Fourth Reich Archaeology - #094 - She Harvey Oswald, Part Six, Side C

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

It just so happens that She Harvey Oswald is more timely than ever, as yet another person - Cole Thomas Allen - has been charged under the same statute as our protagonist, Squeaky Fromme, 50 years ago. That's right, there's another fella under the book for "Attempted Assassination of the President of the United States." A federal offense carrying a maximum life sentence. Not even joking: this series WILL help you understand what the hell is going on right now, with all this craziness. And even though this maybe the last Squeaky ep., our foray into the dual hit attempts on Jerry Ford is only getting started. Indeed, that's why we're pumping out the rest of the Squeaky episodes now: gearing up for our deeeeep dive into the real "She Harvey Oswald," Sara Jane Moore. But that's for another day.Today, it’s the end of the line for Squeaky, as this week we wrap up our tale on the first of the two would-be assassins who, in September 1975, pointed their pistols at President Gerald R. Ford.  In this episode we pick things up on the morning of September 5, 1975, just moments after Squeaky is taken into custody for making an attempt on our boy Jerry’s life. In side C, we cover the trial and its aftermath. Spoiler alert: she’s convicted, and the whole story passes into the realm of spectacle. We consider Squeaky’s trial as a window into the pros and cons of propaganda of the deed - relevant today in a time when political assassination and spectacular violence is very much back in the mainstream.Finally, we end with two overarching questions.  Did she really intend to kill Jerry, or was it just a performance?  And did she act alone or was there a conspiracy? If you like what you hear, head on over to patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and become a member of our community to get access to the full 3.5 hour episode including all three parts, a standalone version of the outro music, and more. At the end of this one we read some excerpts from two articles published shortly after Squeaky’s arrest. You can listen to the full readings in our special, Patreon exclusive episode “Squeaky in the Spectacle,” and you can get the full articles below. TIME: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,917812,00.htmlNY TIMES: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/30/archives/the-significance-of-squeaky-fromme.html

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The Warren Commission was science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information which showed that there were two wars going.

His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds when there's the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mile. He knows so long as a die. A freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure.

Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? This is a model. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don.

Welcome back, listener, for this side C, the final saga, the final chapter in the saga of Squeaky Fromey. a character that we have really gotten to know quite well over this series within a series, Shee Harvey Oswald. And, listener, I will get into a little bit of an introduction in a moment, but first, I'd like to thank you for tuning in. I'd like to thank you for liking, subscribing to, and commenting on and sharing the pod. We rely on your word of mouth, and we appreciate each and every one of you. You can reach us anytime about any topic at forthrightpe pod at gmail.com. We love hearing from you.

We also love if you join our patron community on patreon.com slash forthrightich archaeology. We're always, always, always grateful above all else for the support and the just great community that we've come into as a result of this project and we hope that you get just a fraction out of it that we get out of making it so thanks again now looking forward to this week's episode here side see that's right the final squeaky focused episode before we move on to sarah jane more the real she harvey oswald believe me when i say that you all are going to flip when. If you thought that the Squeaky Frommi story was weird and wild and went into some dark and interesting places

in the history of the 60s counterculture, well, the directions in which the Sarah Jane Moore story will take us, yes, all the way back from her family dynamics and her father's job and all that. that good shit, all the way to her eventual entanglement with just about every three-letter agency that you could possibly name in the dark and violent underbelly of the deeply infiltrated radical movement of the 1970s in the Bay Area of California. But before we get there, the following episode is not only a transition from one to the other and really wraps up how squeaky is absorbed into the spectacle.

But, listener, it is particularly timely in light of recent events. That's right. Once again, the U.S. Department. of justice has dusted off the old 18 U.S. Code section 1751. That's right. Assassination and attempted assassination of the President of the United States. And of course I'm referring now to Cole Thomas Allen of Torrance, California, who was arrested at the nerd prom, aka the White House Correspondence Association dinner, the annual event that rather than be presided over by a comedian MC this year,

was presided over by an Israeli mentalist. That's right, folks, an Israeli mentalist, who was in the middle of guessing the name of the baby of press secretary Carolyn Levitt when a loud noise was heard from the lobby and indeed a man had attempted to bum rush the event right through the metal detectors dressed up matrix style in some sort of a duster jacket concealing a shotgun handgun couple of knives took a selfie doing the DreamWorks face in the mirror in the hotel before doing this and wrote what can only be described as a bizarre, bizarre note

describing his reasons and intentions in committing this attempted propaganda of the deed against the Trump administration. And, listener, I don't think that anybody in the U.S. United States of America is better equipped than your boys, Dick, and Don to assess the parallels between Squeaky Frommi and Mr. Cole Thomas Allen. Of course, that's not the subject matter of this episode, but you will hear how this statute is used and really at bottom how the system of quote-unquote justice, but let's just call it the legal system to be a bit more objective about it and a bit less dishonest. Well, the legal system, of course, exists within the

spectacle and is functional in cabining off counter-system narratives, like those raised by Squeaky Fromey in her attempt on Jerry Ford's life or alleged attempt, right? And similarly, the sort of maybe religious, centrist political message of Cole Allen is already wrenched out of the guy's hands and is putty in the hands of those spectacular talking heads who frame the discourse, who set the tone, who narrate the story of history in real time, while taking a big fat check, of course, from the ruling class, the powers that be the same moneyed interests that control the very government whose approval ratings, I'm not sure if they have ticked in an upward direction since this spectacle.

But certainly that is a silver lining that many in the administration are hoping for. Whether they'll get it and how long it could be sustained is another question, because obviously on the ground, material reality continues to deteriorate, worsen the humiliating, deeply humiliating losses being suffered on a strategic level against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, which continues to be closed against the wishes of the United States. And of course, with catastrophic looming consequences for the global economy that we're already beginning to experience, but we've not even scratched the surface on the extent of the economic damage and devastation that this will wreak. And we have that to look forward to thanks to the

psychotics in charge of this government. But bringing it all back together, you see, there is a real sense of spectacle among those in a position to pull the levers of society. And regardless of whether somebody else put Squeaky Frommi up to pointing a gun at Gerald Ford, regardless of whether somebody put Cole Allen up to taking 50 plus hours worth of trains, from California to Washington, D.C. with firearms to try and infiltrate the White House Correspondents Association dinner and did so with astonishing ease. I mean, the scene of the alleged crime, if the squeaky-fro-me scene is in any way a tragedy, the Cole Allen scene is beyond a farce. The video has been released. You can see the guy trip. You can see a secret service

agent take aim and fire shots at his fellow agent across the way. As Cole Allen in a blur stumbles past them, the scene is truly, truly the epitome of how far we've fallen. The low effort of all of this spectacular manipulation of the masses is just beyond insulting. It's embarrassing. It is vicarious shame that I experience living among these people. And, you know, in Jerry Ford's Day, remember, and we'll get into this, what happened shortly after. The two assassination attempts on Jerry Ford?

Well, of course, in October of 1975, is when he receives that memo. This is a month after his life is allegedly threatened, twice, certainly once it really was threatened. But he gets this memo from Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, basically telling him to hand over the reins of the government to them, to the burgeoning neocon movement. And that movement is once again in power, degraded though it may be, and we see it all coming full circle. Now let's get digging. You know, many people have asked the question, why wasn't then from under observation by the secret service? by the keep a closer eye on her.

Nesson said that Ms. Fon was not a fact which astonished son, including the chief prosecutor of the Manson case, Vincent Bouglorsi. During the trial, she and Manson and several other members of the family expressed open hostility, as you probably well know, towards President Nixon, and President Ford, and the appointee of President Nixon, it's understandable to me that in their minds he should also be the object of their hatred.

I find it absolutely incredible and inexcusable, and inexcusable that someone of Lynn Squeaky Fromm's past history and her reputation would be permitted to get within two feet of President Ford. Law enforcement does not deserve any credit for the fact that President Ford is still alive. It seems to me that they should have been watching, squeaky, throughout the years, as I don't think they've done. And when President Ford was scheduled to come to Sacramento, law enforcement should have contacted the Secret Service

and alerted them about the existence of this person, and perhaps this would never have happened. The man Muleosie put in prison, Charles Manton, is in San Quentin Prison tonight, starting a life term for murder. Manson learned of the attempt on President Ford's life today by the prison grapevine. A San Quentin prison official said Manson reacted with what seemed to be non-committal surprise. Well, let's just really quickly talk about, like, the actual case in chief, and then the defense, and then we can maybe get to the aftermath.

Yeah. So like we've sort of danced around this and hinted at this. But for the prosecution, the big thing and the witnesses they pulled up, right? They pull up witnesses to sort of show Lynn's propensity for violence, to show that indeed she did point the gun at the president and pulled the trigger. And there was this click that was the noise, the click that was sort of meant that she did pull the trigger. and but for her incompetence or, you know, her not knowing how to use the gun properly or but for the grace of God, the gun didn't go off.

But it was fully Lynn's intention to shoot and kill the president. And they pull up this cast of characters, right? It was, what was his name, Ramir? Raymer. Yeah, Lanier Raymer. Yeah, Lanier Raymer. And then Vandivort, these people that were, in Lynn's circle, right, whether they corresponded with Lynn or actually were in her inner circle

network in Sacramento that came and testified about her proclivity for violence and her desire to do something big, right? And the prosecution was very much focused on this idea that, yes, indeed when Lynn went to the Capitol Park in September of 1975, she did so fully intending to shoot and kill the president. That was their case. Now, when they hand over the case, you know, the prosecution rests their case and they hand over the case to the defense. When they do that, they basically hand over all of this evidence. right where they're done with their case they hand over all this evidence of all these other witnesses that they would have called but they didn't and among that evidence is wouldn't you know it a potential exculpatory evidence within that evidence there is this witness statement that shows that you know there was someone that heard lynn call out you know not only it didn't go off it didn't go off but also that the gun it's not loaded anyways, meaning that she knew at the time that she allegedly pulled the trigger

that the gun did not have a bullet in the chamber. This wasn't revealed until after the prosecution had rest their case. That's a big deal. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a Supreme Court decision, a very old case from the era of the Warren Court in the 60s, called Brady v. Maryland, which says that the prosecution in any criminal action must provide to the defense immediately, you know, upon discovering it, any exculpatory evidence. That is, any evidence that tends to prove the innocence or undermine the showing of guilt or, you know, including undermining

the testimony of any witness that the prosecution is going to call, that is supposed to be turned over to the defendant as soon as the prosecution becomes aware of it and understands its exculpatory nature. And in this case, you know, there was extensive pretrial proceedings where the issue of Brady material had come up and the judge had stated in no understanding. uncertain terms. Of course, the government is aware of its Brady obligations. You must provide the defendant with any exculpatory evidence. It wasn't as though anybody on the prosecution team would have been unaware of this obligation. And nevertheless, you know, buried in their case file, they had this statement that was taken, I believe, the same day or more or less contemporaneously with

the event? Yeah, it was the same day. It was like that afternoon on September 5th, this guy, Demir, his last name was Damir, I think, had testified, or put out a witness statement, rather, that he had heard her say, you know, it's not loaded anyway, referring to the gun. Right, like in an interview with a cop or an FBI agent or whoever on the investigation team, was interviewing him, that was the context in which he gave this statement. And he affirmatively recollected that Squeaky had shouted, it's not loaded anyway.

That was the big quote. And this spurs just a whole brouhaha where the defense really rightly, I think, gets a glimmer or more than a glimmer of hope that the whole case could be tossed as a result of this Brady violation. Now, there is a sliding scale of remedies. Like, if a prosecutor fails its obligation to hand over exculpatory evidence in a timely manner, then what happens is the court will make a determination whether it's a harmless error. In other words, what big of a difference does it make that this was not revealed sooner. And if the error is prejudicial, if it could affect the outcome, and if it reflects bad faith on the part of the prosecution, like actually hiding

something as opposed to making just a mistake, then it's on the table that the court can toss the charges against the defendant. And the defendant can walk as a result of a Brady violation. It's happened many times, you know, a conviction gets reversed. It could be retried later or they could be released. There have been very many high profile Brady cases. We don't need to get into those now as we are taken up some time with this one, rightfully so, I think. But suffice it to say in this case, after really heated proceedings, a whole mini hearing about what to do about this. This is, of course, outside of the jury's hearing. This is a hearing just before the judge who has the authority to make the decision of what

to do. And the judge, in this case, found that it was harmless error. And so, you know, the hopes of the defense team are dashed. The trial proceeds as planned. And interestingly, you know, perhaps having been pressured by the prosecution team, the witness himself, this Demir guy, actually backs away from his original statement such that he wouldn't even be a valuable defense witness. Like he's kind of saying, oh, I don't really remember if I, like, I guess maybe I said that, but I don't really remember. but I don't really remember hearing it. And it's a little fishy.

Like, it's not clear if he just doesn't want to get into the middle of this imbroglio or whether he has been gotten to and is simply backing away in order to help the prosecution and avoid the would-be assassin of the president, you know, walking on his account. So I don't know. What do you think, Dick? Do you have anything else on this one? Like, it is pretty wild. Like, the judge, I think, could have made the opposite conclusion. He could have reached the opposite conclusion. Yeah, I would have probably made, yeah, I probably would have made the opposite conclusion, especially because this James Damir guy was on the witness list, which meant that, like, they didn't really have to give any evidence about him until after the case. after their case in chief, right? And there was this whole sort of component of not giving up this evidence because he was on the witness list and because he was a prosecution's witness.

And I think that was even one of the defense's arguments was like, well, they just put this guy on the witness list just so that they didn't have to give up this information. And of course, you know, Don Heller went through the ringer with the judge on this. and the judge was very upset at him. And I do think that it probably is enough to amount to Brady violation because it's not loaded anyways is pretty pretty heavy stuff. But then, you know, as you say, the judge is like, okay, whatever, it's harmless error onto the defense's case.

the defense first witness president gerald r ford and so they roll in the tv they have jerry's testimony and for the most part as you say the defense is uh defense is like this harm reduction defense to show that really it was really could amount to maybe an assault but not a not an assassination attempt. And, you know, throughout the whole thing, Lynn is very disruptive. She's in and out of the courtroom. Most of the case, most of the trial, she's just watching it on close circuit television. And by the time the defense rests their case, you know, the case goes to the jury.

It doesn't take very long for the jury to come back with their verdict. And, of course, they convict her. and when they do, Lynn cries out, you animals. She's sentenced to life imprisonment and she throws an apple. She throws an apple at Duane Keyes's head. That's a nice little punctuation mark at the end of the whole thing. And fittingly, I think the apple was actually supplied to her by Art Van Gogh. and court's wife, the same woman that had served as Squeaky's decoy,

or was asked to serve as Squeaky's Decoy, at least, after her arrest. Yes, and Lynn is sentenced to life imprisonment, and she spends the majority of her life in prison. And I think now is a good time to wrap up by discussing a little bit of the aftermath and trying to discern some meaning out of all of this as we move on to our next would-be assassin. Sarah Jane Moore. Yeah, so I think the big takeaway,

something that we've already discussed, is once she's locked up, you know, she does not have a platform to get her message out. She doesn't really have a platform to talk about the environment, to talk about Charlie Manson to do much of anything, really. She's locked up, she's serving out her time in relative obscurity, and, you know, I think it's not for several years until she does some TV interviews now and then,

on an anniversary, this or the other thing, but it's certainly nothing like what she might have had in mind if indeed she set this whole thing up in order to really get a direct line to the American people through the media. In 1987, there's a bit of a disturbance in her life story. She apparently hears that Charlie Manson is sick and on the verge of dying. and so at that time she actually tries to and does escape from prison in West Virginia. And it's the same prison that Sarah Jane Moore was being incarcerated at that time,

interestingly enough, although I think they did not really have a relationship with one another, and that's something that we can discuss later when we're in fully with Sarah Jane. But this escape is pretty interesting because Squeaky's just walking around the mountains of West Virginia for a few days and eventually gets, you know, gets picked back up. And she tells the cops that arrest her, you know, she wants to see Charlie Manson. And she doesn't get to see Charlie Manson. Turns out he wasn't really dying. So he lived for, of course, many, many years after 1987. And the upshot for Squeaky is, you know, it hurts her parole chances.

It keeps her in there a little bit longer. And so she doesn't get out until 2009. So in total, she served 34 years in prison for having a gun in her hand in close proximity to Gerald Ford, you know, did not fire any shots, did not injure anyone, and it's really questionable whether she had any intent to injure anybody. Nevertheless, she does 34 years. She gets out, and apparently, by all accounts, she has been living peacefully in New York State somewhere ever since. She published her memoirs that we talked about. you know, she was working on those for really her whole adult life after Charlie got locked up in 1969

and finally got those out to the world in 2018. And she's done a handful of radio interviews over the last few years. We've played some clips from some of those, you know, my impression having listened to, I believe all of them that are available online at least. It's several hours of interviews with her, you know, the elderly squeaky that I've listened to. And the real takeaway that I have is, you know, she seems to not be willing to talk about criminal activities very much at all, sticking with the no snitching paradigm. and she does not say an ill word about Charlie.

She's still very much in his thrall. I think she is pretty open, that she's still in love with him, and thinks that he's just the best. And she never got out from underneath his spell. And yet she still holds these beliefs that, you know, that we need to save the environment, that modern society and, you know, corporate dominance over American life is killing the climate and is putting all of us in jeopardy.

And now that Charlie is dead, you know, she doesn't have the old go-to solution anymore, but she is not a crusader. Let's just put it that way. She is speaking up when she can. She put her book out. Her book, as we have already covered in this series, is a wash job, I guess you could call it. It really focuses on all the positive things and all of the good times and the good vibes that were had at the Spawn Ranch especially. And then it kind of cuts off the narrative before all the bad shit happens.

So, you know, she is very much focused on the positive. She is prohibited from going on the internet. So as far as we know, she's not been able to hear any of these episodes, although perhaps somebody will send her some tapes or something so that she can give us a listen. And, of course, we would be happy to hear from Squeaky and and speak with her and get her side of all of this stuff. Because as we've kind of hammered home throughout the entire series, so, so much of all of this story is shrouded in the inevitable mystery that comes

when it's built on just a proliferation of competing narratives, all from individuals with competing agendas, and none of which has real solid evidentiary corroboration by reference to facts or events outside of those subjective perspectives that people are free to give and are free, of course, to manipulate to their own convenience. Yeah, Squeaky, if you ever hear, hear this, please do hit us up for Thrikepod at gmail.com. Oh, I guess you can't use the internet.

So get someone to write us because we would love to have you on and to get your take on all of this. Yeah. But for now, maybe we just talk about this point, which I think is a good way to sort of get towards the end of this episode, which is, here's the big question for you, Don. And I'll answer first. But the big question is, did she actually intend to kill Jerry Ford on September 5th, 1975? My take? Absolutely not. And I don't think, I mean, look, so at this point, it's kind of hard to make this

judgment call, having seen, you know, seen all the videos of her, seen, you know, Jerry Ford testimony, having read the, you know, the articles about her, having seen the SNL skits about her and sort of the way that this event has permeated the culture and our historical sort of view. It's really hard to sort of come to a conclusion without, you know, by sort of cordoning off all of that and come up to like some objective conclusion. But I think the big thing for me is that there wasn't a gun, there wasn't a bullet in the chamber. And she knew how to use a gun. She knew how to use automatic pistol.

And it's not like, you know, despite what S&L might want to portray her as, she wasn't this idiot when it came around to handling firearms. Because there is definitely a historical record of her, you know, showing she knew her way around automatic pistols. So I think that when she walked up that morning, she more than anything, wanted to just get some attention. I think this was very much a publicity stunt that she thought would give her some and give Charlie Manson a much-needed boost in the headlines. Because don't forget, by the time 1975 is rolling around, Charlie Manson is not relevant anymore.

You know, he's very much, his star is very much fading. and you know squeaky and sandy had been going through the saga of the atwa and trying to get um you know what is it the international people the international people's court of retribution trying to get that off the ground with no avail i think this was very much a PR stunt for the mansin family maybe a last ditch effort for the mans and family to try and get their name back in the headlines and you know uh to quote pete hegeseth squeaky effed around and she found out yeah no i tend to agree and for the exact same reasons i mean the most convincing thing is just if she wanted to kill him she knew how to and would have properly loaded and prepared the weapon

to be able to do the deed. And she didn't do that. And that, to me, is like the most telling thing. Because certainly she wouldn't have left her house thinking about, I'm going to go here with plausible deniability, but still wanting to kill him. And what she says is she left her house. She wasn't sure what would end up happening. You know, she left.

she had not made up her mind to kill the president, but she obviously did have a gun. And I think her lawyers have also opined publicly that they didn't think that she intended to kill him after having obviously a lot more in-person conversations with her about this than we ever could. And it just, it makes sense from understanding where her head was at, the thought process that would lead her to go and try and spark off this spectacle without actually wishing to end a life. Now, maybe there were other conversations. conversations that she was having and maybe she wanted other people to think that she was going to kill the president. Maybe she wanted Sandy to think that or she wanted Charlie to think that

because it would boost her cred in a certain respect with all of the Manson members that were incarcerated, for example. But, you know, at the end of the day, I just don't, I just don't see it. I don't her having been frustrated in a legit attempt. Now, the other question that I will put back to you, Dick, is related, I think, but it is whether, you know, assuming that she was just seeking attention here, based on what we've just sort of concluded provisionally, was this attempt part of a bigger plot or conspiracy, or was it just a rogue action by Squeaky,

maybe with some input from Sandy Good? And maybe I'll take a first stab at this one and opine that, you know, going into this series, you know, after I first read kind of the lay of the land on what was available, what was published about this attempt, I had real questions about whether this was part of a bigger plot. And I came into it, I guess, inclined to believe that it was part of a bigger plot, just given everything that happens later, you know, especially like the coincidence with another

assassination attempt coming just a couple of weeks later and all that follows that second assassination attempt. But after having really dug very deep on it, I have been dissuaded of that inclination because mainly because for the reasons we just said, like she had plenty of sort of idiosyncratic personal reasons for wanting to do this act as an attention-seeking propaganda of the deed and especially to try and get contact with Charlie and get Charlie back on the radar,

think that that is enough of a motivation from her point of view. and she didn't really need anybody to push her to that point of view that wasn't already, you know, in her inner circle. And the other reason is because, you know, at very first blush, I had a lot of suspicion about some of these characters that are involved in the attempt and in the trial, like, for example, Mani Borrow, of course, like, adjacent to the military industrial complex himself, a much older guy, and he's the one that supplies her with this gun and is kind of her boyfriend for a period of time

before this attempt. Given his sort of superficial suspiciousness, I had some questions about him. but nothing that I've seen after digging more deeply on him actually bears out that he was even capable of carrying out orders for a higher power because he's just kind of a loser like a dirty old man sort of guy puttering around as you described him. And the same goes for Judge McBride. Like on paper, he is suss as fuck. But, I mean, the guy just hasn't really done anything to raise the hackles of the suspicious, like, including in the conduct of the trial.

Now, that said, of course, I think the Brady decision, like, to not. throw out the case when it came to light that the prosecution had violated Brady in that pretty egregious way. My honest to goodness reflection from practice is this is a judge who just doesn't want to let a person walk who is a defendant in an extremely high-profile criminal case involving an attempted assassination of a sitting U.S. president. Like, nine judges out of ten. Right, he wants to get the case to the jury.

He wants to get the case to the jury. And so he's willing to sort of eat it through. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like, just because you and I, Dick, would reach a different result, you know, we don't have to actually make that determination because we're not sitting there. And likewise, you know, he has his career to think about and he has his reputation and his stature in the community and any judge, right?

Like, you see it all the time. Judges are inherently conservative with respect to criminal defendants because if a criminal defendant walks in the next day, they commit a crime, right? The headline in the paper, or if not the headline, at least two or three lines down, the name of the judge that let them walk is going to be associated as almost a guilty party in whatever crime they commit after a judge lets them out. And so I just think, you know, it's not really suspicious that Judge McBride reached this result and made the evidentiary rulings he did.

it's totally consistent with a normal ass judge doing normal judge things and being generically conservative, which is just what judges are almost all the time. So I don't see it here. We can talk a little bit later after you give your take about why notwithstanding the fact that it's not part necessarily of a conspiracy, it still figures into the overarching conspiracy narrative of the 1960s and 70s and of the consolidation of the spectacle and the rise of this forthright reality that we live in. But at this point, Dick, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Yeah, 100% agree. I think that the most interesting,

interesting thing about this whole event, the squeaky incident, the most interesting thing about it is that 17 days later, Sally Moore also tried to kill the president, right? I think that if it was only the squeaky incident that happened in September 1975, if there was only one would be assassin, and if that person was just squeaky, I think this whole thing would have a completely different characteristic to it, right? We wouldn't really be so interested in it, to be sure, right? Like, the facts surrounding the squeaky assassination attempt, they're not, to me at least, they're not as suss as the facts surrounding the Sarah

Jane Moore assassination attempt. And I think it's pretty clear to me that this wasn't some bigger plot, part of a bigger plot or bigger conspiracy. And that wouldn't even be a question in my head, were it not for the fact that within the same month, there is another attempt on President Jerry Ford's life in California. And I think that's like, really for me, that's like what it boils down to, which is that the most interesting thing about the squeaky Frommi assassination attempt is that there was another assassination attempt within 17 days in California. Yeah, exactly.

And again, to try to bring it back to the present day, you know, you can look at this period of time, 1975, as a period of time where events like this are, they don't have to be planned by deep state operatives in order to deride. from the conditions that are imposed upon the population by everything from the state of the economy to the state of the political system to the media, right? These are the ambient conditions that will lead a person like Squeaky to believe that propaganda of the deed, that assassination or that, you know, spectacle of attempted assassination is the only way to get your message across. And that's something that in the mid-70s, of course,

was very much in the air. We talked about how even in Sacramento, there were members of the SLA living and working and studying in Sacramento at this time. And we'll hear a lot more about the SLA as we get into Sally Moore, but it's just in the air that everyone is breathing, especially in California. You know, think about the paranoiac environment that is so effectively illustrated by Thomas Pinchon in Inherent Vice, for example, in 1970s, California. Or, you know, think about all of the movies of the 70s, all of the 70s, all of the, the paranoid cinema of the 70s,

a parallax view, all the president's men, the long goodbye, you know, all of the French connection movies. There's an ambient sense of paranoia, of looming violence in the air and of mystery and lack of accountability. And in this story, you know, we know that Squeaky's

deed fits into a longer narrative about broader deep state operations, even if it isn't itself a deep state operation, because we know that Manson was certainly a node in this underworld that interlocked with the deep state in the form of operation chaos. And it bridged a gap through crime, you know, through pornography, through drug trafficking, through human trafficking, to the Hollywood cultural elites. Remember when the Manson group was living with Dennis Wilson? Remember when they were hobnobbing with Dean Martin's daughter and with all of these celebrities with Terry Melcher, you know, the previous owner of the Cello Drive house, with the mamas and the papas with all of these major, major wealthy players in the cultural scene and in

the countercultural scene. And, you know, today we have the example of Epstein, which there's far more inaccurate bullshit circulating out there about that whole milieu than there is solid information that can lead to a deeper understanding of how the world works. But there is that parallel. And we've talked about that parallel, about how these really criminal folks who are not geniuses, they're not big minds, really. They are people with no scruples

who are in the right place at the right time and that have some special talent that makes them, useful to various powerful interests. And Charlie Manson was such a person. And Squeaky Frommi ended up becoming such a person, too, inasmuch as she carried this entire shit-coding operation forward of associating the hippie countercultural movement that reflected this desire among the youth

to break with the stifling, of their parents' generation with the repressed sexuality and the boring economic life that awaited with the sort of nine to five picket fence suburban model of life and that rejection which poses a real threat to the reproduction of the capitalist system was associated thanks in large part to the Manson crimes with insanity, with violence, with narcissistic egotism, and ultimately with, you know, with commercial products. So today, you know, 50 years later, plus we look back on hippiedom as a set of fashions, as a set of music, as a set, of movies as an aesthetic as something that is set in its time and in its place and that has been

fully incorporated into the system that it once stood against and at the end of the day I view the squeaky from a Jerry Ford assassination attempt as yet another sort of piece in that process, another phase in that process. And to a lesser extent, in the process of shit-coding environmentalism and cementing the link between environmentalism and white supremacy that's achieved by the Atwa-Aryan Brotherhood collab that, you know, today you never see or you rarely see, at least more rarely than you should see, the absolutely essential connection between any sort of environmental activism and criticism with the movements for racial liberation and solidarity.

And a big part of that is the strain of that. of sort of eco-fascism and white supremacy that has long been deliberately injected into environmental movements, and this is yet another vista into that process as well. And the way that the attempt passes into the discourse immediately after is proof of its value to the CIA adjacent makers and shapers of public opinion and of official historical narratives. So there's some really interesting magazine articles, one being the cover story from Time magazine, and another being the coverage and criticism of that article by Time publisher Henry Luce's wife, Claire Boothluse herself, up to her.

eyeballs in CIA connections. Hi there, folks. It's Dick, your friendly neighborhood noided podcast co-host, speaking to you in post-production. And we just could not help ourselves on this one and decided to give you all some further context. And for our Patreon family members, you will have already received this context in the form of a Patreon exclusive episode in which we read from these two articles that Don just mentioned. The first one, of course, is from Time Magazine. And the interesting thing about this one is that there's no byline. There's no author accredited for the work. But it was on the cover of Time Magazine on September 15, 1975. And it does compare our young protagonist, Squeaky,

to none other than Lee Harvey Oswald. And it even features a direct quote from none other than Dr. Jolly West. So without further ado, here is a brief excerpt from that Time magazine article read by Don. And folks don't sweat it. If you want to read the full thing, we're going to put the links in the summary of today's episode. And with that, here is an excerpt of the cover story that was published on Monday, September 15th, 1975 in Time magazine, Violence, the girl who almost killed Ford, as read by our very own Dawn. There was about the incident a sense of chilling deja vu. Only this time,

the president was not riding in a limousine. Instead, Gerald Ford was walking through a group of several hundred admirers in a pleasant sunlit park in front of the California State Capitol at Sacramento, shaking hands with people in his amiable, relaxed way. He was as pleased with his reception as John F. Kennedy had been with the crowds that had come out to meet him that day in Dallas in 1963. Once again, precisely at 9.57 a.m. on Friday the threat suddenly materialized out of nowhere. A movement in the crowd, a raising of a hand. And to his astonishment, Ford found himself looking down the barrel of a loaded 45-cult automatic pistol,

scarcely two feet away. There was a brief flurry, and then the Secret Service subdued, a social misfit, a psychological cripple who might have easily assassinated the president. of the U.S. Her name was Lynette Alice Fromm. As an aside here, I will pronounce her name as it was pronounced in the mainstream media at the time, you know, rather than consistent with how she has articulated the pronunciation. Okay, back to the narrative.

Her name was Lynette Alice Fromm, and she was the first woman ever to attempt to kill her a president of the U.S. Her manner was gentle, and while she was pretty in a freckle-faced, red-haired, little girl sort of way, she would turn few heads on the street. But the 27-year-old woman behind this innocent facade was anything but normal. In her way, Lynette Fromm was as much a social aberration, an amoral freak, as Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of John F. Kennedy, or Sirhan Sirhan, who shot to death Robert F. Kennedy, or Arthur Bremer, who crippled Alabama governor George Wallace. She had been, and still was, an ardent follower of Charles Manson, the psychopathic killer who's now serving a sentence of life imprisonment for committing seven murders, including

the vicious slaughters in 1969, a film actress Sharon Tate and Lino Labianca, wealthy owner of a grocery chain. Because her voice was so tiny and high-pitched, Manson had nicknamed her Squeaky. Discerbing Paradox. Squeaky Fromm's mad act in Sacramento Park with a 45 in her small hand had an immediate sobering effect on the 1976 presidential election campaign. All too clearly, every candidate could visualize a similar attack being launched against himself. The incident was also a vivid and sickening reminder of one of the most disturbing paradoxes of America. The fact that such a liberal and free society should somehow generate a sprinkling of warped souls who, for dark reasons of their own, seek to work out their frustrations by destroying political leaders.

The free society has discovered no effective way of identifying and controlling its demons. Despite the vigilance of the Secret Service, American presidents traditionally make themselves easy targets for would-be assassins. They love to get out among the people, to press the flesh in Lyndon Johnson's homie phrase, to show that they are just plain Americans, after all. No one could reach the White House while campaigning from behind a bulletproof glass. Just hours after his near escape, Gerald Ford was in full. and calmly telling newsmen that this incident under no circumstances will prevent me or preclude me from contacting the American people as I travel from one state to another and from one community to another. What made the flare of violence in Sacramento, especially baffling and frightening for leading American politicians,

was the fact that Jerry Ford seemed to be as free of the danger of assassination as any man could be, a friendly father figure who excited neither envy nor hatred. But Squeaky Fromm had discovered her own reasons to dislike the man. With Sandra Good, her roommate and another member of the Manson family, Fromm issued a statement to the press two months ago equating Ford with Richard Nixon, the man whom the clan has always blamed as the source of its troubles with the law, declared the release, quote, if Nixon's reality wearing a new face, i.e. Ford, continues to run this country against the law,

your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-Labianca houses and Milai put together, end quote. Watching hands. Fromm was ready when Ford flew into town from Portland, Oregon at 10.42 p.m. Thursday, he was accompanied by the standard number of agents in his personal entourage, the exact number is secret, and there was a relaxed air about the trip. A secret service official points out that if there had been any indication of trouble, Ford would not have been allowed to walk anywhere. He would have been in a car. Ford spent Thursday night in a suite on the sixth floor of the Senator Hotel, a nine-story Moroccan-style building in downtown Sacramento.

On Friday morning, he addressed a breakfast gathering of a thousand prominent citizens, winning solid applause by attacking excessive government regulation for causing, quote, cost, contradiction, and confusion, end quote. He was obviously untroubled by a plea from liberal Republicans earlier in the week that he moderate his conservative line. After the breakfast meeting, Ford went back to the hotel and, right on schedule, left at 9.55, to walk a block to the California State Capitol where he had a 10 o'clock appointment with Governor Jerry Brown. At about that time, a small, slim woman, wearing a bright red, full-length gown, and a matching turban, asked a policeman on the street between the hotel and

the Capitol if the President was coming. He made a non-committal reply, and Squeaky Fromm waited. As Ford started across a small park in front of the Capitol, he was greeted by bursts of applause from the crowd that had been waiting patiently to see him, or perhaps even shake his hand. Head up and smiling, surrounded by aides and Secret Service agents, Ford moved quickly through the park, an athletic, vigorous man obviously enjoying his reception. As the party moved along, the agents carefully watched the hands of people that were approaching, says one veteran agent, quote, You gotta keep an eye on their hands, sure, you notice looks and faces and a lot of other things,

but hands are the most important. If somebody's going to try to hurt the president, they'll have to use their hands, end quote. Waiting, the woman in the red dress began to raise her automatic. Near a magnolia tree, Ford paused to shake some hands. He was actually stretching his hand out to the woman in red, according to some witnesses, when he froze for an instant. Quote, I saw a hand coming up between several others in the front row,

Ford would later recall, and obviously there was a gun in that hand. She was no more than two feet away from the big man who made such an easy target. She cried out, The country is in a mess. This man is not your president. Let's go. White-faced, Ford flinched from the gun. At the same instant, Secret Service agent Larry Boondorf, 37, lunged forward.

A husky athlete, Boondorf easily arrested the gun from her grasp and threw her to the ground. With the help of agents and a policeman, he quickly handcuffed her. Meanwhile, another Secret Service agent shouted, Let's go. The command was a signal to tell other agents in the area that Ford was in danger. Swiftly, a cordon of men formed around the shaken president. Two agents pulled down his suit jacket, forcing the tall six-foot-two-inch Ford to bend so that he was partially concealed by the group.

Then, moving at a brisk walk, the party swept through the park, past the startled spectators and in to the safety of the capital. As the president disappeared, Squeaky Fromm was shouting in her little girl voice, He's not a public servant. He's not a public servant. She also cried out, it didn't go off. Can you believe it? It didn't go off. Why the gun could not go off quickly became clear when the Secret Service examined the three-pound colt automatic. It was loaded with four bullets, but there was no bullet in the chamber ready to be fired. To shoot the gun, Fram would first have had to pull back on the slide on top of the pistol,

thus forcing a bullet from the clip up into the chamber. After the first shot was fired, the next bullet would have been automatically fed into the chamber. There is evidence that Fromm was doing her best to shoot the weapon, that at such close range would almost certainly have killed the president. Some witnesses reported hearing a distinct clicking sound, which could have been made by the hammer snapping forward as she pulled the trigger. In addition, there is the record of what happened to Agent Boondorf when he leaped into action. Instinctively, as he had been trained, Boondorff grabbed for the hammer of the gun,

trying to interpose the web of skin between his right thumb and his right forefinger between the hammer and the firing pin. In the confusion, just what happened is not clear, but Boondorf came away with a cut between thumb and finger, as though he had been caught by the striking hammer. Once inside the Capitol, Ford recovered his aplomb so quickly that he went right on to his meeting with Governor Brown without making any mention of the incident.

In fact, Brown did not learn what had happened right outside his office until a Ford aide brought up the matter after half an hour. Later, Ford insisted upon addressing the California legislature as planned without mentioning what had occurred earlier. He looked when and was unusually serious. Ironically, his topic was crime. Ford told the lawmakers that he was especially concerned about the truly alarming increase and violent crime throughout this country

and advocated mandatory sentences for persons found guilty of crimes involving the use of a dangerous weapon. Trying to explain Frum's fascination with violence, Dr. Louis Jolion West, head of the psychiatry department at UCLA, points out that she was part of a group whose members all were paranoid to varying degrees. They all suffered from group syndrome, he says. There was a pattern of holding to false beliefs with even greater conviction and emotional commitment than a normal person's beliefs that are subject to the laws of evidence.

They're being victimized by conspiracies and plots coming from very high levels of government. This affirms the grandiosity of their self-image, and it justifies the violence with which they strike back. Class hatred. Psychiatrist Harry L. Kozol, director of the Massachusetts Research Program on the study of dangerous persons, thinks that Fromm may really have been striking at Nixon when she took aim at Ford. Broadly speaking, adds Kozol, assassinations are eruptions of bitter class hatred. By killing a member of a more powerful group, he says, the assassin not only exercises class hatred, but builds up egotism and self-confidence.

However well he conceals it, every leading American politician is acutely aware that someday he may be the target of the wild frustrations of a psychosis. The kind of sullen person who broods in rooming houses in the striking phrase of Democratic presidential candidate Morris Udall. The news of Ford's near escape from death made the current presidential candidates of outer coy even more apprehensive, but they were saying little about their concerns in public. Wow, I'd like to thank Don personally for that inspired reading. I can't wait to listen to more. Of course, our Patreon family can listen to the whole thing in that Patreon exclusive episode, or you can read the whole article on the link that will be provided to you. But for now, let's turn to the next article published in the New York Times.

This one was accredited to an author by the name of Claire Booth Luce, aka Henry Luce's wife. And this one was published on September 30th, 1975. in the New York Times, and it's titled The Significance of Squeaky Fromm. Is Lynette Squeaky Fromm, the 27-year-old girl who tried to assassinate President Ford, just one more youthful psychotic, whose case should be disposed of by the state's criminal psychologists and forgotten, but is the girl in the long blood-red nun's robe in hood, who proudly wears the Manson, mark of cane on her brow have some social and political significance for our culture and our system of

government. Poverty and illiteracy, today's favorite explanation and apologia for youthful criminality, do not explain her. She was raised in a comfortable middle-class home and was in her first year in college when her father, a well-to-do aeronautical engineer, kicked her out, apparently because she was promiscuous and insubordinate. Shortly after, a chance encounter at a bus stop with a jailbird named Charles Manson led her to join the Manson family in the hippie world of Hate Hatchberry.

She still considers herself the main lady of the hypnotic parent-e-sukes who masterminded the seven sadistic murders for which he and three of his girl children are now serving life sentences. Freudian psychologists will have no trouble explaining her in terms of a father complex. In some things she has said and written about her harsh parent, there are definite overtones of the repressed, incestuous desires,

which he seems consciously or unconsciously to have aroused in her. In Freudian thought, patricide is the archetypal gesture of youthful, rebellion against parental authority and liberation from the sexual taboos and cultural restraints imposed by the old man of the tribe. Freudians will find it easy to construe how her attack on the president was a subconscious transference of her hatred of her own father for rejecting her sexually to the great white father figure. She herself claims that her motivation was political, She blamed President Nixon for the conviction of Manson and had planned to kill him. But when he resigned, she decided to kill Mr. Ford because he had been appointed by Mr. Nixon and had pardoned him.

But every young woman who hates her father and wishes he were dead doesn't, fortunately, actually try to kill him, or his Freudian stand-in the president. What was the psychology, a philosophy? that gave this freckle-faced little flower child the courage to debase a noble word to carry out her patricidal wishes. We're all children of our times and the culture of the communities that we live in. Miss Fromm's philosophy is the philosophy of the counterculture of the youth revolution and the flower children who first began to bloom in the drug-drenched soil. Excuse me, in the drug-drenched soil of hate Ashbury. Miss Fram herself denies that she has a philosophy. If you have no philosophy, you don't have any rules, she explained to her captors.

In an unpublished memoir recently obtained by time, she wrote that freedom to her meant getting everything out from behind closed doors and shedding all the guilt feelings, especially about sex and obedience, which had been inculcated by her middle-class parents. She discovered a goal in life after she became a flower child. It was to find something exciting and do something that felt good. I didn't. I wouldn't adjust to society and the reality of things I've made my own world.

It may sound like an Alice in Wonderland world, but it makes sense. says her memoir. Any college philosophy major knows the name of Miss Fram's philosophy. It is existentialism, the 20th century thought system expounded most notably in the 30s by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French writer. Sartre, like many Western existentialists, gives lip service to communism, which is the political thought system most congruent with existentialism. Existentialism holds that there is no life hereafter.

There is not even a yesterday or a tomorrow. The here and now, the existential moment is life's only reality. Moral values based on transcendental concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, got or devil, are sheer fantasies, the ephemeral effluvia of the human brain box. Man creates his gods, religions, and moral values, in order to give some meaning to the random, episodic, transient succession of moments he calls living, or, more often to him and his class, to exercise power over others, and deprive them of their freedom by manipulating the consciences and guilt feelings that religions and moral values create in them.

Existentialism, like communism. Even life itself cannot be called good, Subison's life is essentially accidental, irrational, meaningless, tragic, in a word, absurd. As the French existential novelist, Camus puts it, the only philosophical question worth asking is, Why shouldn't I commit suicide? The individual's freedom consists in acting, and acting out his emotions, feelings, impulses, and desires. Nero and Hitler, Jesus and G.

Gandhi were equally free men. They knew what they wanted and did it. In the jargon of today's youth, existentialism is picking your own bag, doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and anything goes, including violence. Violence, including suicide, is the natural reaction to the absurdity of human existence. It is the vomit induced by the nausea of life. One makes love, not war, not because love is a good value and war a bad one, but because it feels good to make love, and it doesn't feel good to be wounded or killed, unless one is a masochist and likes it. On the other hand, if wounding or killing or even torturing someone else feels good, the sadistic act is equally liberating.

The Manson girl, who repeatedly stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate in the belly, dipped her fingers in the victim's blood, lick them, the sensation. Wow, delicious. Time, in its recent cover story on Miss Fram, suggests that she's an amoral freak. Editorializing on her mad act, the magazine wrote, The Incident was a vivid reminder of one of the most disturbing paradoxes of America, the fact that such a liberal and free society should somehow generate a sprinkling of warped souls who, for dark reasons of their own, seeked. to work out their frustrations by destroying political leaders.

The free society has discovered no effective way of identifying and controlling its demons. To write of a sprinkling of warped souls is to ignore the fact that America is now producing a deluge of warped souls and amoral freaks. The rise in this decade in juvenile gangs, armed robberies, rapes, Car thefts, prostitution, drug peddling, drug addiction, and alcoholism is horrifying. In the richer society on earth, more than $5 billion a year are purloined by youthful lifters. Youthful vandalism costs our society another several billion annually. Congress has just passed a $40 million bill for fiscal year 76 to study and prevent

juvenile delinquency. But sociologists have begun reluctantly to face the appalling fact that the majority of juvenile crimes are committed just because they feel good and are something exciting to do. Secondly, it is no paradox that a society which has helter-skelter been abandoning its traditional Judeo-Christian moral values is now producing demons. And to say that it is found no way of controlling them is to ignore the reasons why our free and liberal society is continuing to produce them in ever greater numbers. Excuse me. Some years before the counterculture became a newsworthy phenomenon, Joseph Wood Crutch wrote,

quote, Without standards, society lapses into anarchy, and the individual becomes a of an intolerable disharmony between himself and his universe. End quote. This intolerable disharmony is the nausea described by Sartre, which the young individual feels when he learns from his parents, teachers, or professors, that life is meaningless, that all morals are relative, all ethics situational, and that eternal verities are so much religious mumbo-jumbo and obsolete bourgeois,

What nonsense. What do you say we call it on this one? Sounds good to me. Okay. Thanks again for your time, dear listener. Join us next week when we will no doubt be covering some other wild and crazy topic in depth with you, for you, with each other, for each other. Until next time, I'm Dick and I'm Don saying farewell. And keep on digging.

Well, our dream has soiled nights and honor. I'm saying something about the queen. Peas and sing. All righty, folks, you know what time it is. It is time to give credit where credit is due. and for us to do some shoutouts to our Patreon doctoral candidate and research assistant members. Thank you so much to Remington, to Sammy Sixth Guns, to Lenin Party, to Hank, to Sergeant Grumbles, to Cornelia, to Bic, to Dave B. Thank you so much to Raven, to McGee, to Al, to Kelly, to Annie, to Venn, to Wizard of Choice, to Mike.

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