It Could Happen Here - Assassination Week #3: How The Reagan Assassination Attempt Made Everything Worse

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

The gang sits down to talk about John Hinckley Jr., mental health, and what happens when you try and fail to kill the President.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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from. This is Assassination Week. Oh God, my left armpit, it hurts so much. My lung doesn't feel so good. Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six, six, six.

Six letters in any way, whatever. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about assassinating world leaders. That's why it's called It Could Happen Here. And today we're talking about a time where it did. When John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Wilson Reagan. With me today, James Stout, Garrison Davis, and of course, the ghost of Ronald Reagan,

who is a regular contributor to our podcast series. Along with the ghost of the Queen. Yeah, now the ghost of the Queen has joined the team. Very excited. So obviously, John Hinkley shot Reagan in 1981. We're going to get into a lot of detail about Mr. Hinckley's life. This is something that is joked about a lot on the internet, including by me. But, you know, it's interesting because there's two strains of people who will like come out and tell you it's not cool to joke about John Hinckley Jr. shooting Ronald

Reagan. And one of them is right, which are the people who are like, well, actually, like, it's a pretty messed up story. And he like it's it's kind of messed up to laugh about this family's tragedy because it was a family's tragedy. And the other people are like, no, it's fucked up because he had the hots for Jodie Foster. And what was actually going on there was a lot more complicated than that. So we're going to talk about all of the things that happened in this shooting, which was messed up and which I probably shouldn't joke about on Twitter, because it's actually really bleak. And in order to understand both why it's sad on a personal level and why it's a tragedy

for the entire country, yeah, I'm just going to start by talking about John Warnock Hinckley Jr., who was born on May 29th, 1955 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, which is about two and a half hours from where I grew up in Oklahoma. Unlike me, John's dad, who was John Warnock Hinckley Sr., was the chairman and president of Vanderbilt Energy. So they had lots of money, a lot of a lot of walking around money and Vanderbilt money. Yeah. And like most people who have good money, they lot of walking around money. That Vanderbilt money. Yeah. And like most people who have good money, they don't stay in Oklahoma. They have any owls? I know the Vanderbilts big owl enjoys. Must have.

I'm certain they did. Add owls to this story as you picture John's childhood. Yeah. So they're rich as hell and they get the fuck out of Oklahoma and move to Dallas, Texas when John was four, which is so far weirdly like my life in a lot of ways, although I was a bit older. Maybe that's why I didn't get the madness. So that's not why. Normally, getting kids away from Oklahoma really, really fixes stuff. But John was taken.

Yeah, John was taken to the only place more toxic than small town Oklahoma, a wealthy neighborhood in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He attended Highland Park High School, the school where I would later lose several speech and debate competitions and win one or two as well. It's where if you're in the DFW area, the rich kids who don't have good drugs go to Highland Park. The rich kids with good drugs go to Jesuit because they're private school kids. But Highland Park is like the rich kids who are going to like try to sell you shitty ditchweed.

Anyway, these are this is important. Dallas Fort Worth context. And I assume it was the same when he was a child. As far as I've ever found any information, he was a pretty normal young man for that time and place. There's no one really seems to notice anything particularly different about him. He does reasonably well in school. Later in life, he's going to express some racist thoughts in his diary and in other writings prior to the shooting. It doesn't really seem to have ever been a motivating factor in his life. And to the extent that he had regressive beliefs, they seem to have been due to the fact that he grew up in a sheltered, rich, all white environment. And that's not great for you.

Shocked. Yeah, shocked. In Texas, no less. In Texas, no less. One write up in the New Republic describes his childhood this way. Perhaps it is fear of what lies outside that makes the interior of the family so rigid and subdued, like life in a well-run bunker. The world of the Hinckleys was the rootless middle-class sunbelt culture that nurtures pro-family values, Christian fundamentalism, and occasional mass

murderers. Families move frequently, but without compromising their parochialism. Everywhere, people are white, Christian, Republican. Joanne explains John's egregious prejudices by saying he had never been around people of other races. Somewhere outside, there are malign elements, minority groups, rock musicians, big government, and the cynical gossmus cosmopolites who dominate the media. Mothers in this culture do not lavish attention

on their children, but on their furniture. Now, that is a coastal liberal elite like fucking paragraph trying to describe like people who grow up in this situation as someone else who grew up in a similar area i think most of that is pretty silly and and more to the point it doesn't get to why john does this we're getting to why john does this it's not because he grew up sheltered and a little racist um that is not why he shoots the president um

there is however a bit of that that that does strike me as accurate as, again, a kid who grew up near here a couple of decades later, which is the description of his childhood as life in a well-run bunker, which is kind of how it feels to live in these wealthy enclaves in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I grew up in Plano, which is, you know, a couple of steps down the economic rung from Highland Park, but not all that far. And yeah, that's not a bad description of it. It just doesn't generally lead to kids shooting the president. More often, it leads to them shooting up heroin and then dying of heroin overdoses, which was the big problem in Plano when I was a kid. That said, it's also worth noting that his parents are not, as far as I can find, like 50 stereotypes. Like his dad's not this super masculine guy who's like mentally abusive to his kid. His mom's not like checked out.

Neither of them are against the idea that their son might have a mental illness and need help for it. In fact, it seems like they're kind of more open to the idea of reaching out for professional mental health for their kid than a lot of parents would have been at the same time period. In 1976, John drops out of Texas Tech to go to Hollywood and try to make it as a musician. Again, his parents are very supportive of him. One cannot say they didn't try to help their son live his dreams. When he gave up on music and he wanted to be a writer, they paid for him to take a class at Yale. We'll get to that in a second. It doesn't go well because he's, yeah, anyway. But John's not being honest with his ambitions, nor is he open with his parents about his mental health.

We now know that John developed schizophrenia as a young man and had a series of psychotic breaks. When he would get money to do stuff like this Yale writing class, he would take it and buy guns. He did go to Yale, but it was mainly to stalk Jodie Foster, who was going to Yale at the same time. Now, this is all occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which is the fucking dark ages for treatment of this particular condition

and a lot of other conditions. There are not a lot of good options. Among other things, I just said, he's not open with his parents about the fact that his mental health is declining. I don't know how he really could have been. I don't think it's likely. It's certainly not the case. This didn't happen to John, but I don't think it's very likely for a young man in this time and place to be well equipped by his education or society to express what is going on in his head to his parents., to be fair to his parents, they're not equipped with

a lot of like, you know, an ability to really help him out here. And they're doing the things you would want them to do. Again, they repeatedly are bringing in professionals to try to help. None of it is particularly useful, but it's not for lack of trying. Like a lot of people who struggle with similar mental health issues john seeks refuge in fiction unfortunately for everybody the movie that he finds himself most drawn to is taxi driver and i think most people are aware of this part of it oh boy that's a bad choice that's a really bad choice yes if he had found maybe adventure time or something it would have been a lot healthier but instead taxi driver if you haven't seen't seen it, the main character is this kid, Travis Bickle, played by a very young Robert De Niro.

It is weird to watch him because we're all so used to old man Bob De Niro, who is thinking about assassinating like a presidential candidate. And then kind of through movie magic rescues a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster from a pimp. And Hinckley thinks the movie is kind of talking to him and providing him with like information about how he can fix his own life. He starts dressing like Travis Bickle. He starts wearing like an army jacket and boots and drinking the way that Bickle drank. He starts buying guns. He gets really into guns for, you know, um,

he started, you know, in letters that he's writing home to his parents, he starts talking about this relationship he has with a woman named Lynn, who isn't real, but who sounds a lot like one of the women that Travis Bickle has an interest with in the movie. Um, and yeah,

this is kind of the start of his obsession with Jodie Foster. And there are people who will like say that he's a pedophile cause she's 13 in the movie. And yeah, this is kind of the start of his obsession with Jodie Foster. And there are people who will like say that he's a pedophile because she's 13 in the movie. That doesn't seem to be the case when he is actually stalking her and most obsessed with her. She is 18 and he is stalking her in real life and calling her on the phone and stuff, which is like bad and messed up. But he's not into her because she's young in this movie. He's into her because he's kind of losing his mind and obsessing with her, right? So while this is all going on, kind of in the late stages of this, his parents bring in a psychiatrist.

Again, they're willing to fund and support him in seeking professional help. The doctor they wound up getting for him, I don't know if he's a bad doctor for the time but he's wrong as hell he kind of looks at the fact that john has been normal quote-unquote in high quote-unquote in high school and like at the start of his college career and so he looks at this kid who's like seems to be developmentally normal up to a certain point and then goes off the rails and says well it's because you were sheltered and coddled by your rich parents and you're just lazy right that's that's that's what this guy says so a big part of because you were sheltered and coddled by your rich parents, and you're just lazy, right? That's what this guy says.

So a big part of his, like, advice to mom and dad is you got to cut him off. You can't keep giving him stuff, can't keep giving him money, can't keep taking care of him. So while this is happening, and this guy is, like, making them make plans for John to be less reliant on his parents, John Hinckley is getting way more into guns. He does a lot of target shooting. He also plays a lot of Russian roulette with himself alone on his parents, John Hinckley is getting way more into guns. He does a lot of target shooting. He also plays a lot of Russian roulette with himself alone in his basement,

which is not great. In Christmas of 1979, he takes a very famous photo of himself holding a handgun to his temple. Now, John is increasingly harassing Jodie Foster in this period. Now, what he's doing is not, he's not just obsessing with her and it's one-sided. He is reaching her on the phone. They talk a couple of times. I didn't know that. Yes, they do. She is always very terse in their calls,

always, you can tell, is kind of frightened, but is very controlled and careful. I would describe the way she handles this as very responsible and like, you can tell she's talked with like people, I think like her manager or something. And been like, I have been advised,

like, I don't want you calling it. She's very, tries to be very clear here. Um, and I think handles this as well as a person can possibly handle, you know, being stalked in this way.

I believe he's able to get her number because like it's the eighties and people just have numbers in the phone book. Yeah. Um, again, she's kind of taking a break from hollywood right now and is going to yale um right his obsession with foster veers between these kind of like fantasies of like harming her or harming a guy that she's with uh or harming himself and eventually harming the president of the united states now he is not want to shoot the president for political reasons. He has no kind of particular anger at the president that he wants to work out with a

gun. He wants, number one, to impress her. And he wants everyone to know his name and know his name associated with Jodie Foster, right? Because again, he's very ill. He starts following Jimmy Carter around. He goes to like three different Jimmy Carter rallies in D.C. and in Ohio. There's video of him 20 feet away from Carter at one point.

He probably has a gun on him. Like he gets really close to Carter. Again, one of the through lines here is that like presidential security wasn't great in 1980. Yeah. It's not very good. John thinks about shooting Carter. security wasn't great in 1980. It's not very good. John thinks about shooting Carter. He's probably there and equipped to do it,

but he just can't get himself into the frame of mind to shoot Jimmy Carter, which is understandable because it is Jimmy Carter, right? He is a hard man to want to shoot to death. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented

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to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. roughline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

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It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. So there's a moment where he like, yeah, so he's kind of bouncing around after this period where he like is he thinks about shooting Carter, but he doesn't. He is in communication with this Nazi ideologue, and they almost have a meeting, but they don't. That's all kind of obscure, kind of unclear. And then on October 6th, 1980, he gets arrested at the Nashville airport with a briefcase full of handguns and a pair of handcuffs.

Now, Hoops Among Us has it. Hoops Among Us has not been in this situation. Picked up the gun bag. Oops. Yeah, it's the wrong bag. He says he's just trying to sell them, and they're like, well, you still can't get on a plane with a bunch of guns, John Hinckley Jr. This is pre-9-11, too. This is pre-9-11.

So you have to assume he he's looking weird he's like sweaty and in an army jacket and talking to him and they're like well we've literally never searched a single person before in the entire life of this airport but let's check this guy what's this massively heavy briefcase you're carrying there's a fucking there's a dude just walking in with a stinger and they're like no no let that guy on but we gotta check john inkley um so he flies to dallas where he buys more handguns uh and some explosive 22 caliber bullets we will talk about that in a little bit but they are explosive bullets for a second 22 caliber bullets yes yes they are bullets that are meant to explode on impact is he like reading Soldier of Fortune magazine at this point?

Because this, nobody seems like it. He's into gun culture, so we have to assume. I think his family's kind of casually conservative. He is kind of maybe, as is embodied by the Nazi thing, probably dabbling in some areas. Again, I think that's certainly not good for him. It's also, i don't think politics i haven't seen any real evidence that politics is a motivating factor in what this guy

is doing um he does get explosive bullets uh probably helps that he has explosive bullets in terms of making this less dangerous these are not good explosive bullets they are meant to be fired out of a larger weapon than he fires them out of uh but they are supposed to basically the idea is this these are 22 caliber rounds so the idea is that this little explosive charge in them makes them more like a 38 so we're not talking about like military grade weaponry or anything here why is he doing uh you may not know of course but like if he's a massive gun dork why he's not a massive no gun culture is different than right he's buying a bunch of handguns he's shooting a lot i i don't know that it would be

he's not particularly good or knowledgeable with yeah right okay there yeah i see but gun culture is very it's harder to get information about guns right maybe today he would have gotten a lot more into you're like just flipping through magazines exactly you can't like look something up online yeah yeah he's 22 good for assassination just exactly yeah and and this is also like this is what he can afford right he gets kind of a he's lost his better guns right they're a property of the state so he winds up with his 22 and he gets these explosive bullets to try to make it give more of a kick obviously the thing that's going on in the background here is that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are having a presidential election, which Reagan wins. We'll talk a little bit about kind of that a bit later.

But that happens. Reagan is the president-elect. He flies home. Hinckley flies home. Things continue to deteriorate in his own life. He's continuing to travel around. John Lennon is assassinated, and he kind of goes a little bit nuts over that because he loves john lennon also might kind of think that he is john lennon so that does not help his mental state he

visits the the um the the the what is it the shrine to him in new york at one point and kind of when he gets back in march of 1981, his dad cuts him off. Basically like says, you know, you've got your, here's your car, here's $200. We can't take care of you anymore, John. And I think this is his dad basically trying to take that psychiatrist's advice of like, we need to have tough love.

He has to be forced to kind of get his shit together. But John Hinckley is not really capable of getting his shit together because he is profoundly ill. So he uses that money to pay for hotel rooms in Denver where he sits alone watching television with a gun. Not great treatment for schizophrenia. Reagan wins the election in what was a sweep electorally, but fairly tight in terms of popular vote. He's got like 50.5% of the popular vote, something like that.

It's pretty close. And soon after taking office, he gets hammered on a bunch of, something like that. It's pretty close. And soon after taking office, he gets hammered on a bunch of stuff, right? The economy's not great. He's like going for a bunch of far-right policies to unwind the New Deal, a lot of which are unpopular and some of which he'd said he wasn't going to do in debates with Carter. He doesn't have the kind of traditional grace period most presidents get where they're broadly popular, right? It's not looking great for kind of the midterms is what I'm getting at. So Reagan's staff is struggling to right the ship, trying to figure out, like, how do we fix all this?

Reagan or Hinckley, while this is going on, gets convinced that, like, shooting the president is a pretty good idea. He doesn't have a lot of other options. He's kind of, like, running money and he's able to get a little bit more from his mom, but he's increasingly unhinged and alone and desperate. On March 29th, he checks into a hotel in DC where he finds in a local paper the president's schedule. He loads his.22 caliber revolver. He writes a letter to Jodie Foster and he travels to the Hilton where the president is set to deliver a speech to union workers. Here is how John's letter to her ends. Quote, I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am doing all of this for your sake. By sacrificing my freedom

and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jody, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever,

Sean Hinkley. It's not great. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. Not a good letter to get. Yeah, not a great letter to get yeah not a great letter to get not a great letter to send what was was this actually like delivered in the mail i believe so yeah i think this she winds up getting this i mean like she has to come to court and stuff when

he goes on trial it's like something he kind of demands and i think she does to just make it easier for things to move along. Obviously she, she does nothing wrong at any point in this process. She's just living her life. And this guy is out of his, out of, out of his head and has easy access to guns, which is a problem.

At 2 27 PM on March 30th, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. opens fire at the president's entourage from just a few feet away. Reagan had been speaking to a bunch of union guys at this thing at the Hilton anyway, and they're kind of like walking out towards the limo when this happens. John's first shot hits James Brady, the press secretary and former PR man for Phyllis Schlafly, in his head. He then wounds a police officer and a Secret Service agent. He actually does not hit, probably does not. Lafley in his head. He then wounds a police officer and a secret service agent.

He actually does not hit, probably does not. I don't, I think there's still a little bit of debate because it's like ballistics are kind of fucky, but he probably doesn't directly hit Reagan instead around fragments and bounces off the armored limousine penetrating the president's lung. None of the explosive bullets explode because they're not the right bullets for the gun. The barrel is too short. So it doesn't, it might even do less damage than it would have done. Although maybe they fragment because they're these weird explosive bullets and that's why Reagan gets hurt.

Anyway, hard to say. Nobody really understands ballistics all that well today. There's a lot of debate over how all this stuff works. Reagan had been in office for 69 days and no real plan existed for what to do if the president gets shot and is alive, but is unable to do the job of the president. Um, fucking, uh, George H.W. Bush is in the air a bunch of this time and like people can't reach him. Um, they're like, he's there saying, you need to come back to Washington now. Um, so kind of the people running the country for a few hours is Al Haig, the secretary of state, and like a room full of guys in the cabinet who were all disagreeing about everything and none of whom are constitutionally supposed to be running the country. Right.

It's a real big problem. Like the fucking like the press ask at one point because Haig goes out there to be like, hey, the president's in surgery. And they're like, well, who's who's in charge? Like with the nukes and stuff, who's running the country? And and he's like we got a whole room for the guys don't worry it's all fine and they're like is that what the law says because i don't think that's how it's supposed to go um it's it's not great it's actually a real problem and they do they they make a bunch of changes after this to make sure that like we never don't know who the president is when if this kind of thing happens at least um but on a political level this is fucking gangbusters

for the reagan administration and i'm going to quote from a write-up in lpi here the assassination attempt silenced criticism of his administration at a critical point early in his term explains hw brands author of the biography Reagan, The Life, in an email. The good humor he exhibited during his recovery, he spent only 12 days in the hospital, convinced many skeptics. Some of his followers believed that God had forgiven him to allow him to finish his work,

and it is possible that Reagan thought so too. On the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt, journalist Del Winton Wilber published Raw High Down, a thorough investigation full of revelations of what happened that day. The book is written in the style of true crime, and its title is a reference to the Secret Service codename given to Reagan. Rawhide, Joe Biden's codename is Celtic, and Donald Trump's was Mogul. It reaches two important conclusions. Firstly, it argues that Reagan became the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms because of the way he and his team handled the assassination attempt.

And secondly, the White House did not reveal the seriousness of Reagan's injuries. He walks into the hospital and then stops breathing and collapses. Like he walks in specifically because he wants to be seen walking in. And it's like they don't know that he's been shot at first. It's not like bleeding a bunch outside. He's bleeding internally. So it's this is like legitimately the best case scenario. It would have been hard to figure out what had happened to him kind of because you can't immediately tell that he's bleeding. A lot of people have been shot. And so everyone just kind of assumes he's having a heart attack, which is why they take him to the hospital. He thinks actually I think he believes that his secret service agent broke his ribs, getting him into the limo. Yeah. But if they take him to the white house first, he would have fucking died.

He loses half of his blood in the surgery. Like it's that's pretty, which is like bad. If you lose half your blood, that's not like a great injury. Um, just, it's just lung collapsing is what's happening.

Like, yeah, they've got him on oxygen and stuff. He's like barely able to joke with the doctors which he does which is one of the things that like goes viral from this and makes him so popular because he's he's yucking it up oh ronnie um his uh yeah this is believe there's a number of massive long-term fucking consequences to this one of them is that this is why uh nancy brings in jo Quigley, the astrologer.

Like this is when she, you could refer back to Behind the Bastards 2 part on the Reagan astrologer. But this is why the Reagan astrologer becomes like they start, they stop having him do events

when the astrologer says it's a bad day for it and shit. Because like Nancy, this kind of breaks her. And it also kind of breaks Ronald. He's not the same man after getting shot, which, to be fair, he is 70 when this happens. So getting shot in the lung at 70, most people aren't going to come back all the way. This is also probably doesn't help.

The Alzheimer's may accelerate the timetable there. But on a political level, this goes fucking great for the Republicans, and it allows them to do a lot of really fucked up shit. And I'm going to quote from CNN here. Today, Reagan is the only modern president who receives high marks from Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike. A look at the polls can quantify the roots of this enduring goodwill. Despite an electoral landslide over Jimmy Carter with a 44-state win in 1980, Reagan won a narrow popular margin of 50.7%.

Moreover, Gallup's valuable presidential poll tracker shows that Reagan's approval ratings were significantly split along partisan lines after his 1981 inauguration, with 74% Republican support and 53% from independents, but 38% from Democrats. When Reagan came back to the Capitol on April 28th to push for his Economic Recovery Act, he was greeted by a hero's welcome and a three-minute standing ovation. He leveraged his political capital to help publish and pass his agenda. Before the end of the summer, the Reagan tax cuts had passed the House of Representatives, led by Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill and the Republican-controlled Senate, reducing the top tax rates from a confiscatory 70% and unleashing an entrepreneurial era. That's how CNN categorizes it.

Yeah, that's what we got to call it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in 1984, Reagan wins 49 states and 59% of the popular vote. It is very clear kind of how this happens and what this allows Reagan to do. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because you have in Britain, like less than a year later, it's fascinating isn't it because you have in britain like less than a year later or we have margaret thatcher right like who is similarly not doing very well until she gets to go to war for two tiny little cold islands in the atlantic than no one knew about before like and then they proceed to just ravage like the like post-world war ii social democracy consensus just fuck it up and fucking here we are now here we are 2022 and people are gonna die of cold in britain this winter

welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I

love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29,

they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. I will say in terms of just to be fair, one of the things people will say is a positive from this is that this is one of the things that helps push the arms treaty deals with the Soviet Union. Because Reagan is like, God saved me for a reason. And maybe it's to make nuclear war less likely. That's a bigger topic than today. It's a thing that he will claim.

That's a bigger topic than today. It's a thing that he will claim. And generally speaking, the fact that the Soviet Union and Reagan started talking about nukes during this period is not a bad thing. Always good to be talking about nukes. But yeah, what I will say, if we're looking at kind of the only clearly good thing that came out of this shooting, it's the fact that the justice system actually worked in this one instance pretty much exactly how you would want it to. Hinckley was clearly not mentally competent to understand his actions, what he had done, or to stand trial, and he was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. His father, tearful, took blame for the shooting for cutting his son off from resources. The psychiatrist who had botched his diagnosis admitted his mistakes on the stand and expressed regret. Hinckley was sent to a

psychiatric facility where he received decades of treatment, and the treatment seems to have really helped him. On December 17, 2003, a federal judge ruled that Hinckley was entitled to unsupervised visits with his parents. This is five years before his dad died, so they get time together again. In 2007, he has a request for unsupervised visits as long as one month. This is denied, not because of any problems, but because of issues the hospital had not taken to prepare for the transition. In July of 2016, Judge Paul Friedman concluded that Hinckley did not pose a threat to himself or others and ordered him released. The conditions initially limited him to his residence where he lived with his mother in parts of Southern California.

He was obviously forbidden from contact with past or present presidents of the United States or any of their family members or graves. He was banned from contact with Jodie Foster or other entertainers. He was prohibited from watching violent movies, television, or online media. In 2018, a restriction confining him to his mother's house ended. He can now live anywhere he wants with doctor's approval. And on September 27th, 2021, John Hinckley Jr., age 66, was approved for unconditional release by District Judge Paul Friedman. Friedman noted that, quote, very few patients at St elizabeth's hospital

have been studied more thoroughly than john ankley and again that's pretty much how it ought to work right like yeah he shoots the president but clearly because he's sick and you don't just punish sick people when they don't know what they've done so he gets treated for decades until he's better and now he's able to live a life. Yes. It's really good. Quite surprising. It is very surprising. And part of why it's surprising is that one of the other negative lingering effects of

John Hinckley attempting to shoot the president is that a lot of changes are made in many states to make it much less likely that people benefit from the same understanding judicial system that John Hinckley Jr. does. Okay. that people benefit from the same understanding judicial system that John Hinckley Jr. does. Okay, I'm going to quote now from a write-up from FamousTrials.com, which has a pretty good bit on just kind of everything that happened here. It's a pretty fair summary, I think. Within a month of the Hinckley verdict, the House and Senate were holding hearings on the insanity defense. A measure proposed by Senator Arlen Specter shifted the burden of proof of insanity to the defense. President Reagan expressed his support

for the measure with the comment, if you start thinking about even a lot of your friends, you would have to say, gee, if I had to prove they were sane, I would have a hard job. Ha! Ha! Ha! Maybe that tells us more about you than what you think. Maybe that says a lot about your administration, who are,

by the way, at this point, deep in, like, Iran, Contra shit, selling cocaine. And anyway, we're talking about all of this on an upcoming episode of bastards, but like, yeah, they're all monsters.

Joining cons Congress and shifting the burden of proof where a number of states within three years after the Hinkley verdict, two thirds of the states placed the burden on the defense to prove insanity while eight states adopted a separate verdict of guilty, but mentally ill. And one state, Utah abolished the defense to prove insanity while eight states adopted a separate verdict of guilty but mentally ill and one state utah abolished the defense altogether always delivering so the system works really well for john hinkley jr um and then ethically i think they change it i think the justice department of the united, this is maybe one of, probably in history, you will not find many cases of a guy shooting an active world leader and being treated ethically by the justice system. Like, he's handled very reasonably, I think.

Yeah. And never again, never again will that happen for anybody, even if they don't shoot the president. So, obviously, I wish john hinkley jr well i i hope his musical career goes fine um i fuck ronald reagan um hate him and uh yeah uh it's probably made the world a lot worse that john hinkley jr tried to shoot ronald reagan because it empowered ronald reagan one of the lessons here if we're talking about assassinations is that um it's a real wild card as trying to assassinate a president or any other politician and as a general rule people are kind of programmed to think that somebody's cool if they get shot and don't die

like it's one of the cooler things that like look it just objectively it's what do you do if you want to show john mcclain as hard as hell you can get like hit in the arm or something and just like work through it right like what do people people talk about like teddy roosevelt when he was shot and how bad it was that he gave a badass it was that he gave a speech or how cool it is that fucking andrew jackson you know who they don't say any of these things about is jfk that's right they don't because dying is not cool because dying's not cool not cool at all over the roof of a church yeah lame as hell yeah but like you know this is the look if if you want john f kennedy to stop being the president

and you can successfully kill him you will get get what you want. He's no longer the president. If you were to have a political motivation, and again, Hinkley doesn't. Hinkley is not thinking about the top marginal tax rate when he does this. But if that had been his goal, this is the opposite of that, right? Because it just makes Reagan look cool and helps him,

makes everybody feel like an asshole for fighting him for a while so like he gets a bunch of shit through and also a bunch of laws get worse for mentally ill people and uh in on the whole bad bad bad assassination zero zero out of ten yeah i have to say based on based on the evidence we have here, shooting Ronald Reagan, not a good idea. They didn't do it. No. Let the whole team down. And we should just plug his album.

It's out on Asbestos Records. We should plug his album. Because again, he's not responsible for this. Yeah, no, if he's happy singing songs, I'm happy for him. Yes, yes. I wish you the best of luck, John. You can buy his t-shirts. He's got t-shirts that he's trying to move,

which, I don't know, I don't think it's bad to encourage his music career. Like, seriously, like, we're all doing it with a little bit of a smile, but what's the harm if John Hinckley Jr. thinks that people like his music? That doesn't hurt anybody. And look, maybe if people can see that, like,

if you treat people with mental illnesses, like people who are ill not fucking terrible people then they can get to a place where they can sing songs on youtube and that's nice that's good that's an example again of the only time it worked the way it should but it did work out pretty well in this case yeah um so i don't know yeah take whatever lessons you want to out of this many many possible things can be a lot of a lot of a lot of different lessons we can take out of this much don't hire al haig but i feel like that's that's a generally good lesson yeah uh there's a phoenix punch band called j Foster's Army. I've just read as well, who make songs about him.

Great. Buy their records too. Fine, yes. No strong opinions on that either way. Anyone else got anything to say about John Hinckley Jr. or the assassination attempt on Ronnie Rawhide Reagan?

Also, we're talking about the IRA a lot this week. Probably not for nothing that joe biden's code name is celtic and the queen dies now makes you think you're telling me it's a coincidence uh i still suspect liz trust personally i i think that maybe joe biden shook hands with liz trust and like transferred a nerve poison onto her hand and then she touched the queen. Definitely possible. She wanted to be number one.

Sweet Joe sipping a Guinness on the plane back, knowing that he's done his job. In his balaclava, inexplicably. Therefore, it's one. Anyway, hopefully nobody who has stuff going on listens to that and takes the wrong message out of it. Yeah, no. Be kind to one another.

Anyway, we're done. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising and expanding your horizons? Everything. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

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