the sixth floor quickly, leaving everything behind, and disappearing down into the traffic, into the street, is nonsense. It looks like there was nobody on the sixth floor at this point in time, nobody. And so the identity of the shooter. And then the other thing that we bring up into the film, besides all the evidence, is the issue of why he was killed, what the outcome was, what were the reasons? Well, actually, let's talk about that,

because I guess the third part is sort of like, you talk about Oswald, the figure, the man, and the details about his life that would lead one to believe that he was probably a part of an intelligence operation. The third and sort of broadest case, and it's the one that involves, I think the most amount of, you have to lead to a certain amount of speculation, because the nature of the case means that a lot of this stuff will be secret. But I think for those who are inclined to be skeptical, I think the line people take is that the CIA wouldn't have had to have orchestrated some plot to remove him from office or even kill him, because he wasn't really a threat to like, you know, ending the Cold War or anything like that. Could you talk about the national security

memos that you bring up that I think make a very good case that he was looking to, I don't know, bring the temperature down on the Cold War, and specifically not to get US troops directly involved in Vietnam? Oh, it's much bigger than that. It was a much bigger change. He was working on a broad scenario, and he was in danger of being reelected in 1964. As a second term president, he would have much more power. He was bringing the whole concept of detente to the Cold War, the concept of a peace. He was talking about peace in his last speech at the American University, the peace speech, peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. Very eloquent speech and peace for the sake of the world. He had been through the nuclear missile crisis of October 62. He knew how close

we had come to nuclear catastrophe. He saw that Khrushchev is opposite in the Kremlin, and together, and with Robert Kennedy, they saved the world basically from blowing up. The Pentagon and the CIA wanted to invade Cuba. They wanted to invade, in spite of everything, with bombing and go in, full American invasion, get the Russians out. Well, Kennedy and Khrushchev brokered the deal, got the Russians out, removed the missiles. At the same time, Kennedy quietly agreed to take out the American missiles from Turkey. That's all behind the scenes. And what happened essentially was that we're on a road to coexistence, which is important. Kennedy, a piece of legislation that was passed in September of 63, was a nuclear test ban treaty. I can't emphasize how important

that was, how important it is to him. That was the first treaty that the United States and Soviet Union had been able to make on this level. No more atmospheric testing. That was huge. On top of that, he was talking about a space cooperation with the Soviets. He was talking about a general détente, a loosening of the tensions that had been building up through the 1950s. The military establishment, the CIA, were so ready to fight. They were ready to go to war, because essentially, we were much better equipped for nuclear war than the Soviets were. We had many more missiles. There was no missile gap. That was one of the big issues, of course. Kennedy found out the moment he was elected, and he went with McNamara, his Secretary of Defense,

that the United States was way over, had way too many nuclear missiles. The Soviets had very few. So it was a disbalance there. But the bigger point is that he wanted to lower the, as you call it, lower the temperature, not only with the Soviet Union, but in Cuba, too. He put feelers out. Two or three people of his, friends of his, talked to Castro. He wanted to get this cool down, the Cuba situation. And on Vietnam, there's no question, because now we have more evidence from declassified files, that he was withdrawing troops in 1963, but essentially all of them in 1965, because when or looms, he was going to pull out of Vietnam. It was up to the Vietnamese government to fight if they wanted to fight. And this is confirmed by

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, in cables that we have. And we see declassified files of the meetings. And on top of it, McNamara wrote about this in his book, after my movie came out. So the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, no question Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam. So historians have to realize that they're getting it wrong when they say Johnson transitioned smoothly. Johnson changed the whole policy. He went into a hard, hard ball situation right away. Didn't want to make any compromises and fully supported the South Vietnamese corrupt government and got us into the war, which Kennedy never would have gotten us into. So you have a whole, it's a worldwide situation. I mean, specifically you

talk about the Bundy memo, NSAM 273, which Johnson changes within a week of Kennedy's death to completely reverse a paragraph about the commitment of American forces to Vietnam directly, not just in terms of advisors. But Kennedy was clear to his people that he was willing to accept the loss of South Vietnam. Yes, he said that. And so did McNamara and so did McGeorge Bundy. And so did many people around Kennedy. So it's out of the, it's no longer contestable. It's really, we don't know what could have happened, but certainly Kennedy was in a very tough position because you realize you'd been elected as a Cold Warrior, that you couldn't be anything else in the United States in the 1950s, 1960 election. You had to be, you had to, you know, since the

McCarthy era, United States has been belligerent and saying that we have to roll back communism. Big issue, big issue. And it depended to what extreme you were willing to go to roll back communism. I mean, to that question about like a skeptic might say like, oh, he ran as a Cold Warrior. He was from a staunchly sort of right wing Catholic family, ardently anti-communist, like, you know, why kill him if that was the case? And I think honestly, one of the more persuasive pieces of evidence that you present in the film is the case of Charles de Gaulle. Charles de Gaulle being probably even more of a right wing figure than Kennedy, a great hero of World War II. But you have in the movie, Kennedy told the French ambassador that he wasn't entirely

confident that he was in complete control of his own government, i.e. the CIA, and that they had tried to essentially have de Gaulle assassinated a number of times because he was willing to let go of Algeria. So what do you think they would do to John F Kennedy for letting go of South Vietnam? Of course. Well, we never had South Vietnam. Kennedy was not willing to go there. So it wasn't like the French situation. The French were a colonial power. They'd gone back into Vietnam. Kennedy traveled to Vietnam in 1950s with his brother and actually saw the situation firsthand and knew the French were in a very impossible situation. He was totally anti-colonial, totally, in all his efforts with France, with Vietnam, and also with Algeria. He made a

speech on the Senate floor that got him into a lot of hot water against the French occupation of Algeria. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was an even ally, Stevenson, who was a Democratic candidate, asked him not to make any more speeches about it. In other words, he certainly crossed swords with the avowed policy of the United States to fight communism. It was a delicate situation. In Africa, he certainly, after Lumumba was killed, he was shocked. He didn't even know the CIA was involved, but he investigated with Dag Hammershaw the crime and tried to bring peace to the Congo. He also was very involved with Indonesia, with Socorno, which of course, all these things backfired after he died. Lyndon Johnson took a hard line on Indonesia,

which resulted in a massacre out there in 1965. Then he took a very hard line on Africa. He took a hard line on Soviet issues. On Cuba, there was, well, Cuba ended up as a stall. It sold out. There was a very hot issue there. Lyndon Johnson, also in the movie, if you remember, talks on the phone to Robert McNamara and says, I was not, as you know, he signed the McNamara, he says, you know, I was, I did not agree with you and the president's idea of pulling out of Vietnam. He says it bluntly. Well, I mean, under the sort of the final part of the movie, which speaks to this, this broader moment, sorry, motive. And I got to say, I really appreciated that you switched narrators for this section of the movie from Whoopi Goldberg to Donald Sutherland,

sort of recalling his great role in the original film JFK as the sort of Mr. X figure that Kevin Costner talks to and gives voice to this idea of what is the motive for the national security state to kill the president. And what you're talking about here is a moment in which a, you know, president who was, you know, close election, democratically elected, well, depending on, you know, who you talk to. But there was a moment in which the American people had a choice to live in a more peaceful world than the one that we created in the second half of the 20th century. And then that was essentially stopped with the Kennedy assassination. So, I mean, like, what, I mean, just could you speak a little of the broader, like, implications of the world that

we're living in that has been directly traced to this murder in Dallas? To begin with, you can say that no American president since Kennedy, since Kennedy has been able to curb, to change the military situation or the intelligence agency situation, we're stuck with these two dinosaurs and they're gigantic, they become gigantic, more and more fed, more and more blown up, giving us bigger and bigger threat inflations, telling us not only that the Russians were out to get us, but now it seems the Chinese are out to get us. And it seems like we're in facing Iran is out to blow up the world. And that in other words, we have, and of course, Cuba has to, is still an evil regime and Venezuela has to go. In other

words, we create these situations that are, and we make them much more dangerous than they are. This is an American pattern since World War II. And then in Dallas, on November 22nd, 1963, you had, of course, Kennedy himself, but in the city of Dallas on that day are Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush, three future U.S. presidents. Do you think that what happened sort of, I don't know, provided a sort of example of what happens if you try to govern outside the sort of set parameters of what the Pentagon and CIA would have you, just in terms of the parameters set by them as it regards engagement with the rest of the world? Yeah, well, certainly. And Lyndon Johnson,

you can say the same thing, the bullets flew over his head. I think one of his first lines of dialogue was to Hoover, were they shooting at me? Were they shooting at me? It kind of sells you a lot. You know, no American president has been able to go there. Kennedy had a lot of guts to do this, to try to tap down the temperature. I think his model was Roosevelt. The Roosevelt people had been there. New Deal liberal liberalism was popular. And then, of course, it got buried in this World War II mobilization. And after the war was over, the people who ran the country, the financiers, the industrialists said, well, we're going to go back into a depression unless we keep this militarization of the economy going. And that's what they did, essentially.

They put a huge amount of people into the defense industries. They built them up enormously. Eisenhower, with missiles in the 1950s, the budget enormous, the amount of missiles built, we loaded up. It was a false stimulus. I think a very dangerous one. And we created this monster that's become bigger and bigger with the lobbies around the industry, the defense industry. And we can't stop them. Every time there's any kind of muzzle trying to put on, you have all these lobbyists moving against it. So it's just we're stuck. And Kennedy, I think, was the last possibility of really penetrating this deep state apparatus and ending it. Or at least, I think it would have been a battle. But I think he could have done something at that time. It was only 20 years into this new

regime. It was 20 years after the end of the Cold War. After the end of hot war, I mean, 1945 on. So that I see that, I mean, it's to me, it's a very sad story, a tragic story about the growth of America into a militarized country that we have become. It's portrayed in the feature film JFK. And I've alluded to here, but following on the heels of John F. Kennedy's assassination, then a couple years later, you have the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy. Both of those cases contain, similarly, baffling and absurd distortions of common sense in the sort of public presentation of the facts regarding those assassinations. I'm wondering,

I remember, is it correct that you were at one time considering doing a movie about Martin Luther King Jr. and that assassination? Oh, yeah, twice, twice. And like, do you think that it's in some ways harder to accept like, because, you know, like I think, you know, the American public broadly believes at the very least that there was more to what happened in Dallas than was officially presented or that there's evidence of a conspiracy. Do you think it's harder to discuss the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the same context? Not at all. I think it's very important to see the context in the Martin Luther, you know, Kennedy had his own problems with the South. People don't know this, but he had quite a bit

of a civil rights story. I mean, he was a very tough position for him, but he took action in Mississippi and in Alabama with George Wallace and against the Mississippi governor to put James Meredith in the college at University of Mississippi. And in Alabama, two young black students were enrolled over a tremendous opposition, tremendous opposition. They beat up the marshals in Mississippi that were sent there. I mean, it was, it was a war practically to get a civil war. He had, there was a lot of anger about his position in the South, which is why we cut to the George Wallace clip saying he's not going to get reelected in the fall of 64. He's got a lot of enemies down here in the South. So I think King brought all that to a head. King brought it all to a head and

it culminated in killing King. After King, the situation for them, for the segregationists cooled down. I mean, although there was a lot of the march on Washington had disturbed them greatly, but after that, the march on poverty, the King's final goal was defanged. With Robert Kennedy, you have a case where if he had been elected, he, I think it was pretty clear from all the people around him that he would reinvestigate the case of his brother's murder. And if that was the case, that was dangerous for them. Very dangerous because there were a lot of loose ends, there was a lot of things that were involved. And if he was going to undertake the same program as Kennedy, which was against the Vietnam War, against militarization and all the things that

Kennedy stood for, including the fight against poverty, that's very important. The money would be spent in the wrong direction. So there was a reaction to the candidacy and he was killed right away before they could get out of hand. No question. But in the assassins themselves, in James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, I mean, do you see any evidence? I mean, like, do you think a case can be made that they, like Lee Harvey Oswald, were also Patsy's? Somewhat similar. Somewhat similar patterns. Oswald was an asset that they were using. He was a Patsy. And I, you know, I actually interviewed James Earl Ray. I saw him and talked to him. But, you know, it's hard to say because he doesn't seem like a man who could do anything on his own

like that. He certainly was used. We know that from all the traveling after the assassination. It goes on. That's a, it's a mystery, but it does, I think that there was, I think it does track back to people who had power, who were able to pull this off. And there was also the issue of Robert Kennedy. That's even crazier with a Sirhan, with a brainwashing, which makes sense because the CIA, MK Ultra had been in, they'd been playing with hypnotism for a long time, as well as brainwashing. It seems like Sirhan has no, had no agency of his own. And of course, you have the issue of ballistics in Robert Kennedy assassination, as you do in the Martin Luther King, too. But in Robert Kennedy, it's insane to have so many bullets being fired and out of a gun that

had only six. To go back to Oswald for a second, like similar to the pristine bullet, which was, you know, a marquee piece of evidence in the Warren Commission, to me, the single most stunning feature of the facts concerning Lee Harvey Oswald is that he defected to the Soviet Union and then was allowed back into the country with a wife, seemingly with no consequences to him personally or professionally. And then sort of found himself ingratiated into this white Russian community in Dallas, and then working for an insane anti-communist like Guy Bannister. So like, those details there, to me, like make the most compelling case that Oswald was a creature of intelligence or involved in an operation of some kind. Yeah. And the jobs he got, the jobs that

Jagger, Jagger child stole. Me, he had jobs that were very bizarre jobs, put it that way. Riley Coffee Company, all run by right wing people. And of course, the final job at the book depository, which is owned by a guy who's an anti-Rabbit, anti-Kennedy man. So there's so many coincidences, but the Oswald case is, it was the way we had done business abroad. It was just a continuation of using people. You always use a gunman who looks like a communist, or it looks like he's nuts, and that's the way things get done. It's a typical scenario. Whether you use it in Latin America, you have somebody kill a presidential candidate, it's always a loose gun, a loose cannon. Very rarely is it admitted to being political. One of the more interesting things in the documentary

concerning Oswald that I wasn't aware of concerns the sort of mirror plots on Kennedy's life in both Chicago and Tampa, leading up to Dallas, and including another figure, I forget his name, Arthur Valley, who was almost identical to Lee Harvey Oswald in many respects, even given a job along the parade route in an office building weeks before Kennedy was supposed to go through Chicago. Then I think someone named Lee gave a tip to the FBI that President Kennedy's life was in danger in Chicago. Then Oswald himself went into the Dallas FBI office, I think, a couple weeks before he was interviewed. No notes were ever produced regarding that interview. But when you think about Oswald and his involvement in this, how do you imagine Oswald as an individual

like what did he think he was taking part in or his role in this was? When you speculate on Oswald, you're going down a rat trap because it's a lot of people have. I personally also would just speculate that he actually liked Kennedy and he knew that Kennedy's life was in danger. I think he knew that he was in something far bigger than he ever imagined when he started. I do think he had a love of espionage and he got into this thing originally and that he was seen as a loose cannon that could be used. That's why he was put in the defective program. So was Thomas Arthur Valley. There were other people in the defective program. In fact, we show this guy, this State Department guy, Otto Otebka, trying to investigate that matter. He's

fired because he's looking into the defective program and who is defector, who's come back to the country. There's quite a few, apparently. There's more than certainly those two. He's fired Otto Otebka. He's one of the first guys who tries to get in on the Oswald trap. He's fired because of pressure from the CIA. Another really interesting thing that I wasn't aware of before the documentary. Could you talk a little bit about a man named Abraham Bolden, who was the first Black Secret Service agent assigned to the White House Detail? What happened to him after he started raising questions? It's a sad story. He got railroaded. Kennedy, when he first got into the problem, the first thing he said, he looked around at his Secret Service Detail and he said,

why are there no Black people here? He actually insisted that they hire Black people to work around the president. That was part of his integration of the system. He passed the law prohibiting discrimination in federal jobs, not federal jobs. Bolden worked closely with the Kennedy people inside. He was giving them information. You're telling them that things were not great with the Secret Service. It was sloppy. He traveled with the president and then eventually ended up in Chicago. This plot in Chicago unfolded. Four Cubans were seen by a landlady in an apartment, strange with guns. Of course, two of them were arrested, but they disappeared after the arrest. A valley was arrested, but he disappears from the scene.

In other words, no real investigation is followed up on. No real investigation, although we know that there are plots against the president, quite a few. The threats are coming in in this period. This is another thing that leaves questions of Secret Service reaction and their behavior in Dallas. When they were so sloppy in Dallas, it leads one to believe that they were in some way involved. Oliver Stone, I'll let you go there. I just want to thank you so much for your time. I want to thank you for the movie and for all your movies. Thank you so much. Goodbye, William. Thank you once again. Thank you. Bye-bye. Do you want a man for president who's seasoned through and through? But that's a dog on season

that he won't try something new. A man who's old enough to know. And young enough to do. Well, it's up to you. It's up to you. It's strictly up to you. All right, so, Aaron, you cool to talk for a little bit now? Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's just keep it rolling. That was Oliver Stone, ladies and gentlemen. But without further ado, we do have Aaron Good with us for the rest of the episode. Aaron Good, editor-at-large at Covert Action Magazine. Aaron, just like, yeah, you listened to our conversation with Oliver Stone just now. I mean, like, so the 58th anniversary, I mean, like, just where are your thoughts today on this anniversary? And just like,

like, nearly 60 years later, what the Kennedy assassination means and like, what it represents in our sort of our cultural imagination, but also as like an unsolved murder. Right. Well, I think that it speaks to the power of the perpetrators that it has been scrutinized and hundreds of books written about it. And yet we, it still cannot be solved. And the government can still withhold these documents that can't possibly, it's not that they're withheld for the reasons that they say that that's pretty obvious. So we have to reflect on the kind of government that we live in. I've been immersed in this case for a while because I got a doctorate in political science, which is a pretty straight-laced kind of boring discipline,

but I wanted to look at state crimes and state criminality in the intelligence agencies, unstudied largely in political science. And the Kennedy assassination is really useful in terms of giving a window into a number of things that are important and suppressed, like the role of the intelligence agencies, relationship between military intelligence, you know, complex to the national media. And, you know, what the CIA and what these agencies are in relation to capitalism, the system that we live under and the, and really the forces that they're ultimately beholden to and the forces that brought them into existence. So it's, the sadness of the day is not like something I reflect on so much on the day because

I spent a lot of time on it. And I've been working on a podcast that is an accompaniment to Oliver's new documentary. And he has a four-hour version of that documentary coming out. The podcast interviews a lot of people that are involved in the actual film itself. Like I have about two hours with James Galbraith and John Newman on Vietnam. I have one with Zach Sklar, where he talks about how JFK got made in the first place. Oliver left this part out earlier, but it was actually Covert Action Magazine's publishing house that produced the Garrison memoir that Ellen Ray gave to Oliver Stone at a conference in Cuba back in 1988, which set him on the path to making JFK. So I agree, I'm in agreement with Oliver's analysis

about it. And I would, he even, you know, expand on some of these, these things where he talks about the policies that Kennedy had. There was this much continuity between Eisenhower and what Johnson did. But with Kennedy, he wanted different things with Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, Cuba policy. I mean, Fidel Castro himself said, this is bad news. Everything has changed when he heard what happened. And he was right about that. Patrice Lumumba is a figure that haunts both Kennedy and this movie quite a bit. I mean, particularly in, as regards his like, basically, Dulles had already gotten his plot to assassinate Lumumba approved as Eisenhower was hitting out the door. Kennedy comes in and finds out about it.

And basically, you know, it's sort of like outrage that Lumumba has been arrested by the, you know, like coup forces and sends an official memo saying, get this guy out of prison. Well, what do they do then? They kill him like instantly. And he has to find out about this. And like, you know, once again, it's like an example of like, what Dulles was doing overseas was the like, you know, subversion of democracies and assassinations. What would lead us to believe that Alan Dulles wouldn't do something like that in the United States? Right. That's a good question. I mean, he's, they put that quote in the movie where he's talking to his biographer, you know, a biographer of Dulles and Dulles at one point,

because he always was, you know, a duplicitous kind of a phony individual who was very good at, you know, presenting a facade that belied what he was really thinking. And he just said, that little Kennedy, he thought he was a God, meaning he thought he had a right to like, I don't know, decide policy for the United States after being president. Exactly. He thought he could, he could take on the masters of the universe. And the Maluma case is the perfect example because Eisenhower wanted him dead. And, and I, and this is a case where you do have evidence documentation of Eisenhower authorizing that assassination. The official CIA line is, is in effect, oh, but we authorized him to be killed on Thursday and

he was killed on Friday. So just a coincidence. Yeah. Right. But Kennedy, there's that famous picture where he gets the news and he gets it from Adelaide Stevenson, even though the CIA had known about it for a while. And he's just like, Oh God, this is terrible. Okay. So that, there you can see the difference between Kennedy and Eisenhower, you know, the Eisenhower Dulles brothers before Kennedy. And then in the Congo, after Kennedy's killed, and Johnson takes over, who does Johnson install, you know, as a dictator for the next 30 years, basically Lamumba's assassin, Joseph Mabuto, Mabuto says he say he takes that name, right? So this is, you see a really clear difference in that, in that case, you had a, you had a different point of view. And Lamumba was a

pan-Africanist and he gets killed and they, they don't just kill him, they dissolve his body with acid so they can't, you know, bury his remains anywhere and let it turn into a, you know, make a martyr of him. They try to do that. And you can fast forward to today and look at Congo, and you can see pictures of little kids who are essentially slave labor, mining cobalt for all of our cell phones, making lots of money for Glencore. It's, you can see the, the line there. It's neocolonialism. And you said like, you know, after Lamumba was assassinated, the person who ran the country that he was supposed to be the leader of the next three years was his assassin. And I think, you know, if you look at the Kennedy assassination, you can view it in

similar light with, in this country, is that like people who killed him, essentially have been the people in charge of this country until, you know, now. Up to the present day and continuing into the future. And there has to be some element of the CIA, you know, there's some, Bill Clinton, when he took office, he tried to get to the bottom of it. So he sent a guy, I think it was Webster Hubbell, one of his deputies, they said, why don't you go over to see if you can find out who killed Kennedy, whatever he says, right? And then he gets told, no, you don't have the, you don't have the authority for that. So there are, there must be on some level,

a class of people charged in the national security state with knowing what the secrets are and what they need to like act against, because you can see the way that the corporate media reports about Kennedy to this day and so on and other issues like Frank Olson's assassination and never get to the bottom of that, the drug scandals with Air America or the Contras. Oh, there's a number of things that are just this dark quadrant of national security state chicanery that we are not privy to. And it's not controlled by democratically elected officials. It's this foreign policy blob that was created by capitalist forces and operates under a cloak of secrecy. We're like, into this like broader like motive question, like the third part of the

documentary, the Donald Sutherland, the Mr. X part of JFK, the movie, it's like after World War Two, you have America emerges as the most powerful country in the world and decides like, hey, we're going to run the world and we're going to run it for good. But in order to do that, we need to create this permanent state of war, a permanent wartime economy. And you know, this is what Eisenhower was talking about in his farewell address, even though he had a lot to do with it. But like it becomes this question of like, as Oliver alluded to, where is this money going to be spent? Is it going to be spent on $3 trillion a year in Afghanistan, or are we going to have health care for anyone in this country? And I think the answer is like, I mean, through

violence, I think like these questions have been answered by the people in charge of our government. Yeah, you just you said it. This is it's funny that you mentioned that because I'm doing a rewrite of my dissertation. It's going to be published in April by Sky Horse. Oliver was kind enough to blur it for me, which was a big help. And I just added a section on the birth of the of the of the military industrial complex. And it essentially, I learned things doing this that I had suspected but didn't really know. In 1948, there's a war scare. It's pretty much fabricated using, you know, different tidbits to like scare people into boosting the economy with military spending. And a lot of it is to save the aerospace industry, which is struggling because of the end of the war.

And its biggest creditors are so it's not just these companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Martin, and all this. It's banks like Chase Manhattan, they were the biggest creditor. That's Rockefeller money. That's like the Titan really of Titans in terms of US capitalism. And they stood to lose a lot of money. And so they have this war scare. And it saves the industry in 1948. But it's not sufficient. So they ramp it up to another level. And the outcome of this sort of scare mongering about the Cold War is in SC 68, which calls for a massive, it's a 1950 document calls for massive rearmament against the Soviet Union. And it's not just about the economic downturn that they're suffering after the war ends, because you don't have this government stimulus into the economy.

It's also a way to deal with, and they write about this in the SC 68, the dollar gap, which meant that with Marshall aid money running out, it was going to be difficult to maintain the capitalist system as these planners that Council on Foreign Relations had put together during the war funded by Wall Street, of course, the think tank, right? They needed to deal with this dollar gap issue, which is how are they going to be able to purchase our goods? And the massive military spending meant that it would put the US would run like balance of payments deficits. And then this would help in both in Asia, a dollar, a potential dollar gap issue, and in Europe. And what they didn't want was Europe to go neutral, which meant that they

could potentially buy from the Soviets or buy from Americans, whichever had the best deal. And it would be OK. They were really paranoid about this. And they spoke about it in apocalyptic terms. What they're really talking about is maintaining hegemony over global capitalism after World War Two, so that capital and trade flows would go across the Pacific to America and back, and then across Europe to America and back. And this is maintaining this as you still see it today. Look at the reaction about Nord Stream and Europe between Germany and Russia and the US. It repeats itself. I just want to get back to the... I know I brought up Charles de Gaulle before, but to me, that's a potent example because it shows that you do not need as a leader

to drift too far outside a very narrow consensus. You don't need to be anywhere close to being a radical to basically get targeted for assassination or have someone look the other way when someone takes a shot at you or actually be killed yourself. It's definitely true. And I mean, a funnier case, I'd say funny, but funny, tragic, something morbidly amusing. More farcical is Jimmy Carter because Jimmy Carter is a Rockefeller man. The Trilateral Commission selected him, handpicked him to be their guy, which was Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. And they boost that he gets all this great media coverage and he comes from nowhere. And he's a media fabrication, but not a terrible guy as these people go. So he fires

like George H. W. Bush, places him with Stansfield Turner. Stansfield Turner fires people like Tom Shackley and Ray Clines. He's really super gangsterish fellows in the CIA. And Carter has all these other trilateral people around him, but he's still too progressive for David Rockefeller. David Rockefeller becomes one of the characters behind the October surprise, or counter surprise that delays the release of the hostages and so on in Iran and leads to Ronald Reagan's election. So in this case, you have a guy who doesn't even like his own handpicked puppet and sort of helps to make sure he gets defeated in 1980. It's wild. Yeah. And with Carter, it's, I mean, Operation Cyclone, obviously everything that

you mentioned in foreign policy, but he was also one of the hatchet men who helped destroy the Democratic and labor alliance. He deregulated credit. He deregulated trucking several key industries. But he just didn't go that extra 3%. And that was enough to get rid of him. Well, as you mentioned, he fired a lot of people involved in covert operations in the intelligence community. And what are these guys? Did they just get another job? No, they kept doing what they've always been doing. And then in Reagan and Bush, they found the perfect people. I mean, Bush, the former director of the CIA, to just get right back in charge there and just be like, business as usual,

store is open. Let's go. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of that some of this untold part of aspects of this, we still don't really know what we can piece together. The Safari Club in Iran established there with Iranian and Saudi intelligence. Richard Nixon fires Richard Helms and makes an ambassador to Iran. So Helms is over there in Iran. That's the worst guy. He was probably the top guy at CIA involved in the Kennedy assassination. He's also the grandson of the founding president of the Bank for International Settlements. That's his middle name is Magara and Gates Magara is the BIS guy, which was like this Nazi bank. It's like the worst of the worst of the supranational financial establishment. And that's

what Helms represented. And he set up that Safari Club over there with help of from Adnan Khashoggi. And that is a way to deal with to outsource CIA chicanery, because for a while the Congress was actually investigating the CIA. So they just this capitalist shenanigan machine just is privatized for a bit and probably elements of those are what come to eventually screw Carter in 1980. By the way, I will I must credit Oliver Stone with portraying Richard Helms as Satan himself in the director's cut of Nixon with the black eyes scene. I know we have Oliver and I have had a little bit of an argument over this, which is a funny argument. And I don't know. I can't figure out if this if I'm being sycophantic or anti sycophantic. But I basically think he got Nixon

just right pretty much. And that there's more about that business with like that scene you describe where Nixon's in trying to talk to Helms about getting these Bay of Pigs files and things. There's actually more to that story. And Oliver's kind of backed off that a little bit. But I'm like saying, no, no, you're you're wrong. You're wrong about being wrong. Because I think he actually I looked into it more and I'm trying to persuade him about this. But we'll see if that ever comes past. Yeah. And I mean, in Nixon, Nixon refers to the Bay of Pigs thing. He refers to it obliquely as the beast. And this idea that like he's not really in control of the government and that like his role as president is only to kind of like placate and keep at arm's length this beast

represented by Richard Helms and everything that the Mongoose, you know, in quotation marks really represents, which is like an ongoing threat to his life, basically. Yeah, I mean, I find Watergate, I this is like I wrote two chapters on it in my dissertation and worked with Peter Del Scott or talked to him a little bit about it. And I got some feedback from him. And there's more to that than just the Bay of Pigs thing. There's actually an earlier visit before Watergate happened where Nixon goes into Helms's office and he says, hey, we really want those Bay of Pigs files, you know, I mean, there's things we got to know about not because of me, but because it might come up, you know, that he says the whole who shot Jack angle? Was it

who was responsible for that? Was it was it that was it the Soviets? Was it Cubans? Was it Nixon? Was it the CIA? And this 30 tricks department, you know, I'll protect you guys, but I just want to know this stuff. So so Nixon was trying to get leverage over the CIA at different times, even before Watergate, he stupidly thought that having hunts in his employ would allow him to have leverage rather than the other way around, which is what ended up probably happening. So the Watergate Dallas angles are fascinating as well. But, you know, in in this sort of like arc of American history from Kennedy, from his murder, the Lyndon Johnson, and then to Nixon and Watergate and his resignation, I mean, like, isn't like just sort of like everything about

like the second half of the 20th century and like America as a country and a global hegemon? Isn't it all of it contained in like the transition between those three men and what they tried to do or fail to do in office? And I think that Reagan, his election represents really a consolidation of it. But but honestly, getting rid of Nixon, Nixon was a liberal, as weird as that sounds. And he was also a bit of a nationalist, meaning that he did not like the fact that Japan and Western countries in Western Europe were accumulating dollars and potentially weakening US, the US economy. He wanted to strengthen US domestic production and engage in some protectionism. And the Rockefeller wing of, you know, the establishment, your more capitalist, you know, commercially minded people,

they did not like this. So Nixon ran afoul of those of those people. And then he also ran afoul of the hawkish military people because of detente with Russia, you know, arms control treaties and recognizing China. So the Nixon thing is fascinating because he was an anti-communist, kind of a wacko. And yet the more you look at what happened to him, you know, he did try to struggle with the CIA. He had them dig up the family jewels specifically because he thought they were screwing him with Watergate and he thought he could get leverage over them that way. So he fires Richard Helms and replaces him with his own guy, Slesinger, in order to try to do that. But he's unsuccessful. Well, I mean, regardless of like the political differences between, you know,

party differences between Kennedy and Nixon, I think in both of them, you see, you see kind of like the last attempts of the American president as an institution, thinking that power is vested in the office itself, that an American president through, you know, democratic consent and just force of will could direct American policy on behalf of the American people. Yes. It's sad. It's sad what happened to Bernie Sanders. He was the most popular politician. The chicanery of that whole primary process was absurd, although at least in Bernie's case, his, you know, his cranium is still intact. So it could be worse for those who try to meddle with the masters of the universe. But it was, you know, what a farce that was. Joe Biden

was very unpopular. It was, it was, it was ridiculous that we have this guy as a president. There's a line towards the end of the documentary where David Talbot says that you can draw a direct line between what happened in Dallas and the current horror show that Americans are living through. And I thought of that in light of the fact that right now, as we're recording this, in D. Lee Plaza, in Dallas, are dozens to, if not hundreds of skew and non supporters who have gathered there in the belief that like JFK Jr. will reveal himself or even under like the Kennedy, like something will happen, something momentous, the occluded Kennedy will return. And that like, I'm just, Aaron, what do you make of the symbolism of JFK and like the feeling that like, you know,

what it augurs is that like no one really has any confidence in America anymore or trust any of our leaders or institutions. But like, how do you feel that like mutating into being like a central tenant of belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory, Laura? I mean, it cannot be an organic phenomenon that has emerged out of a healthy democratic civil society. But to me, it reminds me of, if you study the Kennedy assassination more, there's one character named Kerry Thorntonly, who was friendly with Oswald and involved in a lot of ways in setting up Oswald as a communist. You know, he was very useful to the Warner commission and so on. And he wrote a book about Oswald before Oswald killed Kennedy. And he was in God banister's office and knew a lot of these

same people that Oswald knew in New Orleans. And then later he set up this thing called Operation Mindfuck, which had, which talked about how it was a satirical thing and they would publish him Playboy and other things and they would say, oh yeah, it's the Bavarian Illuminati that's behind all the governments and they're pulling all the strings, right? So it's a way to, and he was a, let's accept the hypothesis that he was a CIA asset or an intelligence asset of some kind. And here he is, you know, perpetrating this kind of, you know, misinformation, disinformation out there in a way that was like delegitimizing conspiratorial suspicions that people would have, right? It's a way these people are idiots. Like, oh yeah, it must be the Illuminati doing

this, right? Which, you know, this is the same time they're doing Operation Chaos and so on. And so I have to imagine that this QAnon thing is a way to taint, you know, the Kennedy assassination makes, it pulls the curtain back on the kind of regime that we actually live under. And so these QAnon people are tainting it with the, you know, the taint of their, you know, gullibility and stupidity. It has to be some kind of operation, I would guess. I mean, I just can't believe that they would come across it. It's too perfect. I do think it's interesting that one of the promulgators of a Pizzagate and then QAnon was a Navy intelligence officer. I mean, I do think, I think if you go back and you look at like the 90s, like Bo Gritz type shit, that there's always

going to be something that runs parallel to a horrifying thing the government is doing, where, you know, whether it's NAFTA or Ruby Ridge or whatever, you have these people ready to go who are already insane, where you're like, oh, let's just roll this in with people who think that there are still like, there are still prisoners of war in Cambodia that we're just, that we're just purposely not getting with people who sell gold through direct mail. I also, I don't know. I think that like now, you know, just thinking about what you said about Biden, I feel like a lot of the function now is different from the 90s in that I think that there's a lot of what we see as just supposed to demoralize people. Like QAnon serves a function if you're like an insane person or if

you are checked out of the political process, it sort of keeps, it sort of tampers down your potency and your, how much you can become a part of something larger. But the other purpose of seeing it, if you're not, if you're not part of it, if you're not prone to do that, is to see it and just completely give up on your fellow American and give up on yourself and give up on everything, to just feel shitty and demoralize all the time. And that is like, I don't think they always really wanted to go with Biden that much, but I think he's, there is, to make that the guy that beats Bernie serves their purpose just as well, because it's like, yeah, see, fuck you. This is us standing over you in the end zone. Yeah, it could have been anybody. I mean, well, not anybody, it would

have been Bernie. It could have been Pete, if Pete, if Pete Mania had taken off and they would have been like, all right, this guy is fine too. It's wild. But you're right about it being demoralized. And I think that's all they have now. They don't have any, there's no attempts to really have a unifying myth or not even a unifying vision that's articulated that you actually expect to people to rally behind. And I think that they've really, you know, you've got Russiagate, which is absurd. It comes from the intelligence community. QAnon, I have to imagine also. And, you know, it's pretty clear that we're being subjected to like a lot of divide and rule tactics, as though we are, you know, a target of imperialism of a kind. I mean, Pete obviously would have been fine

as nobody would have stopped him from being president. But what that whole primary showed was that the next thing never materialized. The next model for the voters to care about didn't materialize. It ended up having to be Biden because he was the one who stood for the party itself, for the Democratic Party, like as an apparatus, and also for the lingering positive feelings people had for the Obama administration, their nostalgic yearning for that time before Trump. They tried to have a new brand for the Democratic Party. Pete was one attempt. I mean, there were 20 people there. All of them would have been amenable to the party itself and to Capitol, but none of them were able to gain any sort of excitement outside of the very

narrow band of media obsessed early primary voters. And I think what that means is that they're going to keep having to run people for office, keep having to run people for the presidency, but if they aren't able to have some sort of story, some sort of narrative and some sort of branding that makes it worthwhile, they're going to stop being a credible alternative to the Republicans. And the system, whatever else it needs, it needs that. It needs the give and take. It needs the turnismo between the two parties. And the Democrats at this point and in defeating Bernie really destroyed any viable alternative to just continue, continual slide into irrelevance. Not to get too much into primary and Democratic stuff,

not to zoom too much in, but it does seem, it seems like every four years that's when the Democrats decide that they're an actual party. Every time there's a presidential primary or presidential election, and that seemed to come back, it's now really, really coming back to bite them. I do wonder how that portends with other things degenerating. That would be maybe an optimistic thing in America if something worse didn't always come. Yeah, I feel like the crumbling of the empire is the opportunity to, you're not going to be able, the creation of the empire and the creation of this Rumpelstiltskin effect that they get from owning the dollar. It's impossible to even really wrap your mind around how it has perverted our institutions and changed politics.

It really was the establishment of the post-Bretton Woods system made peace with those capitalist centered parts of the establishment and the militarist parts because they can both have whatever they want. The banks through the federal reserve system have the ability to create as much money out of thin air and loan as much money to each other to buy up everything they want to in the world and the military has its budgets as well and the inflation gets exported to other countries who collect the dollars or treasury notes in their reserves in the place that gold used to be in. This is a power that the US has established for itself and as that starts to crumble and countries are trading amongst themselves and other in their own currencies and so on and

the Belt and Road Initiative in Asia seems to be unstoppable at this point. Can the Chinese and other people point to success that they are having in making their own people's lives better and be the good example that the US has always tried to crush since the end of World War II? This seems to be an opportunity to present the ruling elite in America with the obvious evidence of their own failures and their own defaults. Do you think one of our possible futures, this is a weirdly optimistic one, that American politics just becomes like royal watching? It just becomes a soap opera between the ugliest and most boring but strangest people just every few years like a joust between you know Marjorie Taylor Greene and a woman who left the CIA three

years ago and like royals like monarchies in Europe it doesn't really mean anything because China just runs every everyone has decided that like we need to sort of keep America going as the part of the world where these people buy but we can't let them run the show anymore really. I do not know what it is that holds why I know a little bit of it actually what holds Europe and thralls the United States a lot of it is just brute force like I spoke to Ola Tynander who's at the Oslo Peace Research Institute and he told me some of the conversations he had with like top military generals in Scandinavia and other places in Europe and he said that there are like secret treaties that basically assert that the US has the right to like intervene anytime in some of these

countries. I'm going to go back and add some of that that's one of the last additions I'm going to make to my book but it's like it's it's wild and you do wonder like why do the French and the Germans like why are they still listen to America and how do they how do we still have any prestige in these places it's it's and eventually I think it's the illusion of our omnipotence is it's going to evaporate and then what are they going to do what are they going to do then I don't I can't predict when that would happen but it seems like it has to it's just it's such a shit show in this country well it's hard to it's hard to keep the military together as this as this reliable salient threat against everything as we have if everything else and

every other part of American society is degenerating and fragmenting how do you how do you keep that together they're not even making they're not even making hellcats anymore I mean Felix you you talked about I heard you on Truin on talking about um the Gaddafi thing which is a hugely important story but the U.S. did that and they they've they've taught people the west of the world learn some lessons Russia and China learn that they can't abstain from these U.N. votes and that the U.S. cannot be relied upon to to make agreements other other people learn that if you're not to give up your weapons like Korea Korea learn what happens I mean basically if you have you know a deterrent you know in your military don't think that you can give it up through

negotiations with the U.S. unless you want to end up sodomized with the bayonet and have the snuff film put on YouTube and have Hillary Clinton cracking jokes about it right nobody wants that so it's the U.S. is is that sort of that way of running things is is is gonna is is coming back to home I think well I mean like actually just like to to refer back to the the anniversary I'm like you know the Kennedy assassination is often talked about is this kind of like primal violation of like the American America's like self-confidence and self-image and like look it was all pretty rotten before Kennedy but like more than that I think it's like the first in this like a long process of like these huge public events to take place that nobody really believes the official

account of but like but we have no alternative otherwise like they're just they go on unresolved unpunished like it's just they they just continue on and I think it just leads to this sense that like articulated or not that we're just like not a real country like I mean this is the feeling that I have like after the Iraq war that like nobody involved in planning or doing that fucking atrocity has been punished at all it's just like how do you believe that you live in a real country that you're a citizen of when like these things can keep happening over and over again but without any compelling resolution or consequences for any of the people involved in it yeah there was one guy who was who went to jail for related to the Bush Cheney CIA torture and that was John Carriacou

a friend of mine who does he's helping me with the podcast now and they so he went to jail for exposing it okay that's those are the only people who do get punished so yeah it's a lawless at the top there is lawlessness and it's been institutionalized it's like Carl Schmidt wrote sovereign is he who decides the exception the exception is the exception to the rule of law and the national security state has assumed that role and it is is shrouded in state secrecy so we don't even know when they are asserting it and how they are asserting it they use their own techniques of the clandestine arts to perpetrate political violence under with plausible deniability and it has carried over as you allude to these issues that these things that we never get to the bottom of

you know Peter Del Scott calls these deep events and they're really important ones he calls them structural deep events meaning that they have the power to alter you know political history and politics in the US and that they they invariably increase the level of government secrecy in the system and so these deep events these structural deep events they're dismissed by the mainstream as mainstream as conspiracy theory but you know a lot of the prevailing liberal ideologies are that the rule of law prevails and that democracy is a real thing and that you know we are a country where the public is sovereign and so on and so forth but you know the Kennedy assassination is a perfect example because you can see not only do you see the president get killed in a way that this that

this that were the state's narrative of it is absurd but his brother is the top lawman in the country and realizes makes the assessment that he is powerless to do anything about it and unless he becomes president and on his way to becoming president he gets shot in the head in the back of the head at point blank range by a guy who's six feet in front of him so these are things that we have to deal with but the problem is that you start to like actually think of like what this means it narrows your it's a challenge to most people's political perspectives you're going to be outside of the mainstream if you start saying like if you start saying these things all the time because even if people are vaguely yeah I don't believe the Warren commission support for that fell for

eight percent to eight percent after they showed the supporter from on tv and yet what can you do about it it's it's a conundrum it's not just like you know maybe alienates you from mainstream politics but I mean it it it narrows your very idea of like what politics is because if you can know about all these things more or less openly and discuss them on podcasts or make movies about them but the the the fictions themselves like are are unaltered or like the people the the principles involved in it are undisturbed entirely because of the things you talked about because of these secret laws and secret power that they've spent decades accruing for themselves and it's just sort of like yeah you're you're not really living in a in a country you're not really living like

in a democratic society no it's uh you know Sheldon woolen he didn't get into the details of specific state crimes but he called it inverted totalitarianism where because totalitarianism just meant you know it was there was no element of civil society that could act as to counterbalance the power of the regime except that in under instead of like it being like nazi germany or the soviet union this totalitarianism sort of disengages people and disempowers them rather than like rallying them to like the cause or whatever and so that's that that's sort of the the situation that we're in i'd like to see the rise of a marxist you know materialist because these people running things are obviously people with a lot of money and power that's not that hard to figure

out and they don't they they run the security apparatus which by definition conspires all the time like they have people like operations and plans and like what is that their secret secret illegal violent things carried out by people which is the definition of a conspiracy right so we have state sanctioned conspiracies that are institutionalized and ongoing like the operations arm of the CIA so but on behalf of capital so not to be like a bircher or a qanon nutter who thinks it's like oh yeah they're all conspiring so that they can go into the peace place with their pedophile ring you know that that's not really logical it's more people that own everything that's that's the position you want to be in and that's what this national

security state you know it serves to bring about i think the problem for a marxist attempt to like assimilate the reality of the of the deep state the reality of this structure into their narrative is that at the end of the day you are telling a narrative about people and about choices made conspiracies made by people in power and when you're doing that people want a motive they want to understand why are they doing this right and to maintain power doesn't really work for a lot of people because uh you know that they believe the thing that these powerful people are making is a society that is increasingly anti-human like at a basic level it's it's it's destroying the planet it's destroying social cohesion it's destroying what it is to be a human

and what person even if they're rich would want to do that uh and so that's why it's very difficult for conspiracy emphasizing narratives not to end up having to have some end state of a villain that is somehow human but not human like a reptile or an alien or a member of a certain uh religious and ethnic group that has some sort of so that has values that are not human values and the thing is is that you don't really need that because capitalism is a algorithm that is inhuman and that people even at the very top they might be benefiting from it and they might carry out conspiracies to perpetuate its domination but they are fundamentally at the end of the day not in control of it like there are no people at the top of this thing there is only this algorithm

there's only the value form and there is profit extraction and that is hard to pitch to regular people narratively it's not as satisfying as the idea of cabals and the idea of people with who are somehow not us doing things uh uh to us instead of really everybody along for the ride in a certain respect uh being pulled towards a total annihilation of of life without anybody in the system even those behind closed doors making these plans uh really wanting that to be the case it's a it's frightening to think about these it's not just capitalism it's civilization there are people civilization is hierarchical and the people at the top enjoy more power and wealth because of exploitation it's dynamic of exploitation and you have myths to rationalize it we all have

things that we do to rationalize our position in our own mind where we in like I buy a oh I need a new playstation game starving kids in Africa could maybe you know be helped by two dollars a day but I'm going to buy a playstation game right we all have these things that we do that are to rationalize our own position and some of the things that we enjoy and if you try to extrapolate what it's like for these elites that you know do have their hands on the levers of power and I I think it's a you know it's a rotating class and some of the people that do the worst things are really more the servants of the money power itself the people with all the money but it's a human thing to detach from worrying about some of these more serious things because if you

did you'd be so depressed to think about the genocide on the area where you're standing right now today or where you're living today if you thought about that all the time you couldn't function and the these elites are probably more in that direction than anybody else the people that said like okay Indonesia huge gold mine in West Papua biggest gold mine in the world so Karna wants to give it to the communists this is a problem we'll stage this provocation with these generals and in the aftermath of that we're gonna have them kill up all kill the communists they just murder a million to two million three million and it's just like to them it's a way to like solve these problems of power that they're faced with and it's but it's a it's a it's not

that regular people do this thing on anywhere near that magnitude but there is civilization it kind of allows you to and it forces you to accept a certain amount of brutality and exploitation that comes with your position i think that's kind of the point of uh in the last 30 years last 30 40 years the mushrooming of the national security state is i mean a hey i think one of the key one of the unique features of it is that it always has to keep rolling it always has to be keep growing it always has to keep expanding i always liked what michael parenti said about gangster capitalism and is an amazing lecture on this as it relates to jfk but i would almost call the last 40 years uh pillhead capitalism you always there always has to be a new scan there

always has to be a new thing you have to new new bit of copper you have to strip you have to keep it going or else you go into withdrawals and you die uh but i think since the 80s and especially since 9 11 is the the the security state has exploded and the especially the contractor state after 9 11 the people that helped turn virginia blue um the the function of that beyond just needing to always get bigger and gain momentum is so there aren't as many single individuals who this will weigh so heavily on someone who is a cog in this machine can go oh well you know like what we did here was bad but you know i i work on the fucking malaysia desk all i do is malaysia shit all all i all i do is you know uh support for the cia hit teams that we have in uh afghanistan

and pakistan it's it's a way to it's a way so that no individual player is that important anyone who proves themselves it stays in it long enough shows themselves to be a true believer a true servant of satan uh in the mold of an engleton or someone they get to go up there they get to carry more of that evil on their back but for the the people who are just they're you know middle-class people going in and out the point is that they're not carrying that much and they do not have to think about it that much i think yeah they keep us that way there don't just don't worry yourself about it it's like the jack nicholson monologue in in a few good men right you don't want to know you don't want the truth because deep down in places you

don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall it's just that's that is the attitude that they have for so that's true for a lot of people especially you know liberals uh they just they can't deal with this it they're the they're kind of the pivotal class and i'm glad you guys have had catherine lou on here in the past because her writing on this like p mc mentality is there's a different version of it that prevails at the national security state although they're blending now with like those see those woke cia ads and things all those are great i love those it's it's really wild the way that they try to legitimate and obscure you know there what's going on just like a last question for me here like i don't know like uh in thinking about the kennedy assassination

is just like all all just sort of like all all implications all sort of grand narratives about what this implies aside is still technically an unsolved murder do you think it's useful in that context to think about the cia as basically the history's grandest and still most ongoing criminal conspiracy yes i think that no gang of criminals has ever had the impact on world historic events that they have shaping you know the destinies of congo indonesia brazil you know just during just as the transition from kennedy to johnson for example but like you know iranian history in the middle east and of course but the bigger thing is the the national security state this colossus but the cia is involved in the the worst the worst parts of it and i actually

think that if you were to for the elites in america as this thing is kind of crumbling it would be in their i think it would be in their enlightened self-interest to allow some of these facts to be brought above board because they've sort of created a situation that is volatile for them and it's leading to crises that are not going to leave them untouched perhaps and so some sort of change that would be dramatic would be like acknowledging what happened in the kennedy assassination i think that this could be lead to a breakthrough in terms of our consciousness and maybe well i think they're i think they're trying to do that but i think it's very telling that a couple months ago that they were just like oh here's the documents ufo's are real hey i buy everybody

have a weekend and now and then biden last week is just saying oh we sorry we can't release any more these kennedy documents because they present some sort of unidentifiable harm to national security and intelligence gathering right yeah he was not going to he was not going to release those that well i wasn't too shocked about it i would be also be shocked even though it's silly at this point and pointless gavin newson and releasing seerhan i bet he doesn't i bet he ignores the law and the advice of the parole board and i bet they keep i would put money on him keeping seerhan in jail too because it's okay he talks okay because kinkley's out and he's in the stew right now he's down tracks yeah he's still out he's out there singing his songs i can't believe that he's on

twitter tweeting about about these about these things he seems like um okay ultra case or something i mean uh he was like the son of a close family friend of the bush yeah no the guy he had dinner with hinkley's and the bushes go back in texas to like the 1950s i think yeah he was part of as i understand he and mark david chattin both worked this gets into like the weeds of you know yeah alternative vision but they both work for world vision which was yeah it's this weird ministry this word cia like funded world the christian ministry yeah yeah so that's a strange coincidence and they both didn't they both whip out catcher in the ride after or have it on their possession there's some other weird angle there so it's just like this which they it sounds so nutty to even

talk about it but this is the kind of things that they do there was a cia officer part of the artichoke or mk ultra project he tried this these techniques on his secretary and it actually worked his secretary picked up a gun and attempted to shoot it was unloaded but attempted to shoot someone that they've been working on so like you know like what kind well you know they've if they want to get rid of anybody it's very you know very easy to do i think well uh i i think i think what i learned from the uh the the combination of this conversation is if you ever want to do anything about that step one begin the process of owning everything important in the world so start buying up now start buying up all the land resources and oh yeah i'm in control of the us dollar is global

reserve currency if we can get a handle on that maybe we can pry back some of this stuff that's where crypto comes in i i um something i've been doing that's been a kind of intelligent is um i you know i've been accruing us dollars as anyone should but um i've also been flushing money down the toilet to decrease the m2 money supply so my dollars worth more this is a good strategy i don't know what to even think about investments or anything like that it seems like a lot of this stuff is so precarious and that they can qe invent a zillion dollars i think qe plays a part in what happened with the you know shale oil boom and other and other things it's getting more and more obviously fictitious this whole this whole system if you guys follow michael hudson the way he talks about the economy

and such very important stuff to wrap your mind around it's it's really obama is a great follow everyone everyone throw him a follow yeah and we have a we have a friend that like uh we've known for like almost a decade who's also named michael hudson and he's uh i mean i don't even really want to discuss i can't even encapsulate what he does he's the world's best geogaster player he finds the best guys on facebook but i've also heard great things about the other michael hudson i think people should follow both of them yeah he's brilliant he was the highest paid economic consultant after he was the first person to figure out what had happened with the uh collapse of britain woods and he was working at the hudson institute no relation to stanford university

one and he worked with one or only got that job uh herman kahn right the guy that dr strange love is partly holy and herman kahn was like this is that you basically outlined the con perfectly right so it was it which was true it was a the way that the us had it had it set up but it's you know how long can they can they keep this going the scary thing or or something to really take note of that is those three capital firms that control basically controlling interest so they manage controlling interest in essentially every industry it's um black rock state street and vanguard right when you add up their holdings it's never been so concentrated as it is today and this is ownership of media pharmaceuticals the major banks the defense contractors pretty

much everything this is new in the history of capitalism not that there wasn't wealth concentration before but this new system is it needs to be it's some sort of socialism is the obvious and only answer and yet they're really going to try not to allow that to happen yeah yeah and like and when you describe a situation like that this intense intense concentration of like who actually owns everything i mean you can look at that you sort of optimistically in one regard because because like there's never been fewer of them and more of us but the problem is essentially everybody works for them so it's it's it's sort of like it's hard to work around that you know what i mean yeah the only thing worse than

being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism and and that's the situation that that people the people are in so it's but it seems so clear that like would you rather amazon be jeff bezos or would you rather we all own that for example it's it's amazingly undemocratic the way that this is developing but nobody i mean i almost say nobody cares nobody can do anything about it leave it there for today 58th anniversary the kennedy assassination i want to thank erin good a covert action magazine and once again thank you so much to oliver stone can i also get a plug in for the podcast which has just launched today it is on it's a on patreon covert action bulletin and we are carrying among other things a companion series

on the jfk assassination uh that is a companion to oliver's new documentaries and the producer of the the podcast is jim jim d genia who's the the co-creator of jfk revisited oliver stone's new movie and we also have a number of other interview subjects like pepe escobar and peter dale scott coming up and there's a lot of stuff coming out there so it's on they can find us on patreon and uh it's the covert action magazines of venerable institution it's cool to be doing this uh link to the patreon will be in the episode description gentlemen until next time bye bye all right thank you very much guys thank you erin do you like a man who answers straight a man who's always fair we'll measure him against the others and when you compare you cast your vote for kennedy

and the change that's over too so it's up to you it's up to you it's straightly up to you yes it's kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy40 corny kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy kennedy panry