Fourth Reich Archaeology - She Harvey Oswald, Part 1

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Well, folks, we are back in Jerryworld, and we are right on to the next series within a series. The one you’ve been waiting for. The one we’ve been waiting for. It’s She. Harvey. Oswald. Our deep dive into the two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford just over a year into his presidency. We are just in time for the 50th anniversary of “almost-bloody September” 1975. On September 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme - one of the original members of the Manson family, then aged 26 years old - pointed a .45 caliber pistol at Jerry Ford as he pressed the flesh outside the California state house in Sacramento. She said she did it for the redwoods, and insisted she didn’t intend to hurt anyone.Just 17 days later, on September 22, a 45-year-old accountant named Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at Jerry with a .38 pistol outside of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. She missed by a mere six inches. Moore had spent the California years of lead deeply embedded in the revolutionary left-wing scene in the Bay Area… as an informant for the FBI. There is so much to these deepest of deep events, and we will get into all of it in this miniseries, but first, in this episode, we will set the stage. That proprietary Fourth Reich Archaeology lens, fully equipped with some extensive quotation by Guy Debord, and a zoomed-out snapshot of the development of the spectacle between November 63 and September 75. This episode really has it all. Gerald Ford, geopolitical mise-en-scene, female assassins, radical leftists, parallels to the present day, and so much more.Patreon: Pateron.com/fourthreicharchaeologyTwitter & Insta: @fourthreichpod

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be the President of the United States. To me, nothing could be better than being the leader of the free world, a man who everyone, looked up to and respected. It was as if I were predestined for it by the great architect of the universe. Growing up, the leaders I knew weren't like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted, and everybody wanted them. My father introduced me to Senator Arthur Vandenberg

when I was only a boy. He was probably the most popular man in Grand Rapids. There was a man who commanded respect. I was the luckiest kid in the world, partly because I made my own luck. I learned that with the right attitude and plenty of hard work and persistence, I could go anywhere. I could do anything.

I knew everybody and everybody knew me. I was captain of an undefeated football, recruited by the Green Bay Packers. I got into Yale Law School. I graced the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. I went off to war and came back a hero. I almost died, too. I got into the Congress on a long shot, and before along, I was tapped to help cover up the murder

My old colleague and friend John Kenney. I got named vice president when the guy in that office got caught taking suitcases full of cash. And wouldn't you know it, before a year had passed, I became president. When the other guy got caught trying to pay off a CIA agent to cover up a break in into his political opponent's office, what a country. Must I forever be a bank? But it sure gets lonely at the top, and dangerous too. These damn California women keep taking hot shots, trying to kill me. But not only did I survive, I survive knowing I was important enough to want to kill in the first place.

And that's the feeling of respect. That's America. 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. where you were 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 a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the 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 require information, which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA. No, he has a mile. He knows so long as to die. Freedom can never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. A lot of killers. You've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? This is not going to see. Welcome back, listener. We are thrilled once again to welcome you to the temperate climbs of Jerry World.

That's right. We have the Warren Commission decided series within a series, firmly in the rear view mirror, and we are blazing ahead at full speed into Jerry World. fact, as we'll get into momentarily, we've even jumped ahead in time by a decade. But before we dive into the subject matter of today's episode, the usual preliminaries. First of all, thank you. Thank you for tuning in.

Thank you for your support. thank you for liking subscribing to and spreading the word about our podcast we rely almost entirely on the lot of you listeners rather than any sort of paid signal boosting and i should certainly reckon that we are not at the signal boosting of convenience that the teal network and the musk network and all of the other podcast mighty whorlitzer players enjoy distributing to the masses and therefore it is incumbent upon you listener to be our voice to the world. We are also a voice and an ear to listen to whatever you have to say to us and can be reached by email at forthrighteckpod at gmail.com. We're on Twitter and Instagram at Fortrykepod. And of course,

we do have a Patreon where you can, if you're willing and able, contribute. to our project such that we may dedicate more time, more energy to this project, and to reach more ears like yours. We recently were both Dick and myself on the Subliminal Jihad podcast. Had a great time with Dimitri and Khalid over there. talked about popping that ontological Nazi bubble in which we unfortunately all live and in which we are prevented from seeing the entirety of our very unfortunately Nazi-adjacent reality, and that concealment, that veil, is slowly but surely being lifted, albeit in an alarming way, in a way that's unsettling as the wake-up call, the rude awakening

to our fascist reality is being imposed upon us by the very people who will just as soon take our very last rights away from us as they would salute us on the street. Man, I had such a blast on Slipple Middle Jihad. Those guys are great. Everyone should listen to that episode. Just want to echo your comments. Don, as always, thank you very much to everyone who has been boosting our signal. You know, with a name like Fourth Reich archaeology, we're not likely to get that signal boost from the likes of the musks and the teals and the, basically anyone else, right?

I always say our title is provocative and it is a, it's ripe for misunderstanding. We were joking with the S.J. guys about the same thing, right? Subliminal jihad as well. It's just, these are provocative names, and I think they definitely evoke the things that we want to evoke, and that's why we chose them, and certainly there's an element of satire. But with names like ours, we are definitely not likely to be. promoted by the mainstream. Right, because the mainstream depends on existing in a bubble of lies. A bubble of lies that tells us we live in a democracy and all sorts of nonsense

that's provably and demonstrably false. The point of our name is to really force people to confront the truth of the matter, right? The whole point is to call out the sad truth. fact that we are unfortunately living in the Fourth Reich and it's a bad thing so for someone to even engage in our materials they have to be prepared to receive that message anyhow don i can't believe i'm about to say this but we hope everyone enjoyed the warren commission decided it is over folks well we're not going to say it's the end forever period

But we are closing the chapter on the Warren Commission decided. We hope that you all enjoyed it very much. It was almost the year ago where we were talking about doing this maybe one, two, three-parter mini-series on the Warren Commission as part of our broader Jerry world. But darn it, it was just so much fertile ground there that we, just had to keep digging like when we started i had no i had no idea we would be going so deep into john mccloy but we went there and i think it's fitting that we disembarked from the saga with a deep dive a lengthy excavation into the life in times of jack ruby which of course concluded with this discussion of his bizarre and sudden psychosis that put a layer of mystery,

a sheen of uncertainty over everything he said in the final years of his life, especially those statements like, you know, he was indeed part of a larger conspiracy when he was saying things like, the world will never know the true facts, and all of that will become very relevant in this. miniseries as well, but don't want to give away too many of them spoilers just yet, so just be prepared. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, a big part of this consolidation of the Fourth Reich has to do with murder and psychosis and the intersection between the two. And that is exactly what. what is dead center in the bullseye of our new mini-series that we launch with this episode.

We are going to fast forward in time from the successful political assassination attempt on President John F. Kennedy, which of course was carried out in November 1963 and we're going to jump in time a dozen years or so to a pair of failed assassination attempts by a pair of female would-be assassins on our aerial heroic protagonist of the series Gerald Rudolph. Ford. This is the 50th anniversary of the two hit attempts on Jerry Ford, and it couldn't be more timely as once again political assassination is dominating the airwaves, is dominating the discourse, and unfortunately, once again, is dominating the policy discussions underway about what additional clampdowns and additional repression may be available to the powers that be

to further repress political dissent and to further control the supposedly democratic subjects of the United States Empire. So this is something we've been looking forward to talking about for a very long time. Our long-time listeners, our ground floor partners in excavation will recall that we previewed this way back last year when we first kicked off the podcast. And we're first, before we dig into it, going to provide, as we always try to do, a very high-level, level set, an introduction, a reintroduction to the subject matter, the dual assassination attempts on our boy Jerry. So first up, on September 5th, 1975, Jerry Ford found himself in Sacramento, California, where he had been invited to address the California Chamber of Commerce.

The host breakfast, it was, I think, not just the chamber, it was like all of the businesses in the community, like, the head honchos of all of these industries. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is like a big annual thing. Usually the governor would be the featured speaker, but the California Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, declined to appear because he was carving out a political identity of his own

that was very much opposed to the image of favoritism and beholdenness to the business community, Gerald Ford wasn't so concerned. In fact, he reveled in the adulation of the business community. And so he accepted the invitation. He addressed the breakfast. He returned to his hotel,

the Senator Hotel in Sacramento, on L Street, very proximate to the state house and a little bit after resting up following his address he was on his way to the state house to meet with the self-same governor Jerry Brown and on his way short walk he was out there pressing the flesh among a crowd of people when he noticed a metallic object at about knee height among the would-be handshakers in the crowd. That metallic object was affixed to the ankle of a red-headed young woman who was dressed like red riding hood, in fact,

in a ostentatious red robe. and before she got a chance to really take aim with that metallic object, which, of course, was a Colt 45 pistol, why the Secret Service sprang into action and got the woman to the ground, disabled her weapon, and later discovered that she was none other than Lynette, Alice Squeaky Fromey. And that name may be familiar to some because she was one of the original Manson girls,

one of the original followers of Charles Manson and one of the original members of the so-called Manson family. And as she was carried away from the scene, she was repeatedly heard, calm. out, it didn't go off. It didn't go off. Could you believe it? It didn't even go off. Dick, you want to cover what happened just a couple of weeks later? Before we do that, Don, because I know they're going to be coming at us. How'd you pronounce Squeaky's last name? Oh, good. Yeah. It is pronounced Frommi or so she alleges, and this will become relevant, not in this episode, but in a future one,

Why did she start correcting people about the pronunciation of her name? Well, it was because her father, the German-American middle-class Mr. Fromey, would often become quite animated in correcting people about the pronunciation of his surname, people that he may come into acquaintance with in the course of his employment in Southern California's aerospace industry and just 17 days later a little further south in California in the city of San Francisco on September 22nd a shot from a 38 special revolver does go off it goes off it goes off and it narrowly misses Jerry Ford's head by about six inches.

And that shot was fired by Sarah Jane Moore, a 45-year-old accountant, FBI informant, and self-proclaimed a lot of things. She's a self-proclaimed art dealer, art critic. She was a self-proclaimed math-wiz. She was a self-proclaimed revolutionary radical leftist. And it is officially unrelated to, totally unrelated to the squeaky incident, but very bizarre. And this series will be our excavation into these two events, the women at the center of them, and what they tell us about the tectonic political shifts underway in the mid-70s, as well as their impact on, Jerry Ford, his administration, and the world it shaped.

Yeah, really, this is a high watermark in this process we've been delineating about the consolidation of the Fourth Reich, about the integration of the spectacle that we have made a real focus of our discussions using the theoretical framework. supplied by Friend of the Pod Guy Beaux. It's a period of time in between the first shots in what you might call a cold civil war in America that rang out on November 22nd, 1963, and a war that perhaps you could place the end of it, maybe in the late 70s, maybe with the mass death event at Jonestown in Guyana, maybe you could place the end of it with the release of the American hostages in Tehran in January

1981 on the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. The point is you... have a problem in the United States in the post-war period. And that problem is called democracy. You simply cannot, if you are the ruling class who has essentially pulled off the absorption of imperial power from all the allies of World War II who find themselves in a state of physical destruction, economic depression, and cultural decadence with a crumbling imperial periphery. And the United States, with relatively clean bill of health,

all those fronts comes to scoop it all up and put that in the bag and keep the game of exploitation not only going strong but growing and expanding and becoming permanent in a very concrete way with its whole media apparatus built up in support and its infrastructure built up economically and politically on a global level with the indispensable assistance of the remnants of the Third Reich in the form of both the paperclip Nazi scientists and of course. course, the Galen Organization that becomes the United States Eastern Front intelligence apparatus after the war. Domestically, of course, none of this could really fly. Why? Because America's

built on freedom. You can't have a country built on freedom and geared towards pure imperialist exploitation, nor can you have a country foundation in opposition to Nazism and to the destructive horrors of the Nazi Third Reich, while also absorbing the entirety of the Third Reich surviving apparatus into its own structure. And so you need a way to do away with democracy, a way to destroy democracy, but also continue the spectacle of democracy and pull the wool over the eyes of the people. And there's not a clean way to do that. It's going to get dirty.

It's going to get violent and nasty. And we are going to zero in on that process in this series. And we hope, listener, that it will be enlightening for you as it has been for us to dig, into it and so I think this is a good time to say the magic words well wait a minute before we do that I just want to say and I'm talking to our day one homies now are tried and true Jerry heads are long time listeners it's just me and you right now I want to assure you please rest assure that we are not just skipping ahead in time. Many of you at this point, certainly our longtime listeners, have noticed by now probably

that the pacing that we established in our kickoff episode when we left Jerry World to dig deep into the Warren Commission decided the pacing does not really line up with this first module back into Jerry World. We are skipping ahead, for instance, of Jerry's rise to the presidency. We're skipping ahead of all of the first encounters he had with the likes of Don Rumsfeld with George Bush, George H.W. Bush, that is. And even Jerry's involvement in Michigan's big UFO story of 1966. There is fertile ground that we have yet to cultivate and we are going to obviously double back and track all of that. We are of course going to track Jerry's moves during the rise of the Nixon administration, Watergate, all of that. So please rest assured. We're not

leaving meat on them bones given the timeliness of it all as we'll explain in this episode we couldn't wait any longer we just wanted to dive deep into this miniseries and i think you'll agree with us that it is a good thing that we did now without any further ado let's get digging When President Ford was choosing a title for his memoir, he chose words from the book of Clesiasties. He was the verse. Do everything there is a season. President Nixon turns to the minority leader in the house to stabilize his administration because Jerry Ford's thrilling reputation for integrity.

A time to be born. A time to die. A time to die. A time to breathe. A time to kill. A time to heal. A time to have. A time to read.

To political ally and adversary alike, Jerry Ford's word was always good. And of course, the lie that was finally laid bare. Once again, we entrusted our future and our hope for this good man. As Americans, we generally spew notions of the indispensable man.

And yet during those traumatic times, few, if any, of our public leaders could have stepped into the brief and rekindled our national faith as did President Gerald Ruffler. A woman fired a shot President Ford at San Francisco this afternoon. After the afternoon, the policeman collected the pistol, the president was not hit.

Yes, it was just 17 days ago in Sacramento, the appointed the pistol president for. Mr. Arms linked away, that weapon did not fire. A time of love, a time of hate, a time for... You, as president were the subject of a number of attacks, and fortunately, escaped with your hide, Pretty healthy, though. Yes, she certainly, I'm glad she missed. As you were saying,

part of the reason for this jump ahead in time is, in fact, opportunistic, because nobody, and I say this with all humility, But I think it's true. Nobody out there is better poised to cover the 50th anniversary of the double Jerry Ford assassination attempts than your boys Dick and Don on Fourth Reich archaeology. I mean, you got to give it to us. People, if you give us nothing else at this point, give us that.

So we got to get on that beat. we got to cover our beat and we can't risk given the bone to all those charlatan hacks out there and let them get the jump on us and it's also true that and this was not planned you know we've been planning this for quite a long time but it was not planned that it would be so timely no I think even last week I was thinking maybe maybe now isn't the time for us to do a deep dive on a couple politically charged assassinations in a time where the left was confronting the right over big issues like the environment and wages and living conditions and you know the endless wars needless endless wars maybe this isn't the moment to talk about those things and then they went and killed charlie kirk and I was back on track. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No doubt.

So part of it is opportunistic, but part of it is also thematic because Jerry's service on the Warren Commission really put him in the front row as a spectator to the big show of the Deep State that was put on around the spectacle of the Kennedy assassination. He had a personal view into the operations of the military industrial complex. He had a privileged vantage point to observe the covert operations of the intelligence agencies, and as we discussed in the very last episode of the Warren Commission decided, Jerry was a witting and a willing participant in the Warren Report cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.

He knew that the Warren Report was bunk, and he knew that he was playing a role, in spouting its conclusions to the world and performing that function that was so eloquently attributed to him and summed up at his eulogy, at his funeral by George H.W. Bush, right? It was, the Warren Commission will remain the final word

because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Fard's word was always good. And so there's no doubt that this sense of being on the winning team gave Jerry a massive confidence boost coming out of 1964. He must have felt invincible. But at the same time, he was up against a brick wall of the, or I guess you could say the opposite of a glass

ceiling, a brick ceiling for his personal political rise. Why? Because notwithstanding his leadership in the Congress, the Republican Party was pretty much

screwed for the foreseeable future. They weren't going to take a majority any time soon, not least because, there was a martyred Democrat president and there was a legislatively accomplished successor to that martyred president. I mean, remember, I know Dick and I are certainly old enough to recall that when Hillary

Clinton was running against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, she called up the legacy of Lyndon Johnson's pragmatism. And I would point to the fact that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, president before, had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said we're going to do it and actually it's the high point of the Democratic Party really in the 20th century

and if you're Jerry Ford and your dream is to become Speaker of the House well what do you say about a dream deferred what happens to a dream deferred what does it shrivel up like a raisin in the sun or does it burst and jerry's dream recall was deep-seated it was planted in his mind his ambition

by his mother Dorothy Gardner who was a member just like her mother before her of the daughters of the American Revolution he came from a long line of proud Americans with a personal stake who saw themselves as having a personal stake in the outcome of this American experiment, tracing their ancestry all the way back to its roots and seeing their future

in its heights. And Jerry Ford, you know, he was a 33rd degree master Mason. He was a a part of the self-appointed elect, which really claimed and claims to this day ownership over the continuation of the expansion of the American project that entails overlooking its flaws, believing its mythology, and of course enjoying all of the awards and accolades that come with life at the top of the pyramid. And so, as much as all politicians are lying sex as shit, nevertheless, the effectiveness of any given politician, Jerry Ford being a prime example, is dependent upon the effectiveness of their communication of that grain of sincerity beneath the bullshit.

And Jerry was a talented political performer. You know, in that you can look through whatever was being said about him at the time to what is now said about him in hindsight and see that his entire, legacy really is about his perceived sincerity. And that is the flame that burned in his soul and that brought him to the heights of power when he finally was sworn in as president. I want to just talk about how much Jerry's sense of invincibility was destroyed. when he became the target of the first post-Kennedy presidential assassination attempt on September 5th, 1975, and then he becomes the target of the second post-Kennedy presidential assassination attempt

on September 22nd, 1975. Well, first of all, it would be, what would be really wild is if Jerry Ford actually was assassinated on September 22nd, 1975, because I think the alternate universe, cool bookend to the Kennedy assassination where you um have Jerry on on TV getting popped but it didn't happen after the second assassination attempt he is shook up to say the least and I got to think knowing what he knew experiencing what he had already experienced in connection with the Kennedy assassination and cover-up that was called the Warren Commission, he must have been going crazy. You know, one piece of Jerry Ford trivia I love that comes out of this is that in October

1975, he starts wearing a bulletproof trench coat whenever he can, whenever he goes out into the public so it's just wild to think about how this one person who was so close to the the machine of the powers that be and saw behind the curtain what was going on he was also you know sitting in september of 1975 as someone who has experienced the potentially the sharp end of that and but that's really what we want to explore here right like the questions are not so much about like what was jerry ford feeling but more what i'm interested more is like what who put like who were these women who put jerry in their cross sares right like did they really want to kill jerry i i think for the case of squeaky i think the answer is probably no right

She even says it didn't go off. But there's also the related question, like, were these people acting alone? Were these women acting alone? I don't know if the answer is yes for either of them. Yeah, I think so. And if they were involved in a conspiracy, was it the same one? You know, we've talked about this before, Don, but the temporal proximity of these two events, the fact that they're both happening in northern California.

It's a head scratcher. Yeah, they both have their roots in the post-civil rights era left of the United States, right? I guess maybe it's not really the left. I think that's definitely the takeaway. Like us sitting here in 2025 looking back at it, I think it's definitely, if you were to just look this up online or something, the picture that's painted is like these were leftists of the time and it was a reaction to the veering right of the country totally yeah exactly the official narrative and maybe we can just

get it out on the record in a matter of a few seconds the official narrative is squeaky Frommi did her quote unquote attempt as a radical environmentalist in the mold of the post Tate La Bianca Manson Project and Sarah Jane Moore was more a product of the Bay Area radical scene that comprised everything from the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had made fame by kidnapping Patty Hurst, to the Prisoner's Union, to a number of other active groups that were fomenting a revolutionary movement

infiltrated up to its eyeballs in Northern California in the 1970s. So the official narrative puts them both. And even in Southern California, right? At the time the SLA was responsible for, I should say the police were responsible for one of the bloodiest shootouts in L.A. So they, I mean, they went, they were all over. Yeah. And as an annoyed head will certainly know all of these groups, all of these related.

an overlapping milieus were deeply, deeply infiltrated by and manipulated by what we might call the deep state, right? There's co-intel pro going on at this time. The FBI is extremely active and the CIA through Operation Chaos and other domestic illegal programs is also putting its fingerprints on a number of these groups and shaping the narrative shaping events that are going on between the sort of revolutionary fervor of the 1960s to the decadent and horrific scene of the late 1970s. Basically, the point of this portion of the episode is to tell you, rest assured, these are the questions and more that we're going to be digging in

in this series and we'll try to do it in less than eight months. But it's, I think it's going to be, I have a good feeling about this mini series. I feel like this is, this one's going to really hit. It's got to because it's underreported. We have our hands on some primary source material here that as far as we can tell really nobody has talked about and certainly i think especially with respect to the sarah more attempt you know the people who have looked into this in the past as far as we can tell have not hit on some of the threads that we have pulled And while I can't promise that there will be definitive or satisfying answers to any or all of these questions,

I think we can commit to you, listener, that it will be both a informative project and one that will have some pretty useful, insights into our current moment of renewed political violence, repression, surveillance, sabotage, and sciops. Yeah, totally. I would say that one of the big things of this whole mini-series is that, And we've talked about this off air, but it's like, we're really just back in the 1970s. You know, September 1975, sitting here in September 2025. It's looking a lot the same.

But let's get ourselves to 1975. Let's get ourselves to September 1975 and really just get into this thing. so let me fire up the Fourth Reich Archaeology Time Machine. Recall we were in September 1964 in our last episode and we'll just speed our way up. Here we go. And here we are, September 1975, the month where it all happens. And before we get into it, I think, hey, it wouldn't be Fourth Reich archaeology if we didn't lay down some groundwork here.

Some context and scene setting broad strokes. And I mean not just the historical context, which, frankly, you can get most of this historical context anywhere. But I'm talking about the proprietary Fourth Reich archaeology noided analytical framework, the tools in our toolbox, the texts in our libraries, the theory that really informs our project. And I'd like to call in longtime friend of the pod. You know him, you love him, Giedie Borg As to the rising number of assassinations

over the last two decades, Kennedy, Aldomoro, Olaf Palme, ministers and bankers, a pope or two, some others who are worth more than all of them, which have remained completely unsolved for, while the odd supernumerary has been sacrificed, there has never been any question of apprehending

those who hold the purse strings. Their serial character shows a common hallmark, the blatant and variable lies of official statements. The syndrome of this newly established social disease has quickly spread, as if, following the first documented cases, it moved down from the summits of the state, the traditional sphere for such crimes, and at the same time moved up from the lower depths, the other traditional locale for trafficking and protection rackets, where this kind of war has always gone on between professionals. These activities tend to meet up in the middle of social affairs, a place which the The state was prepared to frequent and which the mafia was pleased to reach.

Thus, a kind of confluence begins. There has been no shortage of attempts to explain these new mysteries in terms of accidents. Police incompetence, stupid magistrates, untimely press revelations, crisis of growth in the Secret Service, malevolent witnesses, or police spies suddenly deciding to go on strike. But Edgar Allan Poe had already discovered the real path to truth in a well-known argument in the murders in the Rheumorg. It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble

for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as an easy solution. I mean, the Utrei character of its futures. In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much as what has occurred as what has occurred that has never occurred before. And we could talk a little bit maybe about the integration of the spectacle. Yeah, so we've kind of alluded to. it and won't dwell too much. But remember the scene when the Kennedy family is occupying all the major networks on TV with its funerary procession, right? This was a real focal point in our Jack

Ruby series because of its spectacular power over the mind. of the spectators. The funerary procession, the dead president, the young widow, the babies in their short pants, not understanding what's going on when the broadcast is interrupted because the alleged assassin of the president has been murdered on live television. And thereafter, things really spin out of control. You've got the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 in February. You've got the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. You've got the televised escalation of the Vietnam War.

throughout the latter part of the 60s and into the 70s, culminating with the videotaped and photographed murder of protesting students on the campus of Kent State University. Violence goes from something that is out of sight and out of mind that is largely confined to the psyes of the soldiers of the soldiers. of World War II and the Korean War who carry that image with them in the back of their minds repressed by alcoholism and repressed sexuality and child abuse and all of that baggage that comes with the unaddressed PTSD of those wars. And it's put on a screen for all to see

in a matter of a few short years, right? The escalation of spectacular violence onto the scene is rapid and it is disruptive in a way that is unprecedented. You've got the hippies, you got the drugs, you've got consumerism, you've got mass production, plastics, to paraphrase the 1966, film the graduate right all of this process is happening so fast that there's no time to really understand what's going on of course there's watergate scandal there is the loss of faith in

the government that comes with that there's the uncovering of all kinds of dirt that the government has been up to behind the scenes. And when you get to 1975, you know, you've taken three laps around the track already. You're coming up on the one mile mark here. You've made the three-quarters turn in the process of the consolidation of the spectacle peppered by one after another in the succession of really, spectacular, spectacular psychic events. And fast forward to September, 1975, Jerry Ford has been in office for just over a year. Remember, when he first took the reins of the presidency and declared

the long national nightmare was over, he wasn't just talking about Watergate, he was talking about all that stuff. He was telling the American people, in effect, we're going to put this toothpaste back into the tube, and we're going to return to a golden era that preceded all this craziness. sound familiar at the same time though jerry got no respect right even when he first took office he was considered a temporary caretaker president a placeholder a lame duck not a real career politician not somebody with a vision for the country. And of course, that makes sense. He was not elected by the voting population of the country.

He was elected only by the good, fine people of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's good enough for Michigan's fifth congressional district. I think it's good enough for America. That's right. This is a CBS News special report. Here's CBS News Correspondent, Walter Cromkite. A woman fired a shot at President Ford in San Francisco this afternoon, but a policeman deflected the pistol and the president was not hit.

The woman was in a crowd across the street, about 35 or 40 feet away as the president was leaving the St. Francis Hotel to enter his limousine to return to Washington. The woman, identified by police, as Sarah Jean Moore in her 40s, was immediately seized. When the shot was fired, the president was shoved into his car and whisked to the airport. where Air Force One was waiting to fly him to Washington. He was not hurt, and at the airport appeared calm and unperturbed. Police Sergeant Jim Wynn says she fired a shot with a 38 pistol at Mr. Ford, standing about 40 feet from him, but she missed.

Here is some film of the incident. This film taken just after the shot rang out in downtown San Francisco, and as you can see, secret service agents and police are moving in. There's a lot of confusion now. No one is really sure as this film is being taken. just what has happened. Witnesses said the president seemed to double over after the shot was fired.

Someone at first thought that he had been hit. Then it appeared he was just taking protective action. The police at first said a man had been arrested. And in fact, several people were taken into custody. Police apparently just arrested suspicious people as they saw them right after this happened. Sarah Moore, the 40-year-old woman, fired the shot with what appeared to be a 38 caliber pistol.

One of the witnesses who saw it and heard it said, it was not an expensive weapon from the sound of it. It was just the cheap one. CBS news correspondent Richard Threlkeld, who for the last year or so has been covering the Patty Hearst story out here on the West Coast, knows Sarah Moore, came to know her during coverage of that trial.

Richard, tell us about it. Bob, it's strange how sometimes news stories become very personal stories and how oddly enough One big story tends to run into another, but it certainly happened in this case. She is a nice, quiet, 40-year-old middle-class, white divorcee with a small child who lives in San Francisco's East Bay near Berkeley, leading a nice quiet middle-class life until one day in March of 1974 when Patty Hurst had been kidnapped, and Randolph Hurst started the People in Need program with $2 million effort to feed poor people To answer the ransom demands of the Symbianese Liberation Army,

Sarah Jane Moore walked into the Hearst Corporation offices off the street and volunteered to help. Over time, she struck up a close relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, Patty's ex-fiance, Stephen Weed, acting as a kind of liaison with the various minority groups who made up the coalition administering people in need. She was bookkeeper and public relations lady, which is how many of the press got to know her, and spent many a weekend with her child at the Hearst Mansion in Hillsborough, joining that long vigil with the family, waiting for phone calls and messages from the kidnappers. When Patty Hurst renounced her family and joined the SLA, the people in need program ended,

and Sarah Jane Moore took some odd jobs, but the whole experience had changed her life. She'd seen the other people, she'd been around the street, talked to people she'd never known before, various social classes, minorities, about things she'd never talked about before with anyone. Later on, she took to spending a lot of time in various Berkeley coffee houses talking to young people. Later on, I saw her at a demonstration outside one of the hotels. I think it was during President Rockefeller's, Vice President Rockefeller's visit. She was with one of the local prison aid groups. I haven't seen her in some months.

She's called me a few times, and I haven't had a chance to talk to her because you get busy. And thinking about it now, I wish very much I had talked to her about. Nick, in the time that you knew her and would talk to her during that story, do you ever get any indication at all that she was a person of a violent turn that something like this might come about? Absolutely not. She is the total antithesis of that. So it's September 1975.

Jerry's been in the office of president for just over a year. In that time, what has he done? He's done some things that are, I guess, meant to be popular, but he's also done some things that are very unpopular. So the first category, right, he does the providing the amnesty for the draft Dodgers, saying that they can come back and come back into the fold of American society. But he also pardons Nixon. and as soon as he does that his approval rating is in the crapper it's basically done what doesn't help also is that by the summer of 1975 he is the guy who has taken the big old l for the country for vietnam don't forget that in april 1975 it was jerry ford who called he called the troops in in sagon and said get out get everyone out

they played white christmas and they got the hell out of there because the north vietnamese had taken the capital of south vietnam you may be familiar with the musical miss saigon the helicopter evacuations, right, leaving the Vietnamese who had helped the U.S. behind. And it's very reminiscent, in fact, you know, talking about parallels to the current day of Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, right? Everybody agreed that the war had to end. But nevertheless, he still takes flack because there's really no clean way to evacuate an occupation force without making a mess. Yeah, a total mess.

And it's all on camera. And it was even bigger than Afghanistan. Definitely. Some of our listeners will remember Biden's Afghanistan. withdrawal. But, you know, evacuating Vietnam, they're doing all of this and doing it in front of the Vietnamese, you know, the people that they were supposedly there to protect and the enemy forces are coming in and they're getting out and the, you know, they leave so many people behind. Not unlike Afghanistan, but way worse, I think. But so Jerry is the bag man for all of this,

right. Jerry is so unpopular. He, the American people, you know, they don't have faith in his competence. They think he's a decent guy. Yeah. But they are not really keen on Jerry, especially when it comes to like foreign policy. And there's just a bunch of shit going on at this time too, right? This is when you're getting the publication of the CIA Family Jules report. where Americans are first really coming face to face with the idea of the American, of this like modern deep state. Yeah. And, you know, he's doing these things that are just not popular.

Like the Rockefeller Commission, the President's Commission that was sort of supposed to be the, I guess not even trying to hide it, but like the whitewash version of, the church committee. Yeah, I mean, what happens is the Family Jewel's report gets published. This was an internal CIA memorandum that had been sort of commissioned by then director of central intelligence William Colby to basically the original limited hangout, right? Take all the shit of the festering, pus-filled boil on the face of the American Empire, a decade-plus after the Kennedy assassination, which is no longer plausibly deniable in the wake of Vietnam, in the wake of Watergate, and lance that boil in a way that could potentially heal, right?

So the family Jules gets leaked to the press, and the calls for a wide, sweeping investigation of the CIA ring out across the political spectrum, and Jerry Ford tries to get on top of that by forming a presidential commission, which in his mind was certainly informed by, the Warren Commission. He wanted to do his own Warren Commission to put a lid on the scandals of the CIA. And he called it the Rockefeller Commission after his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, whom he appointed to chair this whitewash. Really terrible branding. Oh, yeah. Just awful branding. Or I guess maybe like way, like very on the nose branding.

Yeah. I can't wait. But we should look, we'll get into it in future episodes. I can't wait for our, the Rockefeller Commission decided series. Oh, man. Yeah. And we'll cover it. The point is it failed.

Yeah, right. It failed to do what the Warren Commission did, which was to preempt congressional investigations, right? remember LBJ was saying to J. Edgar Hoover, we got to get a presidential commission to call down the Senate and the House. The Rockefeller Commission wanted to do that as well, but failed because both the Senate, form of the Church Committee, and the House, the form of the Pike committee engaged in their own very public, very lengthy investigations into all of this shit. Yeah, this is really the kickoff of all of that crazy stuff that we know about the CIA, right? The MK Ultra stuff, the assassinations, the coups.

And everybody listening surely knows. about the infamous CIA heart attack gun. So that's where we are politically, right? At the point of the assassinations in 1975 and September, 1975, that is where Jerry Ford's head is at politically. Let's zoom out and take a look at the country economically. The big thing of the time was the economy because the economy was shit.

It was not helping Jerry Ford's reputation, of course, but more importantly, it was hurting everybody. This was the period of time where it's the so-called oil shock. But at the same time, unemployment is high and consumer prices were going up. and you have this era of stagnation with wages and job prospects, but also inflation with, you know, consumer prices. And so you get both things in this phenomenon called stagflation. Yeah, one of the most spectacular representations of the economic crisis going on was the bankruptcy of New York City.

which became a national crisis, you know, calls for a bailout, opposition to a bailout, really polarizing public opinion. It's not for nothing that, as our Adam Curtis heads out there will know, that Adam Curtis kicks off the documentary hyper-normalization with this scene of the New York City financial crisis in the 1970s. The banks insisted that in order to protect their loans, they should be allowed to take control of the city. The city appealed to the president, but he refused to help.

So a new committee was set up to manage the city's finances. Out of nine members, eight of them were bankers. The bankers enforced what was called austerity on the city, insisting that thousands of teachers, policemen and firemen were sacked. They were just the representatives of something that couldn't be negotiated with. The logic of the market. To them, there was no alternative to this system.

It should run society. And, you know, Nelson Rockefeller, the vice president, of course, came into that role from the governorship of New York State. So he was throwing his weight behind a bailout, whilst the rest of the Ford administration, pretty much without exception, as far as people with a domestic docket were concerned, were on the opposite side of Nelson Rockefeller. So not only is it a crisis roiling the entire nation, it's also. roiling the cabinet of Jerry Ford and creating a lot of conflict, a lot of interpersonal turmoil, which whatever you say about the role of these people in the government, it's never a good thing if they all fucking hate each other.

And in summer of 1975, that was definitely the case with Jerry Ford's inner circle, bad blood, all around. For sure. I got to say, while we're on the New York tip, this was the air. So ultimately, you know, the Gerald Ford presidency turns its back on New York and New York City. and this was the era that Donald Trump was coming up in New York City. So we got to call that out, right? This was a time where our man Donald and Roy Cohn were really slicing up their kingdom in New York. That's right, yeah.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Right, exactly. And then just bringing it back to Jerry Brown, like the economy was, was shit all over the country in California. That was like Governor Jerry Brown's whole thing was like the belt tightening. And the austerity measures that ultimately turned things around in California. You know, famously, Jerry Brown turned away the governor's mansion. And he turned away the limousines.

And he opted to give off a much more austere persona. Dick, you want to say, what was the blockbuster of the summer? In summer in 1975, I feel like it's also kind of auspicious for what's to come. Yeah, for sure. Our movie heads out there will know already that the summer of 1975 was when Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released. It's this movie where it's set in this background of this, you know, good-timey New England town, right? that is terrorized by a invincible great white shark. Yeah, foreboding on the horizon beneath the surface.

Right, there's like blood in the water. There's bohemouth in the sea, blood in the water. The water is just splashing, and then everyone in the boat is absolutely unable to kill the beast yeah okay but so this is sort of the super we're talking you know movies we're talking the politics we're sort of talking the superstructure the veneer the face of it all

I think maybe it's time before we wrap this one up we should just dig a little deeper and maybe go into a little more of the structural shifts that were going on. Yeah, it would not be very Marxist of us if we didn't. So I think first, maybe I will provide a false narrative, the official narrative, if you will. the narrative that I was taught in school,

which makes up the conventional wisdom about the evolution of political economy at this period. And that goes a little something like this. After World War II, the European powers could no longer afford to maintain, their vast colonial empires. And so in many of the countries around the world that were gaining their independence, the United States as a democracy and as the best equipped democracy in the world with a strong military, with a strong economy, and with a strong government, well, it found itself obliged to step in and to intervene, whether monetarily or

militarily, to ensure that these nations in the process of gaining their independence would not fall into the big, bad hands of the evil Soviet empire. Right. This was the Cold War worldview that I believe still holds sway in the vast majority of Americans' mindscapes. Right. And the big part, I think a big part of that is the reason why we stepped in is you mentioned military might and all of that, but also the moral authority of spreading freedom and truth and justice. democracy and making sure that all of these countries that go independent do it the right way right and the right way in terms of economics of course is to take advantage of their competitive advantages and wouldn't you just know that the poor people of color who had been previously living under the yoke of colonial rule

just so happened to have a competitive advantage for cheap labor. Wouldn't you know it? I mean, that's just so convenient for everyone that the United States has a consumer market to buy a bunch of shit and all of these guys have a lot of people that can go and work in factories and make a bunch of cheap ship.

And so thanks to advancements in technology, including the conversion of wartime military industrial mobilization into consumer economic production, well, it could ship all of this cheap stuff all over the world, especially to the land, land of the free and the other lands of the free right the Europeans flush with that sweet martial plan mullah could also become consumers of industrial goods from the third world industrial goods and raw materials right this is a whole mass on

tray into the global market. And as I learned it in school, that was a very good thing for everyone involved. And those darn commies just trying to wreck it by putting their ideology into the mix because what did they want to do with those poor post-colonial countries? Why they wanted to enslave them into the communist empire, but we wouldn't let them do it. What really happened, Dick? What really happened is that all of these colonial powers that were in existence before World War II after the war, in most cases, and in most cases with the help and equipment from their American friends, they desperately fought to preserve their imperial

domains throughout the world, but they got hosed time and again. So while they were getting help from their American friends, the CIA sometimes called capitalism's invisible army, bribed and killed the right people at the right times to ensure that local leaders who took the torch from their colonial predecessors would keep the gravy train of Western capitalist exploitation running on time and so it's I mean at this point it is a cliche everyone listening knows about it and it is a very simple elegant exchange in exchange for this idea of law and order for example getting a very military to suppress the dissenters in your in your country and in exchange for that these neocolonial

vassals they were paid handsomely and they were rewarded with foreign direct investment and this is nothing more than just money from rich capitalists who wanted to make even more money off the labor of the people in these countries Yeah, we're really kind of paraphrasing Kwame and Krumas theory of neocolonialism, right? This is the idea that, in fact, there's nothing democratic about the forced introduction of market economics, the disciplining of the workforce, et cetera. it is just a spectacle of democracy and freedom and what's really going on is a continuation of domination by other means and involving a larger segment enriching a larger elite among the local populations in the former colonies to administer. administer those colonies to the benefit of capital and that local elite is inherently replaceable and unstable, right? If you act up, you're out. And so it's this great environment, right? It's like

you have these countries, these quote, developing nations and the leaders of capital under the military arm right with the with the help of the military arm of the united states they're able to exploit these locales and by exploiting them it's like a feedback loop right they're able to repress these people because they back the the guys in charge and by repressing them they're making them more exploitable which you know leads to lower wages and lower conditions and endure and higher profits and by getting more profits they get to make more investments which leads to more repression in different places and so it's like you know at the time there was this great sort of power vacuum in the world and in these early years after the war the state

of play was great and the Americans and when I say the Americans I mean the private and public partnership within the Americans, right? Like the industry and the military, they were able to really squeeze out these economies all over the world. Yeah. They weren't ever able, however, to squeeze out the human spirit animating the liberationist struggles of the people under the colonial boot who rose up again and again everywhere where the human spirit burns with the desire for freedom and for justice and so there are these hot spots that cause problems that need to be solved so while on the whole this state of play endures to the benefit of the owners of capital, there is a, there are a number of looming problems

that become increasingly difficult to resolve. Contradictions that become increasingly difficult to paper over and synthesize with some kind of a coherent or a, or a lasting solution. And, you know, one of those we mentioned just a few minutes ago was this oil crisis that, you know, the oil-producing countries start to use their ownership of this essential natural resource to try and exact some concessions from the first world and that creates a whole slew of problems and in turn those problems right the higher prices the lower employment rates the lower purchasing power of first world citizens of the American people for example at this

time that are getting squeezed that are having a hard time making ends meet well if they're having a hard time making ends meet then how are they going to buy all this stuff that the exploiters of labor are mass producing in the periphery well that's a head scratcher right oh yeah it's a big problem it is itself a contradiction right we've been talking about contradictions that this contradiction of you know america spreading freedom throughout the world and what it's really doing is it's putting in figurehead dictators who are able to exploit their people and sort of let let in all of this foreign investment and you know oppression but the other contradiction is of course this idea that america is the land of opportunity and we can you can really make it

And in reality, you have a country in the mid-70s that has a jobs problem because all the jobs left. And if folks don't have jobs, they don't have money. And if they don't have money, they can't buy stuff. The whole wheel stops spinning. And it's like it really is this classic conundrum, right? how do we keep our slaves exactly exactly and it's never been actually definitively resolved because that is the inherent contradiction at the heart of capitalism that will only ever be resolved by the collapse of the system but again you know we could kind of turn to the narrative arc that

is advanced in that Adam Curtis film hyper-normalization because I think it's useful to, it's always useful to point out where somebody is making an analysis that prescribes the problem correctly. And I think that Curtis does. And he even effectively diagnoses what the spectacular response to papering over this problem has been, right? The thesis of the film is that you normalize the crisis through the spectacle and just create this sort of increasingly absurd, increasingly alienated world that the subjects of that world have less and less control over through the media, et cetera.

But he totally eschews any Marxist class-based analysis and just focuses on the superstructural, cultural and psychological manifestations of these deeper phenomena. We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermines to be. of our world. Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with.

No one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future. Over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring. Even those who thought they were attacking the system,

the radicals, the artists, the musicians and our whole counterculture, actually became part of the trickery, because they too had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect, and nothing ever changes. But this retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside. Forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface

surface of our carefully constructed fake world. One way that I've been thinking about the Shee Harvey Oswald series that we are about to undertake is a kind of Marxist rejoinder to the hyper-normalization thesis. where, you know, we're looking deeper, we're setting this stage in terms of the global crisis and pointing out that the problem isn't the ruling class's ability to actually solve the problems that it has created through the promulgation of capitalist accumulation, right? it's not like the Rockefellers or the Bill Gates's, I guess would be today's kind of example who says, oh, I'm Bill Gates, I'm going to solve hunger and solve health care and this

and the other thing. The spectacle of pretending to solve these issues is the point. The point isn't to actually solve them. It sort of becomes the thing, right? It's sort of like when Jack Ruby says, or Delilo in Libra says, like, Jack Ruby becomes Oswald, right? Jack Ruby doesn't kill Oswald. He kills Kennedy. It's like the pursuit of solving the hunger problem, that idea becomes like the thing that is revered, right? It's like not even about solving the hunger problem, but the, concept it's like the pursuit of solving the hunger problem becomes the ideal yeah and it's right back in the framework of the spectacle because that's how the spectacle works is it proposes solutions to the problems that it creates which solutions themselves are limited and will only create more problems for which the spectacle then proposes more solutions all while churning up this froth on top that can then be skimmed and mined for more capital accumulation and it forces you as

the citizen or consumer or whatever the person in all of this it forces you just in the present right it's this idea that you're just always looking to you know you're looking to the future or you're looking in the past and you're forced to sit in the present and it's like you know we will address the hunger problem in the future because we're working on it now exactly and that futurity the eternal extension of the solution horizon is itself a sciop to keep the masses trusting their rulers, right? It's a way for the few at the top of the pyramid to continue exerting control of the very many beneath them on the pyramid in the promise that we are the only ones equipped

to solve these problems. You have to empower us and entrust us to tell you what to do so, that we as a body politic can come together to work for the greatest good for all as a lie and it's and it's a lie that almost i think got blown up in the 1970s it's a lie that is also vulnerable today. This is exactly the thinning of the Nazi bubble that we talked about on subliminal jihad, right? The bubble, the bigger a bubble gets, the closer it is to bursting point, the more reinforcement that it needs in the form of these spectacular events to consolidate, to build up, and to stave off the popping,

whether that's an inevitable pop or whether that is a manufactured sort of controlled demolition style pop. And as we conceive it, as this series will conceive it and will attempt to describe it, the events of September 1975 are themselves, regardless of the intentions of the lady shooters or would-be shooters, those events are spectacular interventions which serve to set the stage for the next round of consolidation, which, again, to call back something we mentioned in our very first episode of the podcast, this takeover of the government by the neocons that had been incubated under the not-so-watchful eye of President Gerald Ford,

your Dick Cheney's, your Don Rumsfelds, your George Bushes, the guys who will go on to populate the neo-conservative movement that soon will be putting their plans under the letterhead of the project for a new American century. They would never get that letterhead if it wasn't for their ability to control the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, and that ability is owed to Gerald Ford's brush with death in September 75. What do you say?

We wrap this one up? That's about all I got to say about it. That's about all I got to say about it. All right. So there it is, folks. It's 1975. The stakes could not be any higher. The Reichsman had invested so much into their project and seemed so close to the finish line of the integrated spectacle. Now, I'll leave with a question. And you don't have to answer it right now, Tom. But in 1963, the powers that be they needed to use JFK to send a message. That message was that. even the most powerful man in the world could get got. Even the president could not stand in the way of their plan. My question is that in 1975, what was the message that was trying to be sent

when they tried to kill Gerald Ford? Or was there a message at all? Tune in to she Harvey Oswald to find out. For now, I'm Dick, and I'm Don, saying farewell, and keep on digging. I'm quick on the trigger with targets, not much bigger than the pinpoint of number one. But the score with a beller is lower than a seller, oh, you can't get a million with a gun. When I'm with the pistol, I sparkle like a crystal, yes, a shine like the morning sun. But I'll lose a bluster when with a bronchol buster.

Oh, you can't get a man with a gun, with the gun, with the gun, oh, you can't get a man with a gun. Thank you.